Robert Evans introduces "Behind the Bastards," a podcast dissecting the bizarre origins of history's worst figures, from Saddam Hussein's romance novels to Hitler's obsession with German children's books and Osama bin Laden's American action movie inspirations. By examining these strange backstories and dictatorial parenting styles, the show reveals how trivial obsessions shaped global catastrophes, challenging listeners to reconsider the complex, often absurd psychology behind tyranny. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Behind The Bastards Intro00:01:50
Hello everybody, I am Robert Evans, the new host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, where we tell you everything you don't know about some of the worst people in history.
Now, in my prior career, I was an editor at Cracked.com and a journalist.
I reported from Iraq, Ukraine, the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and I talked to all sorts of people who'd lived their whole lives under dictators and monsters of varying types.
And one thing I found about these people is that in addition to being, you know, just the worst, they were all way more interesting than I'd ever heard about in school.
The worst people in history are also often the most fascinating.
For example, Saddam Hussein, you know, genocidal monster warlord.
Also, a romance novelist who wrote the strangest book I've ever read, and we're going to talk about that in one of our first podcasts.
Adolf Hitler, you know, obviously worst person in history, but also obsessed with a young adult fiction series that was basically the German equivalent of Harry Potter.
And he, in fact, based his strategies in World War II off of these children's books that he was obsessed with his entire life.
All of these terrible people have fascinating stories like that in their background.
Osam bin Laden obviously hated America as something fierce, but he was also obsessed to a pretty significant extent in American pop culture.
And he and his buddies in the mountains of Afghanistan would watch American action movies to pump themselves up for activities against the United States.
There's all sorts of crazy details about all of these people and it's just endlessly fascinating to me.
And I think it's going to be fascinating to you, the collective internet, as well.
So we'll be talking about dictators, warlords, terrorists, awful people like Carlos the Jackal.
And we'll also be talking about broader subjects like, you know, you think about dictators, they all have these big families.
They groom their kids to take over for them.
What kind of parents are they?
It turns out they're really, really, really weird parents.
Endlessly Fascinating Details00:00:35
So if you want to know about all of these terrible people I've talked about so far and so many more, tune into Behind the Bastards.
You can find us online at behindthebastards.com where you can check out pictures and links to sources.
So you can check up on my work and you can also see things like the incredibly gorgeous face of a young Saddam Hussein or the ridiculously weird pistol packing man who wrote Adolf Hitler's favorite books.
You can also find us on social media, Twitter, Instagram at BastardsPod.
So yeah, check out Behind the Bastards.
I'm Robert Evans and I'm going to be here every week talking about terrible, terrible nightmare people.