Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Tzar Nicholas II Was A Real Dick

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Robert is joined by Jeff May for part two of our four part series on Tzar Nicholas II. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, my gosh, it's behind the bastards again. Part two of what will be our four parter on Zara Nicholas II. A dude who sucked pretty hard with me. What a dick, bizarre, huh? A lot of possible titles for this one, Jeff. How are you doing? How are you holding in there, Jeff? Me, I feel great. I love that. Like the fact that this is, I was, you know how sometimes like you were like structurally designed to do something? Yeah. That's this specific thing right now. Yeah, you were built for it. Like a built for it. A Russian history podcast where I

get to talk about how much someone sucks. Your knowledge of Russian history, your experience as a teacher, your years as a boxer, all of it coming together in this, in this endurance test of a podcast episode. I'm in. I'm all in. Boy, howdy, Jeff. You are a podcaster. You have a podcast called Tom and Jeff Watch Batman on the Gamefully Unemployed Network. You have a podcast called Jeff Has Cool Friends. And you've got a sports podcast that's about the sports. I do. I do. You don't even like sports, which I don't. I don't know anything about sports. That's fair. That would be perfect for you then. Because that's the name of your podcast, more or less. Yeah. So I do that. So Tom and Jeff Watch Batman is with Tom Reiman,

who you may know, and you don't even like sports with Adam Todd Brown. So we're all, it's all a very incestuous. Yeah. Circle of content creators getting the gooey ideas all over each other. Like the czar doing, I don't know, actually more like the czar's uncle. Turn one of those drinking sessions with the boys. Yeah. Just hanging out with the boys, baby. Now, Jeff, you famously, unless this has changed, got drunk exactly once while performing a live show. I did. Yeah. Just one time. I did it at a thing called Performing Under the Influence. It was the partial subject of a cracked article. I got drunk for the first time at 33. Which is a rough time to deal with your first hangover.

Yeah. You know what's funny is I didn't wake up hungover. I drank a ton of water before I went to bed and then I just woke up still a little drunk and then fine. Excellent. But I haven't been drunk since. Well, I don't think the czar and his buddies had a lot of easy nights because champagne hangovers are a fucking nightmare and it kind of seems like they pounded nothing but champagne and hard liquor. Real champagne in the ass right there. Jeff, when we last left, our buddy, our old friend, our pal, Nicholas II, his dad had just died, which is normally a very sad thing and I'm sure was for him. But also his dad was an anti-Semitic monster who used his brother to force all of the Jews out of Moscow. And so I don't know. I'm pretty glad that he

died of kidney failure at age 49. That seems like a good time for him to die. Here's what I'll say, though, is that you're not doing your behind the bastards about him. No. Although he did play us, play quite a role. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, he's definitely a key ingredient. Yeah. And this stew that is now about to be the czar. And Nicholas, you know, he's basically the czar. As soon as his dad dies, he doesn't get coronated for like two years. Like it's a whole thing. When you're making a crowning a new czar, you got to get a lot of shit, the lockdown. It's a big deal for everybody in Russia. I would think. And like all around Europe, you got to get all of the Queen Victoria's kids to come over. You got to get set up a special house

for the Kaiser who's weird and nobody wants to hang out with. You got to figure out who's sitting where at the table. And again, nobody wants to sit next to the Kaiser. You got to get your late century Russian version of Garth Brooks to come to sing a song. Yeah. Yeah. And songs for the czar. So they're all about how cool the czar or how hard it is to be a czar. I would guess it's that. It's like my peasants left me and my carriage got bombed by the communists. It's friends in low palaces. Yeah. Thank you. Oh, no, that's, that's, that's, that's pretty good. So Nicholas, obviously, not a particularly optimistic journey to power. He's immediate reaction is, oh, fuck, I'm going to be terrible at this, which would mark the only time in his life that he would

be right about something meaningful. He nailed that shit. He really got that one right. Like perfect. Yeah. He's like, I'm going to eat a big old donkey dick about this one. I am going to fuck this up. Boy, howdy. Am I going to be bad at this job? It's like he got, it's like he quantum leapt into, into that job and just shows up out of nowhere being like, well, I have to figure out how to do this now. It was like me when I briefly worked at Sonic. Like, oh, I am not going to do well at this. Wait, what? Oh, yeah. When I was a, when I was a kid, yeah. You worked at first job. Yeah. Your first job was at Sonic. It was horrible. I'm very jealous because when you find out what my first job is, it's very weird. I dug holes in a graveyard. That sounds

so much better than working at Sonic. It sure doesn't. I dug, you know, who doesn't want to know that is everyone that you go to school with. That is probably true. I dug the, I dug the plots to Headstones, the foundation, the foundation holds for Headstones. That is a rough series of conversations with your peers. Like, yeah, I got a double shift at McDonald's. Oh, I got to go, you know, work as a cashier at the Barnes and Noble. Yeah, I got to go dig some graves. Yeah, I got to dig some graves. Yeah. Pays holes in the ground. It paid so well. But like people would be like, what do you do? And I'd be like, nothing. I don't do ideal drugs. I mean, shit, it does sound like a great job to listen to books on tape during.

Yeah, but that was 1998. Oh, right, right. iPods were just a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye. Yeah, you'd have to have like an old skipping disc man next to you listening to one of the four CDs that you own at the time. Yes. And they get dirt all over them. Yeah, there's no, that's, it's boombox era. And you can't have a boombox in a graveyard. I don't know if you know this about graveyards, but they prefer to not have loud blaring music. That would be really funny, just like listening to fucking Fleetwood Mac and digging graves. Yeah, well, some they're trying to lower somebody down while like the chain is blasting. No, no, yeah, you put on for them lowering the corpse down, you put on, oh, hmm.

The answer is, is Freebird. Freebird. Yeah, that's the actual answer. Which is Monster Mash. Which is what they lowered my cousin to is Freebird. That's fair. It was, yeah, yeah. That is what that song's for. It took a while for them to start it. And to me, I thought that was really funny that they were like trying to figure out how to get to the part that he wasn't working properly. And I was like, man, this is, the poetry to this is weird because it was like a shitty small boombox. So the acoustics weren't great. Alexander the third does not have a great funeral because they fuck up the embalming. So it's like horrible and nasty. And it's the kind of thing where like the number one thing you read

about him in like summaries of the czars is that like they didn't embalm him properly and it was super gross, which I guess is a fair thing to have as your main legacy as a guy who's did a bunch of racism. Like fair. Yeah, get a gross funeral. William the Conqueror exploded at his funeral. Yes, he sure did. Like so like, I like a good bad funeral. Yeah, there's a lot of fun ones with royalty. So yeah, he becomes the czar. His younger brother is his heir at first, because though he and Alexandra are together, they have not had a boy yet. George the Scar. Yeah. Yeah. He's the without a Simba. Yeah, except for Georgie like dies of tuberculosis. So he's not a very good scar. He's got he's got a lung scar. He does have a lung scar.

Yeah. And it kills him slowly, which is a problem because he's the only one of them who has any sense. And he probably would have done a much better job, but he has to spend all of his time like they have him stay on the beach basically, because they think it'll not kill him faster, but he dies pretty quick anyway. So Nicholas gets coordinated in 1886. I wrote 1986. That's not when it happened. They had a bit of a waiting period. Yeah. Yeah, they waited until Reagan was in office. They need to get him down there. He has a big ceremonial party, right? The thing you'd expect. And it's not just a party for the nobles of Europe and stuff. There's also a party for the peasants because the Romanovs and the peasants have this sacred bond, right? And Nicholas wants

to honor that and build some goodwill with the little people. So he makes like a bunch of gift bags for them that have like some sausage and some special baked goods and like a nice mug. And he gets like 300,000 of these gift bags together for the poor people. Damn. Now problem, about a million of them show up, 700, 800,000, something like that. Oh, so it's not like it's like bobblehead night. You got to do like the first 10,000 people. It's like bobblehead night or Tencent beer night. Like it goes immediately awry because there's not enough of this shit. Now, the other problem is that he had put Grand Duke Sergei, who, you know, the drunken racist piece of shit dude. He was the guy in charge of planning

this event for the peasants. So he doesn't get enough gift bags and he doesn't have any kind of real crowd control. He doesn't have enough people there to like deal with the size of crowd that there's going to be. And when people realize there's not enough gifts, they start like rushing to try to get at the last ones. And then there is a stampede. And it is a stampede of 800,000 people in an area that is not prepared at all for crowd control and doesn't have anybody dedicated to keeping people safe. It's real bad. Is anything prepared for 800,000 people? Yeah. I mean, you know what I went to when I was younger in 2013, I think it was I went to the Kumbh Mela in India. And every time this gathering is held, it's this big religious gathering. And

it's held in four different cities once every four years. And there's one city, Allahabad, where it's like most holy when they do it there every 12 years. And every time they do it, it's the biggest gathering of people in the history of the human race for any reason. And when I was there, it was about 100 million people, intense. And there was like, there was one stampede at a train station that killed like 30 something people, but really like it was fine. I think it went pretty well. There was like one day where 30 million people all bathed at the same time in the Ganges, like India handles that shit pretty well, actually. Yeah. I remember like the Hajj, people would die on the Hajj all the time. There's been so horrible, horrible stampede.

That's like a bonus if you die on the Hajj. Well, it is like, it is pretty holy way to die, you know? I don't know if it's a bonus, but if you, well, if you die on the Hajj, you get, you immediately get sent to paradise. I'm not an expert. I know that like it's definitely like if you, if it's not the worst way to go, although I think getting crushed to death is the worst way to go. But like dying, doing like the holiest thing you can do in your religion is probably of some comfort. This is not that because nobody's doing anything holy. They're trying to get cups. They're trying to get cups and sausage and it goes horribly, horribly wrong. And 1,400 people are crushed to death in a stampede. More meat for the sausages. More meat for the sausages. We

finally have enough. There are some estimates like 1,400 people is what the state estimates. It's probably more like 3,000 or 4,000 people die, crushed to death in this horrible, horrible, like mass of people. Now, this is considered bad luck for the Nuzar, right? This is his coronation and he's just killed several thousand of his own people because he let his drunken uncle plan the whole event. Nicholas writes at the time, this news left me a disgustful impression and noted that he thought the stampede was a great sin, but he doesn't call off the ceremony or any of like the celebrations and stuff. That's not, it's because like he seems to want to. He's like, I don't really want to party after 1,400 people or just got stomped to death in my name.

I kind of feel like maybe just sitting quietly in a chair, but his uncle. Again, very Russian. Yeah. His uncle, the Greg, was like, no, you can't cancel it. We made all these plans. Everyone's coming. You have to do this big event. Like, fuck them. They're just peasants and a lot of other people in the family are like, yeah, you have to do this. They're right though. Kind of, you could see this as like, yeah, like you have to do this. This is like about more than those people. This is like how the change of power in our state goes and all of these international people here, like we just have to do the thing. You could, like that's definitely a fair take.

You could also see it as he feels like something is wrong and will be taken badly by people and he's not strong enough to stand up to his family. The optics are bad, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Both of those things could be true also, you know. It's probably better for the other crown heads of Europe, like in terms of like their opinion of him that he continues the festivities, but it probably is worse for the peasants. Fair. Yeah. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in Russia beyond. The Moscow society had considered Nicholas's refusal to stop the parties as disrespect for the victims. In his memoirs, one of the czar's men remembers the phrase of an old typesetter in the newspaper printing house. This means trouble. The rain

will bring no good. There were a lot of problems like that. So people are like talking about this, you know, like it definitely is problematic within Russia that he continues the celebrations. The people are talking, everybody. The people are talking. The people are talking about the thousands you got killed if you didn't make it a fucking cups. Now, for his part in the disaster, Nicky gets the nickname of Bloody Nicholas, which is a dope nickname to have as an emperor, but not for this reason. Yeah, no, that's like the worst way to get that nickname. You want it to be the blood of your enemies, right? Yeah. Not the blood of the people that were going to send you off and a congratulations. Yeah. You don't want to get it because you didn't bring enough sausage

to the party. That's not why you want to be Bloody Nicholas. Yeah. It's actually the British version of bloody words. Fucking Nicholas. Yeah. Fucking Nicholas. Yeah. Fucking Nicholas. Make the sausage dipshit. Now, his brother, Georgie, who is still alive at this point, tries to use the disaster to convince Nicholas to sack their uncle to Grand Duke. He's like, look, Sergey's obviously bad at things. Maybe we shouldn't have him have a government job anymore because look at all these people he got killed. But Nicky shoots his brother down and what he says, why he says he's not going to fire his uncle, is really revealing about his character. This is what he's saying to his brother in this argument they're having. I don't want to talk about Moscow. It makes me sick

to remember. It's not particularly comforting to think about the sad side of the coronation. This seems to be a year of hard labor with me and Alex as the martyrs. 4,911 just died and he's like, I am the victim here. I mean, this ties into his old train review. Yeah. Oh, the train was awful. We got derailed. 20 people died, but more often it took us a while. Stepping over corpses and like, yeah, the plates got broken. I was trying to bring a bottle of wine to a friend and it shattered. It's a real, oh, that's a lung. Yeah, it's real bad. Yeah. Can I be honest? My steak dinner ruined. Somebody stole my wine. So after losing a couple of thousand peasants and, you know, getting through the coronation,

Nicky and Alex settle into a routine of life and work. Nicholas spent most of his time at his desk in the words of his cousin, Sandro, listening with near awe to the bellowing of his towering uncles. Nicky was particularly frightened of his uncle, Sergei. Sandro claimed he dreaded being alone with them. And obviously, these are the guys who like help raise him. These are his father's brothers and he feels inadequate next to them. He's also much smaller than them. I think Sergei is like six foot five and Nicholas is a little dude. So there's a lot going on here and he's just like, he's kind of dominated during the early years of his reign by his, his just kind of, it's the Sergei show, you know? And as we've established, not a good show. No, no, no, it's

one of the worst show. It's like that show that, that, that, that friends like spin off that was all about Joey. That's, that's the survey show. Yeah, Joey. Yeah. I was going to call that the Big Bang Theory. It's like the biggest thing, but that doesn't mean it's the best. I would say his dad's show was the Big Bang Theory or his granddad's show was the Big Bang Theory. Fair. Very fair. So after, yeah, they, they, they get into this routine, might call it a rut. And Nicky, yes, means a few years just getting dominated by his uncles. Sandro, who became, came a naval officer, begs his brother to fire the grand, or Sandro, his cousin, begs his cousin to fire the Grand Duke. But Nicholas replies, sack my father's favorite brother. I believe they're right. You did turn

socialist in America. His cousin has just gotten back from America. Like firing this incredibly incapable racist man would be like communism. Yeah. My shitty father's favorite shitty dude. Yeah. Kinda man. Yeah. Like kinda. Yeah. Maybe like, I don't know. You know, I think forgiveness is important. It's important for people to have second chances, but I would also like, I would not give an employee a second chance if they killed 4,000 people. They killed themselves in the trampling. Yeah. You know, we have our little hiccups every now and then on the podcast. I get something wrong or there's something else goes awry, but I think if one of us were to kill 4,000 people making this podcast,

I think that would probably need to be the end of that person's job. He who is without sin cast the first stone, Robert. Yeah. I mean, it would be pretty cool to have the, well no, Joe Rogan beat us to that. Yeah. We're never gonna top that body count. Yeah. Yeah. That's a shame. Stop trying to censor him. So, you know who's not trying to censor Joe Rogan? Jeff. I mean, I feel worried. Really anyone. No one really is. Nobody is. No, no, no. No one has tried that at all. No one at all. But certainly not the podcasts or the whatever. The ads. These ads aren't, you know what I, you know what I'm talking about. George just threw you off your game there, Robert. He did. This is my killing 4,000 people at the

czar's coronation moment. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,

and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when

there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. You know what I loved about those ads, Jeff? Zero censorship of meathead podcasts. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say less than a thousand people trample the death as a result of those ads. That's gonna be really awkward when you listen to the episode again. There's a big rush on blue labor. It's some new insurance company. Do you or a thousand people you know got trampled to death?

The Geico Trampolings. So, Zara and Zarina settle into their new life, which, you know, he's working all the time, but not from the same place. They travel constantly throughout the year. Air conditioning isn't really a thing. So, like, at the start of the year, they're in the capital in the Winter Palace where a whole social season in St. Petersburg revolved around, like, partying while it's really cold outside with the Romanovs and their cousins. So, there's all these big dances and balls and things that I think I would rather die than attend. You don't like big balls? No. I, you know, it depends, like, if they're cradled properly. But I certainly don't like

dancers. Get it, there's that AC-DC song when they were clever. Oh, yeah. Clever. They were like, get it! And they were like, we get it, man. Yeah, yeah, AC-DC. We understand the joke. We get the bit. This is a four-minute song? All right. So, this Zara spends a few weeks each year, you know, in the Winter doing galas and balls and yeah, yeah, yeah, these big insufferable parties. And then in the spring, they go to their second,

they're like their palace, the Peterhof, which is in an area that has nicer springs. And then in late summers, they go on their imperial yacht and sail around the coasts and the Baltic and all that stuff. And then in autumn, they go south and travel to their castles in Poland and hunt throughout the fall. God, that sounds so dope. It does sound pretty rad, right? That sounds like a fun life. Man. Now, I mean, he is like working 80-hour nightmare weeks and like heading religious ceremonies and all this stuff at the time. But yeah, it sounds like a pretty fucking dope work

schedule. What's even doper is his like noble cousins and uncles who have that lifestyle, but also don't have anything to do, like have zero responsibilities. That's the life, man. That's the sweet spot. Not the czar, but his like first cousin. Yeah, yeah, like tight enough that the blood is very similar, but not so tight that you're going to get murdered in an uprising. Yeah. And when things go awry, you can just kind of bounce. Yeah. You're going to actually Dutch?

Yeah. Oh, thank God. I spent so much time in Germany. This worked out good for me. I'm going to turn this accent on real quick. So Nicholas keeps a rigorous schedule. He wakes up at eight every morning. He works until the night most days. Simon Montefiore writes, refusing to delegate. Nikki signed off on trivialities such as every change of name and divorce in the Empire and lists of staff to receive Easter eggs, as well as sentences of exile and death. So he is, he takes this thing of like absolute autocrat very seriously,

and he is like micromanaging. He's doing DMV shit. Yeah. He's covering a lot of ground. Yeah. So congratulations. You are married and congratulations. You are beheaded. Oops. I signed the wrong paper. Yeah. It is like, we talk about like, he's working all the time, but a lot of it is stuff that like, he doesn't need to do. Like, hey, yeah, you can even delegate some of this buddy, but he doesn't. And so he has a lot of like busy work. He's again, like kind of the national DMV slash warlord pope. It's a weird thing to do, man.

It is a weird way to set up your gigantic country. Yeah. Yeah. To just be like, no, I have to sign off on every divorce. Yeah. Like no one expects this of you, Nicholas. Yeah. So fairly early on in his reign, Nicholas II had to make a crucial decision. Would he follow in his grandfather's footsteps and push for reform? Or would he be like his dad, an advocate of sacred autocratism? He chose the latter, valuing that when he had a son, he would pass on to him an intact monarchy. This would prove to be a problem. Yeah. Oh, Nicky. Spoiler alert.

Yeah. Does not wind up being that story. This proved problematic for a couple of reasons. But the first thing that stymied his goal was the fact that Alex just wasn't making baby boys, you know? Obviously, that's not, that's not on her. You don't have any choice in the matter. But it's also the most important thing for him to do is to make an air, right? Like every czar, job number one is make another boy who can take over. Keep fucking. Yeah. It's like, it's a big deal. And like the rain is, there's unrest in the kingdom and shit when you don't have an air, because people don't really know as clearly how things are going to shake out. Because even if it's like your first cousin or whatnot,

it's a lot messier if it's not the way it's supposed to go in this system. So everybody's got a lot of writing on he and Alex having a baby boy. And by God, they try, but they are, they just keep making girls. He has four daughters over the course of years. Well, she has four daughters and he helps. It's like a shake and bake situation, you know? And to their credit, they're very devoted to them. There's this story from his first daughter that like his wife starts sobbing when she realizes she's had a daughter because she hasn't, you know, done her duty yet and give him a son. And he reassures her by saying, hey, we're going to have a son one of these days and he's going to belong to Russia, you know?

This girl is ours. Like this child is just, is just our daughter. And like that's great. He's a little softy. Yeah, that's a sweet thing to say. Like that's, in a situation that can't possibly be healthy, the healthiest way to think about this, I think. I got to be honest, he sounds like a real wife guy. He's a wife guy. He is. He is. He's a super-wife dude. I love that for him because apparently everyone else hates his wife. They sure do. And, and spoiler, his wife is sucks. His trash, his wife's bad, but he is too. So it's a good match. Like it's like an Ava Brown, Hitler situation where it's like we're both deeply unpleasant, but you know, at least you found

each other. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe some people should not ever do anything like Hitler, but we don't have that option. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Who are you? Canceling Hitler. Who are you to judge? Yeah. What was he supposed to do after not getting into art school? What was the czar supposed to do other than be the czar? Um, I don't know, man. Yeah. Quit, buddy. Take your money and run. Like that's the thing. Like spend a year as the czar socking shit away in Switzerland, then go on a diplomatic trip one day and just never come back. Just Bruce Wayne at the end of the dark night trilogy. Just do a fucking Irish goodbye on being the czar of all Russia. Yeah. Good Russian goodbye, you know. Yeah. He's just hanging out.

Yeah. He's like a tin Smith and like Boston. Yeah. Figure it out. So when duty kept the czar and his wife apart, the emperor and Empress would exchange letters on a daily basis. Um, they usually had telegrams and so they're like, again, they're like texting each other. Like they are corresponding on a rate that is pretty much modern and they're like the Russian royal family really are the only people in the world who get to do this. I guess there's some other royals like this. Um, but like they're basically texting all the time. And so they talk to each other about everything and we unfortunately as a result of this know a dismal amount about their sex life and what they called each other. Man, how awkward must that have been for the dude

dude? There's just a fucking guy who's like writing this down. Yeah. Okay. Titties one or two days. Yeah. Or whatever. Goddamn Cyrillic letter we have. Message back for confirmation. Yeah. Do you want to come on my neck? Did you say, did you mean neck? Yeah. All right. Neck. Good for them. His pet name or her pet name for him was Boise. Um, like B O Y S Y, not like Idaho. Um, and and his pet name for her was lady. Um, which is fine. It's just some funny texture, not judging them, whatever. Everybody has weird pet names. One example, letter reads, this is going to be hard to get through. Doing an accent. It'll be easier. Tell Boise that lady sins him her tenderest love and kisses and often thinks of him in lonely sleepless nights. Like it's sweet. They love each other,

but I swear to God, I expected something a lot more like graphically sexual. No, they're too boring for that. Um, here's how boring they are. We do, they talk about their sex life a lot, but it's all pretty bland. Um, because he's such a repressed dude in the 1800s, the czar is terrified to use the word period. So when he's like messaging her on the telegram as he's driving back on a train and wants to know, like, are we going to be able to fuck? Because he's, he's obviously, he's not that cool. Um, so he's asking, like, are we going to be able to fuck when I get back? And so he'll ask, is madam Baker home? That's his like slang for like, are you, are you having, I mean, that's, that's fair. Cause remember, this is going through.

Yeah. Other people are reading this like it makes sense. And maybe he's not going to be like, how's that push? Yeah. He's not going to do that. I mean, other people do in this period and it's pretty funny, but yeah, they're a little more coy. He also calls it the military engineer. Um, so I also remind you, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt again, but I would also like to remind you that we're talking about this now. So he is funny, right? Very correct. Yeah. To not be too graphic about this because we're like, let's talk about this other dipshit telegraph that he wrote. Yeah. Google James Joyce love letters and see how it can go when some, what your shit gets into someone else's hands. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm good about that. Yeah. Um, I don't know. I just find it funny. That's not a particular moral mark against them. Like it is interesting to me that they are basically like sexting each other in the 1800s because they have the ability, like they get to use telegram machines that way. But also it means that someone else has to do all of the actual sexting for them, which is awkward. So some guy that's most likely wearing an official uniform. Yeah. He's got the biggest hat you've seen in your life. He's at work doing this. He's a work sexting a wife. Yeah. How was your job, honey? I don't want to talk about it. Let me tell you, this baker lady won't go away. She's there every month. She shows up to her place.

It's really irritating. So Nicholas doesn't seem to have really liked his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm because nobody liked Kaiser Wilhelm ever and never, never weird dude, um, horny for his mom's hands. But he came, uh, calling regularly on like Kaiser Wilhelm came to Russia, uh, to hang out with Nikki pretty regularly. And this is for totally self-serving reasons. Again, he wants to get back into an alliance with Russia. So he's like always dropping by to be like, Hey, can I borrow your entire military in the event of a European conflict? Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what usually happens. Um, and he starts trying to like as part of his plan to win back the czar, he tries to convince Nikki to expand, um, in, in Asia rather than

expanding into Europe. Cause like Germany's doing some expanding stuff in this period, right? They're unifying. They're getting, getting their shit locked down. Um, they're, they're quarreling with a couple of folks. Um, and he doesn't want, yeah, it, it, it ends fine. But he doesn't want, he doesn't want the czar to, to look towards Europe. He wants him to like look towards Asia. Um, and also the, the, the Kaiser kind of has some designs for taking part of China, which is sort of falling apart in this period. Um, and so he's like, Hey, why don't we like steal a little bit of, of China? Uh, and because he's the Kaiser and very racist, he describes this as setting Russia up to quote, defend Europe from the inroads of the great yellow

race. All of the letters and this that, that, that racist phrase are capitalized, I think by the Kaiser who also spoke great English. Um, at least they called him great. He didn't say great. Yeah. I don't think he meant it in a good way. Um, and he advocated working together to steal a bunch of ports from China. Um, and Russia really wants a Chinese port cause China has some ports that don't freeze. Uh, and all of the ports in Russia freeze at some point, right? Like it's not, or all of the ports, at least on the east side of the empire, they've got that problem. He wants like a warm weather port. Um, and he wants to take it from China. Um, and this is kind of like, you know, the Kaiser is sort of like really pushing this, but Nicholas definitely wants. Again,

as we said, like every czar's job is to expand the empire. Um, and this is kind of the only real place to expand. So Nicholas, he hasn't made an air yet. He can't put another a boy into the imperial, you know, baby cavern or whatever you want to call it. Uh, but he can conquer some land for Russia and maybe prove that he deserves to be the czar that way. Um, so he seizes Port Arthur on the Chinese coast cause again, China's sort of falling apart and the Kaiser's like, yeah, this is a great idea. Do it, do it, do it. So he, he sends troops. He's like such a shit talker. He's like, yeah, man, do it, do it. Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna go great for everybody. It's like jackass. Yeah. Yeah. I'm Nicholas II and this is invading China. This is conquering the

Chinese coast. Um, and his ministers in the Navy are like, this is a bad idea, bro. You don't know what you're getting into, bro. We don't have a lot of troops on that side of it. It is far the fuck away from Moscow. I don't know if you know how big your country is, but like, it's going to be a problem fighting in China for us. Um, but the czar is like, uh, I know, I want, uh, I want a port. Um, and the Navy's even like, well, this is a bad one to, if you're going to go through this, if you're going to like take all the risks of seizing a port from China, this isn't a very good port. Why don't we like go further south and take a port in Korea? Um, and his prime minister at the time, a guy named wit, uh, who we'd met, you know,

used to be running the trains and stuff, um, points out that this is going to fuck up the alliance that he already has with China. He's got like treaties because he's building the trans Siberian railway, which goes through territory China controls. So he has like a treaty with China and his prime minister is like, well, you know, they're not going to be happy with you if you start conquering them. Yeah. I don't know if you know what a treaty is. Yeah. But generally picking a fight with someone in the treaty is like, that's like a no, no. Yeah. And he's also wit is also like, Japan's not going to be cool with this. Cause they're in the Japan is waging war in China right now. They are actively conquering chunks of China and

Japan and Russia are at peace at the moment. And wit is like, do you really want to like fuck with Japan in like their sphere of influence? Cause like we're not, we're not great at fighting over there. It's kind of far away. Um, but the young czar didn't listen. Uh, and again, his two issues, his two duties are to expand the empire and to make a baby. So like this is, he sees, this is like, this is the one thing I can do. Um, and during his world tour, that big road trip we talked about last episode, Nikki had met a prince, um, named Esper, who was really into Buddhism. And this prince had claimed like, Hey, the people at Tibet are waiting for the great white czar to conquer Tibet from China and free them. Everybody in Tibet wants to be ruled by the czar.

You just get out, you overthrow the British who are running things at the moment in there and like, they're going to be psyched with you. Um, which is not true. Classic Tibet. Classic Tibet. Everybody just gets a picture of a Russian dude on their wall one day. Yeah. The Dalai Lama just has an Ivan Drago poster hanging up. So Nikki was very superstitious and religious and he was entranced by this vision of himself as a great white czar. Driven by fantasies of a Russia expanded across Manchuria and Korea, he committed more and more of his troops to Asia. Now his brother dies in July of 1899 from tuberculosis. And when his brother dies, that's like the last reasonable voice that he

sometimes listened to. You know, he's got wit. He's got some like ministers that are reasonable, but he doesn't give a shit what they say because they're not, they're not, they weren't, they weren't God-given. Yeah, exactly. He did kind of sometimes, not all the time, not often listen to Georgie, but now Georgie's, you know, dead as shit. So this isn't going to go great for anybody, at least of all China. Now in 1900, we have the Boxer Rebellion, which is this big populist uprising against the West in China. A bunch of embassies and peaking get besieged and like, everybody who's not China puts a big army together to go fuck up China. It's pretty fucked up. The Boxer Rebellion's interesting. Yeah, we'll talk about it. This is like a criminally brief

explanation of what happens. I mean, it's a lot of people, it's some dudes that thought they were in Crouching Tiger and it did not go the way it was planned. It did not, nothing, nothing, none of this goes well. Nicholas doesn't really want to send troops to China. He's like very anxious about actually having his soldiers in peaking. But he's also bullish on conquering a bunch of China. So after his troops get back from the Boxer Rebellion, he sends 170,000 soldiers into Manchuria, which he does not control. And his goal is to provoke a reaction that will justify like conquering all of Manchuria, which Japan is fighting over at the time and is owned by China. So he's really just like sticking his national dick in a hornet's nest for no real reason.

Like, I love that phrasing. Yeah. Yeah, he is about to fuck a hornet's nest. But you know who won't fuck a hornet's nest, Jeff? Go on. Who would that be? Well, they'll have you cook one first. Yeah, they would have you, they would have you, well, they would, they would use, you would, you would marinate your dick in bee venom or hornet venom and then cook it. Like a **** or something. Yeah, probably do it. Filled with hornets. Filled with hornets. Or the Washington State Highway Patrol, mostly hornets. Anyway, here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

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It does. It does. You're trying to censor me? I'm the new Joe Rogan. That's right. You're gonna crowdfund a half a million dollars off of this. Yes. You can't. You can't censor me. I'm insensorable. I'm a straight white man with a background in fighting. You can't get rid of me. You are the anti-Rogan. We could get you guys to touch and... Yeah, we'd merge together like time cop. Yeah. And then you would produce season five of Serial.

I don't know how that works out, but it does. That was a... Anyway. Jeff, so how do you feel all this goes? Getting involved in China, trying to take a China, fucks in with Japan, flipping them off a little bit? I think this goes good. I've seen The Princess Bride. I know for a fact you never get involved in a land war in Asia. You sure do not. And you also, you really don't want to fuck with like early 1900s Japan. They have their shit together. They're doing okay. They had some lulls, they had some ups and some downs. Japan's been pretty victorious, all things considered. China, they did not have a great second half of the 19th century.

You kind of can fuck with China in this period, which is why the entire world does repeatedly. I mean, Jesus Christ, how many drug dealing wars did we have in order to protect our right to turn the entire country into opium addicts? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it was all for tea. That's right, everybody. Look it up. British invaded a country to force them to buy drugs so that they could get tea more easily. That's so us. Not even top 10 of British Empire crimes. Yeah. Man, the open door policy in the opium wars is so wild. It's real. We really need to get into that more on this because it is a fascinating period and it says just everything about the kind of individuals who were involved in colonialism in this period.

One of whom is Nicholas II. So in 1901, the Tsar and Tsarina have their last daughter. They've had four so far. I think it's four. Who can keep track of them? Well, the Bolsheviks could. Well, maybe it kind of depends on what you believe. They were in little nesting dolls. He just keeps popping. They have the one daughter and they just keep popping her in half and pulling out another daughter. And then inside is a tiny little son. A tiny little son who can't bleed right. So about a month after they have their last daughter, two princesses who married into the Romanov family. They're called the Crows in Simon Montfior's book. They're kind of occultists. They're really into like weird witchy stuff. But like Christian, I think. It's pretty dope.

There's a lot of that going around in this period. They introduced Nicholas and Alexandra to a French healer. These princesses were originally from Montenegro and they were part of like they were into these really occult Christian traditions. And they introduced the Romanovs into like the world of like weird spiritual healers. And Nicholas and Alexandra fall hard for this shit. And I'm going to quote from the Romanovs. First, the sisters introduced Nikki and Alex to the epileptic holy idiot, Mitka Kolibya. But when but when you just sounded like a porky pig right there, the fucking names. That was amazing. Yeah. But then one of the sisters, sons falls ill and she consults a French peasant boy who working at his uncle's butcher shop had experienced an

epiphany and set himself up as a hierophant specializing in the power of psychic fluids and astral forces to heal sickness and cure female sterility. Now, this guy's name is Philippe. And by the time the Tsar and Zarina meet him, he's about 50 small with black hair and black mustache. Very unsightly in appearance with an ugly southern French accent. Someone close to the Romanovs writes as Nikki and Alex struggled to conceive a boy. Philippe visited Petersburg at the Palace of the Crows and her the one of the Crow women and her husband, the Grand Duke Peter, noted Nikki, this evening, we met the amazing Frenchman. So they like they they fall for this guy hard. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's a Rasputin kind of thing. It's exactly that.

Yeah, these people are what we refer to as Marx. Yes, they are. They would be devastatingly online and fall for every single scam. Yeah, they'd be Q. Number one. Number one, the Tsar would have like a thousand NFTs right now. They would be pouring bleach down their kids' throats. They would they would have bought into everything. They got trying to escape the palace. They got caught with 17 pounds of bored ape pictures. They were running out of. Yeah, these are these are I can't emphasize this enough. Not smart people. My precious. My precious abs all gone. The Bolsheviks. How could you do this to me? This was the future. Yeah. And then you've got like Stalin in a room with, I don't know, one of the Red Generals and they're like,

know that leaning is dead, the board apes can go to the people. And Stalin looks at the board ape and puts it in his pocket. No, no, this is my app. All apes are Stalin's. So the Romanovs fall for this guy fucking immediately. They start calling him our friend with the F capitalized, which is what they call Rasputin decades later, or years later, and they take him immediately into their confidence. Again, these people have like no guile at all. Like they're like, a holy man who can heal using magic. Let's tell him every state secret we have. I would love for you to plant these beans. It would have been very easy to spy on the Tsar in Tsarina. If like you you are a little good at tricking people. If you're a close up magician, you can just destroy people apart.

But perhaps he would like to see this ruble behind your ear. I've watched a man pull his finger in half. We must give him our boy's health. Yeah, or he will be pulling us all in here. Yeah. So just just lose every dime at a carnival. One carnival would have ruined the Romanovs in their life. So the Tsar's actual doctors are like, you cannot take this man's advice. He has graduated from no school and he has no medical license. You can't take his advice on your wife's fertility or on the health of your children. What are you doing? And the Tsar is

like, oh, your problem with him is that he doesn't have a license? Well, I'll make him a medical doctor by declaration and give him a medical license. Oh, no, that's not how it works. It doesn't rush us. That's not dude. That's not how it works. It's very funny. Simon Montefiore continues. Soon, Philippe was giving political advice. When Nikki met Kaiser Wilhelm, Alex told her husband, our dear friend will be near you and help you answering William's questions, giving him the toughness to be friendly and severe so that he realizes he dare not joke with you, that he learns to be afraid of you. As for reform, Philippe advised Nikki that a constitution would be the ruin of Russia. In the spring of 1902, Alex fell pregnant and our

friend was prophesying. Russia was chosen to dominate the Far East. So this guy is reinforcing, again, he's doing the thing that helps you con powerful people. You tell them what they want to hear. The Tsar wants to hear, no, the people don't need a constitution. And yes, you're going to conquer China. Yeah, smart guy. Which is such like a big gamble. Yeah. It's a horrible gamble. Yeah, like, like, you're going to be able to do this one very hard thing. You sure about that? Yeah, the guy who fell for my tricks are going to be able to tie this knot. Yeah, this fucking Rube, you're going to be able to take care of it all. Oh, yeah, it's going to go great for you. Send more guys to China. That's going to be really good.

Yeah, you know what? I got a mustache. Yeah, do it. So at this point, absolutely nothing but garbage is getting into the Tsar's brain, right? Like his information funnel is just pure trash. Now, he's introduced by Sandro, who's normally like his, who's his cousin, and is normally like one of the more level-headed people around him to a captain named Bezo Brasov, who wants to be the Cecil Rhodes of Russia, and basically is like, send me over to Asia and I'll conquer it for you. I think your historic destiny is to conquer the East and I'm going to do it for you, right? Me, Bezo Brasov, I'm going to be the guy, you like give me troops and money and I'll conquer Manchuria for you and

Korea too. Give me enough troops and enough money and I could do it. Yeah, I mean, I feel like it wouldn't be that hard to, I mean, from what I remember of the Korean War, pretty easy war. Honestly, I'm going to be like so easy that I barely even remember it happening. Barely even talk about it. It's like a forgotten war or something, probably because it was so boring. More like warring. Japan is engaged at this point. They're, again, trying to conquer China. Well, congratulations, Japan. Yeah, it doesn't work out great for them either. They're not getting married. You would not call this a marriage. So they start clashing with Russia diplomatically over the fact that Russia's

expanding into the areas that Japan is already trying to conquer. And Japan does not want to war with Russia because it's a bad idea to go to war with Russia historically most most of the time. Japan likes to avoid wars that are not defensive in general until they see the opportunity. You don't want to leave the island for a war with Russia. It's not a good idea. It's not. I mean, especially you're already fighting this war with China, right? Like you're trying to, you're engaged in conflict all over. Your resources are extended and Russia's huge and rich. You don't really want to fuck with them. And they have a reputation as being a good naval power too. And maybe Japan doesn't really want to like test this shit.

Yeah, just look at their czar. He's dressed like a like a sailor. Yeah, look at him. He's got to be great with boats. He's wearing that little outfit. Dressed like a sailor his whole goddamn life. Now, Japan is scared of getting into a fight with Russia. But because he's listening to Bezo Brasov, Nicholas is not at all frightened enough to war with Japan. He thinks it's going to be a cakewalk. And Bezo Brasov convinces him that conflict is inevitable. So the best thing to do was to start threatening Japan with open war and basically like, hey, if we lay our cards out on the table, they'll either fight us and we'll win or they won't fight us and we'll get our shit.

Right? Like that's Bezo Brasov's attitude. He tells the czar, only the bayonet can guarantee the success of our activities in Manchuria. It does not. So despite the fact that this guy is kind of unhinged, Nikki gives him two million rubles and sends him east on a secret mission to set up a paramilitary force in Manchuria to help them conquer it, which Bezo Brasov has. There's nothing in his background that would make him capable of this. Yeah, that's that's when you make that Irish goodbye. That's when you just are like, thank you. You just take that money and bounce. Yeah, that is that is a bounceable amount of money to have. But he does not bounce. And when he finds out Witt, who's again, one of the few reasonable

people in the czar's orbit, like laments that a, quote, half mad preposterous adventurer is purely in charge of their policy in the east. So Nicholas is basically like, yeah, crazy dude, do whatever you want. You're in charge of Russia's policy towards China. This is going to end well. That's like giving Mel Gibson's character from Lethal Weapon in charge of that. Like it's just like a very unhinged existence to see somebody be in charge of anything with. Yeah, it's it's not a great call. And while Nicholas is edging Japan towards the brink of war, shit is not copacetic in the imperial interior. This article by Shlomo Lambrosa writing for Oxford University Press lays out the situation. The lack of any substantive reform policy compounded

by a deteriorating economy led to increased incidents of popular violence. Poor harvests in 1902 and 1903 caused wide scale unrest in rural areas. Peasants roamed the countryside in search of work and food, occasionally resorting to violence. In 1902, in the provinces of Karkov and Poltava, peasants looted homes from the nobility, causing thousands of rubles worth of damage. So that is a problem for the Russians, right? It's not a problem that people are starving, but now rich people. It's a sign for the Russians. Yeah. Oh, shit. Small pockets of the poor are rising up against the nobility. Yeah. I guess we should just do the same thing for the next 16 years. Yeah. I guess we should continue taking no changes whatsoever and maybe start a war with Japan.

Yeah. So economic, the fact that the economy is falling apart, it doesn't, unfortunately, like there are some isolated pockets of people going after nobles. For the most part, they go after the people that Russian peasants go after and Russian nobles go after when they're angry. They make the same call that Alexander III does. They go after the Jews. Again, this is why tens of thousands of Jewish people are leaving Russia every year, because it's not an easy spot. They're like, you know what's better? Brooklyn. Yeah. It sounds like that's a lot. We got to be a lot safer for us. In 1903, all of this culminates in the first pogrom of the century in a city named Kishinev.

It started with what was basically a drunken party where several kids vandalized Jewish property. So you get these young kind of nationalist right-wing youth and they vandalize a synagogue and then some Jewish-owned stops, shops, and things just kind of keep escalating. Thank God that doesn't happen in modern times anymore. Yeah. We got that out of the species system. Thank God the Jews are no longer targeted by hate crimes anymore. That's what everyone says about the Jews, that things are simple. Things are great for them now. Yeah. I'm going to quote from the Harvard

Crimson here or Harvard Gazette here. Sorry, not the Crimson. Fuck the Crimson. This is the Harvard Gazette. Gangs of 10 or 20 armed with hatchets and knives stormed through the town's narrow streets and into its courtyards where Jewish families defended themselves with garden implements and other meager weapons. In the end, 49 Jews were killed and an untold number of Jewish women were raped and 1500 Jewish homes were damaged. This sudden rush of hoodlum violence prompted by accusatory rumors of Jewish ritual murder quickly became a talisman of imperial Russian brutality against its Jews. So, yeah. Let's cut it out, guys. Just cut it out. It's not great.

I'm cool. Yeah. Maybe don't. Have you tried not? Yeah. Have you tried not being a dick about it? And his empire? Maybe not. So, Nicky, when he hears about this big pogrom, he puts a dude in charge of dealing with it. A minister named Pleve, who has taken part in anti-Semitic violence before and is one of the most infamous anti-Semites in the Russian government. And actually, Pleve becomes one of the more moderate people around him, which is not great. But his move, he fires the governor of Kishinev, which fine. And Nicky seems to barely kind of notice that a pogrom has happened. This does not

really take up a lot of cycles in his brain. He's concerned with the fact that his wife is pregnant again. Yeah, I was going to say, he's probably too busy sexting. Yeah. He is too busy sexting, does not care about this pogrom. On the day of it, he's just kind of like writing home to his wife about shit. This doesn't seem to really left a mark on him at all. And he continued, his wife continued to get all of their medical advice from Philippe. This was deeply worrying to the old Empress, the Tsar's mother. And so, she sends a secret agent with the Akhrana Russian Secret Service to investigate Philippe, this healer. And the investigation realizes like this guy has been charged with practicing medicine

without a license in France a bunch. He's a tiny French Carney. He's like literally a con artist. Yeah, he's like, yeah. This one Carney got close to the Tsar and immediately conned his ass. Smooth as shit, man. This guy could talk himself anywhere. And when this report was brought to the Tsar, he fires the agent who writes it, not Philippe. And Philippe's health advice during this pregnancy that Alex is having is that she's not allowed to be weighed or inspected by doctors in any way whatsoever. And the reason is because she's not actually pregnant. She's like some people, she may have had like kind of a miscarriage or something basically. We don't really know. He may have just been lying to her and trying to get her to put on

a little weight and telling her that she was pregnant so that he could try to get a bunch of money out of them. It's kind of unclear exactly what happened. But yeah, he knows she's not pregnant because he's like, oh yeah, don't let anybody weigh you and don't let the doctors look at you. But also eat this hoagie. Yeah, eat this hoagie. Eat this six foot party sub that I got delivered. And the Tsar and Tsarina are like, that makes sense. Now, obviously eventually, you can only hide from someone that they're not pregnant for so long. There is a point at which it will become very clear that you were not pregnant. This happens. And when it does, this does kind of break the spell a little bit. And Nicholas finally fires Philippe. Simon Montfio

writes, before he left laden with presents, including a Sir Pauli motor car, he gave the Empress a little bell that would ring if dark forces lurked. Philippe died soon afterwards, but not before he had warned that he would merely vanish and then reappear. Sometime you will have another friend like me who will speak to you of God. That's good. You ain't never had a friend like me. He's Aladdin genie. He is genieing him. And he's also like setting him up for Rasputin, which I kind of, he must have known he was an old man. Like he must have known he didn't have that much longer. I wonder if he was just like, I'm going to do a solid for the next con man who gets close to these idiots, you know, like you got to get a look out for the next generation. Yeah, he's

really setting shit up for Rasputin. Like another guy is going to come and con these rich people out of more of their stuff. And I want it to be easy for them because fuck them. There is something fascinating about these, these like mystics that the, that the Zars are pulling in at the end here, the Romanovs, because like they say shit that's like oddly, like it's an odd portent. Like they'll say shit that they like, cause when you talk about like Rasputin, he's like, he doesn't read some of them. Like he's got some really prophetic sounding stuff. The ones I remember being very specific. He's like, you know, if you kill me, you are fucked. Yeah, you're fucked. This war is going to go bad. Like, but also if you're Rasputin and you're a pretty good con man

and you know these people, it's a safe bet to be like, I'll just tell them things are going to get real bad because they probably are going to keep getting real bad because these people are stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don't know, Jeff, uh, but I do know that that's going to be the end of part two. You got some plugables. Yeah, man, let's do it. Let's do it for this, for this week. You know, like I said, if you guys find me on social media, Twitter and Instagram at, hey there, Jeff Rowe, come say hi. I'm actually pretty funny on the old, on the old Twitter. Damn straight. We have a good time on there. You can also check out my shows. I have Jeff has cool friends, which is available at patreon.com slash Jeff may for early on censored episodes

with bonus content, or you can listen to it for free a week later. I have a lot of really cool friends. If you're a nerd, you'd absolutely love it. I also have Tom and Jeff watch Batman on the gamefully unemployed network. You can check that out with Tom Reiman, as well as, you don't even like sports and unpopular opinion, both on the un pops network with Adam Todd Brown. Uh, yeah. Robert, what do you got to plug, man? Tell me something. Tell me something good. I got a novel called after the revolution. It's, you can preorder it now and get it signed. Uh, if you Google AK press after the revolution, you can find my novel. It'll come signed to your house. So order, order that shit. Check it out. Hell yeah. I'm going to do that. I want

you to know my address. I, I, I will not, but somewhat at AK press will learn your address. Oh hell yeah. And we use it for, for unsettling purposes. That's, that's the guarantee. Ooh, unsavory books. All right. Well, that's going to do it for us at behind the bastards this week. Come back next week for several more hours of talking about Zara Nicholas the second. So much Nicholas the second way too much Nicholas the second. And he responsible amount. Not enough Nicholas the second, I would say. That's what Nicholas the second said right before he got shot by the Bolsheviks. He's like, you know, maybe a few more weeks. I feel like more of me would have been good. I was really going to pull it out in the last quarter. Give me a chance.

I can fix. I can fix. I can change baby. Perfect. I'll see you next week. All right. Bam. What would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U S and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sorted tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like

CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him,

he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.