Behind the Bastards - Part One: Radovan Karadžić: The Genocidal Dictator Who Became a New-Age Guru

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to discuss a bastard who really did it all: started his own country and became dictator, carried out a genocide, and matured to quack energy healer using magic to improve men's sperm count. Preorder Jamie's new novel, The Tower: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250480422/thetower/  Sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19960285 https://www.npr.org/2008/07/22/92775717/timeline-the-political-life-of-radovan-karadzic https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/22/the-hunt-for-radovan-karadzic-ruthless-warlord-turned-spiritual-healer https://www.npr.org/2008/07/23/92809597/karadzics-dual-life-war-fugitive-new-age-mystic Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure - The New York Times https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-23-fg-warcrime23-story.html https://calivita.com/webshop https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/01/radovan-karadzic-war-crimes-trial-no-ethnic-cleansing-bosnia https://www.npr.org/2005/11/19/5020196/the-poetry-of-an-indicted-war-criminal https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/karadzic/radovan/poems.html https://jaapl.org/content/jaapl/25/4/485.full.pdf  https://www.jessicasternbooks.com/my-war-criminal See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All zone media. Never forget 9-11 and never forget to listen to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you are all listening to now. This is our 9-11 episode extravaganza, even though you'll be hearing it probably several weeks after 9-11. So I don't even know why I'm like temporalizing this because it's just going to feel old when it hits you. You'll already have had your 9-11 cake.

You'll have opened all of your 9-11 presents. I'm feeling a little somber. So if you feel a tinge of sadness in my voice. voice just that's me not forgetting i that's that's jay remembering yeah i'm always remembering the the the like discourse today online was like the worst of the right being like oh did you see mom donnie and a oc having a giggle during the during the nine 11 tribute in new york and you're like you're like did you see that donald trump wasn't there i don't care i don't care I don't care about any of these things.

I don't care about any of these things. It's fine. Just, it is, it is, it is bizarre that, like, of all of the days, uh,

that we, the thousands of days, we've been very insincere about it. We're like, we're going to do, we're going to do just one. We're going to remember. We're going to remember.

And today we're going to remember for real, for real. For real. Um, and what I remember on 9-11 is the film big trouble, which was tragically delayed. as a result of 9-11 because it featured a plot line in which a nuclear weapon was set off in a commercial airliner. And so tragically, Tim Allen lost what would have been one of his better comedy releases.

And we won't forget that. I will never forget. I will never forget that, Jamie. I'll never forget they changed the climax of Lilo and Stitch. Stitch hijacked a plane. And then they said we can't have Stitch be doing al-Qaeda activity. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really excited about.

Oh, see, Sophie, that's not how you lead into this. I was going to say, you know how there were two towers on 9-11? Oh, that's better. Jamie Loftus has a book coming out called The Tower. Wow, what a plug. Jamie, you want to tell people about it? See, I'm ready. I was ready to plug.

Wow, you're a lot. Okay. Yeah, there's a secret third tower. And what if that, what if it was a 9-11 book? What if it was a W-T-7? I've been secretly remembering for years. You have no idea. Yeah, no.

My first novel is coming out. It's about just one tower, but a beautiful tower. It's a novel about an architect who falls in love with her own blueprint and then spends 20 years trying to get the love of her life built so she can leave her husband for the building. Awesome. excited to read it. So the highs are high, the lows are low. The lows of writing a book are very low. It's the hardest thing in the world. That said, I'm sure by the time you hear this, I've figured it out. Jamie, it's very appropriate that you said writing a book is the hardest thing in the world because the subject, the bastard that we're talking about this week, is an author,

and I think would agree with you writing a book is the hardest thing in the world, which is impressive because he also committed a genocide. So, wow, okay. Maybe not the best way to talk about it, but we're talking about the Balkans this week, and there's no easy way to lead into a story about the Balkans. If you are talking about the Balkans, you're talking about a lot of people dying. That's just, that's just history in the Balkans. Yeah.

There's always a part of me that thinks someday you're going to come in hot with Saddam II. You know, like there's always just a little, like there's another novel that's been found. They made another. Saddam's lost novel like Tupac, he keeps dropping novels like every 15 years after his death. Yeah, on the centennial, we're going to get a new romance novel. If only. RIP Saddam, you would have loved the romanticity trend going on right now. We are talking about a dictator.

Unlike Saddam, he was not a novelist, but he was a poet, kind of like Joseph Stalin. And he also did commit a genocide. And in addition to that, he lived as a new age healer for years after committing a genocide. This guy goes so many places. You are not ready for the Radavan Karajik story. That's who we're talking about this week. Have you heard about Radvon Karajik? No, I have not.

I can't say how. Before we get there, I just want to highlight for the Netflix viewers, Jamie's fantastic John Locke t-shirt that she's wearing. That's for you, Sophie. The one from the show? The one from lost, the one. Yeah, okay, that is from me. The bald king from lost. That's from Lost.

Okay. Yeah, no, it's low culture John Locke. Okay. We're not going high today. It would have been really funny if it was the same aesthetic, like fan cam shirt, but it was like John Locke, the philosopher. I am a thousand percent sure that shirt exists. It has to.

It does. Yes. All my philosophy girlies out there are just absolutely losing their minds. And all of my Balkans girlies are going to be losing their minds this week because, again, we're talking about Radaván Karajik, one of the people most responsible for the Bosnian genocide, also a poet and an energy healer who was Surly Induriki. So we're going to cover a lot of ground. What a sinister multi-hyphenate situation that is. Yeah, yeah. I mean, because in our country, we're seeing like the weird woo, you know, bullshit medicine stuff kind of as a prelude to the fascism.

Right, where it kind of leads in and helps bring it. For this guy, he goes full fascist and then he becomes an energy healer. It's an amazing journey. So I can't wait to talk to you about Rodavon. That's how I always think about like George W. as like a reverse Hitler where he like got the war crimes out of the way and then retreated into painting afterwards. Oh, man.

I think Hitler would have done better painting if he'd taken the opposite route. But then again, what I mean is if he'd never painted because he just shot himself first because he was a bad painter. I guess what I'm saying is George W. Bush is a better artist than Hitler. You know, I got to give Bush that. I, I mean, if we absolutely have to give George W. flowers on 9-11, I guess so. I guess he's top of mind.

Look, Hitler's a better Hitler than George W. Bush was. I'll say that, you know, so it's not 100% either way. Yeah. God. I mean, geez, what a rough lead. Doesn't George W., like doesn't he paint like his war crime? He like paints injured veterans that are injuredness. He painted some injured veterans.

That's not really a war crime. That's just him being a shitty leader. I don't know. But he also painted like Putin's face. He does a lot of weird shit. I don't know. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com.za for details and to check availability.

Bell, connection is everything. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess podcast. The True Crime Comedy Podcasts all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi.

want you. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman. Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft.

Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. You never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time?

Listen to Examine the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, it's me, Debbie Kumabelle. This season on my podcast, who's with me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that, you're lending your life to stewarding. somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with with Debbie Kumabelle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Is there an epidemic against literature? More specifically, black literature. I'm Jack Quist-Peace Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lit podcast, we're outside asking why. They don't want a whole bunch of little Ella Bakers, Michael Maxes and Martin Luther King running around. And when you look at a lot of different cultures,

they're like, we need to know where you came from. And considering this is, Black Reading Month. The only real question is, what are you reading next? Listen to Black Lit from the Black Effect Podcast Network on our Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Anyway, speaking of war crimes, let's talk a little bit about Balkan history, right? Okay.

Because you gotta, we can't just like start talking about this guy's life. There's too much, and too much complicated shit going on in the Balkans that leads into this. So if you, if you're not a map person, the Balkans are like kind of a chunk of sense. Southeast Europe, like leading up into Eastern Europe, but all of a sudden like that southern flank that includes, like you've got Slovenia, you've got Croatia, you've got Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, like all these different areas are like parts of the Balkans. And it's historically this like the most quarrelsome part of Europe in the early modern

era, right? And a big reason for that is that because of geography, the Balkans are the major European battleground for most of the fighting between like the Muslims and the Christians, right? When you get the Ottoman Empire trying to make their way into Europe, they take a lot of the Balkans. And for a lot of like the early modern period, much of the Balkans is like governed from Constantinople, right? It's like part of the Ottoman Empire. And that doesn't, that that leads to a lot of fucking conflicts, right? Because people in like modern day Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia are subjects of the Ottoman Sultan for a very long time. And some of these people can

vert to Islam. And of course, a lot of Muslims from Anatolia and elsewhere migrate to the Balkans, particularly Bosnia, right? They're Bosnia develops a very sizable Muslim population. They're called Bosniaks. Those are like the Bosnian Muslims. And obviously, there's also a lot of Christians. Quite a few Serbian Christians specifically say, fuck you to the idea of serving a sultan. And the mountainous highlands, particularly around Montenegro, the term they use is like a Shatter zone, right? It's this area on the edge of an empire and in between other empires or kingdoms where usually it's very mountainous and so it's hard to like govern in the pre-modern period. Before you have helicopters, you can't really govern these island regions because like if you

have an army and guys just go up 2,000 feet, it's like, well, your army will die before they reach them. You can't you can't march them into the mountains. So you wind up with this big Shatter Zone and like kind of Montenegro where there's all these Serb clans who wish to escape the Sultan's law would like flee and fight. Modern historians tend to emphasize their primary issue with the Ottomans was not even religion as much as it was taxation, which is usually the case with stuff like this, even if it gets written up as a big holy wars because, well, no, that guy wants to tax us and we have mountains so we don't have to pay taxes. Yeah, there's always a secret. There's always a back alley reason for actually doing it. And it's usually taxes.

right? That's a big part of it at least. Still, these mountain Serbs develop a reputation among other Europeans as they're primitives, right? They're these very savage like warriors who don't build big cities because they live up in these highland areas. But they're also these noble warriors defending Christendom against the Islamic hordes. They're like the shield of Europe too. So they develop both of those kinds of reputations. During this period of time, Montenegrin Serbs largely clustered in small clan and tribal groups under the leadership of people called dukes. These aren't royal. in the traditional sense. They're often from like the same families, prominent families. But the leaders are like, so you don't tend to get like super hierarchical by like birth, like governance structures in these mountainous areas where it's just kind of who's best at killing, right? Because if like someone's shithead son tries to rule everybody and they're not great at killing, they're going to get killed.

They're going to get killed. We're going to bring that back. We should bring that back. They had some things, right? We could, we could kill the Nepo baby. course once and for all if we were just allowed to kill people. Yes, the mountain Serbs have much to teach us about governance structures. I'm always saying this. So it's not like an electoral system and it's not it's certainly not electoral. Okay. Okay. Often by like who will the most people like follow into

battle because like they know you're not an idiot. You won't get them killed pointlessly, right? Okay. So it's like it's Instagram rules. Yeah. Largest following with. Exactly. Yes. The Bosnia, Instagram is actually based off of the way the Montenegrin Serbs, you know, handle politics in this period of time. My friend Mark is always telling me about that. The birth of influence of culture. And one of the families in kind of this part, this like part of modern day Montenegro where there's all these clans, what are the families that produces a lot of dukes are the Karajiks, right? The Karajiks are like this kind of, when I say family, it's almost more of like a clan or a tribal group. And in around the 13th century, the Karajic families move to a.

village called Pejika and develop a reputation for producing an outsized number of these military leaders. In her pseudo biography of Radavan Karajik, my war criminal, Jessica, and we'll talk about that title a little bit later, Jessica Stern interviewed several members of the Karajik clan to hunt down family lore behind Radavon. She was told many stories about like one of the most famous early members of the family, this Duke named Sujo Karajik, who was a duke who assassinated the local Turkish leader and had this epic poem written about like him killing assassinating this guy, right? The Balkans in general are big epic, it's a big epic poem place, right?

It's a lot of oral traditions particularly among like the Serbs. And that's how they tend to like pass on stories. You make, you make a mixtape about a cool guy who like does cool shit, right? You know, you got to put that shit on wax. Sometimes you kill a guy so well that your friend writes at EP. about it. I am excited after like several rounds of nuclear war and stuff for like what the story of that guy who blasted Shenzhou Abe becomes like a thousand years in the future when people

don't know what like a 3D printed gun was or whatever. Yes. Looking forward to what people say about that one. So the Karajic family in Radabon as a kid is going to grow up being weaned on stories of like his famous, you know, relative who was this great war leader. He was also told a lot about another one of his ancestors, Vuk Karajik, who was a writer and folklorist born in 1787, and Vuk is credited with helping to form and shape a lot of modern. He helps invent Serbian grammar to a significant extent. This is one of those languages where people have been speaking it for a while, but once we start, like, writing books and publishing them, there's like a couple dudes who figure out, like, how are we going to write stuff?

Like, what are the rules of our language? No one sat down and decided that, really. That is such a great hack into getting your random story kind of like codified into history As if you can like write something down that is actually desperately needed to preserve the culture It doesn't even matter if the story's good. Is it good story not important? What matters is that somebody wrote it down? Yeah.

We figured out flew perfect. And he also writes, Vuk writes a collection of Balkan fairy tales that are some of the first grimest. stories like Jacob Grimm takes a lot of the is inspired to do a lot of the grimm's fairy tales. If you think about a lot of really dark grim very tale, some of them are Serbian in origin. You know, you're so right. Not a lot of happy stories told by the Serbs. For good reason. The Grims lifted stuff like crazy.

I just didn't know. Oh, yeah. Some of it's from the ancestor of this weird genocide guy. We're going to be talking about this week. The Grim's a little grim. It was right there, sorry. Yeah, that's very true, Sophie. So in the centuries to come, many Serbs would need the distraction of fairy tales, even dark ones, because their life was even darker, right?

World War I, as you might remember, was kicked off by a Serb partisan in Sarajevo who shot the Archduke of Austria-Hungary. When the central powers invaded Serbia to get revenge, Serbia lost more than 265,000 soldiers in the war, which was a quarter of their mobilized army. And in comparison, France and Germany both lost, like, I think France loses like 16% of their mobilized army. Germany loses like 15%. And you know how horrible the casualties are for France and Germany in World War I. Serbia loses a quarter of their mobilized army, right? So it's even worse. And between half a million and 800,000-ish, civilians are also killed.

Now, there has been, and still is, a great deal of debate over, like, how many Serbs die in World War I. But in a 2021 paper for the University of Belgrade, Slobodan Markovych estimated that between 21 and 27.65% of the entire Serbian population dies in that war. It kills a quarter of all of the Serbs that exist, right? That's a pretty good estimate. Lord. That's not good. That's pretty rough, right? No, no, that's putting up genocide numbers.

That is really scary. It is. And there's genocidal elements to that war. Yeah. So it's pretty bleak. It's a dark time. And it's got to get even darker because on March 27, 1941, pro-fascist elements within the World War II starts, obviously, just as a little bit of a prelude, right? Sure, sure, sure, sure. And kind of after World War I, because Austria-Hungary breaks up, you have the establishment, I think, of the 20s of Yugoslavia, right? That's when it becomes a thing. And it's independent for a while. And at the outbreak of World War I, Germany attempts to kind of kind of. co-opt the government of Yugoslavia, and there's pro-fascist elements within the government who's agreed to sign an armistice with Germany, right? So initially it looks like Yugoslavia is

going to be kind of on the axis side of things. Not as like a full member of the access, obviously, but it's like one of kind of their allied states. But then, per history.com, quote, Yugoslav air officers aided by the British secret services toppled the country's pro-axis regime. In response, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler launched a massive invasion of the country that began on April 6th with the bombing of Belgrade. The Yugoslav defenders made up of various politically unstable nationalities were routed by the hordes of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops invading their country. On April 17, Yugoslavia surrendered and was divided, except for the puppet state of Croatia

between the four invading Axis powers. The occupying troops aggravated the traditional religious and national differences in the region, and the Serbs were especially brutalized. And this is, things get so ugly in the Balkans and Serbia in particular. during World War II. This might be the place that has like the ugliest war in world, all of World War II. In terms of like the actual crimes against the civilian population, right? That's hard to say, right?

Is it, if it's uglier than Poland, it's by like a fraction of a degree, right? They're both nightmares. Yeah. But we don't, it's also that the degree to which what happens in the Balkans during World War II is horrific and not talked about is, it's much more extreme. Because everyone knows Poland. I was going to say that this is yet another sort of glaring gap in my American public schooling where... We do not talk about this. Yeah, absolutely bashed over the head with World War II.

And then entire regions are just completely ignored. And there's an argument to be made. If you're talking about like what things are why the Germans lost the war, well, one possible argument is because Germany has to invade the Balkans, right? Yugoslavia is that because that's one of the things that delays in Greece too that delays them invading Russia, right? They have to push back until later in the year, Operation Barbarossa, and that is part of why Operation Barber. I don't think it would have worked either way, right? But because they're later, that means they don't get as far before the winter hits, right? It's one of these things that delays Hitler that he didn't want to do. He wanted to not have to invade.

So it is really important to the overall progress of the war, too. Now, there's a lot of ugly things. going on in Yugoslavia during World War II? This is maybe an all-timer bleak start to the episode. Yeah. And it only, well, I don't think it's bleaker. I don't think it's bleaker. But this is a Serbian story. So it stays at a pretty high level of bleak the entire time. Right? Sure. Sure. Thanks for the George Bush joke for me. Yeah. Now, the worst of all of the different bad actors, and there's a lot of them.

in World War II was the fascist, in the Balkans, was the fascist independent state of Croatia. As I said, Croatia gets to be independent because, like, the people in charge of Croatia are basically Nazis, right? They have a militant movement that winds up in charge over there and is active in other parts of the Balkans called the Ustashi. And they do, they're like, they're like the fucking Nazis with like a little bit of extra pep in their fucking step, right? Obviously, they're targeting Jews and Roma, and that's who they massacre first. And the massacre of Jews in Yugoslavia is like pretty nightmarishly, like, extensive. But they don't stop there also. They're also massacring Serbs.

As I said, there's a genocide against the Serbs during World War II, or at least an attempted one. And the Bosniaks, these Bosnian Muslims are, they wind up on both sides, right? Because a big chunk, like the leadership of the independent state of Croatia sees the Bosnia, the Bosniac Muslims as Muslim Croats, right? So, like, they're Muslim, but they're, like, part of their Aryan, right? And they're offered Aryan status. And a big chunk of, like, leaders within the Bosniak community kind of take up and

agree to work alongside and fight alongside the independent state of Croatia. And particularly in some heavily Muslim areas like Bosnia, the Estasha are something like 50% Muslim, right? Now, this has been twisted by racists in the present. And you'll hear claims that the Estashi were, like, 90% Muslim and that the Nazis in Yugoslavia were Muslim. They have these, you know, Muslim genocide in Yugoslavia, and that 90% of the Muslims fought alongside the Ustashi.

This is all nonsense, right? The Ustashi are primarily clerical fascists, and they are Catholics, right? That is the primary religion behind the Ustashi, right? And the Ustashi do offer tolerance to Islam for a variety of complex reasons, but mostly out of military necessity. More to the point, the Ustashi also massacre Muslims, right? A lot of Muslims fight against them, a lot of Muslims get put in concentration camps, and wiped out.

I want to read a quote from an article for the Yasinovitz concentration camp memorial. Quote, The first Muslims were imprisoned in Oostasia camps in 1941. There are mostly communists or opponents of the Eustasha regime, who would grow significantly in number. The first group of Muslims was deported to Camp 3, Brickworks, in mid-November in 1941. The group consisted of 116 Jews and communists from the Sarajevo area, amongst whom there were 16 Muslims.

Over the next few years, the number of imprisoned Muslims grew. They were communists and members of the people's liberation movement from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially from Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and parts of Bosnia and Pasina and central Bosnia. Only a few managed to evade death. So they wipe out a lot of Muslims, too. You know, it's not as simple as like, oh, the Yostashi, the Muslims fought for the Yostashi. A bunch of them fought against it. A bunch of them were genocided. But this is going to get twisted in kind of a lot of modern-day right-wing historiography about the period. Sure, sure. I mean, we're so invested in Islamophobia, people will take it wherever they can find it. And there's a lot of complicated reasons for why, like, a big chunk of Muslims thought the Ustashi were the people to back. And there's also other stuff. So, as I said, there's a lot of different horrible groups fighting in Yugoslavia in this period. One of the more complicated participants in the fighting were the Chetniks. The Chetniks are essentially a Serb-dominated royalist militia. They are fighting. They want independence from the Nazis who have invaded their country,

but they want independence to put the ousted royal family back in power. And the royal family are not nice people, as royal families generally are not. And the Chetniks become known for their use of brutal insurgent and terrorist tactics, which they do use against the Eustasha, who had it coming, but also against any Croats they could get their hands on. Bosniaks and Muslims and Herzegovina and elsewhere were also slaughtered. The nationalistic goals of the Chetniks set them against the Axis long term, but they also fought alongside the Axis too, strategically supporting Nazi efforts, particularly when the Nazis wanted to wipe out a group of people that the Chetniks wanted slaughtered, right?

Because they're kind of thinking about the post-war period. It's a fucking nightmare. It's horrible. This is a horrible. This is a, because, I mean, you just, you hear this many, this many horrible motivations and you're just like, well, civilians are not going to be doing well in this atmosphere. billions in this war. There's no, yeah.

So it doesn't sound like. It's just, oh, God. The other thing you'll get, so generally as a rule, when you hear about, like, German soldiers and, like, their opinion on, like, where they were stationed during World War II, the worst place you can get is the East. You want to be anywhere but the East? German soldiers who wind up in the Balkans are, like, asking to go East sometimes. Because it's so bad.

Because I will take my fucking chances with the Russians. Like, get me away from. from these people. Like, one of the, one of the chief weapons that, uh,

the Astasha are using to, like, do their genocide is just this, like, glove with like a razor blade on the hand that they just jab into people's necks, hundreds at a time. They just throw them down in front of me.

I'll cut their fucking necks with this hand knife thing. Like, it's awful stuff. Like, I cannot exaggerate how fucking ugly the war in the Balkans is. Yeah, that's, uh,

that's pretty fucking horrible. God. It's pretty bad. Such a simple device that also sounds like it would be, it would take so long to kill someone. It would take a lot of time to get through a lot of people doing it that way. But bullets are expensive, you know? Yeah, sure. And this you can just make at home.

Well, and that's, you know, the Nazis have that problem too. They're like shooting a whole bunch of people is really bad for our troops. Their brains break after a while if they're just killing civilians with guns. And also we don't have unlimited bullets. That's why like gas chambers and shit become popular. part of why the eustache are just like what about hen knife what if it was harder and that sounds like the quickest route to breaking your brain as having to like kitchen glove knife someone repeatedly nobody fighting for that particular group had a soul by the time the war

started they had already seen thousands of deaths I yeah I guess it's like that's not you don't put that glove on for your first kill I suppose God, no. You don't start with the knife glove. Yeah, it's pretty haunting stuff. The Balkans. So the whole, the whole ethnic. Yeah.

And I love the Balkans. I've spent a lot of time there. It's a wonderful part of the world. Great food. Anytime you get a coffee, there's a cigarette with it. It's great nowadays. But yeah, they've had a rough history. The whole ethnic and religious situation in the Balkans of World War II.

And the details of everything that happened are way too complicated. for me to cover in more depth during what is the prelude to do a completely different genocide? But there's a myth I do need to bust before we go on, because you will hear claims online that the Eustasha were so viable that even the SS were horrified by their actions, that they went too far for even the SS. And the idea that they went too far for the worst Nazis is very viral and it's also untrue. Most of this rumor is due to the fact that one specific Nazi an Austrian named Edmund Glace Horstanao did attempt to halt the Eustache's atrocities. He was like a German diplomat who was stationed there.

And he sent a bunch of complaints to Berlin. And we're like, these guys are going a little bit off, a little bit out of pocket. And so a Nazi was horrified. But like, Himmler wasn't. Hitler wasn't. Like Berlin completely ignored his complaints. They were like, yeah, it's fine that we don't give a shit. Like, we're the Nazis.

And so you can find SS reports describing the bestial mass. that the Astashi used against, quote, helpless old people, women and children. But there's no evidence that, like, Himmler himself or anyone high up in the SS gave a shit. And you can also find, you can find similar individual SS men writing about horrifying crimes, other SS guys committed. This is also true with Oscar Dirlwanger. So it's not that the Ustashi were too horrible for the SS. It's that there's always some guys who are, like, a little bit, like, softer.

Yeah, that it's like, of course there are Nazis who are also. so like cowardly and cannot yeah like i didn't i didn't know we were doing this yeah yeah that that is like a piece of information that's designed to go dishonestly viral yes exactly um now at most what it is fair to say as i pointed out is that the the brutal hand-to-hand nature with which a lot of the killing gets done and the Balkans does nauseate a lot of SS guys but even himmler got sick visiting Auschwitz and that doesn't mean he wasn't okay with it right um right Anyway, back to the Balkans. So, Balkan World War II history knowers will be livid at me not yet discussing in detail

and arguably the most important partisan militia of that period, which is the communists. And this is because our bastard, Radavan Karajik's father, Vuko, fought for the Chetniks against the communist. So he's a member of this kind of right-wing Serbian militia that fights the Nazis sometimes but also fights alongside the Nazis, especially when they want to kill communists. And the primary people they hate are the communists, right? So our bastards dad may have fought the Nazis. I haven't seen any evidence of this.

It's probably a lot more likely that he wanted to kill communists and Muslim Croats, right? So after Yugoslavia fell to the Nazis, Joseph Broz Tito formed a resistance group made up of members of the former, of the illegal, of the illegal, of the illegal. There had been a communist party in Yugoslavia that's illegal. And these guys are like, you know, probably mostly book nerds as communists tended to be at the period. And Tito's just one of the... We'll do an episode on him at some point. He's one of the most interesting men who ever fucking lived. I could easily do a two-part behind the bastards on Tito,

but I would also have to have Margaret do a two-part episode of cool people who did cool stuff to accurately depict Tito's life. He's that kind of guy. Where it's like... Yeah, he was a dictator, but he was also pretty amazing. That actually sounds like an incredible game of volleyball. We'll do it one of these days. nightmare. For this week, we're not talking much about Tito. What you need to know about him is that he turns his former political party into a partisan army strong enough that they win. Yugoslavia is the only nation that gets conquered by the Nazis and independently frees themselves. They don't have to be, now obviously they receive some assistance and stuff, but they don't have to be liberated. There's not foreign troops who have to free. They do it because they're that good. Like Tito is very, very effective.

as a partisan leader. Can I ask something like very, very tiny-brained question? Why do we not learn about this area of World War II? What is the function? Because it's way too complicated. Okay. None of this, and afterwards even, in like the Cold War, Yugoslavia doesn't cleanly slot into any boxes, right?

Because they were communist, so you'd think they cleanly. But also, Tito literally threatened to have Stalin murdered after Stalin. Stalin kept sending assassins to kill Tito because Tito wouldn't do what he wanted. And Tito eventually was like, if you keep sending it, you've sent like seven of these guys to kill me. I've killed them all. If you send any more, I'll send one man to kill you and I won't have to send another.

Like this is at the height of stall. That's who Tito is. Tito doesn't give a fuck. You know who would have hated ads? Probably Tito. I guess anyone in this. Yeah, probably Tito. Yeah, probably most of the communists in the story, but certainly Tito.

Yeah, definitely the communist. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah. Yeah. Cotino would not buy this. He probably wouldn't. Make of that what you will. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies?

Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my God, Lexi. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me.

I'm Lexi Youwano. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anyone fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say.

If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how much. accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar. Listen on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't really care. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian,

creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast. The True Crime Comedy Podcasts, all about robbery, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on incredible guests like Conan O'Brien, Iowa Debrie, Lamorne Morris, and Nicole Byer. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me.

That's why I had to make yapping a job. And the scams run the gamut. I'm talking about scams from the 1800s all the way up to today. I also warn you and keep you safe against scammers. Call your grandparents. Tell your parents to stop clicking on links. please. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. If there's a scam, I'm here to protect you. And I'm also here to laugh with you.

So if you like fun, if you like comedy and you like learning and protecting yourself from criminals, start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman. Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft.

Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is faux journal. I don't know. Have you guys heard of faux journaling? Yeah, it's reading. It's called reading. So we don't like to use that word anymore. Okay.

A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? No! I've been dying too. I'm so sorry. I'm seeing a reading of Sadako and the Pousand thousand paper cranes by Audra McDonald's at the Wonderland Bookstore on 14. That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland Bookstore yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading

of Zero Dark 30. No way. You have to come to the last bookstore though. Kim Cottrell is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. A panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. ever seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over. We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory.

So he went into a good france. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to examined the backfire effect on the IHeart Radio app, podcast for wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast,

here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers like actor Stephen Root. I think for me to be any good or for any character act to be any good, you've got to put enough of yourself and your empathy for people in it. I'm a people watcher. You see that guy going down the dream and go,

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It's like you with a great actress or actor. It was best to come out of your trailer, full of life, and just face another person who's full of life and don't talk. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What would change if you stopped letting money stress run your life, sis? I'm Mandy Money, host of Brown Ambition, The Podcast. And right now, I'm taking you through my six-part Money Reboot series. This is your chance to hit reset, break the debt cycle, get honest about where your money's going,

build a savings plan that actually sticks, and start making financial choices that support the life you want, not just the bills you have. Because wealth building is not about being perfect. It's about having a plan, knowing your numbers, and making your next move with confidence with a community that cares like we do on Brown Ambition. Each episode gives you practical steps, real talk, and the motivation to stop putting your financial goals on hold. So if you've been saying, I'll get serious about money next month. This is your sign. Start now. Listen to Brown Ambition. That's Brown Ambition and begin your money reboot today. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Although again, one of the

complicated things about Yugoslavia is that there are some points where he's trying, they're trying to align themselves closer to the West. So again, they don't fit super cleanly into any of the boxes that in our very simple histories we like to assign states to. Okay. So we just don't learn about it because because we would have to teach children that more than one thing can be true. I see. I see. It's also,

it's impossible to learn about Tito without being like, well, that was kind of amazing. And you really don't want that with like a communist dictator during like the Cold War era. That's how a lot of,

that's how I feel when a lot of people describe their father. So where you hear some real atrocity is followed by like, man, but he was a great guy. Tell me out of fish. Yeah.

Ruined my life. Yeah. I learned out of fish. And Tito, I mean, the thing about him is that after the war, he governs for decades, Yugoslavia up until 1980. He's running it from the end of World War II up to, I think, 1980 is when he dies. And this is the only period of time, pretty much, that, like, the Balkans is one united

thing. And it's because Tito's very good at keeping this incredibly quarrelsome area together, right? He's going to ultimately be unsuccessful. He tries to create this sense of, like, Yugoslav nationality. As you might guess by the fact that there's no Yugoslavia today. It doesn't work out in the long run, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, that's enough backstory for us to finally turn to the actual subject of these episodes. God, that was a really brutal journey to the beginning of the episode. Kind of an old-timer. The last, oh, man, sometimes we get some fun ones. Sometimes there's a witch at the beginning. No, millions are already dead. This time millions are dead. Okay.

Yeah. So Radavon Karajik was born on June 19, 1945, in Pejika, which is a tiny Montenegrin village that Wikipedia notes is, quote, inhabited exclusively by the Karajik families. So everyone's kind of related in this larger family group in this small town. Okay. Maybe a few dozen people, right? Insest, question. I don't, it's not family quite in the same sense.

Like, I think these are more like a tribal group. But like, yeah, they're all kind of related, definitely. There is going to be incest in this story. Like an intro. There's a tempted incest in this story. Not quite Targaryens. Got it. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, and kind of, again, Radovan comes into the world right at the end of World War II after about a million Yugoslavians die in the war. Mostly, like, Serbs are the largest number of that. A lot of Serbs get killed in Yugoslavia. And a lot of Serbs get killed by Croats in particular. So there's going to be anger over like what was effectively a Serbian genocide. that gets committed by these people who you're now countrymen with some of them, right?

Yeah, I mean, that's just going to simmer. That has to be like categorically true, right? Like there just was a massive genocide that it sounds like most of the world was just ignoring because it was World War II. Yeah. There was a lot of genocide going around. The Balkans are complicated. None of it was easy to talk about. So, yeah, Radavon comes into the world in 45, and his father,

Vucco, who again had fought with the Chetniks, had been born in 1912, and he was not a nice man. An analysis of Radovan's life published by the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law noted after the war that media accounts described Vucco as, quote, a poor tramp and a tenderent journeyman with a history of incest and theft. And this is slightly incorrect, right? But the truth is actually a little worse. He didn't, he aspired to incest. He never quite made it happen, right?

I do think that's better. I do think that's better. Well, you hear about what happens, Jamie. Oh, okay. Maybe I should read this story to you first. What do we mean about failed incest guy? Okay. He tries to marry his fifth cousin, right?

Which is legal at the time. Anything further than like third cousins is legal. So it's not like illegal. I know. Anytime you need to pull out the law, it's like when you're talking to someone or like you're in an argument on Twitter and someone's like, actually it's okay that I that and then they said you a picture of a map. You're like, no.

Right, right, right. Yeah, or they're making a strong point about age of consent law. Yeah. Exactly. If you need to know the law. Yeah. If you need a map, you're a pervert. There's a couple different versions of the story of like what happens with with Vucco and his fifth cousin.

And the version told by his family, this cousin does not love him back. He's in love with her. And they're both cowherds. So they spend like a lot of time together. and one day he tries to kiss her and she pushes him off, and the gun that he was carrying accidentally goes off and hits an artery in her leg. And he tries to, they're very specific, he tries to plug the wound with tobacco, which was apparently a folk remedy for cuts, but she bled out.

You should not use tobacco as a folk remedy for an arterial wound. Oh, so he attempted incest and then killed her? Yeah, he definitely killed her. The family version of the story is, yeah. It was an accident. Let me go with the other first. The family version is he loved her. She didn't love him back.

And his gun just went off by accident as she's like pushing him away. There's a second version of the story. And in the family version of the story, the girl's family, after he kills her, the girl's family understands it's an accident. But because of his negligence, Vuko goes to prison for a year. Now, Jessica Stern, the author of My War Criminal, does not totally buy this story and finds a contemporary news article about the killing. And this news article claimed that Vucco and Jella, who's his fifth cousin, were both in love, right?

So it's different from the family story. But her parents wanted her to wait to marry him until he finished his compulsory military service. As Stern summarizes, quote, Jela promised to marry Vucco, but in keeping with her parents' wishes insisted on delay. Vucco, on the other hand, wanted to get married immediately. One day, Jela asked Vucco to meet her at the top of the large hill above the village. Vucco went to meet his cousin, as requested. He brought a revolver as well as the cows.

He pressed once again for Jela to marry him. When Jella refused, he shot her. The bullet went through both of her thighs, damaging the blood vessels. She died soon afterwards due to the loss of blood. Vugo did not confess to the crime, but told the court that the shooting was accidental. He testified that his revolver had fallen out of his pocket as he was seating himself next to his cousin Jela. He said that Jela had asked him, why are you carrying that devil with you? Then she grabbed the gun and threw it away from where they were sitting.

Vucco testified that the gun hit a rock and accidentally discharged, fatally wounding Jela in the thigh. The court did not accept a Bucco's version of what transpired. Yeah, no shit. Yeah, yeah. Of course they don't. That's the most obvious lie. He's like, he's like creating like an what you say kind of scenario for what happened with the gun. He really is.

That's ridiculous. Stop. Stop. He's found with like a letter on his person. No, Robert. Pause. That was the most impeccable reference. I've ever heard.

If someone's dramatically shooting, I'm going... Oh, my God. If you didn't get that reference, message me on Blue Sky. I'll send you the video. Oh, my God, Jamie. Sorry, Robert. Sorry, Robert. That was amazing.

The court actually has access to a letter that Vucco had in his bag when he gets taken into custody in which he threatens to kill Jela and then himself if she doesn't marry him immediately. And it read in part, quote, Dear Jela, if our marriage cannot be proclaimed, then thank you for burying both of us in the black ground. And Vuk was like, well, yeah, I wrote that letter, but it was to scare her into marrying me.

I wouldn't have actually killed her. I like that he is. The fact that I killed her was a clear accident. No matter what, no matter what, there is no doubt that he shot her in the thigh and killed her. He definitely shot her in the thigh and killed her. I like that there is no interpretation of it. It was like, okay, no, so he definitely killed her. But it was actually an accident and he was just trying to trick her to marry.

him. I, yeah, I guess, not that it doesn't matter which version of the story is true, but I'm going to go with the least charitable one. He didn't kill her. Yeah, probably, probably not the nicest one. And it sounds like he's like kind of, I mean, a shot to the thigh feels quite personal, I feel. Yeah.

Yeah. That is not giving an accident if you, if you have just rejected someone's advance. Yeah, yeah. So again, not a great dude, no matter which version of the story, is true. And Vucco gets released from his, from prison right at the start of the Axis invasion, right? That's what gets him out of being locked up. And that's when he joins the Chetniks. And then after the war, right after his son is born, the communists, wind up victorious. And he gets arrested and imprisoned for another year because he fought against the communists a bunch. Or another five years. Who did he end up with after he killed his cousin for sexually rejecting him? He has to marry him. So everyone will know that the woman who becomes Rodavon's mother, who eventually marries, is like illiterate and like comes from a poor family. And so he has to like, he has to go down a couple of steps. He was like, because of his social position that the Karajik's had, he should have been able to marry somebody better, but he's not able to because he murders this woman, right? That's what people say. And so does, so does she. She has to marry a murderer. She has to marry the murderer. Yeah. Yeah. So she is. He misses the first five years of his son Radovan's life, which is the happiest years of his son Radovan's life. He's emphatic about the fact that, no, it was great before dad came back from prison. The communist did us a favor by taking him away. And so his earliest memories when he's just with his mom would have been a mix of heroic poems.

Because his mom sings a lot. They usually set their poems to music in this part of the world. So his mom's singing him a lot of poems about his valiant ancestors fighting the Muslims and, you know, furiously whispered tales of communist violence against his feelings. family. He grows up knowing which oak trees in town had been used as backstops for the communists to execute his family members, right? These are the stories this kid grows up with. It's a very Serbian childhood. It's like every boy knows. Which trees your family members bled to death against? Yes. Wow. My mother would sing it to me as we've asked by.

Like the family stories that they shoot his dad too. They try to kill him once and he like blocks the bullet with his hand. So they just put him in prison. and instead. This is hard. It's a harsh, yeah, some hard stories to grow up with. Yeah. His mother, Javanka, raises Radovan as an only child for five happy years while his dad is away. Now, she's a decade younger than her husband.

She's also illiterate, and Radovan later described her as a scrappy, energetic peasant girl. Quote, she used to recite epic poetry for me every night. I learned many of these poems by heart before I learned to read. So for those first few years until his dad came home and started to producing what would become four younger siblings, Radavan mostly remembers the songs of his mother and the natural beauty of the rugged landscape around their hometown. He grew up with an almost religious appreciation for the ancient oaks. There's this like, they're like they form part of like the religious ceremonies. I mean, they're Christian ceremonies, but in this region. Like they are

very, very focused on their oak trees, right? It's like a big deal to these Montenegrin Serbs. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of like both natural folk remedies and kind of like magic, like Like, or not natural, but like, like folk magic that he's also raised to believe in. This is an important part of his childhood and his upbringing, right? Like the thing when you shoot your cousin in the crotch and then shove tobacco into the wound so that she doesn't die. Yeah. It's not all very effective folk medicine. It's not 100% effective, but what medicine is.

Yeah. His mother was peaceful and never used any corporal punishment on him or his other siblings. He recalled later, in the first five years of my life, I was never beaten, I was never hit. My mother never kicked me. Now, his biographer, Jessica Stern, because she's talking to him while he's in prison after he does the things that we're going to talk about. And she came to with that he phrased. She's Mrs. My War Criminal? Yeah.

She's a little weird. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. Yeah. She's like, is it like when the journalist fell in love with Martin Schrelli? Not quite, but she, I, we'll talk about this. later. I don't want to shit talk because I rely on her book a lot and she gets a lot of good details in there. She writes some stuff in there that I don't fully understand. I'll say that much. There's something about a horny journalist.

Maybe a little. I don't know. Yeah. It's more that she was impressed by his charisma. Let's say that. Oh, come on. Okay. First of all, dare I say Jamie Loftus, at times a horny journalist. Oh, no. I mean, I I'm interested to hear her point of view. I'm interested to. It's not horny. It's just like weirdly weird. I don't know how else to describe it.

I'm excited to hear the weirdest. She's doing like energy healing and she clearly believes in that stuff too. So she's like, I could feel his energy. Like it's weird. It's a weird biography. I don't know how else to say it, guys. Okay, they're healing each other. Yeah, that's okay.

I'm excited to meet her. Okay. Yeah. Well, she sounds trustworthy. And she suggests that, like, the reason he emphasizes that his mom never hits him is that his dad beats the shit out of him when he gets back, right? And for his part, Radovan more or less agrees. Quote, my father was a strict disciplinarian, but he hit me less that he hit my siblings. I was afraid that my father was very harsh with the other children. My father did beat me, but he didn't beat me that much. Okay. I guess that's all you can ask for. Okay. I do feel like a lot of Behind the Bastards episodes kind of start with this dynamic. This is feeling familiar. Yeah. So he also grew up hearing poems from his father, who was a great Gusler or player of an indigenous,

there's this indigenous Serbian instrument. And he plays it a lot. And he sings. And singing seems to have been one of the relatively few things that Vucco is both around his kids to do. And also he's tolerable when he's singing. Radovan later recalled to Stern, my friends and I once asked my late father how it was possible to know so many poems by heart. And my father said that if a singer forgets the line, he can substitute a new one.

If this new line was better than the old one, other singers will continue to use the old one. Interesting. So, yeah, he's going to learn a lot about, like, art from this. He becomes like a poet and a musician. And he's also, when he becomes a dictator, he gives all his speeches extemporaneously. So I think this has a big influence on him, right? From his parents. It's pretty potent to say, like, well, if you don't know how it goes, just make it up.

and see what people say. Yeah. So from his parents, Radavon would inherit a love of poetry and an appreciation for being able to make shit up on the spot. I haven't found a lot of detail about how he spent his childhood and adolescence.

One BBC article, summarizing interviews with his mother, put it this way. His mother described her son as loyal and a hard worker who used to help her in the home and in the fields. She said that he was a serious boy who was respectful towards the elderly

and helped his school friends with their homework. So that's, you know, maybe. The family left Peshika, not long after Vucco gets out of prison and they moved to another village, Sovnik. When Radovan was 11, they leave for the big city, Nixik, which is the second city of Montenegro. But he never gets over the village that he's raised in, and he would later complain to interviewers with vehement hatred that the communist destroyed the ancient oak trees to build a highway. And he calls this blasphemy, right? So he takes that very seriously. He does not seem to have held any ire against the communists as a young.

man though and he's going to join the Communist Party for years. This might be because he hated his father so much. It may have been a well my dad hates the communist so I'm going to like the communist for a while. I mean that feels like a safe bet. Many such cases. Yeah. At age 15 he leaves on his own and moves to Sarajevo in nearby Bosnia. And everything in the Balkans is kind of near Bosnia, but still. Sarajevo is a strange choice for a man who would later become a violent Serbian ethno-nationalist. Belgrade, which is like the capital of Yugoslavia, is much larger and it's very Serb. Sarajevo, meanwhile, was and is a melting pot. If you've ever been there, it's a wonderful city. You can see the influence of Turkish and even Arab culture alongside

Balkan and European influences. It's a lot like Istanbul, if you've ever been, right? And that it's the city that you can just see has been a crossroads for a bunch of civilizations for forever. It's a beautiful place. It's, I mean, and I can. can't know why Radovan went to Sarajevo. He would only explain to his biographer, most Montenegrins would have gone to Belgrade to study, right? So he's like, most people would not have made the choice that I made. But he doesn't really explain why. Maybe it is because he's attracted to the cosmopolitanism of the city, right? He is initially a pretty cosmopolitan guy. He is a lot of Muslim friends when he's living in Sarajevo. Okay. Jessica Stern writes that when he starts college,

he's largely seen as a country bumpkin, a bit like a southerner with a strong hillbilly accent who like moves to NYU or something to go to call. Sure. Who knows who knows all of his local trees type of guy. Right. All great at trees. Right. One of his friends tries to get him to change his hillbilly haircut when he moves to Sarajevo, but he refuses despite seeming odd. And despite the fact that he's like a weirdo, he's very charismatic. And so he becomes a popular guy in short order just as his intelligence makes him a good student. He's going to opt to go to medical school in order to become a psychiatrist.

And while he studied, he marries a peer medical student named Liliana Zelen in 1967. They had their daughter that year and a son a couple of years later. And unlike Rodavon's family, Lilianus has money. She comes from like an upper class family. She describes her husband as a poetic soul. That's why you go to Sarajevo. Right. Marry a rich girl.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, per that American Academy of Psychiatry Law article, other than, described Radhafun differently. Other accounts note his penchant for drinking, gambling, and spending thousands of dollars over the years in casinos. So he's got a wild side too, right? He's not all good students.

Not to excuse it, but like he's still in college right now, ish, age? Okay. Yeah, he's in college, medical school, right? You know, it's like teens to early 20s. Certain casino behaviors, we can... Certain casino behavior. Yeah. So when he's like 23 in 1968, he's, and he's become the president of the school

communist party by 1919. And that's the year that he starts activism, right? He becomes a student activist and he helps to organize it. There's like a series of protests that culminates in this like big day long strike, right, of students at the school. Now, everyone protesting are still communists. This is Yugoslavia. So they're protesting the communist government by carrying pictures of Che Guevara with them because like that's just, I guess, a universal protest thing, even if you're a communist. Wow.

Okay, potent. Interesting. He later explained this by saying that the protesters considered the fight against their local elites to be part of the global struggle against capitalism, even though their elites were communists. I don't know what they thought at the time. I didn't grow up in Yugoslavia. That's what he says later, but he is a liar. So maybe that's not how everyone felt. It's so, yeah, especially in a, I know so little about Yugoslavia that I'm like, you could tell me anything. And I would have to take you at your word. He's right. And he's, yeah, he's taking advantage of it. Yeah. It is very weird, though, that as a medical student, he's the leader of these protests because

he's the only medical student who participates. Most medical students are from privileged backgrounds and rarely become dissidents. So he is kind of unique. And he's also his style changes during this time. He's said to dress in flower children get up and wear groovy outfits. So he's dressing like a, he's dressing like the, like a communist impression of a stereotypical hippie, right? Like, you have to assume they don't have access to the same clothes. It's like shittier tie-dye or something, I don't know. Walking around like a Gary Larson character.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It must have looked fascinating. Okay. Yeah. Especially for a medical student. Yeah. It's like, whatever. All right. Long hair, weirdo hippie. During the main day of the protest, he climbs onto the roof of the faculty building to give what will be the first of many political speeches. Now, this is also the year that he becomes a published poet for the first time. And he fights with his publisher to ensure that his first book of poems gets published in Akavian, which is a Serb dialect common in rural areas, as opposed to the Bosnian dialect of the language that was much more common for literary works. Stern sees this as an early example of the fact that this guy has ethno-nationalist leanings.

And he does note that during this period, Radavon's activism has plugged him in with the Serbian elite in Bosnia. He would later say, they were all dissidents working in opposition to the regime. Now, it's noteworthy that he specified they're part of the Serbian elite, because the Yugoslav elite at the time were not dissidents. They're communists, right? That's what makes them their elite. The elite in a communist country are not anti-communists, right? So when he says, I was, like, when he's talking about the Serbian elite, he's not taught, he's talking about the ethno-nationalist elite, like among kind of the people who want independent Serbia, those are the people he's talking about, right? Because Tito, the guy who's the dictator, had been born a Croat, but he really

emphasizes that he's Yugoslav, and he tries to build a Yugoslav identity. And some people buy that and some people don't. And you get the feeling that even when he's with the Communist Party for a while, Radovan is never like a Yugoslav identity guy, right? He's always kind of little bit on the ethno-nationalist side of things. And he resigns from the Communist Party after these protests, right? So, you know, it's a, it makes sense. It does. It does.

And it also feels very, like, I don't know, first of all, a lot of intent for someone of his age. And also just, like, what is his, what is the vision at this point? I mean, it seems. I don't know that he has a vision. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's just, he's got some inclinations towards Serbian ethno-nationalism, right,

that are not fully formed yet. And I wouldn't want people to think that like he's fully the guy he's going to be, but you can see he's on that path a little bit even now. And you know what path you're on right now? Woo, the craft to products and services. That's right. That's right, baby. That sweet slick slide to products.

That's right. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

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And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anyone fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world.

We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me.

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Yay. So, yeah. It turns out later, you know, I've just been talking about how maybe he was like, like, sympathetic to Serbian nationalist aims at this period and started to be anti-communist. A lot of people would disagree with that because interviews later, a bunch of his friends who had been part of this activist campaign with him immediately after it ends, comes to to suspect that he'd been an informer for the regime and had been. been reporting on their activities to the police.

This seems like it could be likely because not long after this, this supposed dissident, this guy who would like led a protest campaign, is granted permission by the government to move to the United States and live in New York City, where he attends Columbia University from 1974 to 75. So yeah, maybe he did the government a solid. Columbia has no history with feds. That's so funny. Okay.

That actually, that makes so, I feel silly now. Oh, he was dressing like a cartoon hippie? Oh, he was getting on the roof and acting weird. Okay. Okay. He was a fed. Okay. So he studies poetry at Columbia, which is weird because he'd been in medical school, right?

And he's going to finish his medical degree later. But he's studying poetry while he's at Columbia. This is basically like a hiatus period for him, which suggests that maybe he had some doubts. Yeah. Still the 60s? Are we in the 70s now? This is the 70s. 74 to 75 is when he's in Columbia.

That's another suspicious move. Poetry majors do not like when a science expat, you know, wanders into their midst. No. Stay in your fucking lane. And we do get very different opinions on the quality of his poetry, depending on who we ask. Sometimes the same person will say like, oh, he was good and like,

nah, he was shitty. I can't judge his poetry. So I'm not going to try, right? He does. A lot of people do say he was like, just kind of like a, nickel and dime poet. Like he was writing like not high, high art. One of his

most noteworthy pieces, though, is a 1971 poem titled Serievo, which despite being set 21 years before the war, seems to describe the horror that Radovan himself would bring on his former home. Here's a selection of the poem. The city lies ablaze like a rough lump

of incense, wherein the haze of our awareness twists, the city implodes in that latent emptiness, a stone's crimson death bespeaks the house's blood soaked tide. Plague, tranquility. Again, this is the guy

who's going to order the shell of Sarajevo for three years, so it's weird that he wrote that 20-something years beforehand. Totally. Yeah.

It'd be like if George Bush had written in 1970, like a short story about invading Iraq and it not going well? Or painted it, I guess. Like, all right,

you know, I guess I'll just put this in the back drawer. Yeah. Huh. See how it's just to see? I will say very beside the point,

but, you know what, that was mid. That was a mid-pom. I assume it rhymed better in Serb. I'm sure, but you know. Sub-Croatian, yeah. So, you know, the similar, the use of language is a little obvious, you know. Yeah, maybe a little.

So while living in the U.S., Rodavon was a loud and vocal supporter of Tito, although this may be due to the fact that he had minders regularly checking in and spying on him. His roommate during this period was Barry Farber, who himself grew up to become an influential right-wing radio talk show host in the 1990s. It's just kind of weird that they lift together. I feel like anytime you learn about... Be like a Limbaugh contemporary. Name two men who were roommates in New York,

and you get like the most, the scariest story you've ever heard. You get like, or I mean, just two people. That's how you get like Barry Weiss and Kate McKinnon. You're like, what the fuck are you talking about? You shouldn't be in the same room. Yeah. He later, Barry later recalled this of Radavan. I should have seen that Radavan would not remain just a poet.

He was much too smart and forceful a character. I could see him running a country. He was formidable. He looked the part. And while I don't have a picture of him from the mid-70s, here's how we looked almost a decade later. These are obviously mugshots. He's going to get arrested.

We'll talk about why a little later. But look at that hair. Look at that hair. Amazing. It's great. He looks incredible his entire life. He's an amazing looking man. The hair is herring.

I don't know it's like a, it's like a gray pompadour. It's insane. It is. And like you can tell that it kind of just falls that way, which I resent. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's a lot of us need to do a lot of work to just get it to fall vague. Oh, that's, yeah.

I mean, honestly, he's giving like 2019 hairy styles here. Oh, wow. Sure, Sophie. You're welcome. I was going to, I was going to say like, keep bandarice, like a little. Not in the face, but the hair and the suit. And I agree with Antonio Banderas. Yes, I see that as well.

Sure. Anyways. I always agree with Antonio Mandaris. Look, I'm not going to speak against Harry Styles' hairline today because, I mean, I'm not seeing a hairline struggle from our bath. There you go. No, no, no, no. Harry has a manual. Harry got, Harry got the hair transplant situation.

He's open about it. He got the plugs. He got the plugs. He's open about it. Anyways. Bye. Sure. So the differing.

accounts of Radavan make sense when you learn that he'd been described as a social comedian or as a social comedian later, right? He's a guy who's really good at blending. He's good at being whoever he needs to be in the room that he's in, right? If he wants you to like him, you'll like him. Historian Robert Donia, who testified at his trial and was cross-examined by Radavan, noted, he knew exactly what to say, a different story for everyone with perfect knowledge of what people wanted to hear. After returning home, Karajik began to work as a psychiatrist. His mentor, Dr. Cerec, noted that he was not a very good psychiatrist due to the fact that he's not interested in anyone but himself. He does not care about people. Like, well, I mean, it's, I also just going

back to that other comment that there's a world where Karajik is like in court and he's like, Your Honor, I'm a people pleaser. I don't know what to tell you. I'm a people pleaser. I'm just good at being liked. I give the people what they're. they want. Yeah, of course he's a terrible psychiatrist. I guess that's that stands to reason. That scans. It'd be weird if he was good at it. I mean, most psychiatrists are bad psychiatrists in my experience, you know. True of most people in most jobs. Just throw a pill bottle at your head and tell you to fuck off. I wish. I have the opposite. Anyway, uh, Rodafon was very popular and good at charming his colleagues, but he was also lazy. Quote, he tried to find the easy way for everything.

Dr. Serak described him also as having a thousand faces. So again, he's a liar, he's a charmer, and he's lazy. Radvon spoke highly of his mentor, though, which is weird because his mentor is a Muslim man, right? And several people who have noted that during this time, many, most of the people in his social circle in Sarajevo are Muslims. He does not have any visible or obvious bias against Muslims. Again, he's going to do a genocide against Bosnia X, but he doesn't seem to have an issue with them socially. This is... Okay.

Because with Hitler you can find like yeah there was like one Jewish guy he was nice to in his life. But like with Rodden's like no like most of his friends were Muslim. It's kind of weird that he did a genocide. I'm really, I'm really... I mean,

finding out he was a fed for a period of time so far is the thing that it makes the most sense to me about this guy. Everything else is fairly baffling so far. He's a complicated man, that's for sure. He's had like 12 different professions before the age of 25. He's basically on good terms with people.

He will later genocide. Like, what, what do you mean? He spent nearly a decade in the 70s to the 80s working and living a fairly normal life. No, no, Jamie, you're not ready for where this man's hair is in part two. I'm going to say that right now. You are not ready. I cannot prepare you.

I'm just not seeing the source of, of, Okay, yeah. Usually I feel like we have the source of anger by college. Yeah. Yeah. He's a little hard to understand. I'll be honest. So he spends a decade or so working as a psychiatrist. He's like a successful upper middle class guy. I mean, I don't know that those terms are super useful for Sarajevo, but he's doing well, right? Perhaps his greatest professional achievement was that he somehow gets hired as the team psychologist for Red Star, Yugoslavia's premier football team. Per the book, My War. criminal quote. Karajik instructed team members to lie down together in a darkened room and imagine themselves to be bumblebees flying from flower to flower. The captain recalled the player's responses. Someone was sleeping, someone snoring, someone else was farting, and someone cursing about bumblebee thing was a huge joke to us. For the Red Star position, he moved to Belgrade, leaving his family behind for a year in 1983. Karajik was as boastful about his skill as team psychologist

as he was about everything else. One of his friends recalled that if the team scored a point, Karajik felt that the point was due to his psycho training of the players. He said he could make Red Star the best team in the world. Everyone knows the most important part of a good football team is the psychiatry. He's like, guys, guys, guys. During the World Cup, we were all competing psychiatrists. They would, we would not be in the semis without the bee thing. No.

Oh, okay. It's wild stuff. This is so bizarre. He's a little bit of an egomani. Bear death or, yeah, yeah, I guess it's like, I mean, he does chase attention. He's a narcissist. Like, pretty much anyway, you don't, not a lot of like humble, self-effacing men become dictators.

Like, I'm sure even Tito was on that spectrum. But again, one of the things Tito's known for is he's, like, really good at, like, delegating and knowing his strengths from his weaknesses, actually, which is very rare for a dictator, usually a problem for them. Right. He's a dictator unicorn. Like, I'll say this about Tito. If you were going to have a dictator in Eastern Europe in the post-war period, you'd want it to be Tito.

There's no one else you would have wanted it to be. You'd want it to have been, if you had to pick a dictator. I think I just had to take your word for that. Yeah. I'm taking the word of all of the Yugoslavian people that I met who were like, no, Tito actually, we kind of miss him. It was a lot better in some ways. Say what you will about Tito.

Say what you will about Tito, but we weren't all killed. each other when he was in church. Okay. In 1984, Karajik is arrested, and he's convicted the next year of fraud and misuse of public funds. He spends 11 months in prison, like his dad did for murdering that lady. Radovan would later call himself. Wait, why does he have public funds?

Well, he's because, I mean, the soccer team is a public team, I think. Right? Like, it's a communist state. Like, the team is not, there's not like a billionaire that owns Red Star, right? They're comments. Sorry. I forgot that, yeah, that not just like some ugly guy would own the team. No, no, it wasn't just some billionaire fucking hedge fund asshole.

It was, I mean, I'm sure it was some asshole. I don't know. Some fucking cute-headed guy who's 26, but looks 70. They hired him to be the team psychiatrist, so he couldn't have been that good, whoever the owner was. Okay. Radavan would later say that this arrest was a, he was a political prisoner, right? And that he was abused by the Muslim secret police who definitely did not exist in you.

lobby in this time. It was not the Muslim secret police who took him into custody. It's because he was horribly corrupt. So this is him revising it later or he is now... Yeah. Okay. Okay. This is later. This is later that he would blame it on that, right? Yeah, no. He just stole money from his bumblebees. Right, right. He stole money from his bumblebees. That journal write-up notes that he claimed he, quote, emerged psychically strengthened following the experience. It further notes, allegations have been made of Karajik's corruptibility, is selling fake prescriptions and providing false medical diagnoses to help people collect insurance or pension benefits. Again, this just sounds many such psychiatrists.

Maybe that's why. Yeah. Maybe it was more that than the Muslim secret police. Anytime you hear that someone came out of tax jail feeling psychically strengthened, it's like, I don't know. I mean, Wesley Snipes. That's true. That's true. And then you have your Martha Stewart's.

The bracelet comes off and all of a sudden she's like, she's more powerful than ever. And Shakira, tax fraud. I just, and if we had to have one of our tax fraud celebrities be a dictator, I think I would pick Wesley Snipes over Martha Stewart. Oh. Snipes over Stewart for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'd pick Wesley Snipes over the current president, to be honest.

I'd pick Wesley Snipes over any president because you know what none of our presidents have been in? Blade. That's true. Look it up. And that is, that's a fact. And we can't know what a blade president would be until we have one. Although I think Barack Obama might have been okay. I don't know.

He never had a chance. You can tell he really wished he'd been an actor and not the president. That's why he's making movies now. Is that everyone who gets into politics wishes they'd succeeded in Hollywood? That's basically every president from the past like 40 years. Yeah. Ronald's the only one who did it the other way. He's not alone.

Yeah. It would have been really funny to watch Joe Biden play Blade. I would watch Joe Biden as Blade. I mean, I'd watch Trump as Blade, to be honest. I don't think it would be as good, but I would watch it. Wait, Biden as Blade is really disgusting to think about. Just a shot-for-shot remake of Blade with Joe Biden. That's really, that's really horrible to think about.

I mean, you could say, you know, Obama's kind of doing a bit of a reverse Reagan in some ways, right? He's kind of going into entertainment after. He's going in entertainment after. I do wish we'd gotten to see Joe Biden and Chris Christopherson opposite each other. You know, two men who's, I could just imagine magnetic personal charisma next to each other. Oh, God. If only that movie had happened. Talking in nonsense words to each other, God.

Just gibberish at each other, yeah. Just old man speak. Is Joe Biden alive? Like, deep in the air? Chris Christoperson's dead, unfortunately. Unfortunately. We lost Chris and we kept Joe Biden. I don't know why. So he emerged from prison in the late 1980s, not Joe Biden, Radavun Karajik. That would have been, again, weird if Joe Biden had spent prison in the 80s in Yugoslavia. He emerged from prison in the late 1980s to a Yugoslavia that was in the slow process of collapse. As I said, Tito died in 1980. So before he gets arrested, actually, Tito is dead. And the government continues limping on for a while after him. But Tito's force of personality had held the entire Balkans. together for pretty much the only time that happened. And with his death, kind of these nationalist differences that had been really prominent in and after World War II start to reassert themselves.

They've been kind of buried during the Tito years. And in the years after his death, it becomes obvious to any intelligent observer. Communism's not going to last forever. And Yugoslavia is not going to be one state forever, right? In 1974, late in Tito's life, they had changed the Constitution to give each of these independent, not independent, there's these semi-autonomous states that make up Yugoslavia like Bosnia and Serbia. They had the right to like secede if there was a, if enough people wanted to leave. So like if Croatia wants to leave, they could potentially.

And so once Tito dies, it becomes obvious. That's going to happen at some point. And as this sort of, you have in the USSR, glossed nostrils and perestroika around the same time, the Soviet Union is also loosening stuff. politics starts to come to Yugoslavia in a way that it just hadn't existed there for a while. And a lot of people start looking at what's going to happen next. And Radavon Karajik is one of these guys.

And he starts increasingly thinking about politics and envisioning a future for himself that's very different than his checkered past. A future in which he would hold the kind of power he always felt he deserved. And we'll talk about that in part two. But Jamie, why don't you plug your new novel, The Tower, which I just plugged. You can plug it. I'll do it again. Why the hell not? Sure.

Yeah, I can't stop you and I won't. You can pre-order the tower now. Again, it's about a woman making beautiful love to her beautiful building. Yeah. And it comes out in June. And also the Bechtelcast is on tour in the East Coast. Damn right it is. Throughout the fall.

So if you live in the northeast, we're going basically everywhere. So come out and see us. Everywhere. That's the only part of the country, the northeast. And especially Baltimore. Baltimore Extra. Baltimore, the Serbia of the United States? Whoa.

Whoa. But what an interesting thing to just throw in. Did you say that? Baltimore, weigh in. Uh, Baltimore. Come to the show and I'll say it to your face. That's the episode, motherfuckers. Yeah.

Watch a Serbian film. Don't watch a Serbian film. Actually, do it. It's pretty good. But it's pretty messed up. Anyway, good night. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,

coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com,

slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast. The True Crime Comedy Podcasts, all about robbery, fraud,

and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes

of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Let's go! Lisa? Tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me.

I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman. Angel Geratana.

Jeremy Colhain. Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween.

He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. You never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1986, a man named Scott Macklam was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining. this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real.

And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to Examine the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, it's me, Debbie Kama Bell. This season on my podcast, who's with me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life.

Listen to Who's With Me with me with Debbie Kumabelle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is there an epidemic against literature? More specifically, black literature. I'm Jack Quist-Pice Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lits podcast, we're outside asking why? They don't want a whole bunch of little Ella bakers, Michael Maxes and Martin with the Kings running around. And when you look at a lot of different cultures, they're like, we need to know where you

came from. And considering this is Black Reading Month, the only real question is, what are you reading next? Listen to BlackLit from the Black Effect Podcast Network on our IheartRadio Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. What up? This Jay Valentine, co-hosts of the R&B Money Podcast alongside my brother,

R&B Legend, Tank. Together, we've built a space for artists, and fans of R&B music to reminisce and tell the real stories behind the music. I have no money. I was hood famous. They think you're going to get everybody out. We lived in a project. Real love came out. They're hearing the music and we had nothing.

From Smokey Robinson to Mary J. Blige, B2K to Jill Scott. If you're a super dedicated R&B fan, this is where you belong. Listen to R&B money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Thank you.