Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Nicolae Ceaușescu: The Dracula of Being A Dick

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

Robert is joined by Jeff May for part three of our series on Nicolae Ceaușescu.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We all have newly hot bevs. We're doing great. Yeah, we got a hot bev. And we've got a hot bud jeff may jeff i got a bone to pick with you yeah what what is that bone well jeff at the end of last episode i said as i was asking you to introduce your pluggables where did you come from where did you go where did you come from and then i had to say cotton eye jeff which made me sad because if your name had just been joe you see what i'm saying here jeff yeah my parents that would have worked a lot better enough to do that yeah but they just missed joseph it's

like the one white guy name that nobody in my family has let them know they fucked up my joke i'm sorry honestly like that's on my dad yeah well i'm i'm livid now jeff what i'm not livid at is you for being here to continue talking about nikolai ceausescu with me how are you feeling no place i'd rather be than right here talking about tyrannical despots. Wow. That's a lie, but it's a nice lie. A sweet lie, Jeff. Thank you for that friendly lie. We used to call those white lies, but now I'm going to call them Jeff May lies. I mean, the name Jeff May is pretty synonymous with the word white so i feel like you got that it does work

either way jeffrey may of the west chest amazing we gotta find more uses for you to do your your your frumpy american northeast accent jeff that was perfect um it really was you should be proud i gotta i gotta do a vanderbilt but before we do a vanderbilt let's talk about a guy who probably had an accent like the only the only romanian accent that i know how to do is a dracula accent and i do feel like that would be offensive although jeff no we are about to start by talking about how uh ceausescu used Dracula and other heroes from Romania's past in order to make the case as to why he, and I'm going to quote here from an article

on the cult of Ceausescu by the New York Times. In Tirgoviste's history museum, there is a new exhibition of Romanian heroes. An enormous portrait of Ceausescu gazes down on the busts of Romanian rulers. Among the venerated is Vlad Dracula, the 15th century prince whose cruelties gave rise to the Dracula vampire legend. Flanking the entranceway are huge bronze busts of Decibel, the Dacian king, and Trajan, the Roman emperor who defeated Decibel at a great cost in the second century. Could it be that

Ceausescu is casting himself not only as a Romanian emperor but as a Roman one as well after all he carried a jeweled royal mace at his 1974 induction as president Roman emperor the guy snorted it's a little late to do jeweled mace you think so 74 you think that's late for a jeweled mace yeah yeah 1974 like if my dad was alive for it i feel like you shouldn't have like you shouldn't have a jeweled mace but i do like the idea of like ah i want to rehabilitate your legacy yeah i we're talking about ceausescu here as we shit on the idea of having a jeweled mace at your coronation but the british royal family's over there sweating in a corner being like don't bring us up don't bring us up we got a fucking room full of jeweled maces don't let anybody talk they're like you don't even want to know where we

got these jewels yeah um so yeah uh it's it's very funny um there's a line in that article where the guide is like no he doesn't think he's a roman emperor he thinks he's a god uh and the new york times reporter is like what do you mean and the guide is like in the newspapers they've printed poems about ceausescu describing him as a demigod yeah i mean that's not too far off from what roman emperors thought so that works yeah yeah yeah yeah it's uh it's good so i mean you could say yeah he's just he's honoring his his cultural heritage um all of our cultural heritage as an italian um i understand the need to believe that some guy who was born into a job is is literally divine it's easier than thinking yeah exactly yeah thank you um the the the the god of my people so why is mario italian what is it what

is it about what is it what what is it about japanese game designers that made him think like we got a plumber what what's the natural natural ethnicity for a plumber who fights mushroom people wasn't he italian the superintendent of of the nintendo of america like he was like his character was created to basically he was he was like some guy that they actually knew oh they designed him that way oh okay well that that is less magical than i had hoped it was yeah but i mean you know the japanese and the italians uh deep-rooted history all the way back to roughly 1945 i try not to go too deep into that history constant deep interactions between the two this new chris pratt playing mario situation that's my question when i had a real voice i was like get the shit out of here if you're not being

an offensive italian stereotype you're not my mario yeah that is what i uh bob bob hoskins played an incredible mario um it's like you know who's a great Mario? That Cockney actor. Yeah. So we're back talking about Romania and kind of occasionally Italy. But yeah, so Ceausescu, when we kind of leave left off, he's gotten himself into power. He's establishing his cult of personality. And he's doing some terrible stuff like banning abortion. And he's starting to do some dumb stuff like trying to turn Romania into the television-making capital of Europe. But broadly speaking, things are going okay. And one of the reasons things are going okay is because he does not have enough money yet to realize all of his visions of turning the entire country into

a giant factory. And in order to get that kind of money, Ceausescu knows he's going to need some loans. Now, the Soviet Union does not. One of the funny things about this is for all of the mismanagement the USSR was guilty of. They're totally right here where they're like, no, man, just just keep growing food. Making TVs probably isn't going to work out for Romania. And it doesn't. So they're not going to give Romania the resources that Ceausescu thinks they need in order to become this manufacturing capital of Europe. But you know who does have a lot of money and who's really willing to use it on stupid shit?

The United States of America. Now, that's that's our thing. That is our thing. We will put a lot of money into some very dumb shit because we have infinity dollars. Now, the problem with this is that the United States is the beating heart of global capitalism. And Romania is, in theory, a Stalinist state, right? A state that's based on at least quasi-Stalinist policies. A state that's based on at least quasi-Stalinist policies.

So the fact that Ceausescu decides to get in bed with the U.S. seems like something that couldn't possibly work. It's actually going to be one of the most successful things that he does. But the first stage of his plot to get in bed with Lady Liberty comes courtesy of Lady Liberty's pimp at the time, a fellow that you might have heard about, a friend of the pod, Richard Milhouse Nixon. We love him. We love old Tricky Dick.

Ceausescu actually is going to get along very well with old Dick Nixon. Now, 1967, which is when they meet, is kind of an awkward time for Richard Nixon. He had finished being vice president quite a while ago. And he's sort of in the term that political writers would use at the time is that he's in like the wilderness right now, right? Where he's kind of, he doesn't have this, he doesn't have like a super prominent role, but he's trying to get back into politics, right? He's trying to, you know, he wants to become president. He's had a couple of scandals. He's in this kind of very messy place.

And he's trying to he knows that he wants to like kind of recapture some of his glory days in order to put himself back in the political limelight so that he can run and and win the the Republican nod for president. republican nod for president now one of the biggest moments from his career previously to this had been this very highly publicized kitchen table debate that he'd had with nikita khrushchev so khrushchev comes to power after stalin there's kind of this thawing of a little bit in the cold war nixon has what most people would consider to be pretty unimpeachable anti-communist cold warrior credentials so referring to richard nixon as anything unimpeachable anti-communist cold warrior credentials so referring to richard nixon as anything unimpeachable is also it is it is very and i yeah perhaps an ironic term to use for him um but he uh he so he meets up with khrushchev and they have this like very famous debate that is it's one of these things that kind of turns him makes him look like a statesman and so as he as he's kind of in this awkward position, he's like, well, what if I do that again?

So he gets in a fucking plane, chartered a flight, and he starts traveling through the USSR. He goes to Moscow, and he tries to set up another debate with Khrushchev. But the Soviets are like, well, that worked out for us. But now the Cold War is like getting gnarlier again. And we really, it doesn't benefit us at all to help Richard Nixon become the Republican presidential candidate. So no, we're not going to do this. And he kind of, Dick kind of awkwardly mopes around Eastern Europe until he

finds a communist leader who would be absolutely thrilled to be his buddy. And that communist leader is Nikki Ceausescu. Now, the first meeting between the two men is mainly a photo op for Nixon, but it helps to soften his image as this hardline cold warrior. And it makes him look more like a statesman, right? That's what Dick wants to look like, a serious politician who's, yeah. And the big thing about that is obviously that he has built up a very good photo opportunity life. Oh, like Nixon for all of the, all of the bumbling that that man has done throughout his entire career.

I'm not giving up checkers and all this stuff. Like he went to China. Like he, yeah. Yeah. And this is kind of the start of that, right? Cause I mean,

you can say Khrushchev was kind of the start of that, but it's interesting as much of like this anti-soviet hardliner as he has a reputation for being a lot of his career gets made by hanging out with communists um so that's kind of cool um at least it's well no it's actually going to be disastrous for a lot of people um but it's, we'll call it a mixed bag. So it works out really well, though, for Nixon. It makes him look, you know, like a statesman. And it's going to work out really well for Ceausescu, because it's going to give him a connection to the man who's about to be the President of the United States. And Richard Nixon, you wouldn't call him a great friend, but he does remember when people are useful to him, right?

There's a, I don't know, loyalty is the wrong word, but he is going to have like a soft spot for Ceausescu after this. And he's going to help out the dictator of Romania in whatever way that he can. Now, this does a couple of things for Ceausescu besides just sort of making him look like, oh, maybe this guy's actually not as much of a hardline communist as we've been led to believe. The first thing it does outside of that is it's him throwing a middle finger at Moscow, right?

The Soviets don't want him to do this. And one of the other things that's happening in this period, this is when you have that big Sino-Soviet split. So there's literally like soldiers killing each other, Chinese and Soviet soldiers killing each other on like the borders of both countries, right? This is a really nasty time and this conflict is escalating. And the Soviet Union basically asks Ceausescu to stand with them against the People's Republic of China.

And he's like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to actually take a side in the Sino-Soviet split in the way that you want me to. So by doing that and by having Nixon over, he's kind of provided a bridge for the Americans where they're like, well, we actually would really like to be able to communicate and talk and settle things directly with China. And we've had to do that kind of through the Soviet union prior to this. And now there's this guy,

Chau Chesku, who the Chinese like Mao likes Chau Chesku because Chau Chesku wouldn't throw down against him with the USSR. Um, and he's already had Nixon over. So maybe we can work with this guy. Maybe this guy is going to be our buddy and help us like smooth out some shit.

Um, so this is a you know this is a bold move it's it's risky but you have to say this is actually he's going to do a lot of stupid things most of the things ceausescu does are very dumb this is good foreign policy he's actually playing very intelligently all these kind of powers off each other for his own benefit he's pretty good at this. It's intrigue. Yeah, it's intrigue. He's surprisingly adept at intrigue. Yeah, and it's one of those things,

if he had never been running the country, if he'd just been like Romania's head of foreign policy or something, he might have actually been pretty good at his job. The problem is that no one actually is ever good at the job that he has, which is like guy in charge of an entire country down to the lives of individual people in it. But he's pretty good at the foreign policy shit. And he's going to double down on this foreign policy success in August of 1968, when events in Czechoslovakia provide him with a golden opportunity. So the Czechs elect a new first secretary, and Czechoslovakia is a communist state.

They elect a new first secretary of their party, a guy named Alexander Dubček. And Dubček is a communist, but he is a reformer, right? And he's very popular in the West because while he's still a commie, he's this kind of communist who's got more democratic attitudes

about how things ought to work. And he starts pushing a kind of communist who's got more democratic attitudes about how things ought to work. And he starts pushing a raft of reforms that are much more extensive than the ones Ceausescu had offered his own people. Most crucially, he's like, maybe we'll have elections again. And hey, maybe we'll even let parties run that aren't communist parties. Now, the Soviet Union, who has just sent tanks not all that long ago into Hungary over, you know, an uprising, they're not going to like this. This is not acceptable to them. And Moscow responds by invading Czechoslovakia and arresting Dubček. The force they send is made up of the five Central Warsaw Pact nations.

The two countries that do not participate in this invasion are romania and yugoslavia because they're seen as unreliable um and they are in fact unreliable for the so i love that i love that we're in like obviously czechoslovakia and yugoslavia and we're like oh man these things don't even exist anymore like it's so funny it's like we're talking about the czech republic yeah yes but yeah i mean we are, you got Romania still, you know, you got a Czech Republic. But yeah,

it is, we are talking about like these ghostly nations. It's interesting too because like if you go around, if you travel through a lot of Eastern Europe,

especially if you travel through like the Balkans, it's obviously, it's not uniform, but you will run into a lot of people, particularly older people who are like, who miss when Tito was around and who missed the days of Yugoslavia,

which is not hard to see why, when you think about how ugly things got as soon as Yugoslavia broke apart. And you can find people particularly in Russia who missed the USSR. You do not run into a lot of Romanians who miss Ceausescu. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's correct. Not as common. Not nearly as common.

Not to say that, obviously, I'm not trying to whitewash either the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, but you do run into people who are like, ah, you know, for a lot of reasons, there were things that I preferred back then. That does not tend to happen nearly so often with ceausescu in romania um but what he is pretty good at is this right here so the soviets invade uh czechoslovakia they arrest this guy dub czech um and they you know put an end to this whole we're going to try opening shit up a little bit here and nikolai is in a dangerous position he He does not have Soviet soldiers in his country. But obviously, Romania is not going to win a war with the Soviet Union,

right? If the USSR wants to come in and force him out, they can do it. And he's just seen they're willing to do that to the Czechs. So he's not going to back down over this, though. He calculates kind of accurately that the USSR, they've just blown a lot of political capital and taken a risk themselves in occupying Czechoslovakia. They're not going to want to fuck with Romania right now, right? Because they're kind of dealing with this shitstorm already. So while they're occupying the country, he delivers a speech on August 21st, 1968, in front of 100,000 people in Republic Square in Bucharest. It's called the balcony speech. He's standing on this balcony of this government building, and he addresses this crowd, and he tells them that the Romanian Communist Party is expressing full solidarity with the Czech people. He calls Soviet actions

a danger to the peace of Europe, and he condemns them for forcing their version of socialism on another socialist state. One of the things he's like is that, like, as socialist states, we should have the freedom to exist whatever way we want and to, like, experiment with policies, and the Soviet Union shouldn't be cracking down on that stuff, which is objectively good, right? Like, he's actually taking this is a principled stance, and it's a

risky one for him. Now, he's not taking it because he's morally opposed to what the USSR is doing so much as he's taking it, because this is going to reinforce his popularity with the Americans and the West, right? And it is outrageous. It is popular. You have to say it's very popular in Romania. This is seen as like the high point of his regime. And it gives a lot of people reason to be like, oh, you know, this guy actually, you know, maybe maybe we we lucked out in terms of, you know, having this dude in charge of the country. He's willing to stand up to the Soviets. You know, he's taking a taking this pro stance in favor of liberty from the from the USSR. Maybe maybe we're doing all right.

I'm just going to put this out there. No notes. no notes yeah yeah no notes on this specific thing yeah and we can with that we can put a lid on him that's it that's yep yep that's the end of it go rides off into the sunset um like kojak so um he's he's done this thing and these kind of two moves he's made this unique place for himself in the world of diplomacy and shortly after those are right around this time nixon wins election yeah 68 nixon wins election and he takes office um and so now his buddy richard is running the united states and he's just given himself a really good reason to be trusted by the west so he starts saying hey i would like to have most favored nation trading status, right, with the U.S., which is a big deal economically.

There's a whole bunch of benefits to that. And no communist country had ever been offered that. And the U.S. is like, well, fuck, why shouldn't we do this, right? This guy actually seems like he's, you know, and obviously we don't care that he's, he's, he is a dictator who's purged his enemies. He's made abortion illegal. He's doing all of these things that are like fucked up in his own country. But obviously we've never given a shit about that. What we care about is that he's, he's benefiting US foreign policy right now. So we're going to stand up and start offering him some shit. And one of the things that means is that

Romania does eventually get most favored nation trading status. But the other thing it means is that Tricky Dick is going to start talking to American business leaders and American banks and being like, yeah, you can trust Ceausescu. Invest in his country. Give him some loans. It's going to

work out very well. He's a trustworthy man! As he is pounding his entire body weight in vodka on a daily basis and threatening Henry Kissinger. He is letting people, yeah, put your money in Romania. It's going to work out really well. Long term, goodbye. Who among us would not threaten Henry Kissinger given the opportunity?

Yeah. I mean, we probably shouldn't go much further down that road, because I think he still has a Secret Service detail. So this is also very popular among the Romanian people, and Cătălin Gruia, who's a Romanian journalist, describes people's feelings this way. Romanians lived better, and they were proud of their president. Frustrated by history, they saw in Ceaușescu one of their own,

who was on equal standing with the world's bigger players. When he condemned the military intervention in Czechoslovakia, Romanian enthusiasm was spontaneous. This act of defiance against Moscow brought him the respect of the entire world. And Silviu Brukin, another Romanian writer, adds this. Ceaușescu was a tyrant when it came to politics, an economic disaster. But in his foreign policy, he had a spark of genius. Although uneducated, he was smart, a wily peasant sort of smart. And, you know, it is the kind of,

one thing that's interesting is Ceausescu is this little guy, he doesn't have, he never has anyone backing him up earlier in his career, he's entirely his own and so he's really good at kind of running in between the feet of these more powerful figures in romanian politics yeah yeah yeah and that's what he's doing like you can see why his background makes him good at this specific job because romania is in this really awkward position geographically and it's in this awkward political position between china and the ussr in the us and he is he is very good at he's as good at this as he was good at navigating a similar situation in the communist party what do you do when you're a rock between three hard places like like how do you like when you're like yeah when you're a tomato between three rocks props to him for doing guess, as far as foreign policy is concerned,

as good as you can do in this situation. From a foreign policy standpoint, he's kind of your best case scenario as a leader in Romania at this point. From an everything else standpoint. That's what we're about to talk about. Not the optimal case scenario. Unfortunately, it is not enough to be good at foreign policy and for his first half decade and so in power he seems to be okay at some of the

other stuff we've just talked he does some ugly shit but like the communist party under him in the first five or so years in power also does the sort of shit communists are supposed to do um they put a huge amount of money into this building program to ensure everyone in the country has a private residence, which is nice and a good policy for keeping people happy, right? He also invests funds in education. And again, it's promoting books that he supports, including these propaganda books about Dracula and shit. But it's still better than, I guess, doing nothing at all. And then in 1971, Ceausescu goes on tour.

And as part of his plan to irritate the USSR, he visits China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Mongolia. Now, China is going to be the big visit, right? Because he has just kind of backed or at least refused to like side with the USSR against China. And Mao is very grateful for this. So he gets this huge welcoming, these massive crowds and marches, you know,

China's. And then he played for three hours straight. Yeah. Yeah. He does all, all, all of the big hits he's doing. I don't know.

I don't know where to take this joke jeff but mao shows him a very good time and obviously china massive powerful country so coming from romania mao is able to show off these huge factories these massive crowds of soldiers and workers marching in unison and he and elena chusescu and Elena look at all this and they start to get really jealous because they're like well shit this is like a first class world power and you know we're us and I would really like it if we could be a little bit more like Mao um one of the things that he and Elena do is they go to see this play put on by Mao's fourth wife, John Queen. And they see for the first time what this like real cult of personality looks like,

because Mao's fourth wife and Mao both have very effective cults of personality, massive and expansive, huge numbers of people have all these books about them and paintings and portraits everywhere. Um, he, we, he, I made the joke,

the three hour, he performed for three hours talking about being on tour. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, it's actually kind of the opposite of that because Ceausescu is the, and, and Elena,

like Nikolai and Elena are the audience and Mao is putting on a show for all of them. Right. He's got these huge crowds of soldiers and of workers, like, marching in unison. He's got all of these, like, they go see these beautiful elaborate plays. He takes them to see these factories. And Nikolai is just, first off, he's blown away by all of this. But he's also, he's kind of, like, jealous, right?

Because China is on its way to becoming kind of this first but he's also, he's kind of like jealous, right? Because China is on its way to becoming kind of this first class world power. And Romania is a pretty small country by comparison. So he's, he falls in love both with this idea of power that Mao is able to show, but also he becomes aware of this huge cult of personality around Mao and around Mao's fourth wife, where they've got all of these books about them, all of these plays that are both like dedicated to them and dedicated to like, kind of referencing them. And they've got, you know, portraits up everywhere. And he sees number one, wow, this is really what you can do when you get off your ass and you put

together a first class cult of personality. But the other thing he sees is that like well shit romania could maybe be the kind of power that china is if only i exercised power the same way that mao did right um because mao is a very centralized ruler he's got total pretty total control. At least he is. Yeah, we've heard of him. Yeah, we've heard of Mao, right? I would like to add, every time you say cult of personality, I immediately want to break into the living color riff. Oh, see, I was going to. I was thinking of, isn't that a, what is it?

Duran Duran song? Living color. Wait, the TV show? That's in Living Color. With David Alan Greer? Oh, excellent. I saw David Alan Greer. Living Color is the band fronted by Corey Glover.

And in Living Color was the comedy show fronted by Keenan Ivory Wayans. And David Alan Greer. David Alan Greer was there, yeah. Although it was really a wayans joint it was and and and isn't that how jim carrey broke out too jim carrey for uh did that until up until the end really i mean he stuck around there you go jim carrey refer relevant because he is obviously the chairman mao of comedy you could say that you know there's a lot of similarities between uh the the cultural

revolution and that year that we got ace ventura and the mask and uh there was at least one other jim carrey movie that he was at 95 or something like that was 1994 i believe and then the mask was 1995 i think you had dumb and dumber around somewhere in there too much like mao declaring war on the sparrows i don't know well i mean if you think about it there's a lot of similarities between when when um when he was showing up he was saying let me show you something and that's a very fire marshal bill line right there so it all does tie together a lot of a lot of similarities between the two men. But you know who won't make inappropriate references to tragedies from Jim Carrey's life? I'm going to guess

that it's these amazing sponsors that we have coming up. It is these amazing sponsors because they are all big fans of Jim Carrey. All of a sudden, he says, Linda, I see a skull. Deep in the heart of the Ozarks, a mysterious disappearance turns into a grisly discovery.

Two young women murdered. My name is M. William Phelps. For the past several years, I've been reinvestigating the cases of two young women abducted from their small towns, their bodies dumped deep in the Ozark woods, with a connection to one very familiar name. He chose his own moniker, bind them, torture them, kill them, BTK. Cold cases I'm breaking wide open as a heated confrontation with an alleged psychopath ensues. Did you kill those girls? You got all this information.

Now why did you ask me if you already knew? Long-held secrets finally revealed, sending authorities rushing to confront a suspect who's been hiding in plain sight for decades. Listen to Paper Ghosts Season 4 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show, ears edition podcast.

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Ah, we're back. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling like maybe watching The Mask tonight. That seems like one of the Jim Carrey movies that didn't have anything problematic in it, right? The Mask is pretty good he also saved him a lot of money in CGI by being able to do a lot of that stuff yeah interestingly enough that is one of four movies that were produced by Dark Horse Comics in 1995

ish so you had a two-year span where we had four movies you had the mask you had Tank Girl you had Time Cop and Barbed Wire. I didn't realize that was a... Man, the Tank Girl movie, also pretty good. It's interesting. It gave us Naomi Watts. Definitely better than... Yeah.

I'm going to say it. Tank Girl, better than The Mask. And Mao, a better dictator than Ceausescu. But now he's jealous, right? He's jealous at seeing this Jim Carrey-like power than Mao has. More like Mao who's jealous. he's jealous at seeing this jim carrey like power more like that now has jealous wow um good work jeff thank you professional comedian so he he decides like the only thing

holding romania back from being china is that there's still all this red tape right it takes too long to do things there's too many other people who aren't nikolai ceausescu in power if i can just get it yeah yeah yeah uh because the communism right because it's red yeah yeah well obviously there's a lot of reasons why Romania was never going to be the kind of power China is including look at the two of them on a map just look at the size of both countries yeah you're not saying, I wouldn't shell that for all of the tea in Romania. Yeah, exactly. The other reason is that Mao, a lot of problems with Chairman Mao, pretty canny fellow. And Nikolai Ceausescu has his kinds of canniness, but they are more limited than Mao.

So he is not going to be good at this. But I'm going to read a quote from Nicholas Holman describing what happens next. To achieve his aims, the population would have to be subjected to his control, most easily achieved if they were contained in large urban centers. The economic consequences of such a policy was an all-out drive to create a heavy industrial base in Romania and a determination to make Romania self-sufficient through the elimination of its foreign debt. A policy of systemization was also proposed in which the rural population was to be moved to larger urban centers, but this was later abandoned. Initially, the development strategy was very successful as vast pools of underutilized labor and agriculture was mobilized for industry, with the proportion of the non-agricultural labor force

increasing from 30.3% in 1956 to 63.5% in 1977. However, this growth was not sustainable, being based on structural shifts, and soon the labor force was faced with inadequate employment and income opportunities, with a reduced supply of food and other consumer goods. However, Ceausescu's ideological inflexibility allowed for no changes in his policy, and the regime resorted to coercion to achieve the production targets which enterprise managers were then forced to fabricate. The effects of this flawed system soon became apparent as the benefits from the labor force

shift were reduced. Economic growth fell from 10% in the early 1970s to 3% in 1980, with food and other consumer goods becoming very short in supply. The raw 80s, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, he basically is like like everybody get out of the country everyone has to move to the city so that you can work in these factories and we're just going to start this slow process of bulldozing every single rural community in romania um yeah it's like he did he did he think he could build food yeah i mean he doesn't want to make food

like food is not sexy right food is a very reasonable thing to want to have. And actually not a bad thing to base your economy around making because people are always going to need food. But you're never going to be a world power just making a decent amount of food as like a country the size of Romania, right? You become a world power by industrializing. So you can have this massive industrial base. So you can have a big military. So you can have all of these things that he sees the USSR and the Soviets and the Americans having. And so this is going to be a fucking, this is kind of Romania's version of the Great Leap Forward.

And like the Great Leap Forward, it does not work very well. And he might've known that if he'd actually gotten an accurate look at what was going on in china yeah he asked his wife to do that and she was like and she checked in with mao's wife and said everything's good yeah it's going great things are going yeah the backyard furnaces worked wonderfully yeah um we've been leaping forward greatly yeah and this is part of the problem is that like his

attitude about what works in mao's china comes from mao and you may recognize chairman mao not the most reliable source on chairman mao yeah so nikki's friendship with nixon who was also buddies with mao they all get along. Like legitimately people will say Nixon and Ceausescu were friendly with each other. Like they enjoyed one another's company. So that's sweet, Jeff. It's always nice to hear about friends. You know, it's funny when you see that people are friends with other people that you know, and you're like, oh, I didn't know you guys were friends.

Oh, you like Mao? I know Mao. Oh my God. I was in Glee club with Mao. Yeah. Great guy. So, Nikolai's friendship with Nixon had earned Romania an invite to the World Bank and the

IMF. And again, the only communist nation, at this point at least, who gets invited to the World Bank and the IMF. The US, consideringy a good communist, and this is the term that people in Nixon's White House will say for him, and eventually I think in Reagan's White House too, people are calling him, he's the good communist, right?

He's the nice one. They encourage banks to lend money to Romania. And so Nicky uses all of this cash he's getting from the West to start building these massive, absolutely titanic factories, much larger than they need to be and much larger than there's any kind of demand for, right? Yeah. Yeah, this is the field of dreams of industrializing the Soviet bloc, yeah.

If you build it, everyone will want a Romanian television. Yeah. But there are problems with this. One of them is that Romanian steel, because they're also trying to make, like, cars and shit. Romanian steel is of terrible quality, right? This this is i'm not a metallurgist but certain areas make good steel and certain areas do not make good steel unless you know how to like remove impurities and shit the the the the iberian peninsula and pittsburgh yeah generally speaking those are the two the two

main spots are like seville and pittsburgh and i'm not again not a metallurgist but perhaps romania would have done a better job of removing impurities from their steel if they'd had chemists who weren't elena chachescu it might it might have helped um there's also massive corruption and corner cutting which means none of their products are actually very safe to use. Romanian televisions were known to be as likely to burn your house down as let you watch Three's Company. And so once they start producing this stuff, European countries get a look at these things and are like, well, these will kill people. You can't put these in houses.

It's a very Soviet idea of like gas hole. But some houses burned down is fine. Let me tell you what dracula would say dracula would say sometimes you get impaled sometimes impaled gets you you know yeah so just just take it from nationally rehabilitated hero dracula the impaler that's a fun time and nickname to have for somebody that you're trying to rehab i mean it's funny he is objectively a better person than a lot of the american folk heroes i was raised to hear about like kit carson where it's like well at least dracula was usually doing

it in self-defense um i don't know you know what i'll say it right now dracula better person than kit carson that's uh that's my pathfinder right yeah yeah yeah and genocide finder oh okay so now we're just gonna call every american we see that does a slight genocide a genocide yeah a light a light genocide yeah so uh dabbler if you will yeah yeah he was he was a genocide uh theoretician so matters were made worse by the fact that all of this industrial production used up more fuel than even and again romania like the nazis are very like like part of why they wanted romania on their side is that like romania has a shitload of oil right that's why the germans wanted to conquer romania like during world war one is romania has a shitload of oil one that's why the germans wanted to conquer romania like during world war

one is romania has a shitload of oil one of the things that romania could be other than a bread basket is a massive oil producing nation which again everything is set up for romania to have been doing quite well in this period they could be the the dubai yeah yeah and ceausescu could have made made very well for himself but because he wants to industrialize this takes a shitload of fuel and so romania one of the most oil rich nations on earth becomes a net importer of petroleum like they are having to buy guys what are you doing they are buying oil from iran because he's using up all of their fuel trying to make fucking televisions um yeah it's like if the saudi king embarked on a building program that forced them

to buy oil from texas where it's like what the fuck are you doing you're in what world you shouldn't need to do this yeah this should have been a sign that something was awry you had no um and as the building program churned ever onwards romania's debts stacked up ceausescu cut rations over and over again and caps were put on how warm buildings could be during the winter it was like if it was above 16 degrees fahrenheit i think you had to you i think yeah that was the equivalent you you weren't allowed to use heating at all which is like that's quite cold um That's below freezing. Yeah.

And it becomes increasingly common for the old and sick to freeze to death in winter. Again, in a country with some of the largest oil reserves in Europe. Should not have been a problem they were dealing with. Now, this was, of course, very stressful for Nicky, and he opted to blow off steam in one of the most time-honored traditions of European rulers, shooting hundreds and hundreds of animals. Now, Romania is a country with a long sporting tradition, and as a result, brown bears had been prized hunts of the Romanian nobility for, I mean, presumably for thousands of years. And as a result, the whole country of Romania

had less than 900 brown bears when the monarchy fell, right? By the time Ceausescu took power, socialist policies had rehabilitated the bear count, because again, there's not any nobles hunting bears at this period of time for sport. Communists are pretty good about shutting, yeah. One thing communists are great at, making sure that doesn't happen for a a little while so the early years of communism are very good for romania's bear

population it goes from about eight nine hundred prior to um communists taking over to about 2500 um by kind of the the like first 10 years or so of nicky's uh regime so that's good bears are fucking those bears are fucking nobody's killing them so bear fuck in the woods in romania they did for a while and then chauchescu found out that it's kind of fun to shoot things um so one of the things he does when he gets into hunting if you're a dictator and you take up a hobby you can get really into that hobby so he takes personal possession of all of the best hunting land in romania and so the game wardens who are watching these areas realize that like if i want to keep my job anytime the boss

comes by i need to make sure he gets to shoot something right which you may recognize is not really hunting but we're about to talk about that and i'm going to quote most hunting isn't yeah um this is less hunting than most bad hunting this is like like like the guys who pay a half a million dollars to shoot an elephant in the head from a truck would look at what chaucheski's about to do and be like well that's a little gross yeah um so i'm gonna quote from the atlantic here one district competed against another for his visits offering big bears and rack heavy stags as easy targets for his expensive imported rifles. For a typical hunt, Ceausescu would fly in by helicopter, landing on a pad cleared within

the hunting area. From there, he'd be taken by rough-terrain vehicle. In earlier years, he favored jeeps, later a Russian maid, the Gaz, and later still a rattletrap Romanian imitation, the Aro. Along forest roads to a point very near the spot where hungry bears or rutting red deer were expected to appear. He would walk the short distance to a strategically placed high seat, a tight little draw that served as a game corridor, for example, or along a stream where the gurgling water would cover noises made by a hunter. Usually, he was accompanied by at least one security officer who would carry his weapons and ammunition, and a forestry official from the district office. Many other Forest Department employees would have been involved in preparing for his visit,

but they were kept at a distance during the actual hunt. In the high seat, Ceausescu had little patience for waiting and watching. His attention span, according to a witness who had worked with him often, was five minutes. The report of his short attention span comes from Vasil Krisan, a forestry official who later published a memoir in German, the title of which translates as Ceausescu, Hunter or Butcher. The gist of the book is that Chrisan's boss was indeed a butcher and not a true hunter.

For instance, Ceausescu would continue firing wildly at an animal until it collapsed or ran away. If he wounded a stag, he'd command Chrisan and the other attendants to find it and bring him the trophy. If he missed altogether, they would tell him the stag was wounded and that they'd find it, and then that stag or a similar one would be killed and delivered.

Sometimes more stags were found than were shot, Chrisanne wrote. Once after a hunt, a party secretary called him the next day and told him that all six stags were found. The hell, Ceausescu said, how can you find six stags if I only shot four? I mean, they're like, look, man, you're just good. Yeah. I don't know what you want from us. You're just talented. You John-whicked it.

You folded the bullet through one and into another. One of the things that's funny about this, so there's a way that you can, like if you're the kind of people who measure trophies and hunting trophies and stuff, there's like different categories. Right. And it was known for a while.

Like if you go to museums in Romania of like that, like have animal stuff like that are like museums of like natural wildlife in Romania that have stuffed animals, like most of them, even to this day are from Ceausescu. And he had this, he was noted during the time when he was hunting for, he had like a weird number of incredibly high quality trophies, um, particularly for bears. And there were a lot of questions about like, how are there so many bears of that size in Romania? Like there shouldn't be that many trophies that big. And it came out after his fall that what, what his, um, like the people who were responsible for keeping him happy were doing is they were stretching the hides in a bunch of fucked up ways in order to make it look like the bears were much

bigger than they were oh yeah yeah yeah they were like cheating to make him feel like he'd shot a bigger bear than he had yeah it's like those dudes that that were like filling fish with uh with weights yeah yeah it's exactly like. But he's not even competing against anybody. They're just trying to make him feel like a big man. And he's trying to make himself feel like a big man. Yeah, exactly.

So it was not uncommon for him to shoot more game than just four, I will say that. On one day in 1974, he shot 22 bears. And over the course of his reign, he's known to have killed at least 400 of the animals. He also blew off steam in the gigantic, almost impossibly large mansion he had constructed for himself, using some of those same foreign loan dollars that he'd used to make giant factories with. I know this is the name of the show, but this guy's kind of a dick.

He is a little bit. We are getting well into the bastardry now. So when he had taken power, Nicky had actually refused to live in the mansion occupied by his predecessor because he was like, you know, I want to live in a people's house. I'm going to live in a humble house when I go out and shoot 22 bears in a day. But then he visits Mao and he comes back and he's like, actually, I think I want a palace. So he builds one for himself using the people's money that has 80 rooms, a jacuzzi and a movie

theater where he can watch Kojak. That sounds awesome. It does sound awesome. Look, it's it's it's objectively sweet to have your own private Kojak theater. But that's not a thing that I would be like, this is a problem. I'd be like, this is this guy gets it although perhaps not very communist um yeah but yeah yeah yeah yeah you know what is communist i mean i'm at a loss because there's so much stuff that we've talked about that is communist the products and services that support this podcast, all proud members of the Romanian Communist Party.

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Ah! We're back. We're feeling good. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling great. You feeling great? Yeah. Excellent. So I feel horrible.

Thank you, Sophie. Have you considered hunting 22 bears? Yeah. Um, Sophie, why don't you and I go out? We'll shoot 22 bears. We'll come back. We'll have us a good time. I'll pass.

You don't want to shoot 22 bears? Like you don't even want to run romania wow yeah i'm good yeah you're never gonna wind up in charger romania with that attitude so 22 bears it's a little bit much for my taste you know okay what what about an even baker's dozen uh no half half a chow chesku worth of bears for the day yeah no it's still gonna dreamers dream yeah so exactly dare to dream follow your follow your but if you feel like doing that all life for you in court thank you sophie you're welcome um help me out in my poaching trial everybody and hey if you've got any bears that you need shot i'll helicopter in um i've got about a five minute attention span like nikki but that ought to be enough allegedly yeah you're fine you're fine it'll be good it'll be good i'll just keep shooting

until i hit something much like chauchescu now so chauchescu builds himself this mansion but he realizes he decides pretty quickly it's it's nice having a mansion certainly but that's also not nearly enough for a guy with my kind of tastes. And so there's this, in 1977, there's this devastating earthquake in the capital, in Bucharest. And most people would say, devastating earthquake, that's a tragedy.

But Ceausescu says, devastating earthquake, well, shit, that got rid of a lot of buildings that weren't doing anything but taking up space I could have replaced with a palace. Where some say tragedy, dreamers see opportunity. That's right. And, you know, you might say he's a dreamer, Jeff, but he's certainly not the only one because nobody is allowed to disagree with his dreams. Are you proud of yourself?

Thank you. I'm always proud of myself. Cool. As long as you're proud because I'm not. I'm proud of him. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. Not thank you i i'm always proud of myself cool as long as you're proud because i'm not i'm proud of him thank you thank you jeff not thank you sophie and thank you chauchescu because the thing he's about to do next is he's about to start construction of a parliamentary palace for romania now i thought you were going to say a death star for some reason i don't know why i thought that but it is it is a little bit of a death star undergone construction

of a new death star it is going to be a death star for the romanian economy because the palace they are building again romania lovely country a lot of great resources not a massive country right 10 to 20 million people you know kind of over the course of his reign it gets up to about 20 million people so not like tiny but not a massive country and Ceausescu decides we need one of the largest buildings ever constructed by human hands in order to act as the center for our government let's not forget tourism dollars folks yeah well that's not legal um that's the biggest ball of yarn of romania um that's what he should have done he should have made the world's biggest ball of yarn and then lived inside of it he is not going to do that um sophie would you google cecescu stairs so you can pull up some of these picture pictures for for uh uh for jeff while i i tell this story. So today, the parliamentary palace

that Ceausescu had built is the third largest building on the planet by volume. It comes in right after the Aztec pyramid of Teotihuacan and the Cape Canaveral rocket assembly hangar. It used 3,500 tons of crystal and 1 million cubic meters of marble. The carpet of the main hall weighed on its own one and a half tons.

When you have a 3,000 pound carpet, that's a big building. Now, the earthquake had not destroyed enough of the city to make room for this palace. So Ceausescu ordered the rest of the city center bulldozed. palace so chauchescu ordered the rest of the city center bulldozed he flattened a hill yeah like you do we gotta get rid of the rest of this capital city so we can build a capital for our city um i mean to be fair too that that has very very like the forbidden city energy yeah and he is he he sees what happens to the the government that makes a forbidden city and he decides i want that for myself you know why not me yeah why not me too um he changes the course of a river using dams and he forces he's going to evict 40 000 people from their homes

in order to build this thing every building and not only does he bulldoze the center of town in order to make this fucking thing so yeah every surrounding building for four square miles is rebuilt so not only does he demolish a bunch of buildings in the center of town in order to make this thing but he demolishes and rebuilds every building for my within four miles of it so that it will match the style of the building it's pretty pretty impressive yeah it is quite a building you're looking at those photos now yeah like i'm seeing them you know sophie did bring them up we're looking at these things and like the man made a pretty impressive building well the man forced a large number of other people to make an impressive building it It looks like Scientology.

Just a little bit. Scientologesque. Yeah, so that's pretty cool. He calls it the People's Palace. Like the rock. Yeah, and in order to make the People's Palace, he has to demolish multiple hospitals, as well as two dozen historic churches and synagogues. They do save... do say nothing for him

no no he'll demolish a lot more than that before we're done i'm in yeah um he also like while this is going on there's this kind of like um covert plan within citizens of bucharest where they figure out how to lift up historic churches and put them on wheels and like drive them away from where Ceausescu wants to destroy them. And so they wind up like hiding. There's all these, there's these, there's I think like three of them, these old Orthodox churches that are like in the middle of these gigantic warrens of massive apartment buildings because they had to hide them from him.

He didn't want to see them. So they had to like stick them in courtyards and stuff where nobody could see them so that they wouldn't be destroyed by cecescu genuinely unhinged yeah it's pretty it's pretty cool stuff yeah that's like yakety sax playing while they're moving it now i i want to quote now from an article in cnn travel that interviewed irene a parliamentary aide who works in the building today, or at least did when that article was written, well past Ceausescu's period. Quote, construction involved 700 architects and 20,000 building workers doing three shifts a day, plus 5,000 army personnel, one and a half million factory workers, and an army of

so-called volunteers. You didn't always get to volunteer the palace's union hall features two large spiral staircases that descend to the main entrance to allow chichescu and his wife elena to make grand synchronized entrances he was short and touchy about his height says irene so he had the staircases rebuilt twice to match his step all right i'm gonna say that that's not a good investment of money no no no you gotta make you gotta you gotta make it sound right right um you gotta make it look like you're a taller man so you have to change the staircases repeatedly man just spend that money on lifts if that's the case or yeah bigger shoes yeah irene claps her hands the sound travels crisply every chamber has a

perfect echo because when cecescu wanted something he clapped and he wanted everyone to know he'd clapped oh yeah that was very big in um uh moogle architecture actually they used to do that a lot in palaces they would have those reflective the refractive yeah whatever the the i forget what the building process is where you'd clap in one spot and it would travel all the way to a central location yeah there's actually this it's really actually pretty amazing what people can do with stuff there's this like with with the way sound travels around objects there's this art project by the wharf in san francisco where it's these two big metal chairs that are like i don't know 30 40 feet apart and you can sit in one and like whisper and the person in the other chair will hear you clearly just because of like the way the sound waves travel. It's fucking wild.

Some of the stuff that that you can do with that shit. But as impressive as aspects of this building are, it is not worth the money. And in fact, is kind of like a massive disaster from every practical standpoint. So today in Romania, the people's palace is still 70% empty, right? They're still using this thing because like, well, it's kind of- You have it. You have to at this point.

But like they've never, it's never even been close. They never needed anything nearly this big. Like a building a third of the size would have been perfectly adequate for their needs well into the future. But you know Ceausescu wanted to look fancy now fancy looking he is he is and another person who liked looking fancy was Alina Ceausescu she had developed very expensive tastes over the period of their time in power for high faction and luxury goods and

it ain't cheap covering that ass no no no you need a lot of a lot of nice fabric um and so ceausescu obviously regular romanians are not allowed to travel unless they're involved in the security services um and they're certainly not allowed to go buying capitalist goods unless they're paying bribes and shit but ceausescu's family well they're able to travel they're able to travel. They're able to go shopping, you know, wherever they want. We're going to go to the U.S. We're going to go to Paris. We're going to buy all the nice luxury goods we can.

Now, the problem with that is that it takes cash to do that. And getting cash is going to, because again, this is a communist state, they have to get a little creative about where they find cash for these kind of foreign shopping excursions and ceausescu decides that the best way to kind of wring water from the stone that romanian had become on romania had become under him was to ransom off the city the country's jewish population for cash that's how he's going to pay for these shopping trips he's gonna ransom off romania's jews that's somehow he's going to pay for these shopping trips. He's going to ransom off Romania's Jews. That's somehow, that's so much, somehow worse. Like that's, it's such a unique process. It's pretty bad.

I don't think somehow we need to say, yeah. Well, I mean, other than like straight out extermination, like. Yes. It's just strange. It does involve, obviously he's not killing anybody here, but it is, this is intimately tied to genocide because, you know, World War II ends and an awful lot of Jews in Romania are like,

well, Antonescu killed like half of us. Maybe this isn't a safe place to stay. And, you know, it is perhaps time to go. But obviously the people who are in charge, the new leadership of Romania, are not going to do that, right? They don't want anyone leaving. They certainly don't want a fairly well-educated and economically productive chunk of the population to suddenly leave. And so at first, under Giorgio Dei, when Jewish people in Romania would try to leave, generally for Israel, they would ransom their Jewish population off to Israel in exchange for money and trade goods. A lot of it, they would like trade pigs for people because they were trying to start all of these factories.

Many Romanian Jews were ransomed off in exchange for bull semen, which was later used as part of a breeding program um getting that husbandry in yeah it's uh it's a whole thing and when ceausescu comes to power and he realizes what george uday had been doing he was initially like livid like oh my god that's actually kind of fucked up like what the hell um but then he starts to get over it he gets over it when he understands how much money is at stake. And I'm going to quote from the book Children of the Night by Paul Kenyon here. Under Ceausescu's stewardship in the 1970s, the trade in Jews became even more elaborate and far more lucrative. Financing animal farms was no longer adequate. Ceausescu was prepared to throw caution to the wind and demand direct cash payments in exchange for Jewish exit visas.

The ransom money was to be calculated according to a sliding scale. At the lower end were unemployed Jews and children who were considered Category D and required a ransom fee of around $2,000. More well-educated Jews were deemed Category A and could only be released from the country for a fee of $6,000. In exceptional cases, that rose to $250,000. The secret trade in Jews provided an important source of income for Ceausescu. He never drew an official salary and, in fact, never actually earned a penny in his life, having worked in exchange for food and lodging when he was an apprentice shoemaker. The ransom money constituted an emergency slush fund.

He kept it in secret bank accounts alongside the proceeds from other covert operations carried out by his foreign intelligence services. According to the former chief of his foreign intelligence services, Jan Pasipa, these accounts contained around $400 million by the mid-1970s. They were used to buy Western motor cars for Ceausescu's children and custom-built armored Mercedes limousines for the leader and his wife. Along with the new acquisitions for Alina's expanding collection of diamonds, the First Lady was notorious for purchasing jewels while on trips abroad but on most occasions her aides persuaded the foreign hosts to present her with expensive gifts this is for a rainy day

chaucheski would whisper to pasipa as they discussed the slush fund while walking along the moonlit pathways around his villa so that's cool he's salesman. Yes, he's selling them to Israel. That's such an uncomfortable thing. Yeah, it is pretty gross. Pretty gross. Now, within the broad context of his, at least these people are getting out of Ceausescu's Romania. But yeah, we probably don't need to do that. need to do that so i don't know jeff you don't make your money by ransoming holocaust survivors off to another country how do you make your money uh that is fair uh that's a great question

occasionally i i win small fortunes on netflix game shows um but when i'm not doing that uh i have uh i do stand up and i am a podcaster um i am also a podcaster i don't do stand up um but you know what i do like is hearing you and tom watch batman that's right tom Tom and Jeff watch Batman is a podcast I do with Tom Ryman on Gamefully Unemployed where we watch, we go through all of the annals of Batman history and we talk about it and we are doing 1973's

Super Friends and that is insane. So you can check that out at Gamefully Unemployed. You can also hear You Don't even like sports and unpopular opinion both on the unpops network with adam todd brown and i do my own show called jeff has cool friends which is a sort of long form interview podcast with people i know that have cool jobs and yeah and we we talk about it and that's really fun and that you can get for

free if you just look up jeff has cool friends wherever or you can go to patreon.com slash Jeff may, you get early access to uncensored episodes with bonus content, as well as access to shows like Ugg Fine with Kim Kroll, which is a monthly show, the monthly show Nerd with Dre Alvarez, which is a deep dive into nerdy histories between me, who is more of like an artsy nerd and Dre Alvarez is a stats nerd. So it's an interesting clash of two worlds in that regard.

Uh, if you want to see me live, I run a standup show in a toy store in Burbank called mint on card. It is the second Friday of every month that blast from the past on Magnolia in Burbank, California. Uh, so our next show,

uh, will be coming up real quick, uh, February 10th. And if you live in New England, I'm doing a very rare one night only show at Redemption Rock Brewery in Worcester, Massachusetts. And that is Wednesday, February 22nd. I'm very excited to be able to get home. I perform back home once a year and it seems like this is going to be it i do a lot of uh local talent uh i managed to make sure that the people that i work with are not scum

which is very hard in comedy yeah yeah you know what it's almost as hard as finding a good dictator yeah yeah no it's very hard it's i i get to yeah i get to i get to take the moral high point of saying if i find out a comedian is a rapist i don't work with them anymore yeah and the clubs very hard to get the clubs to buy into that yeah um but i love stand up i love doing it i love my hometown uh i love performing uh i keep the tickets cheap so if you want to check that out uh redemption rock brewery and you can go to my social media at hey there jeff row for more information about that hell yeah we'll check all of that out um and uh i don't know go uh go go to hell but you know what we should do huh we should do this again in a couple days we should do this again in a couple of days and talk

more about chow chesku particularly the end of chow chesku actually there in a couple of days and talk more about Ceausescu, particularly the end of Ceausescu. Actually, there's a lot of other fucked up shit, including the inevitable consequence of banning all contraception in your country. And yeah, we'll get we'll talk cult personality. We'll talk getting shot with your wife. All the good Ceausescu shit. If you're going to get shot with someone, might as well be with your wife um all the good chauchescu shit if you're gonna get shot with someone might as well be with your wife right yeah man not if it's elena actually no that sounds awful yeah that sounds actually well maybe worse i don't know that's actually way worse

yeah who knows we all as everybody gets to choose who you want to get shot with um that's not true anyway episode's over perfect finish excellent dismount 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 podcasts. them kill them btk secrets finally revealed sending authorities rushing to confront a suspect who's been hiding in plain sight for decades listen to paper ghosts season four on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you find your favorite podcasts john stewart is back in the host chair at the daily show which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. The Daily Show podcast has everything you need to stay on top of today's news

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