Gabriele D'Annunzio, the 1863-born Italian poet who faked his death to manufacture fame, utilized emotional manipulation and necrophilic fantasies to become a master of brand management. His vitriolic rhetoric, including the early use of "Holocaust" to incite violence against politicians, orchestrated a coup that pushed Italy into World War I, causing over 460,000 deaths. By harnessing societal rage and scapegoating enemies, D'Annunzio established a prototype for modern populists like Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, proving that directing real anger toward destructive ends creates terrifyingly effective fascist movements regardless of legal precedent. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Introduction: The Popular Con Artist00:04:02
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
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Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's back to my old introduction style, my podcast host who's out of ideas?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about terrible people.
And more importantly, I completely botch the introduction every time.
And after a hundred some odd podcasts, I shouldn't be doing that anymore.
But I'm not a professional.
I am a hack and a fraud.
But you know who isn't a hack and a fraud?
Shireen Lana Yunas, Airhorn, Airhorn, Air Horn.
Are you never?
I've never felt more like a hack and a fraud than I am when I'm on this podcast.
Why is that?
I don't think I'm smart enough for this.
No, I am.
Well, the point of this podcast is nobody's very smart, or none of these people would be getting away with all the shit they get away with.
True, true, true, true.
No, I'm very happy to be here.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm excited to know what the fucker is out there fucking up the world.
Well, Shireen, I'll tell you who we're talking about today.
Okay.
I want to ask a question of you first.
Okay.
What in your mind qualifies someone as a ladies man?
A ladies' man?
Well, um, someone that's like a charismatic, smooth talker, you know, maybe gets away with a lot of like things that a less capable person would get away with.
Yeah.
Someone's a really popular person.
He's popular, but I don't know.
Like, you know, like if someone's a creep and they're good looking, you give them a pass because they're good looking.
Like, not like you, but like you're just saying, like, the general society.
I kind of think of that as like a ladies' man.
Gabriel D'Annunzio's Rough Times00:04:28
But also, he can be a good kind of ladies' man and be nice to ladies and treat them well.
Right?
It is a double-edged sword.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've known some guys that I would describe as ladies' men who were very respectful.
And I've known some guys who are ladiesmen who are like absolute sociopaths.
Like, it's but it always is one of the two.
They're either like the best person you know and they're just incredibly charming because they're really decent people, or they're utter like soulless monsters.
Yeah, I think there's definitely middle ground.
There's definitely a dichotomy there where there's like one side where they're like charismatic, the life of the party, everyone's like attracted to them like a magnet, and the other side where it's like a dark brooding that you should get all the girls because they're just like rude.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, today, Shireen, we are talking about the quintessential ladies' man, one of the men, in fact, for whom that term was coined.
Wow.
And the guy we're talking about today is also the inventor of the concept of fascism.
Oh, that's a nice little blend of attributes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This, this is, this is a hell of a tale.
Um, so I'm curious for a woman's perspective on this guy's.
I don't fully understand this guy's appeal, but it was undeniable like in his lifetime.
But I find him baffling.
So maybe you can help me make sense of this.
I will try my best.
Have you ever heard of Gabriel Di Annunzio?
Nope.
All right.
Well, neither had I really until I started digging into him a little bit back.
So he's not very well known today outside of Italy, but he is an important figure.
So Gabriel Di Annunzio was born on March 12th, 1863, in the city of Pescara, Italy.
Now, the nation of Italy itself was only about two years old when he was born because it had just, you know, like after the Roman Empire fell, it had mostly been a collection of city-states and big chunks of it had been ruled by other countries and kingdoms and shit.
So like Italy had just started being a thing, like in the modern sense when this guy's born.
And Pescara, his hometown, was a small coastal city buttressed by mountains and pine trees.
It was not a particularly like hustle and bustly place.
And Gabriel's father, Francisco Paolo, was the mayor.
Today, we'd probably consider Gabriel's family to have been upper middle class.
His dad was a small-time landowner and a wine merchant with a terrible habit of spending much more money than he could actually afford.
So they made a good living, but they were always kind of like on the edge of their means.
Now, as the biggest man in town, because Francisco Paolo was, you know, the mayor, he needed to be seen displaying conspicuous wealth.
So some of Gabrielle's earliest memories during Carnival were of his father standing on the balcony and tossing gold and silver coins down into a crowd of partying poor people, which was like not just his dad did that.
In any town, the guy who occupies his position, that's like a tradition.
Okay.
So you show off your largesse, right?
Okay.
So he was like.
He was like a guy.
He was perceived as good.
No.
No.
Well, I mean, he was very popular in head.
Yes, he was perceived as a good guy, but this was also like what you do if you're the mayor.
If you're the richest man in town, you throw money into crowds on carnival.
It's just what happens.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's worse traditions.
Yeah.
I prefer other forms of income redistribution, but that one's throwing money at me.
That can work, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's better than what we have now where they don't do that at all and just hoard it all.
Yeah.
So I can imagine.
I can imagine like if that happened now, it would be like very riotous, like just clamoring for that $1 or like whatever cent is on the ground.
If you're really looking, you know, because times are rough.
Times are rough.
I do think if like, I wonder, because like, I think part of why so many rich people are against both Warren and Sanders, who both have wealth redistribution platforms, is that they, like, and they, while they're in favor of like charity and stuff, is number one, they spend less money on charity, but number two, like, then it's them, then everybody gets to see, like, oh, this, this great rich person bought this hospital, as opposed to like, well, this guy paid his taxes.
Right.
Like, one of those feeds your ego more.
Maybe if you're like, look, you have to give up X amount of money, but you can toss it into a crowd of partying people.
Like, let's compromise.
That's a good, that's a good question.
Yeah.
Fighting for a Female Agenda00:02:28
So Francisco Paulo, like, you know, Gabrielle's dad, he grows up like seeing him doing all this stuff.
It's very ostentatious.
And displays of wealth are a big part of his childhood.
His dad also had a hobby of dying doves in a variety of colors using like new high-tech dyes at the time and letting them fly around inside the house, which is weird.
That's an interesting hobby.
They didn't have TV or radio, so you know.
They had to entertain themselves by.
Yeah, torturing animals is about all you got.
Wow.
That's quite the activity.
I don't want to keep leading back to my pro-dog fighting agenda, but you know, in a time with less entertainment.
You have a pro-dog fighting agenda?
I've been out of the loop.
Some dog fights.
Sure.
Some dog.
Legal dog.
No, I'm not.
So as a young boy, Gabrielle was the beloved center of his family's world.
He had a brother and three sisters, but Gabrielle's family immediately recognized that he was special and treated him that way.
And generally, when we say someone was a child genius on this podcast, we're repeating the lies of a narcissist.
This is not the case with Gabriel.
Basically, everyone who's ever covered this guy, ever written about him, agrees that he was like everyone kind of knew he was a genius from a very early age.
His most prominent biographer, Lucy Hughes Hallett, absolutely despises him and thinks he was a monster, but repeatedly emphasizes that just everyone who knew him as a kid recognized that this kid's brilliant, right?
So he's not exactly lying about that.
Now, Gabrielle was a mama's boy, later writing of his mother that her glances made my heaven.
He was surrounded by women from an early age, maids, sisters, and aunts, and his grandmother.
He was the center of their world, and he in turn learned how to manipulate and to please women.
He's an adoring female.
Yeah, exactly.
That is something like all the guys I know who I would describe that way, most of them grew up with like either a single mom or like, but like usually they grew up raised primarily by women.
I think they definitely have to have a female influence so they could understand how a female brain can work.
Not that it works so different, radically different, but it does in some certain like circumstances with like intimacy and bonding.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's kind of like, it's just like you grow up like wanting, because they're like the center of your world, like really wanting to please the women around you.
And then as you go out into the world, that remains like one of the centers of your being.
Yeah.
And I do think that's sorry.
Parents, Bell, and Complex Growth00:16:03
No, go ahead.
Sorry.
I keep saying yeah and agreeing and then it sounds like I'm about to say something more, but I have nothing profound to say.
But I will say that I think having being raised around women and understanding women in the real world, that leads you to almost like speak their language.
And you're able to like establish a bond with someone like immediately better than like someone else that's not like that doesn't have sisters that wasn't raised by a single mom because there's already like this understanding there and I think that gets you in their bubble.
You know, you break that barrier so much easier.
Because if you're raised mostly around men like I was, you you you you grow up starting every conversation with just a series of fist fights and and that that only works in certain situations.
Yeah.
It's very helpful at like the Taco Bell, but outside of that...
The Taco Bell, really.
You're going to get into a facade of Taco Bell.
I can navigate a Taco Bell like nobody else.
It's just a bunch of right crosses, but yeah.
Good to know.
Good to know.
So Pescara, the city he was born in, is located in a region of Italy called the Abruzzi.
And there was vanishing, and it was kind of like a rural area, so there was vanishingly little to do there outside of religion.
And basically, any monuments... around him were either churches or these perilously carved caves that had once been occupied by monks and been turned into like sites of worship.
And faith there was a mix of extremely strict Catholicism and ancient Italian pagan traditions like fortune-telling, palm reading, and other manners of like what we'd call witchcraft.
One of Gabriel's earliest memories was being taken in by an aunt of his who was a not a monk, a nun, into a part of the convent where males were not allowed to go and then breathlessly watching her perform like a pagan fortune-telling ritual.
So he grows up both with this intense like ritualistic pagan influence in his life and also with a lot of his earliest memories being because he's seen a special taken into places he's not allowed to be.
Those are both kind of like you can see like the kind of person that makes like this idea that like the rules don't apply to me.
Like I'm not bound by the same things as everyone else.
And then the world proves him right by letting him like going to places not allowed.
So it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Absolutely proves him right.
Gabriel was never religious and nursed all of his life a deep contempt for priests, but he also grew up with an abiding love of ritual and the trappings of faith, if not any actual like belief in faith.
He would later write of himself, quote, I come from an ancient breed.
My ancestors were anchorites in the Maia.
They flagellated themselves till the blood came.
They throttled wolves.
They stripped eagles of their feathers and they scratched their seals on giant rocks with the nail Helen took from the cross.
So a lot of pagan influence, you could say.
Now, Gabriel D'Annunzio was an infamous liar, but the books and stories he published later in his life give us deep insight into the sort of things he would have experienced as a boy in Pescara, because writers write what they know.
So I'm going to quote now from the biography of Gabriel D'Annunzio titled Gabriel D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes Hallett.
And this is a quote from that biography about one of his early books.
Quote, In D'Annunzio's first story, set in or around Pescara, he conjures up a place where the bustle of port and barracks and market are contrasted with the frustration of women confined to small dark rooms who watch the life of the street through chinked shutters or small high windows.
The church bell clangs out the hours.
Priests pass in the streets carrying extreme unction to the dying.
Young people, strictly segregated as a rule, furtively press up against each other in the merciful darkness when the church lamps are extinguished in Holy Week to mark Christ's passion.
Funerals, the beer followed by long lines of hooded mourners, their faces covered all by but a slit for the eyes, or processions of girls in sacrificial white on the way to their first communion, provide the town's main spectacles.
Many of the stories D'Anunzio related about his childhood concerned dying animals.
There was the death of his little Sardinian horse, a bay with a white muzzle named Aquilino, whom he would feed with apples and sugar lumps in the peace of the nighttime stable.
There was the quail the farm manager gave him in a cage made of twigs.
Half a century later, D'Annunzio could still recall how the tiny creature had dashed itself against its makeshift bars, gashing its head until the bone showed.
On killing days, the howling of stuck pigs and their blood spurting into basins so appalled him that he would hide in a corner, face to the wall, his hand over his contorted mouth.
Life scared me as though it stalked me with a pig-sticking knife in hand.
After the massacre, he sobbed all night.
So that's a little insight into his childhood.
Fuck.
Not a bad writer.
No, that's...
Wait, that's...
He wrote that about himself.
Yeah, yeah, like a lot of that included a lot of quotes from him.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, that's...
I mean, he's called a poet and a seducer is what I remember from your description.
That's the biography title.
Yeah.
I mean, that's very poetic.
That's a very graphic way to describe everything.
The bone and the fuck.
Jesus Christ.
What an intense, what an intense life.
One of the things Lucy Hughes Hallett, his biographer, emphasizes is that he was really, his writing had a real visceral quality, just in the way he, like, both in the way he described bodies and like his romance books and like, in the way he like, wrote about like it was, there's a lot of blood, a lot of uh, a lot of like.
He was one of those like shove your hands into the meat kind of writers right um, which is part of why he, he had such an impact on people, but i'm getting ahead of myself.
Um anyway uh, back to Gabriel.
Uh, he'd almost been choked by his call while he was being born.
Uh, and because people are dumb, this was the focus of much superstition.
Babies born this way in Italy were believed to have the second sight, and the call itself was supposed to protect the person from drowning.
Uh now, the call, if you aren't aware, is the amniotic membrane that surrounds a fetus.
Gabriel's parents dried his and put it in a little silk bag which they hung around his neck for his entire childhood.
So that's cool, that's so fascinating, because if he was already born with this idea that like, this child is second sight, this child is special.
Like, how much of it is nature versus nurture, like how much of it was like I know i'm special because everyone's telling me i'm special, and how much of it is like you have a genius brain and it just so happens that everyone already knew that about you.
Like, like that's so fascinating.
How much of it was him living to the standard that everyone had of him and how much of it was just like actual intelligence, I don't know.
He his, his whole story has convinced me that my idea towards how you should raise a child is correct, which is when they're five, you put them out in the woods with a knife and you, just you, leave them, and if they come back home, if they find their way back home, you know uh, then they get to continue to grow up and if not well, you know, I don't mean this in a mad, in a bad way, but I don't want you to have kids anytime soon.
I'm just gonna say if someone had done that to Gabriel, he's not gonna grow up thinking he's special.
You know for sure.
You're out in the woods with all the other five-year-olds and you have to form your own society if you're gonna get back to your parents and then you learn.
Does he have siblings?
Yes, and like they must have had an awful life.
I mean not awful, but they must have had very much like a complex about themselves, with this like special prophet child around them all this time right, I don't.
I don't know much about how his siblings thought of him.
He was very charming and you do get the impression that everybody was kind of in love with him when he was a little.
So he got away with it.
He got away with everything yeah okay yeah yeah, yeah.
Now, his most significant childhood memory was of one of his sisters showing him a fake pearl, and he was so taken with the object that he immediately started climbing the nearest tree to steal an egg from a bird's nest, because kids are fucking stupid.
Um, his parents rescued him before he fell down and killed himself and they freaked out about the whole ordeal.
Uh, and i'm gonna quote from his biography again, his parents were there, his mother Trembling, his father pale and threatening to beat him.
He was lifted back through the window and laid, faint and shaking, on a bed.
In retrospect, he saw them, the mother, father, child, as a secular trinity.
His aunts hung over him weeping as the sorrowing Marys wept over the dead Christ.
But the family's communion was interrupted.
The crowd now gathered in the street, believing the child to be dead, began on the chilling eulations customary at funerals.
Gabriel's father picked him up and carried him, limp and white-faced, back out onto the balcony.
The keening turned to shouts of joys.
Describing the incident in old age, D'Annunzio made of this his first balcony appearance a portent.
He was marked out from childhood, so he asserted, for a public life.
So this is his like defining childhood memory: almost dying on a tree and like the whole town turning out because they hear his parents and aunts shouting.
And yeah.
And this is basically he's recounting this from his memory.
So there's an element of like loftiness that's in this memory that is he was a child.
There's no way there's ever like every time you remember something, it becomes distorted.
So yes.
By the time he's recounting this, I'm sure it's not 100% factual.
But I will say that I went from like having this like Christ image of everyone like gathered around him and being sad to like the lion king of like Simba being on like pride rock on this balcony, just like lifting up this child being like, this will save us.
I think he sees himself a little bit that way.
Yeah, he definitely sees himself as a Christ-like figure.
And he was like, he was absolutely a narcissist.
Like there's not a doubt in my mind that this is the same thing.
Just the way he recounts his own memory is very telling of that.
Yeah.
Now, his school reports from the time describe him as very unbelieving in God.
And as a boy, his favorite books were Paradise Lost and Cain by Byron, both of which were epics about heroes who rebel against God.
In school, he got in trouble for telling his teachers, who were priests, that if God existed, he was a villain or an imbecile who created mankind to amuse himself by watching us suffer, which is not an unreasonable theory.
No, I kind of feel the same way a lot of the time.
Yeah, I can get on board with that one.
I feel like if you are at all a thoughtful person, you at least consider that possibility at some point in your childhood.
It's like, no, what the fuck is going on in this world?
Yeah.
I mean, like, when I was 12, I told my mom I didn't believe in God because I just like, I thought he was so cruel and just amusing himself by making everyone suffer.
And then she started crying.
And I was like, oh, I'm too young to be to speak my mind.
I should keep it to myself.
But I will say that's a very normal thing for a child to think, especially if he's being raised by God-loving, God-fearing people.
So I think even if you wind up being very religious, at some point, if you pay attention to the world, you have to wonder, if there's like a space guy in charge of all this, is he a fucking lunatic?
Like, what the hell is happening up there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's he's he's on the money with at least that listening.
I will agree with this point so far.
You got me there.
Yeah.
Okay.
One for you.
Gabriel grew up in an exciting time for Italy.
Giuseppe Garibaldi had conquered Sicily in 1860 with just a thousand men, defeating the vastly superior military of the Bourbon monarchy.
King Victor Emmanuel had united Italy as a single polity for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Nationalism was sweeping all throughout Europe in this period, but nowhere was it stronger than Italy.
And nowhere in Italy was it stronger than in the heart of young Gabrielle D'Annunzio.
So the idea of being Italian, very new at this point.
For most of history, you hadn't, nobody would have cared.
Like, nobody thought of themselves as Italian.
You thought of yourself as I'm a Venetian, you know, I'm a Roman, I'm a whatever, a Florencian or Florentine, whatever the fuck they call people from Florence.
But there's this newfound like nationalism that was like very prideful.
And from an early age, he really identifies with this as an Italian.
And he's kind of one of the very first major Italian thinkers in the Italian peninsula to identify as an Italian.
Okay.
Now, when he was 11 years old, Gabriel's parents sent him off to a boarding school, the Cisognini, Sisognini?
Jesus.
This is like supposed to be my ancestral tongue, and I don't know anything about it.
So I apologize.
I did not know that.
My whole family is very Italian.
We came in like the 1890s on a boat to the U.S.
But yeah, they come from like transalpine Gaul, like the chunk of the Alps that's on the Italian side of the peninsula.
That's fascinating.
Look at you now.
Yeah, look at me now.
At the time, sending your kid off to this boarding school was like the thing to do for wealthy parents.
But I think in modern terms, we would consider this schooling experience to be profoundly abusive.
One of the school's rules was that new pupils could not return home, not for holidays, not for summer vacations, not for any reason, for their first four years.
So from age 11 to 15, Gabriel is just in this school, totally isolated from this very loving family that he's grown up in.
So he goes from this like very safe, nurturing place where he's like the center of the world to a cold boarding school run by priests who show no warmth or emotion or compassion to any of their charges.
Yeah, he describes the Sisognoni in Letters Home as a prison.
His only escape was a daily walk around the grounds.
His letters home to his parents became almost fervidly loving and cloying, agonizing over bright memories of his childhood and obsessing over the pain of his absence.
Lucy Hughes Hallett, Gabriel's biographer, suspects that this environment caused him to grow a shell that was at least partly responsible for the fact that he grew up into the sociopathist sociopath to Everpath Sosis.
Whoa.
That is a great line.
And I guess it must have been jarring to go to a place that you weren't like revered constantly.
Yeah.
And I guess it kind of destroys my thesis that making children survive alone in the woods for months would stop them from becoming monsters.
Well, your theory is that you would do that at a young age before they had a chance to think that they were messiahs.
You're right, Shireen.
My theory is bulletproof.
My theory of children.
Your theory is not bulletproof.
I won't say it's bulletproof.
I will say it's fascinating.
And I will say to use a condom.
But continue.
Now, at a certain point, Gabriel seems to have replaced the affection he once expressed for his parents with a love of Italy.
At age 13, after two years in the Sissognini, he wrote that he had two missions in life.
Quote, to teach the people to love their country and to hate the enemies of Italy to the death.
Now, I'm obviously not a child development expert, but this does not seem like healthy behavior to me.
As a general rule, I think children shouldn't focus on hating the enemies of their country to the death.
I feel like that's led people in bad directions.
That's how you make an army.
Yeah, a generational army.
Yes, that's how you make the Nazis.
Gabriel's devotion to his nation was not, however, selfless.
He seems to have been obsessed with Italy primarily as a vessel to express his own greatness.
One of his school reports from the Time notes, he is entirely dedicated to making a great name for himself.
He signed one of his earliest photographs, a picture that he sent home to his parents with to glory.
So, yeah.
All right, Gabriel.
Now, Glory.
Yeah.
Any other child probably would have been ribbed mercilessly for this kind of arrogance, but it must be said, Gabriel backed up his words with deeds.
He learned to play the violin and the flute and to sing expertly.
On holidays, he would translate ancient Greek literature into Italian.
He wrote ceaselessly, and when study time ended, every evening, he would collect the excess lamp oil from the other boys so he could stay up all night writing.
He was always at the very top of his class.
And at one point, he wrote home to his mother that he was angry he'd been allowed to skip a test because, quote, I am certain I would have taken the first place.
At age 16, he could speak and write fluently in Italian, Greek, Latin, English, French, and Spanish.
Okay, so he's not.
So my theory about nature nurture, okay, there's definitely an element of him being intelligent.
I'm just very smart.
Yeah, he's a smart kid, but my, but it is a very interesting idea just to, I don't know, like, you can be smart and not a fucking lunatic.
Shut Pizza and Racist Ads00:04:58
Yes.
And he definitely, I don't know, we'll tell you where this goes.
But before we talk more about Gabriel D'Anunzio, we're going to talk about some motherfucking products and a goddamn service or three.
It's going to be great.
Okay.
You ready for this shit, Shireen?
I'm so fucking ready.
Robert.
All these ads.
Italian Robert that I've just learned.
Okay, I'm going to shut up.
Pizza.
That's...
No, me.
It's me, Robert.
It's okay.
It's okay to be racist towards Italians.
It was a Mario reference.
I guess Mario the racism have been tied to Mario too long.
Wait, Mario is so racist.
Yes, incredibly so.
But it's fine.
I'm shattered.
My little self at playing Mario growing up is really sad.
Listeners, you couldn't see it when the light went out of Shireen's eyes for a whole 30 seconds.
Jesus Christ, let's go to ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
So funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Poets, Fetishes, and Written Power00:15:10
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
All right.
I will say that I would play Yoshi a lot of the times in Mario Kart, not Mario.
Yoshi was my guy.
Have you gotten all the anti-Italian bigotry out of your system now, Shireen?
I didn't mean it.
Robert.
Italian.
Roberto.
Sorry.
I'm digging my own grave.
I do.
Like, you should have known I was Italian by like the frequency with which I gesture with my hands.
You're allowed to say that, but I'm not, am I?
No, I think everyone is allowed to recognize that about Italian people.
Well, they say that about Middle Eastern people, too.
We're an expressive bunch.
Well, and like, it does, like, Italy, Italy, like, actually, Italy's not super far from the Middle East.
Like, it's just literally across like a stream from the parts of the world.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, there's a reason why every Arab related to my big fat Greek wedding.
We're all the same.
We're all that whole region, the Mediterranean, is all the same.
We all show both our love and hatred with food.
Very true.
Very true.
So the month he turned 16, Gabriel's very first poem was published.
It was an ode to King Umberto.
Now, Gabriel's father, Francesco Paolo, had it printed and handed out to townsfolk who showed up to take part in the king's birthday celebrations.
And normally when someone's dad helps them publish their work, it's a sure sign that that work is no good.
But this was not the case with Gabrielle.
Less than a year later, his father helped him publish his first book of poetry called Primo Vera.
Now, right out of the gate, it was clear that Gabriel D'Annunzio was an incredible poet.
He sent copies of his book out to several of the greatest Italian poets of the day, and most of them wrote him back with like very positive things to say about his work.
And he's again, he's 17 at this point.
Wow.
Yeah, a number of them even invited him into their homes and gave him advice and counsel.
Critics raved about his work.
The priests at his boarding school considered banning the book because it had powerfully erotic subject matter.
It contained lines like, with trembling agitation, I laid you on the water lilies and kissed you with convulsed lips, crying, you are mine.
Like a viper, you writhed and groaned.
So like the priests are like, this is way too much fucking to allow in our religious school.
But that must have just fueled his cause.
That must have just been like, fuck yeah, this is what I wanted.
They didn't ban the book.
They wanted to, but they decided that his use of Italian was so perfect and his verse form was so exquisite that they couldn't ban the book.
It was just too well written.
Wow.
So, like, yeah, they decided to allow, like, but like, fuck, the dude can write.
Like, that's how good the poems are.
That's crazy.
That is.
Yeah.
I mean, especially for the time, it must have been a very revolutionary thing to even write about.
Well, you know, they are Italians.
So, yeah.
Like, this is like, you're going, like, there's always been more of this kind of like acceptance of sort of like the sentence.
Passion.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is a very Italian thing.
That's true.
And I can't, I'm not going to have a lot of quotes from his poems in here just because like a big part of them is that he was such a good writer in the Italian language.
So like the translations, you lose a lot, I think.
But it's universally recognized that this guy is one of the greatest poets in Italian history.
And some people will say, including he would say, that he was the best Italian writer since Dante.
I love that you said including him.
Yeah, he was, he was, he was sure of that.
Most modern like academics will say, no, he was one of a number of people, but he's at a very high level.
Like he's had a big impact on the language.
I just hate that he is so, I mean, it's fine to be confident and know your worth, but to say that you're the best writer since Dante, that's like such a, I don't know, that's fucking wild.
But so he was never a victor or he never suffered from criticism of nepotism.
Like he, even though he had such obvious nepotism in his life, like advances and privileges, no one ever, no one ever saw that as any kind of issue.
I think his work is just so good that like people are like, well, fuck.
Like, I mean, yeah, he definitely comes from money.
His dad is able to help him, but like his work does seem to stand on its own.
Interesting.
Okay.
I'll give you that.
I'll give you that.
Like, like most academics who write about him now, like agree that he was a monster and a piece of shit, but pretty much everyone agrees he was really good at writing poems.
Imagine if Hitler was good at painting.
Yeah, it's weird.
You get this mix of dictators like Saddam and Hitler who are like want to be artists but suck at it.
And then you get guys like Stalin.
Like Stalin was a poet in his youth and was a really well-regarded Georgian poet.
Like he gave it up after a while, but he was like considered to be very good and still is.
No, I'm obsessed with poetry.
Poetry is so powerful and I write poetry.
I think there's a there's a such a power in using the written word and it can garner so much attention and respect, especially back then because there wasn't like the internet.
But yeah, I it's it's a fascinating thing to, in this case, you have to separate the art from the artist.
And we go through it right now with filmmaking.
Like someone makes a great film and you find out they're a pedophile.
So it's like, it's this balance of like someone can make something so profound and so incredible, but also be a complete waste of space or like a piece of shit.
So there's, it's still going on now.
And I think it's just fascinating to see it back then as well with poetry.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And it's to understand, you have to understand what poetry was back then too.
Because like now there are people, like people like poems.
Most everybody has at least a couple of poems that they've enjoyed.
But it's not like, it's not like a huge thing at the center of life for us.
Back then, like to be honest, at least the feeling I get is that like poets at this period, particularly in Europe, kind of occupy the space culturally that like an Instagram or a YouTube star like occupies now.
Like they have these legions of utterly devoted fans, like a pop star.
Like they are like the closest you can, like the best poets of the day, guys like Byron, like the closest modern, like, like comparisons would be someone like Beyoncé.
Like, that's the level of devotion that their fans have to them.
No, it was like that in the Middle East, too.
There's this poet kind of from similar roots.
Like, he came from privilege.
He was rich.
His name is Nizar Kabani.
He's an amazing poet in the Middle East.
He's Syrian from Damascus.
And he was regarded as like a celebrity.
He was...
His book was banned from so many places because it was very erotic, very sexual.
And it was like everyone would read it as a political pamphlet that came out.
It was like this thing that everyone was looking forward to.
Poetry was like the mouthpiece of that generation for a long time.
And he would use it in a political way and to talk about like, I don't know, I think poetry now is not what it was back then.
And because the time is so different, but no, it's, it's, I believe you, they were celebrities.
Yeah.
And so like when I talk about poets in this episode, think about like a very high-level pop star.
You're thinking about like the way people treat these guys.
So he's, he starts reaching out to the most famous poets in Italy with his work and they love it.
And one of them who is particularly taken is a fellow named Nincione, who's one of the biggest poets in Italy at the time.
And Nincione takes him under his wing and starts like tutoring him and he introduces him to a book by a guy named Thomas Carlyle.
The book is on heroes.
And it's basically the thesis statement of the great man theory of history, that like single exceptional individuals are the ones who move history, not economic forces or like the actions of like mass groups of people.
Like exceptional individuals are what make history.
And Gabriel is absolutely taken with this theory and is of course convinced that he is supposed to be one of those great men.
And from a very early age, he was not just, it was not just enough.
He's not just one of these people who like wants to make a living with poetry or like just has to express something.
The thought of being anything but like the very best poet writing in Italy is like hateful to him.
So early in their relationship, he sends Nincione a book of his poetry with a letter asking if his work is just charming or pleasing.
Because if that's the case, he was going to give up writing immediately.
He said that little artists and little poets were abhorrent to him and asks, can I cover myself in glory?
So like, again, he can't stand the thought of just being a good poet.
Like that's not enough for this guy.
He's got to be the best.
Okay.
By age 18, Gabriel had published three books of poetry.
One was dedicated to his recently deceased grandmother.
The other was a second edition of his first book, Primo Vera, with 43 new poems and revisions to his old work.
His father paid the publishing costs for all these books, but D'Annunzio took responsibility for picking the font, the paper, the printer, and in setting up distribution deals with bookstores.
Both D'Annunzios had a hand in promoting the work, and the differing ways they went about it say a lot about their personalities.
Francisco Paolo, like a normal person, threw a big banquet party in the middle of town to drum up interest in the book.
Gabrielle, being a narcissistic maniac, sent an anonymous letter to the editor of a poetry magazine in Florence lamenting that Gabriel D'Anunzio, the young poet already noted in the Republic of Letters, in his words, had died after falling off of a horse.
So he sends a letter to like a big poetry critic and claims that like, hey, this guy Gabriel who wrote this book, he's dead now.
Yeah.
Well, he does this because guys like Shelley and Byron, poets who died very young after publishing a handful of books, were like the biggest poets in Europe at the time.
They had these huge cults of fans because they died young.
And so he knows that like if it's just the story of like a young poet who's pretty good and has published a new book of poetry, like he'll sell some copies.
People will talk about it.
But it's not going to be a huge deal.
But if he's a great poet who dies tragically young, that's a huge deal.
And it gets treated that way by the editor.
Like a bunch of magazines start writing articles about this dead young poet.
They like call him things like the last born of the muses.
Like he suddenly, like the fact that he's believed to have died young elevates his work instantly in Italy.
And he develops this huge cultie fan base.
And eventually Gabriel corrects the error and basically plays it off as if, oh, this must have been, someone must have just gotten their wires crossed and like sent you incorrect information.
And, you know, it's the 1880s.
Honestly, honestly, I respect this.
This is genius and I respect this.
This is a genius level influencer.
Like, I don't know.
That's one way to get a following back in the day.
There was no Instagram.
You couldn't just, you know what I mean?
Like, you fake your death.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He fakes his death.
And then it turns what would have been kind of a modestly successful book of poems into a national news story.
So as he turns 18, Gabriel D'Anunzio is already famous and already like very well regarded.
And of course, he was already fucking.
As a young teen, his teachers had noticed that on walks through town, Gabriel constantly stared at young women.
At age 14, he spent a few days in Florence with a family friend and wound up taking that guy's 17-year-old daughter to the Museum of Archaeology and making out with her in public.
Shortly thereafter, on a school trip to another town, he pawned his grandfather's gold watch to pay for a hooker so he could lose his virginity.
Okay.
Yeah, he is, he is, just dives right into fucking.
You cannot stop this guy from fucking, which gets exactly as rapey as that sentence should make it seem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The summer after he was finally allowed to go back to Pescara at age 18, he flirted constantly with every woman in town.
He found himself particularly enamored with a young peasant girl.
She, unfortunately, was not enamored with him.
So he hunted her down, chased her into a vineyard, shoved her to the ground, and raped her.
Gabriel was quite proud of this and wrote about it openly.
He had a lifelong obsession with raping poor women, particularly servant girls.
And it's actually hard to tell how often he did it because the act was such a fetish for him that he also fantasized about it regularly.
Okay, my mom is a thing he's wide the fuck open.
I am.
Because when you read that poetry verse like before the break, where she was like writhing and whatever, I was like, in my brain, I was like, that sounds rapey.
And this makes so much sense in the worst way.
I am disgusted that I agree with some of the points that you made earlier.
He's a very rapey guy.
That is a big part of his personality.
Oh, God.
I mean, we're talking about the guy who invented fascism.
But that's the thing.
You can be a ladies' man and not be rapey.
Absolutely.
A rapey ladies' man is the worst kind of ladies' man.
That's the sickness.
Oh, God.
There's a lot of class issues wrapped up in this because he doesn't, at least I don't, I'm not aware of him.
I don't think he raped upper class women, wealthy women, famous women.
And he had hundreds of affairs with the most famous women of the era and was considered to be a very great romancer.
His particular fetish was in raping poor women.
That is like that is just appalling.
I mean, not really.
It's appalling.
It's just disgusting.
Yes.
Wow.
It's horrible.
Yeah, it's horrible.
Because he's regarded as this womanizer, a seducer, and also this rape fantasy of poor people is just regarded as a fetish because he has all these other qualities.
But the thing is, though, it's a little more complicated than that.
Not that it's morally complicated.
It's horrible.
But at the time, number one, most men who he would have talked about that, he wouldn't have hide the fact that he was forcing himself on these poor women, and they wouldn't have really thought it was bad.
Like, that's kind of like, it's a rapey time and place.
Yeah, fair enough.
Italy in this period.
And like, not just Italy, obviously, like everywhere in the world.
Yeah, no, no, I mean, you rape and pillage.
That was like how you were fucking taught to show yourself as a man.
It's fine.
We're not all the way past that now, obviously.
No.
So it was worse back then.
And he would not have.
This was not like a dark secret of his, is the point.
Like, this is a thing that he was like, yeah, I'm a ladies' man.
I romance these women.
I force myself on these women.
That's just what a ladies' man do.
Like, that's the attitude with which I'm for all the classes, even if they don't want me to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kind of especially if they don't want me to.
Yeah.
At age 18, Gabrielle met Giselda, the daughter of a schoolmaster in Florence.
Tears, Therapists, and Bad Choices00:07:52
When he first met her, she was sobbing because she'd just seen the corpse of a little girl who'd frozen to death.
This really turned Gabriel on.
They started dating and fucking.
In his early letters to her, he would write about how much the sight of her tears turned him on.
I want to make those tears fall again.
Lucy Hughes Hallett writes, quote, he luxuriated in the idea of her unhappiness.
He even told her how much he would like to see her corpse.
He loved it that she was deathly pale, like the blessed damosele, the dead girl of Rossetti's famous poem and painting, but he would have preferred her even paler.
He told her that he would go around all the florists in the city, fill a carriage with assorted flowers, to come and bury her beneath them.
Yes, to bury you.
I want to make you die, he wrote to Tito Zucconi, not as one might expect, promising to cherish and protect Tito's daughter, but announcing, I and Elda cannot live long.
Both he and Giselda were, so far as we know, in perfectly good health.
Yet D'Annunzio wrote, Our cold bodies will fall to the earth to feed the flowers, and we will be swept away, unconscious atoms, and the irresistible currents of the universal force.
I want you even paler.
I want you dead.
Yeah, some red flags, huh?
Well, okay.
Unfortunately, I dated someone that told me he thought it was attractive when I cried.
And I think, like, it's such a weird thing to say to someone, like, to be like, I think girls are hot when they cry, or like, I'm turned on by girls crying.
There's an element of some, like, I mean, I guess there is a beauty to tears.
I'm fucked up.
I don't know.
I think, like, it's complicated.
Like, you're not a bad person.
If, like, obviously, you're not a bad person.
Sorry, I don't want to get into this.
I have been ghosting my therapist.
I don't want to use you as a therapist.
But I. He's also a necrophiliac then?
Like, he's also into like deadness.
You know, I don't know.
I wouldn't say that because I don't think that's.
I think it's more that the art of he's very much into classical and medieval art.
And that sort of art, there's like this death obsession because death was such a part of the Middle Ages.
And there's a lot of paintings and poems and works about like focused around dead women.
Yeah.
Like fucking Dante is obsessed with this dead chick that he only met twice.
Like it's a thing.
And so it like now, if somebody's like fantasizing, yeah, I would say, yeah, that's probably what that dude's into.
But at the time, it was probably just romanticizing this idea of, I don't know, losing your life.
Romantic death.
Yeah.
Like there's just, there's so much culturally wrapped up in it that like you really honestly can't compare it to anything today because like we don't have those same sort of, they're not nearly as powerful as they they were then.
Wow, now you know what won't fantasize about your dead body.
That's a bad way to lead into ads.
An ad break.
You'll never get raped by an ad break.
Oh god, you know what won't molest peasant girls in a field Jesus, I hope.
I hope the ad that comes up is like, I don't know fucking, what do you get sponsored by?
Like dawn ad for Gabriel D'enuncio?
Oh boy okay, let's just Go to products.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of love.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
I mean, the first ad break started with me being a bigoted racist against Mario, or like realizing that Mario is tainted forever.
And the next one leaded up to me just I'm sad.
Yeah, that's that's the denunzio effect.
Okay, continue.
I'm sorry.
This is not about it.
Emotional Distance and Addiction00:05:29
Over the two years that they were together, Gabriel wrote Giselda 500 letters.
They actually spent very little time in each other's company.
Shortly after hooking up, he graduated and wound up traveling all around Italy, launching his career as a writer.
He continued to write her dizzyingly passionate love letters, but ignored all of her pleading requests to visit her in Florence.
Sometimes he would even pass by the city on journeys to other places without diverting himself to visit this woman he claimed to love.
The fact that he wasn't all that into seeing her didn't stop him from giving her orders on what to wear, only black.
But by 1883, he was tired of the relationship, and gradually his letters to her dwindled off into nothing.
Gabrielle was never able to actually break off things with anyone.
He just sort of ghosted them after spending months and even years writing tens of thousands of passionate odes to their bodies.
This would prove to be a lifelong habit for the poet and writer.
By his own count, Gabrielle betted around a thousand women in his lifetime, and this is probably not far from accurate.
He developed a reputation for being not just a great seducer of women, but for abandoning them and breaking their heart.
His lovers would repeatedly attempt suicide, and a number of them probably succeeded.
One of the reasons I really love Lucy Hughes-Hallett's biography of Gabrielle is that she's a woman, and she brings a woman's perspective to the way this guy dealt with his relationships.
And I'm very interested in the way she writes about him because she's very detailed and thorough and clearly is an appreciator of his work, but is also utterly unsparing in sort of analyzing him as a human being.
She writes at one point, quote, the more unhappy a woman was, the more interesting to him she became.
The more he tantalized Elda with promised visits, which were repeatedly deferred, the more adorable her image seemed to him.
You must be sad, immensely sad, my poor angel, he wrote.
You will be thinking of me with desperate desire.
The idea of her disappointment, denied his savage kisses, was one he liked to dwell on.
Seeing her so seldom, she was really in no position to report on how pale and wan Elder really was.
But he addressed her in a rapture of sadistic pity as, my pallidophilia, my poor betrayed virgin.
So he's like into ignoring and emotional manipulator.
He's a fundamentally abusive person.
He's a very abusive, like emotionally abusive person and ghosting someone and like there's a there's a term called love bombing where you're like showering someone with all this affection and everything and then you're just like gone and it's a huge form of emotional manipulation because you make them addicted to you because every time and it's like Scientifically proven that whenever this person reaches out again, your cortisol goes up and your cortisol is like your stress hormone.
And it's like literally the same way an addict reacts to an addiction.
So he's literally making all these women addicted to him.
And it's conniving and disgustingly brilliant because that's what a really good emotional abuser does.
But it's one of the things that's really hard about thinking, like I most of at this point in my life, just because of the way my career and my travel has gone, like most of my relationships have wound up being long distance for some particular point.
And that's like a really, that's one of the things that's like really tough about them is there is this like addictive sort of like nature to the relationship where you're apart and then like you're together and you get this like massive oxytocin release.
And then like, like, it's hard not to, I don't know, like, it's one of those things that I always wonder about, like, because it's, it's, it's just, it's difficult to do that and not like fuck it up and not hurt the other person or get hurt yourself.
Like both of those things happen.
Like, I guess they're hard.
Yeah, well, because when your relationship is established as this, like, I don't know, like it's, it's, it's hard to describe it as anything but an addiction because there's like this huge overwhelming release of happiness and everything when you're together and then you're not.
And then, especially if there's someone that's constantly pulling the rug from under you or pulling away constantly, that only feeds the addiction for the other person.
So in this case in particular, I think, I mean, like, my the relationship that I've kind of like, the closest thing I've had to relationship was long distance.
So I could kind of relate to what you're experiencing as far as like, when you're apart, it's like you're just waiting to be with them again and you're waiting for that, like basically a hit.
And then as soon as you get it, you're good.
Even if they're just like replying to a message or whatever, it's like you're constantly needing that like streamline of like, I don't know.
But in his case, he's, it's a one-side addiction.
He's completely fine.
I don't think he ever means anything he writes.
No.
Yeah.
He is not at all emotionally engaged, which is part of what makes it abusive, right?
If you've got two people and you're both dealing with that thing and you're both emotionally into each other, that's not abusive.
But if you, and number one, he also doesn't, in no way does this need to be a long distance relationship.
He is very well off and successful from an early age and absolutely could at least visit her regularly.
Like there's times where he's like an hour away and he just doesn't give a fuck.
Like he's, it's he probably honestly, he probably gets turned on with having this kind of power.
He knows he has power over these women and he knows that his emotional abuse has made them addicted to him and his presence, even if he's not there.
And that probably turns him on more than any type of sex, in my opinion.
Like he's absolutely sitting there jacking off as he writes about how sad he thinks he is.
Like that's that's what he's into here.
And that's why he's a sociopath because you're just, yeah, wow.
Sex, Hunger, and Conning Power00:15:24
In 1921, when Gabrielle was very famous and renowned, not just in Italy, but all across Europe, Giselda wrote him and asked for permission to sell the letters that he'd sent her.
She needed the money to gift to her son so he could get married.
Gabriel refused her this and instead asked her to hand over the letters to his lawyer.
So like he just doesn't give a shit.
Like he just stops writing this woman and it completely cuts her off without even like talking to her about it.
Wow.
Just one day we're just done.
And he doesn't even tell her we're done.
She just stops getting letters and never hears from him again.
So like most great men in history, Gabriel treated the women and indeed the men in his life like trash.
But this did nothing to halt the meteoric growth of his career.
He went to Rome where he studied literature, published more poems and started writing books.
In 1882, he wrote The Innocent, a book about a dandy and fuck-hungry man named Tullio Hermil, who cheats constantly on his saintly wife until she cheats on him and finally gets pregnant.
In 1889, he published Il Piacere, considered the manifesto of Italian decadentismo, which is more or less what it sounds like.
And I'm going to read you two paragraphs from Wikipedia's summary of this book.
Okay.
Gerard, an aristocrat, is in mourning over the death of his mistress Leonora.
He listens to tape recordings of them having sex and records his recollections of the day he met Leonora for the first time at the Carnival of Venice many years ago on a day he felt sexually adventurous.
In a flashback, we see him meet her on the street, introducing himself as Giacomo Casanova.
After chasing her through the city, he finds her waiting for him behind a column in a passageway, where he lifts her dress and has sex with her.
Later that day in an opium dim, after having a smoke, they are initiated by Honani in the cosmic secrets of pleasure and join in a threesome with her.
Back in the present, Gerard and Fiorella dress Leonora's naked body for her funeral.
When Ursula and Edmund, Leonora's children from another man, arrive for the funeral, Gerard, who has not seen either of them for 10 years, at first mistakes Ursula for Leonora.
Gerard is now legal guardian to both until they come of age.
In a sudden fit, Edmund cries out that his mother was only a whore and suffers an epileptic attack.
He is calmed down by his sister breastfeeding him like their mother did.
Later, it is Fiorella who repeatedly breastfeeds him and with whom he has his first sex.
That's just two paragraphs.
It goes on.
Like, that's the kind of books this guy writes.
Like, they're the smuttiest smut to ever.
I mean, I'm still not over the phrase fuck hungry that you used maybe five minutes ago.
He is very fuck hungry writing.
Fundamentally fuck hungry is Gabrielle D'Anunzio.
That is twisted.
Yeah, but they're wildly successful.
I mean, because it's what's the word?
It's pushing that.
They're the horniest books ever and everyone's horny.
Yeah.
Everyone's fuck hungry when you want it.
When we're honest, everyone's fuck hungry.
Everybody's fuck hungry and Gabrielle is just leaning into it.
Like, you guys want horny books?
I'll write the horniest fucking books anyone's ever written.
Yeah.
People are sucking each other's fucking each other.
Fuck Jesus.
Yeah, it's just like the most depraved, decadent shit he can think of.
Yeah.
But for his legion of followers, they're probably like, this is from his real experience.
Like, he probably did all this stuff because he's like this amazing womanizer.
I mean, he probably did a lot of this stuff, to be honest.
Like, yeah, he was.
Did I ask?
Like, was he a good looking?
I'm going to show you his picture at the end of this episode.
Oh, my God.
We'll talk about that.
He was not considered good looking, though.
Most of Gabrielle's protagonists were aristocrats, though he himself was not.
It's notable that his only marriage was to Maria DiGalisi, a duchess, and probably because marrying her technically made him an aristocrat, too.
He had three children with her, and Christ knows how many with other random lovers.
He never took care of any of these kids.
And I'm going to quote from the New York Times.
Wildly generous, he bestowed upon them custom-made gifts by Bucaleri and famous guys with flamboyant nicknames that bring to mind a pantheon of Olympic goddesses.
Bessalisa, Nike, Barbarella, and of course, Core, the outrageous Marchesa Cassari.
Yeah, I don't know who any of these people are, but he's like, he's always got these loving nicknames that are like really out of this world, flamboyant, and he spends thousands of dollars, essentially, on fancy gifts for whoever he's fucking before he abandons them.
It's love bombing.
It's love bombing.
Yeah.
D'Nunzio was wildly successful and made fortunes from his writing, but he spent those fortunes even faster than he could accumulate them.
I found a write-up on his life on The Rake, a fashion and style-focused magazine, that makes it clear just how he managed this.
Quote, he could shop until he didn't drop, endless trips to the tailor, thousands of books, and he once even acquired 22 dogs and eight horses, all in one purchase.
When he stayed in hotels, he always traveled with his own sheets.
I am, as he once explained with characteristic self-assuredness, a better decorator and upholsterer than I am a poet or novelist.
Indeed, at the turn of the century, when his marriage into aristocracy, along with his journalism and plays, afforded him considerable wealth, he habitually lived in rented furnished houses that, at great expense, he immediately refurbished in extravagant fashion.
Or, as he put it, in a style gorgeous enough to be worthy of a Renaissance lord, which involved filling his properties with mock 16th century furniture of his own design.
He's that guy.
I mean, I think that's really funny that he's like, I'm an even better upholsterer and decorator than I am a poet.
Like, you think I'm good at this?
Well, God, I'm not bad at anything, basically.
Yes.
The other people in Gabriel's life were more distractions to him than real human beings.
At one point, when he already had eight horses, he spent the money given to him specifically to feed his kids on buying a new horse.
By 1893, he was 30 years old and living in Naples to avoid his creditors because he was just in huge debt all the time.
He'd long since abandoned his wife and all three children, as well as Elvira Fraternale, a woman he lived with and loved for eight years.
He broke up with her to move in with a Sicilian princess.
He was actually charged with adultery for this and almost went to jail for fucking this princess.
Wow, he goes to jail for fucking.
If anyone should go to jail for fucking, it's him.
Yeah, yes.
If anyone should, I'm not normally, as long as there's consent.
Well, actually, I mean, he should have gone to jail.
No, if anyone should go to jail for any kind of fucking, it's him.
Yeah, it's him.
When writing novels and poetry wasn't enough to cover his debts, D'Annunzio wrote for tabloids and gossip rags.
He used his media connections to do things like tip off gossip journalists about when and where he would publicly be breaking up with one of his lovers.
He started telling fanciful lies, that he'd been born aboard a boat, that he had a glass eye, that he had two bottom ribs removed so he could suck his own dick.
Yes, Gabriel D'Annunzio is the origin of that.
Is he really?
Yeah, that is.
Yeah, that's where that's.
That's the first time I think we come across it.
Yeah.
He is a shithead, but he did start so many things.
Maybe the first poster.
You know, maybe the first.
Oh my God.
He's...
Wow.
I mean...
Yeah.
He's definitely of the belief of like any press is good press.
So...
Yes.
Damn, that's just...
And his life kind of proves that that's true.
I found a couple of articles comparing him to Donald Trump.
And while he's a much more talented person than Trump and did succeed on his own merits, that's not completely ludicrous, as we'll get to.
Like, there's actually some comparisons between the two men.
Now, Gabriel's maxim was, one must make one's life as one makes a work of art.
As the rake notes, he was, quote, a die-hard disciple of Baldassare Castiglione, the author of a 16th century book, The Book of the Courtier, in which the writer posited what he referred to as the universal rule in all human affairs.
Spresatura, a façade of nonchalance that concealed the artistry required to pull off challenges with aplomb, regarded even at the time as both romantic and deceptive in almost equal measure.
D'Annunzio clearly lived out Castiglione's doctrine, which was described disparagingly by Henry James as beauty at any price, beauty appealing alike to the sense and the mind.
So.
You would not, however, mistake Gabriel D'Annunzio for beautiful.
By age 30, he was completely bald.
He was short.
He was, to his credit, very physically fit and muscular, but his teeth were disgusting, his breath was horrible, and his voice was high-pitched and considered weird by all who heard it.
Leanne DePuy, a famous Parisian courtesan, met him once on a visit to Florence.
Here's how she described him.
There before me was a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, the manners of a mountebank, and the reputation, nevertheless, for being a ladies' man.
You just described like a goblet, like a greblin.
This is a god.
This is the guy.
This is the guy that no one can't bone, except for the women he sexually.
How?
Yeah.
I don't know.
God, I am livid.
I don't know why I'm so much more angrier than I would be if he was good looking, but I am.
I'm so angry.
Yeah, well, it's...
It's because in my brain, I rationalize, like, if you're a ladies' man and you're good-looking, you can get away with it.
Like, you can get away with so much shit behavior if you're a good-looking person.
Man or woman or anything.
If you're good-looking, you get away with shit.
It's like scientifically proven.
You have an easier life, whatever.
But if you, like, you're a piece of shit and you, like, are repulsive by this description.
Like, Jesus.
It's remarkable.
And I don't really.
Why would you ever be...
Like.
I mean, to be honest, Shireen, a big part of it, just you have to understand, like, he's a great poet.
Like, that's probably a lot of why, is he's like, he's a musician.
So you can be like a shithead that we almost can't.
Like, maybe in this context, it's like, you can be, like, a really talented musician, right?
But yeah, maybe like gross.
It's like you hear stories about like some famous rock stars who like just didn't shower and were like these nasty like drug addicts, but like everybody, because like their music was really good.
And there's just like something about that that can overcome an odious other aspects of your personality, you know?
I will say, I will say talent and ambition are maybe, ambition, in my opinion, is probably the most attractive quality, but I just can't get over all the other things.
That description is a repulsive description of a human being.
Like that is.
I would say.
Sorry.
No, I'm just mad.
Go ahead.
I mean, I would say you have to remember.
One thing that kind of helps me is look at pictures of like John Lennon with his shirt off and remember that there was a time when everyone in the world basically wanted to fuck John Lennon.
And like just take a look at that guy shirtless.
Like hard to get your head around it, but like it's because of the artistic, not just how his music on its own, but also the cultural platform he stood on was so elevating.
We revere these artists.
They're regarded as these really artistic, beautiful souls.
Maybe not beautiful in Gabrielle's case.
He's definitely not a beautiful soul.
He's revered in his case.
He was abusive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wait, are you going to show me a photo?
Oh, yeah, in a little bit.
Okay, okay, fine.
I'm so excited.
Despite his looks, Gabrielle managed to sleep with many of the most beautiful women in Europe, and the vast majority of the sex was consensual.
His habitual rape seemed to be mostly of poorer women.
His housekeeper was required to have sex with him three times a day, whether she wanted to or not.
Gabrielle kept his homes bizarrely warm at tropical temperatures, so he could wear only a light, thin kimono-style robe with the special hole in the fabric for his dick.
Oh, my God.
He had custom shoes shaped like penises.
You almost miss the penis shoes.
Shoes that are shaped like penises?
This gets more absurd by the fucking second.
Are you shitting me?
You know what?
Maybe I haven't emphasized enough.
He's Italian.
Does that explain the penis shoes?
I'm sorry.
Do you have penis shoes?
Of course.
Oh, fuck it.
When you're Italian at age 18, you get your penis shoes.
That's just a part of being Italian.
I.
The kimono.
The word Italy means an ancient Etruscan lamb with penis shoes.
Wow.
Yeah, he does a little bit.
Now, Gabriel was above all else a genius at brand management.
He knew how to make Gabriel D'Anenzio into a star and to keep himself in the headlines.
It was crucial to him that people believe him capable of literally anything.
And so in pursuit of that end, he ran for the Italian parliament in 1897 as an independent.
He called himself the candidate for beauty and ran on a platform of pushing the politics of poetry.
A big fan of Nietzsche, he declared that he was beyond right and left as I am beyond good and evil.
In a way, Gabriel was kind of a prototype for Donald Trump, as well as Adolf Hitler, the first man to take his literary fame and pop culture cachet and turn it into political power.
But when it came to actually staying in power, D'Annunzio decided he really hated politics.
He served one term and never held any kind of legitimate public office again.
So he is like the first guy to take, like, he's just a famous guy for being famous mostly.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, he's a great poet, but like, he's also really just famous for being a celebrity.
And he turns that into political power.
And that really hasn't been done, you know, in the way that he did it.
That is fascinating.
Also, side note that I'm still thinking about the kimono.
I'm sorry.
The dick kimono, the copy.
Well, because if the temperatures are so high that it keeps them this tropical level, I just watched Kirby and Thursday's curb your enthusiasm.
I watched that for the first time recently.
I'm all caught up.
But there's this one episode with like Leon, his roommate, fucking yoga teacher, a hot yoga teacher.
Apparently, warmer temperatures, a quarantous episode, good for orgasms.
So maybe he was onto something.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah.
Then again, I'm sorry.
I'm a piece of shit.
And I will say, like, this was not, like, he was not like a one-sided sort of lover.
Like, he was real into Conalingus and wrote about it for pages sometimes.
He says he's mostly consensual.
Most of the people that have sex with him wanted to have sex with him.
So, yeah.
But yeah, I mean, like, would you say that his use of like his brand of narcissistic politics, like using his platform to become a politician?
Like, was that not what like Reagan did or like, or oh, you mean Reagan?
Oh, Reagan.
Sorry.
Did I say?
Yeah.
I will just pronounce it because I say it how I think it's pronounced.
English is my second language.
Leave me alone.
Yeah, like Reagan, like since D'Annunzio, a lot of people have done that.
But he's kind of like...
But he was the first, you think?
He's the first.
Yeah.
Who's just really mostly famous for his fame and then takes, turns that into a political career.
And this is not the end of his political career, just his end is an elected political leader.
Oh.
Keep that in mind.
Yeah.
You haven't even stepped foot into the fascism yet.
The fascism.
Jesus.
There's so much about this guy.
Oh, no.
His debts were so outrageous by 1910 that D'Annunzio was forced to flee Italy for Paris, where he made a film, collaborated with some of the greatest artists of the day, and became friends with Proust.
Rage, Anger, and Terrifying Speeches00:14:23
American whiskey heiress Natalie Barney wrote about this time, quote, he was the rage.
A woman who had not slept with him made herself ridiculed.
He even managed to bed Romaine Brooks, a famous lesbian artist who wound up painting his portrait.
So like, again, you really can't, it's hard to understand like the level of fame to where like a famous lesbian would be like, I gotta fuck him.
Like, you just gotta see what's going on there.
That's crazy.
It's wild.
As the years in Paris.
Is it massive?
What?
Yes, actually, you'll see it.
You'll get a sense for the size.
Yeah, it's in like a banana hammock in the picture I'm going to show you.
And it's not small.
I'll say that.
As the years in Paris ticked along, Gabriel found himself less and less enthralled with high society and more obsessed with the war clouds on the horizon.
The actual start of World War I came as a surprise to most, but for years prior to the war, every observant person in Europe had been aware that some sort of violent conflict was very nearly like coming.
Artists who recognized this wound up in one of two camps.
Many dreaded it and worked to do all they could to pull Europe back from the precipice.
Gabriel, however, wound up in another camp.
He saw it as his duty as a lover of beauty to push Europe into calamity.
This seems insane to us now, and it is fucking crazy, but D'Annunzio was not alone in this.
I'm going to read again from Lucy Hughes-Hallett's biography.
Quote, In the political rhetoric and poetry of the period, civilian existence is gray, dim, morally compromised, and physically grubby.
The battlefield, by contrast, is bright, a glitter with weapons, and flashing with joy.
Above all, it is clean.
When Britain declared war, Rupert Brooke proclaimed his gladness to leave the sick hearts that honor could not move and half-men and their dirty songs and dreary.
Like D'Annunzio, Brooke saw the war as a saving freshness into which he could plunge as swimmers into cleanness leaping.
In Germany, Thomas Mann welcomed the conflict as a purging and a liberation.
Let the storm come, cried the Hungarian doso, I'm not even going to try to pronounce this guy's last name, and sweep out our salons.
So, like, there's this idea that like society is decadent.
There's all these like young, like, lazy, like, like, children of privilege sitting around drinking coffee and talking about politics.
We need a war to kill a bunch of them and make the others into better people.
Clean out these crowded cities.
That's like a sizable chunk of particularly like the intelligentsia in this period is into this idea.
Yeah, they're all fanos.
Yeah.
Yeah, they kind of are.
Gabriel D'Annunzio had become a fervent nationalist by this point, an adherent of a school of Italian thought that believed the new nation needed to reabsorb or conquer a number of states that were currently its neighbors, but historically, they believed Italian.
This included much of what became Yugoslavia.
But Gabriel didn't just see the coming war as a chance for Italy to regain lost territory.
He saw it as a beautiful aesthetic endeavor in its own right.
He believed that, quote, a great conflict of the races would purge society of its weak elements.
As soon as the guns started pounding in 1914, while Gabriel was still living in France, he had a friend drive him as close to the front lines as he could possibly get.
They wound up in a place called Rheims, where German artillery had just destroyed an ancient and famous cathedral.
Taking a valet and several suitcases full of clothing with him, of course, Gabriel wound up in the middle of the front line, watching artillery land just a few hundred meters ahead of him and seeing the corpses of men and animals rotting in the mud.
He immediately grabbed souvenirs and started taking fastidious notes.
He used these notes to write an article about the German vandalism of the Reims Cathedral.
He hadn't actually watched the cathedral's destruction, but he had no problem lying and describing how, with his own eyes, he'd watched them burn it.
Gabriel D'Annunzio despised Germans, considering them a barbaric and disgusting race.
The goal of his article was to try and push his nation into joining with France and Great Britain in the war.
Now, Italy had entered World War I as an ally of Germany, but no one in the country was particularly interested in actually entering the war on Germany's side.
In fact, most of the country wanted to stay out of the war entirely.
Given how World War I went, this was not a bad call.
But Gabriel wanted Italy to go to war more than he'd ever wanted anything in his entire life, and he set at once to the task of dragging his country with him.
As soon as he got back from Italy, in mid-1915, he began giving speeches.
And I'm going to quote from an article in the New Republic about this.
Quote, Italy was no longer a pension di familiar, a museum, but a living nation, he declared in one interventionalist demagogic speech to general acclaim.
The prospect of mass deaths thrilled him.
Benedito Kros was repelled by his seeming to enjoy war, even to enjoy slaughter, as Hughes Hallett puts it.
The politics of beauty was revealing itself as a politics of blood.
Among his ardent supporters were Marinetti's futurists, who had recognized early on that, for all his fondness for classical art and medieval knickknacks, D'Annunzio was a fellow modern, a poet who rhapsodized over warships and steelworks, and who set a higher value on energy than he did on virtue.
Genoa is where he first started haranguing the masses towards apocalypse.
In his first four days there, he spoke seven times.
The Italian government itself was torn over the question of war.
The Queen Mother desired it dearly, but most of the elected leaders were firmly against the idea.
They hated that D'Nunzio was ranting about the need to destroy Germany while they carried on secret negotiations to try to plot the national course.
Standing on balconies and shouting to increasingly large crowds, he urged his countrymen to pull out of the triple alliance and join the Entente with France, Britain, and Russia.
He was not content just to attack Germany and make the case for war.
Gabriel D'Annunzio made a habit of viciously attacking any politician who spoke it out against his whims.
He called them cowards and appeasers, the enemies within.
He said the old order reeks and must be utterly destroyed.
Sweep away all the filth into the sewer with all that is vile.
He called the current political order infected, diseased, corrupt, and defiled.
And he said the only solution was cauterization.
The corruption must be burned out.
Gabriel called repeatedly for a Holocaust to cleanse the body politic.
Holocaust was, in fact, one of his most frequently used words, and in a positive sense.
Foreign reporters who watched him were almost as enraptured as the crowds.
Jean Carrer, a French reporter, wrote, Never have I seen an orator advance before the public with such composure.
Standing on his improvised tribune, he was magnificently alone, of a marble pallor with two eyes aflame.
And when Gabriel spoke to crowds, they didn't just listen, they acted.
In May 1915, he made it to Rome and gave what would become one of his most infamous tirades.
And I'm going to quote from Lucy Hughes Hallett again.
He attacked the advocates of peace in vitriolic terms.
The very air of Rome stank with their treachery.
Those who still hung back from war were traitors, assassins of the Patriot, Italy's executioners.
Giolitti, one of these politicians he hated, was strangling the nation with a Prussian rope.
D'Annunzio was openly advocating violent attacks on the people's elected representatives.
He called upon the Roman mob to take the law into their own hands.
He urged his listeners to attack the appeasers who lick the boots on sweaty Prussian feet.
He called for stonings and arson.
His rhetoric was becoming ever more frenzied.
I tell you, there is treason here in Rome.
We were being sold like a herd of diseased cattle.
He urged the people to hunt down anti-war deputies.
Form squads.
Squadra was one of the many words the fascists would pick up from him.
Lie in wait, seize them, capture them.
An observer reports that the applause when he paused was like a storm.
When he resumed to denounce Giolitti in ever more vituperative terms, that diabolical old blubber-lipped hangman, the storm was transformed into a cyclone.
D'Annunzio was high on his own eloquence, on the frenzy of the crowds he flattered and inflamed, and on the prospect of blood.
52 years old, he extolled the ruthless purity of youth.
A poet whose life's work had been the threading together of obscure and beautiful words, he invayed against verbiage and called for action, swift, cruel if need be, and unambiguous.
It is not the time for speaking, but for doing.
He ended by leading the crowd in an anthem, beating time with his little white hands while the people below bellowed out the refrain, let us join the cohort.
We are ready to die.
Italy has called.
Damn.
Yeah.
Fame is terrifying.
You're seeing some of the fascism creep in here.
Yeah.
I mean, fame is terrifying, and he obviously used this like visceral quality of his writing into his speeches, obviously.
Like, he's a good wordsmith.
Like, that's been already proven.
But, like, it's so terrifying when someone is already so, I don't know, praised and lauded for being this amazing thinker.
He's obviously going to have a huge legion of people follow him in anything he does, even if it's to tell people to pick up a weapon and be violent.
And the fact that Holocaust was a word that he used so much, like, that's so telling of like the kind of mentality he had.
Even if he did despise Germany, like, he definitely had similarities to Hitler in that regard of like rallying people together and being an amazing speech person, like a speech giver.
It's so disturbing because I think that's a huge reason why fame and influence really freaks me out is because you have all these people follow you blindly, just like with Trump.
Trump has the same thing.
The people, I hate the people in the rallies that I see.
I hate the people behind Trump that are clapping at every dumb bullshit thing he says.
I hate them more than I hate Trump, honestly, because they're just sheep.
I don't know.
You know, I...
Actually, no, I don't want to say sheep.
Sorry.
I think people see...
People are intelligent, but they're also desperate to belong.
And if someone is just like rallying people together for a cause that he thinks is like, well, better humanity, I don't know.
I think what you're getting at, and I think the reality both of why D'Anunzio was successful and why Trump is, is that everyone has this very deep understanding in our society, as they did then, that like something's wrong.
Things shouldn't be as fucked up and hard as they are.
Like this shouldn't be as messed up as it is.
Someone is responsible.
And if you are able to tell people who is responsible and convince them of who it is and then inveigh upon that group or that person with the kind of rage that everyone has in their heart, whether or not it's directed, everyone has that anger in our society because we all know shit's fucked up.
If you can convince people that you found the people who have fucked up the shit and then express the hatred that is in their hearts, you can get them to do anything.
And that's all that matters.
They don't care about laws.
They don't care about precedent.
They don't care about history.
They don't even care about their own health to a certain extent.
If you are able to convince them of the group that's responsible for their pain and express the hatred that's in their heart towards that group.
And that's what D'Anunzio is good at.
That's what Hitler's good at.
That's what Trump's good at.
You described what I was trying to articulate in a much better way because that's what's terrifying is that what you said, you can get them to do anything because that's completely what happens.
And it works on all of us.
Yeah.
It works.
I mean, to be honest, like a lot of the success of this podcast, which has been very successful and has done a lot for my career and has built up a fan base that is very loyal and active, is because what we focus on is talking about these are the assholes responsible for why shit is so fucked up.
Right.
Like the most powerful thing in the world is harnessing the anger that exists in all of us because of the damaged nature of our society and directing it.
It's not an inherently harmful.
Bernie Sanders' appeal is a lot in his ability to say, this is why shit's fucked up.
This is who you should be angry at.
We need to fix it.
Now, he does it in a much, I would say in a non-toxic way, in a productive way.
It doesn't have to be a horrible thing because the anger is real.
The anger that Trump's fans feel, the rage, they're not directing it in the right direction, but that rage is utterly earned in most cases.
No, I completely agree.
I think directing that anger is such a powerful tool and being able to harness that is a terrifying quality when you use it in the wrong way, which is what Hitler did, which is what DeNunzio is doing or did.
And what I'm going to do in my new cult.
So stay tuned.
Very excited.
We're going to buy a compound.
It's going to be like that with the kids around machetes.
Battle shit.
Machetes as far as the eye can see.
It's going to be glorious.
Now, on multiple occasions, crowds rioted after D'Annunzio's speeches.
Several times they attempted to break into the prime minister's home in order to murder him.
The violence only encouraged D'Anunzio further, and he repeatedly urged good citizens to take vengeance on lying politicians.
If blood flows, such blood will be as blessed as that in the trenches, he said, drawing a direct line between political murder and the national war effort.
Shortly after that speech, some of his supporters stole a fire truck and used its ladder to try to break into the home of one of his political opponents.
Lucy Hughes-Hallitt writes, he was fast developing a brilliantly manipulative oratorical technique.
He allowed his public no break in his contrivances of their hysteria.
He played on them with rhetorical tricks borrowed from religious liturgy or from classical drama.
Hear me, he cried.
Listen to me.
Understand me.
The crowd was urged to join him, howling out responses to insistent avivas.
These were not speeches to be rationally appraised, but acts of collective self-hypnosis.
D'Annunzio's work as a dramatist had frequently been grandiose in conception, spectacular in their staging, and appalling for the violence of their sentiments.
But never before had he produced anything like the shows he put on that radiant May.
The sheer rage he worked these crowds into eventually made any outcome but war basically impossible.
Most of D'Annunzio's enemies fled the city.
The prime minister stepped down.
Historian Mark Thompson calls what D'Annunzio achieved a coup d'état in all but name.
The leader of the Socialist Party, Filippo Tirati, ruefully and accurately exclaimed, Let the bourgeoisie have its war.
There will be no winners.
Everyone will lose.
Well, on May 23rd, 11 days after Gabriel D'Annunzio entered Rome, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary.
There is, of course, significant debate over whether or not Italy would have entered the war on this side without D'Annunzio.
Historians will note that the Pact of London, which set out Italy's new alliance, had been under negotiation for a while by the time he arrived in Italy.
But most historians agree he had at least a very significant impact in pushing his country into World War I. By the end of that war, more than 460,000 Italians would be dead.
More than 955,000 would be wounded.
The old order of Europe died, and Gabriel D'Annunzio helped to kill that too.
Packing Heat: The Turn of Life00:08:08
His career, though, was just getting started.
And now, Shireen, Sophie, would you scroll to the bottom of the screen and show Shireen?
Oh, no.
Oh, but you have to.
She has to see D'Anunzio.
This is the best.
I just am sorry, Shireen.
I just can't believe.
I just, I don't know.
Let's just get like a band-aid.
Let's rip it off.
I'll see it.
Come on.
Okay, bro.
Here.
Here he is.
Here you go, Shushu.
She just grabbed my computer.
What the fuck?
Are you shitting me?
Okay, first of all, banana hammock.
Hilarious.
He does look like he is packing heat, but he is packing heat.
Yeah.
But he's pretty stacked.
He's pretty yoked.
He's just skinny.
What do you mean?
Yeah, he's not.
He's not yoked.
He's just tiny.
He's got.
Well, you got to admit, you got to remember, too.
Like, people didn't know how to build muscle then the way they do now.
Like, he's pretty.
He's not fat on him.
I'll give him that.
But he's also like.
If anyone that's listening to this in the beginning was imagining this like attractive, womanizing, seducing, whatever, this is not the guy.
But he did it.
No.
I mean, like, a champion for short guys, unfortunately, for y'all.
But you already have Napoleon.
What a war do you want?
I don't know.
Jesus, he's.
That's a hilarious photo, by the way.
This photo is amazing.
He's completely naked other than this banana thong, and his arms are at his hips, posed for this photo.
His mustache is curled up.
Didn't know he had a mustache, by the way.
Yeah, bald with a curled-up mustache.
You gotta see the picture.
He's a clown.
He looks like if Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, and Colonel Sanders had a baby, and that baby was a creep.
Yeah, I would say definition of creep.
If you look up creep, that's what I imagine.
If you watch the TV show Community, he looks like Pierce's father.
Like, he's that exact build and size.
He's just this, like, weird little bald.
He's a little, he's he's smeagled.
Yeah.
He convinced his country to enter the dumbest war in history.
But he humanized, personified, whatever.
Yeah.
He does look a lot like Schmeagle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah.
How are you feeling after part one, Shireen?
I've learned a lot.
I think we had a good like bonding time, you and I, to be honest.
I feel like we just verifies each other a bit in parts of this episode, which I feel kind of like nice about.
I think we're good friends now.
The Denunzio effect.
Oh, God.
Don't give him credit.
Give him more friendship.
Feel his power, Shireen.
I would like credit.
I would like credit for the friendship.
Thank you, Sophie.
I will give you the credit.
I mean, this episode has convinced me, among other things, to buy a banana hammock.
That seems like a good decision.
This episode has convinced me, among other things, that you should not have children.
But sorry, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
You would be a great dad, in all seriousness.
Just don't give your children to be aware of that.
That seems like a long reach to make, Shireen.
No, I've learned a lot.
I can't wait to learn more and really.
Yeah.
Just the turn of this guy's life.
What an eventful, awful way to leave the world.
He's not lazy.
You got to say that for the man.
He accomplished a lot.
A very productive, like back in the day.
We're not even.
I mean, we have that saying now, like, you have as many hours in the day as Beyonce does.
Back in the day, you have as many hours in the day as Denunzio has.
You know what I mean?
What have you, what country have you demolished today?
Yeah.
What world order have you destroyed?
Exactly.
What generation have you sent into machine gun nests?
Robert, do you think we can get a banana hammock sponsorship?
That's just my only.
Oh, I hope so.
I want a banana hammock sponsorship, and I would love it if we could get a war to sponsor us too.
Like that would be really good.
Like, I feel like there's a lot of really good wars going on right now, and one of them should sponsor this podcast.
I mean, Lord knows they have the money.
So.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Great.
Yeah.
Well, Shireen, you want to plug your pluggables?
Oh, yeah.
I'm Shireen.
And I am a co-host of a podcast called Ethnically Ambiguous.
It's on the iHeartRadio Network.
It's ethnically, you should look it up.
It's everywhere.
You find your podcast.
I'm Shiro Hero, S-H-E-E-R-O-H-E-R-O on Instagram and Shiro Hero666 on Twitter.
And yeah, that's about it.
I have a poetry book.
If you guys want to like the poetry talk, it's on Amazon.
Oh, shit.
Well, there you're working on my next one.
Read Shireen's poetry.
It's really depressing.
It's not her ego.
Turn her into a monstrous sociopath who leads the world into a tremendous calamity.
Honestly, I'm just waiting to sell out.
So please, let's make this a little bit more.
We all are.
We all are.
I'm begging.
I would love to sell out.
So make it happen.
And I'm Robert Evans.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
You can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com, where you can find sources and this picture of D'Nunzio and his banana hammock.
You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
And you can find me fully embracing the lessons of Gabriel D'Anunzio when I create my cult and plunge the world into a new dark age.
So look forward to that.
It's going to be a real good time.
Free machetes for all.
Yeah, that's the episode.
Have a good one, y'all.
Bye.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share, stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.