Behind the Bastards - Part Two:  Tzar Nicholas II Was A Real Dick
Aired: 2022-02-17
Duration: 01:11:22


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (09:14) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  You know the famous author Roll Dahl.
[00:00:38]  He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
[00:00:40]  But did you know he was a spy?
[00:00:43]  Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
[00:00:49]  All episodes are out now.
[00:00:51]  Was this before he wrote his stories?
[00:00:53]  It must have been.
[00:00:54]  What?
[00:00:54]  Okay, I don't think that's true.
[00:00:56]  I'm telling you, I was a spy.
[00:00:58]  Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:06]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:01:12]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:01:19]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:01:26]  I'm an alcohol.
[00:01:29]  I'm a guy.
[00:01:30]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:36]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:01:44]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:01:51]  Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
[00:01:56]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, or it's really like a stone sculpture.
[00:02:04]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[00:02:06]  Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:02:11]  Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:02:19]  Oh my gosh, it's behind the bastards again.
[00:02:22]  Part two of what will be our four-parter on Czar Nicholas II, a dude who sucked pretty hard with me for episodes worth.
[00:02:32]  Yeah.
[00:02:33]  What a dick.
[00:02:35]  The czar, huh?
[00:02:36]  A lot of possible titles for this one, Jeff.
[00:02:39]  Harry, how are you?
[00:02:40]  How are you doing?
[00:02:40]  How are you holding in there, Jeff?
[00:02:42]  Me, I feel great.
[00:02:43]  I love that.
[00:02:43]  Like the fact that this is, I was, you know, how sometimes like you were like structurally designed to do something?
[00:02:50]  Yeah.
[00:02:51]  That's this specific thing right now.
[00:02:53]  Yeah.
[00:02:53]  You were built for it.
[00:02:54]  Like built for it.
[00:02:55]  A Russian history podcast where I get to talk about how much someone sucks.
[00:02:59]  Your knowledge of Russian history, your experience as a teacher, your years as a boxer, all of it coming together in this endurance test of a podcast episode.
[00:03:09]  I'm in.
[00:03:11]  I'm all in.
[00:03:12]  Boy howdy, Jeff.
[00:03:13]  You are a podcaster.
[00:03:14]  You have a podcast called Tom and Jeff Watch Batman on the Gamefully Unemployed Network.
[00:03:20]  You have a podcast called Jeff Has Cool Friends.
[00:03:24]  And you've got a sports podcast that's about the sportses.
[00:03:27]  I do.
[00:03:28]  You don't even like sports.
[00:03:30]  I don't.
[00:03:30]  I don't know anything about sports.
[00:03:31]  That's fair.
[00:03:32]  That would be perfect for you then.
[00:03:34]  Because that's the name of your podcast, more or less.
[00:03:37]  Yeah.
[00:03:37]  So I do that.
[00:03:38]  So Tom and Jeff watch Batman is with Tom Ryman, who you may know.
[00:03:42]  And you don't even like sports with Adam Todd Brown.
[00:03:45]  So we're all, it's all a very incestuous content creators getting their gooey ideas all over each other.
[00:03:54]  Like the czar doing, I don't know, actually more like the czar's uncle during one of those when he was getting gooey others with the boys.
[00:04:04]  Yeah.
[00:04:05]  Just hanging out with the boys, baby.
[00:04:07]  Now, Jeff, you famously, unless this has changed, got drunk exactly once while performing a live show.
[00:04:14]  I did.
[00:04:14]  Yeah, just one time.
[00:04:15]  I did it at a thing called Performing Under the Influence.
[00:04:20]  It was the partial subject of a cracked article.
[00:04:23]  I got drunk for the first time at 33.
[00:04:28]  Which is a rough time to deal with your first hangover.
[00:04:30]  Yeah.
[00:04:31]  You know what's funny is I didn't wake up hungover.
[00:04:33]  I drank a ton of water before I went to bed and then I just woke up still a little drunk and then fine.
[00:04:38]  Excellent.
[00:04:39]  But I haven't been drunk since.
[00:04:41]  Well, I don't think the czar and his buddies had a lot of easy nights because champagne hangovers are a fucking nightmare.
[00:04:48]  And it kind of seems like they pounded nothing but champagne and hard liquor.
[00:04:51]  Real champagne in the ass right there.
[00:04:54]  Oh, Jeff.
[00:04:56]  When we last left, our buddy, our old friend, our pal, Nicholas II, his dad had just died, which is normally a very sad thing.
[00:05:06]  And I'm sure was for him.
[00:05:08]  But also his dad was an anti-Semitic monster who used his brother to force all of the Jews out of Moscow.
[00:05:13]  And so I don't know.
[00:05:16]  I'm pretty glad that he died of kidney failure at age 49.
[00:05:19]  That seems like a good time for him to die.
[00:05:21]  Here's what I'll say, though, is that you're not doing your behind the bastards about him.
[00:05:26]  No, although he'll like play us, play quite a role.
[00:05:29]  Oh, yeah.
[00:05:29]  Yeah, he's definitely a key ingredient.
[00:05:32]  Yeah.
[00:05:32]  In this, in this stew that is now about to be the czar.
[00:05:36]  And Nicholas, you know, he's basically the czar as soon as his dad dies.
[00:05:39]  He doesn't get coronated for like two years.
[00:05:41]  Like it's a whole thing when you're making a crowning a new czar, you got to get a lot of shit locked down.
[00:05:47]  It's, it's, it's a big deal for everybody in Russia.
[00:05:51]  I would think.
[00:05:53]  And like all around Europe, you got to get all of the Queen Victoria's kids to come over.
[00:05:57]  You got to get set up a special house for the Kaiser who's weird and nobody wants to hang out with.
[00:06:03]  You got to figure out who's sitting where at the table.
[00:06:05]  And again, nobody wants to sit next to the Kaiser.
[00:06:08]  You got to get your late century Russian version of Garth Brooks to come to sing a song.
[00:06:14]  Yeah.
[00:06:15]  And songs for the czar.
[00:06:16]  So they're all about how cool the czar or how hard it is to be a czar.
[00:06:20]  I would guess it's that.
[00:06:21]  It's like my peasants left me and my carriage got bombed by the communists.
[00:06:26]  It's friends in low palaces.
[00:06:28]  Yeah.
[00:06:31]  Thank you.
[00:06:32]  Follow me on Twitter.
[00:06:33]  Oh, now that's that's that's that's pretty good.
[00:06:36]  So Nicholas, obviously, not a particularly optimistic journey to power.
[00:06:43]  His immediate reaction is, oh, fuck, I'm going to be terrible at this, which would mark the only time in his life that he would be right about something meaningful.
[00:06:50]  He nailed that shit.
[00:06:51]  He really got that one right.
[00:06:52]  Like perfect.
[00:06:53]  He's like, I'm going to eat a big old donkey dick about this one.
[00:06:56]  You sure are.
[00:06:57]  I am going to fuck this up.
[00:06:59]  Boy, howdy, am I going to be bad at this job?
[00:07:02]  It's like he quantum leapt into that job.
[00:07:05]  He just shows up out of nowhere being like, well, I have to figure out how to do this now.
[00:07:10]  It was like me when I briefly worked at Sonic.
[00:07:12]  Like, oh, I am not going to do well at this.
[00:07:15]  Wait, what?
[00:07:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:07:18]  When I was a kid, yeah.
[00:07:19]  You were the first job.
[00:07:21]  Yeah.
[00:07:21]  Your first job was at Sonic?
[00:07:23]  It was horrible.
[00:07:24]  I'm very jealous because when you find out what my first job is, it's very weird.
[00:07:28]  I dug holes in a graveyard.
[00:07:30]  That sounds so much better than working at Sonic.
[00:07:32]  It sure doesn't.
[00:07:34]  I dug, you know, who doesn't want to know that is everyone that you go to school with.
[00:07:39]  That is probably true.
[00:07:42]  I dug the plots to Headstones, the foundation holes for Headstones.
[00:07:47]  That is a rough series of conversations with your peers.
[00:07:49]  Like, yeah, I got to double shift at McDonald's.
[00:07:52]  I got to go, you know, work as a cashier at the Barnes and Noble.
[00:07:55]  Yeah, I got to go dig some graves.
[00:07:57]  Yeah, I got to dig some graves.
[00:07:58]  Got to put the payholes in the ground.
[00:08:00]  It paid so well.
[00:08:02]  But like, people would be like, what do you do?
[00:08:04]  And I'd be like, nothing.
[00:08:07]  I don't do, I deal drugs.
[00:08:09]  I mean, shit, it does sound like a great job to listen to books on tape during.
[00:08:13]  Yeah, but that was 1998.
[00:08:15]  Oh, right, right.
[00:08:16]  iPods were just a glimmer in Steve Jobs's eye.
[00:08:19]  Yeah, you'd have to have like an old skipping disc man next to you listening to one of the four CDs that you own at the time.
[00:08:28]  Yes.
[00:08:30]  And they get dirt all over them.
[00:08:31]  Yeah, there's no that's it's boombox era, and you can't have a boombox in a graveyard.
[00:08:36]  So I don't know if you know this about graveyards, but they prefer to not have loud blaring music.
[00:08:42]  That would be really funny.
[00:08:43]  Just like listening to fucking Fleetwood Mac and digging graves.
[00:08:47]  Yeah.
[00:08:47]  While some they're trying to lower somebody down while like the chain is blasting.
[00:08:54]  No, no, yeah.
[00:08:55]  You put on for them lowering the corpse down, you put on, oh.
[00:08:59]  Hmm.
[00:09:00]  The answer is Freebird.
[00:09:03]  Freebird.
[00:09:03]  Yeah.
[00:09:04]  That's the actual answer.
[00:09:05]  Or the Monster Mash.
[00:09:06]  Which is what they lowered my cousin to.
[00:09:10]  That's fair.
[00:09:11]  It was.
[00:09:12]  Yeah.
[00:09:12]  Yeah.
[00:09:13]  That took what that song's for.

=== Digging Graves to Freebird (15:37) ===

[00:09:15]  It took a while for them to start it.
[00:09:17]  And to me, I thought that was really funny that they were like trying to figure out how to get to the pipeline properly.
[00:09:26]  And I was like, man, this is the poetry to this is weird because it was like a shitty small boombox.
[00:09:32]  So the acoustics weren't great.
[00:09:34]  Alexander III does not have a great funeral because they fuck up the embalming.
[00:09:39]  So it's like horrible and nasty.
[00:09:41]  And it's the kind of thing where like the number one thing you read about him in like summaries of the czars is that like they didn't embalm him properly and it was super gross, which I guess is a fair thing to have as your main legacy as a guy who's did a bunch of racism.
[00:09:57]  Fair.
[00:09:58]  Yeah.
[00:09:58]  Hit a gross funeral.
[00:10:00]  William the Conqueror exploded at his.
[00:10:02]  Yes, he sure did.
[00:10:03]  Like, so like, I like a good, bad funeral.
[00:10:07]  Yeah.
[00:10:07]  There's a lot of fun ones with royalty.
[00:10:09]  So yeah, he, he, he becomes the czar.
[00:10:13]  His younger brother is his heir at first because though he and Alexandra are together, they have not had a boy yet.
[00:10:21]  Georgie.
[00:10:21]  He's a scar.
[00:10:23]  Yeah.
[00:10:24]  Yeah.
[00:10:25]  He's the yeah.
[00:10:26]  Without a Simba.
[00:10:27]  Yeah, except for Georgie like dies of tuberculosis.
[00:10:30]  So he's not a very good scar.
[00:10:32]  He's got, he's got a lung scar.
[00:10:34]  He does have a lung scar.
[00:10:36]  Yeah.
[00:10:36]  And it kills him slowly, which is a problem because he's the only one of them who has any sense.
[00:10:42]  And he probably would have done a much better job, but he has to spend all of his time.
[00:10:46]  Like they have him stay on the beach basically because they think it'll not kill him faster.
[00:10:51]  But he dies pretty quick anyway.
[00:10:53]  So Nicholas gets coordinated in 1886.
[00:10:56]  I wrote 1986.
[00:10:58]  That's not when it happened.
[00:10:59]  They had a bit of a waiting period.
[00:11:02]  Yeah.
[00:11:02]  Yeah.
[00:11:03]  They waited until Reagan was in office.
[00:11:04]  They needed to get him down there.
[00:11:07]  He has a big ceremonial party, right?
[00:11:09]  The thing you'd expect.
[00:11:11]  And it's not just a party for the nobles of Europe and stuff.
[00:11:15]  There's also a party for the peasants because the Romanovs and the peasants have this sacred bond, right?
[00:11:19]  And Nicholas wants to honor that and build some goodwill with the little people.
[00:11:24]  So he makes like a bunch of gift bags for them that have like some sausage and some special baked goods and like a nice mug.
[00:11:34]  And he gets like 300,000 of these gift bags together for the poor people.
[00:11:38]  Damn.
[00:11:39]  Now, problem, about a million of them show up, seven, eight hundred thousand, something like that.
[00:11:43]  Oh, so it's like Bobblehead Night.
[00:11:45]  You got to do like the first 10,000.
[00:11:47]  It's like Bobblehead Night or Tencent Beer Night.
[00:11:49]  Like it goes immediately awry because there's not enough of this shit.
[00:11:54]  Now, the other problem is that he had put Grand Duke Sergei, who, you know, the drunken racist piece of shit, dude, he was the guy in charge of planning this event for the peasants.
[00:12:07]  So he doesn't get enough gift bags and he doesn't have any kind of real crowd control.
[00:12:12]  He doesn't have enough people there to like deal with the size of crowd that there's going to be.
[00:12:18]  And when people realize there's not enough gifts, they start like rushing to try to get at the last ones.
[00:12:23]  And then there is a stampede.
[00:12:25]  And it is a stampede of 800,000 people in an area that is not prepared at all for crowd control and doesn't have anybody dedicated to keeping people safe.
[00:12:32]  It's real bad.
[00:12:33]  Is anything prepared for 800,000 people?
[00:12:37]  Yeah.
[00:12:37]  I mean, you know what?
[00:12:38]  I went to when I was younger in 2013, I think it was, I went to the Kum Mela in India.
[00:12:43]  And every time this gathering is held, it's this big religious gathering.
[00:12:46]  And it's held in four different cities once every four years.
[00:12:49]  And there's one city, Allahabad, where it's like most holy when they do it there every 12 years.
[00:12:53]  And every time they do it, it's the biggest gathering of people in the history of the human race for any reason.
[00:12:58]  And when I was there, it was about 100 million people in tents.
[00:13:02]  And there was like, there was one stampede at a train station that killed like 30-something people, but really like it was fine.
[00:13:08]  I think it went pretty well.
[00:13:09]  There was like one day where 30 million people all bathed at the same time in the Ganges.
[00:13:13]  Like India handles that shit pretty well, actually.
[00:13:16]  Yeah.
[00:13:17]  I remember like the Hajj, people would die on the Hajj.
[00:13:21]  There's been so horrible, horrible stampedes with thousands.
[00:13:25]  That's like a bonus if you die on the Hajj.
[00:13:27]  Well, it is like, it is pretty holy way to die, you know?
[00:13:30]  I don't know if it's a bonus, but if you, well, if you die on the Hajj, you get, you immediately get sent to paradise.
[00:13:36]  I'm not an expert.
[00:13:37]  I know that like it's definitely like if you, if it's not the worst way to go, um, although I think getting crushed to death is the worst way to go, but like dying, doing like the holiest thing you can do in your religion is probably of some comfort.
[00:13:50]  This is not that because nobody's doing anything holy.
[00:13:52]  They're trying to get cups.
[00:13:54]  They're trying to get cups and sausage and it goes horribly, horribly wrong.
[00:13:57]  And 1,400 people are crushed to death in a stampede.
[00:14:01]  More meat for the sausages.
[00:14:02]  More meat for the sausages.
[00:14:04]  We finally have enough.
[00:14:06]  There are some estimates, like 1,400 people is what the state estimates.
[00:14:09]  It's probably more like 3,000 or 4,000 people die crushed to death in this horrible, horrible mass of people.
[00:14:17]  Now, this is considered bad luck for the new Tsar, right?
[00:14:20]  This is his coronation, and he's just killed several thousand of his own people because he let his drunken uncle plan the whole event.
[00:14:28]  Nicholas writes at the time, this news left me a disgustful impression and noted that he thought the stampede was a great sin, but he doesn't call off the ceremony or any of like the celebrations and stuff.
[00:14:40]  That's not, it's because like he seems to want to.
[00:14:43]  He's like, I don't really want to party after 1,400 people just got stomped to death in my name.
[00:14:49]  I kind of feel like maybe just sitting quietly in a chair.
[00:14:53]  But his uncle is very Russian.
[00:14:55]  Yeah.
[00:14:56]  His uncle, the Greg Duke, is like, no, you can't cancel it.
[00:14:58]  We made all these plans.
[00:14:59]  Everyone's coming.
[00:15:00]  You have to do this big event.
[00:15:01]  Like, fuck them.
[00:15:01]  They're just peasants.
[00:15:02]  And a lot of other people in the family are like, yeah, you have to do this.
[00:15:06]  And so kind of, you could see this as like, yeah, like you have to do this.
[00:15:12]  This is like about more than those people.
[00:15:14]  This is like how the change of power in our state goes.
[00:15:16]  And all these international people here, like we just have to do the thing.
[00:15:20]  You could like, that's definitely a fair take.
[00:15:23]  You could also see it as he feels like something is wrong and will be taken badly by people and he's not strong enough to stand up to his family.
[00:15:30]  The optimism is bad, I guess.
[00:15:32]  Yeah.
[00:15:33]  Yeah.
[00:15:34]  Both of those things could be true also, you know.
[00:15:37]  It's probably better for the other crowned heads of Europe, like in terms of like their opinion of him that he continues the festivities, but it probably is worse for the peasants.
[00:15:47]  Fair.
[00:15:47]  Yeah.
[00:15:47]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up in Russia Beyond.
[00:15:50]  The Moscow Society had considered Nicholas's refusal to stop the parties as disrespect for the victims.
[00:15:55]  In his memoirs, one of the Tsar's men remembers the phrase of an old typesetter in the newspaper printing house: This means trouble.
[00:16:03]  The rain will bring no good.
[00:16:05]  There were a lot of problems like that.
[00:16:07]  So people are like talking about this, you know, like it definitely is problematic within Russia that he continues the celebrations.
[00:16:16]  The people are talking, everybody.
[00:16:17]  The people are talking.
[00:16:18]  The people are talking about the thousands you got killed because you didn't make enough fucking cups.
[00:16:24]  Now, for his part in the disaster, Nikki gets the nickname Bloody Nicholas, which is a dope nickname to have as an emperor, but not for this reason.
[00:16:32]  Yeah, no, that's like the worst way to do it.
[00:16:35]  You want it to be the blood of your enemies, right?
[00:16:37]  Yeah, not the blood of the people that were going to send you off into congratulations.
[00:16:42]  Yeah, you don't want to get it because you didn't bring enough sausage to the party.
[00:16:46]  That's not why you want to be Bloody Nicholas.
[00:16:48]  Yeah, it's actually the British version of Bloody where it's fucking Nicholas.
[00:16:52]  Yeah, fucking Nicholas.
[00:16:54]  Yeah.
[00:16:54]  Fucking Nicholas.
[00:16:55]  Make the sausage dip shit.
[00:16:58]  Now, his brother Georgie, who is still alive at this point, tries to use the disaster to convince Nicholas to sack their uncle, the Grand Duke.
[00:17:05]  He's like, look, Sergei's obviously bad at things.
[00:17:08]  Don't maybe we shouldn't have him have a government job anymore because look at all these people he got killed.
[00:17:14]  But Nikki shoots his brother down.
[00:17:16]  And what he says, why he says he's not going to fire his uncle, is really revealing about his character.
[00:17:22]  This is what he's saying to his brother in this argument they're having.
[00:17:25]  I don't want to talk about Moscow.
[00:17:26]  It makes me sick to remember.
[00:17:28]  It's not particularly comforting to think about the sad side of the coronation.
[00:17:32]  This seems to be a year of hard labor with me and Alex as the martyrs.
[00:17:37]  4,000, a 9-11 just died.
[00:17:40]  And he's like, I am the victim here.
[00:17:42]  I mean, this ties into his old train review.
[00:17:46]  Yeah.
[00:17:47]  Oh, the train was awful.
[00:17:48]  We got derailed.
[00:17:50]  20 people died.
[00:17:51]  But more often, it took us a while.
[00:17:53]  Stepping over corpses and like, yeah, the plates got broken.
[00:17:56]  I was trying to bring a bottle of wine to a friend and it shattered.
[00:17:58]  It's a real, oh, that's a lung.
[00:18:00]  Yeah, it's real bad.
[00:18:01]  Yeah, can I be honest?
[00:18:02]  My steak dinner ruined.
[00:18:05]  Somebody's skull.
[00:18:06]  Spilled my wine.
[00:18:10]  So after losing a couple of thousand peasants and, you know, getting through the coronation, Nikki and Alex settle into a routine of life and work.
[00:18:17]  Nicholas spent most of his time at his desk, in the words of his cousin Sandro, listening with near awe to the bellowing of his towering uncles.
[00:18:25]  Nikki was particularly frightened of his uncle Sergei.
[00:18:28]  Sandro claimed he dreaded being alone with them.
[00:18:32]  And obviously, these are the guys who like helped raise him.
[00:18:34]  These are his father's brothers and he feels inadequate next to them.
[00:18:38]  He's also much smaller than them.
[00:18:39]  I think Sergei is like six foot five, and Nicholas is a little dude.
[00:18:43]  So there's a lot going on here.
[00:18:45]  And he's just like, he's kind of dominated during the early years of his reign by his, just kind of, it's the Sergei show, you know?
[00:18:53]  And as we've established, not a good show.
[00:18:56]  No, no, no.
[00:18:57]  It's one of the worst.
[00:18:58]  It's like that show that friends spin off that was all about Joey.
[00:19:03]  That's the Sergei show.
[00:19:04]  Yeah, Joey.
[00:19:06]  I was going to call it the Big Bang Theory.
[00:19:07]  It's like the biggest thing, but that doesn't mean it's the best.
[00:19:10]  I would say his dad's show was the Big Bang theory, or his granddad's show was the Big Bang Theory.
[00:19:15]  Fair.
[00:19:17]  Very fair.
[00:19:18]  So after, yeah, they get into this routine.
[00:19:22]  You might call it a rut.
[00:19:24]  And Nikki, yeah, spends a few years just getting dominated by his uncles.
[00:19:27]  Sandro, who became a naval officer, begs his brother to fire the grand, or Sandro, his cousin, begs his cousin to fire the Grand Duke.
[00:19:35]  But Nicholas replies, sack my father's favorite brother.
[00:19:38]  I believe they're right.
[00:19:39]  You did turn socialist in America.
[00:19:42]  His cousin had just gotten back from America.
[00:19:44]  Like firing this incredibly incapable racist man would be like communism.
[00:19:49]  My shitty father's favorite shitty dude?
[00:19:52]  Yeah.
[00:19:54]  Come to that.
[00:19:55]  Yeah.
[00:19:55]  Like kind of.
[00:19:57]  Yeah, maybe like, I don't know.
[00:19:59]  You know, I think forgiveness is important.
[00:20:01]  It's important for people to have second chances.
[00:20:03]  But I would also like, I would not give an employee a second chance if they killed 4,000 people.
[00:20:10]  They killed them.
[00:20:11]  That's still a gambling.
[00:20:13]  Yeah.
[00:20:13]  You know, we have our little hiccups every now and then on the podcast.
[00:20:17]  I get something wrong or there's something else goes awry.
[00:20:20]  But I think if one of us were to kill 4,000 people making this podcast, I think that would probably need to be the end of that person's job.
[00:20:27]  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Robert.
[00:20:31]  Yeah.
[00:20:32]  I mean, it would be pretty cool to have the, well, no, Joe Rogan beat us to that.
[00:20:36]  Yeah.
[00:20:36]  Kill him.
[00:20:37]  We're never going to talk anybody count.
[00:20:38]  Yeah.
[00:20:39]  Yeah.
[00:20:40]  That's a shame.
[00:20:41]  Stop trying to censor him.
[00:20:44]  So, you know who's not trying to censor Joe Rogan?
[00:20:48]  Jeff.
[00:20:49]  I mean, I feel worried.
[00:20:51]  Really, anyone.
[00:20:52]  No one really is.
[00:20:53]  Nobody is.
[00:20:54]  No, no.
[00:20:55]  No one has tried that out.
[00:20:56]  No one at all.
[00:20:57]  But certainly not the podcasts or the whatever.
[00:21:01]  The ads.
[00:21:02]  These ads aren't.
[00:21:02]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:21:04]  Jordan just threw you off your game there, Robert.
[00:21:06]  He did.
[00:21:07]  This is my killing 4,000 people at the Czar's coronation moment.
[00:21:19]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:21:23]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:21:26]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:21:29]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:21:33]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:21:36]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:21:40]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:21:42]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:21:47]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:21:49]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:21:51]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:21:53]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:21:56]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:21:57]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:22:00]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:22:04]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:22:06]  Trust me, babe.
[00:22:07]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:22:17]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:22:23]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:22:30]  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.
[00:22:36]  From power to parenthood.
[00:22:38]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:22:42]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:22:44]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:22:46]  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.
[00:22:50]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:22:57]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:23:00]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:23:06]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:23:08]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:23:11]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:23:19]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:23:25]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:23:29]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:23:35]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy.
[00:23:43]  Really too many to name.
[00:23:44]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:23:50]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:23:53]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:23:56]  Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:23:58]  That's so funny.
[00:23:59]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:24:07]  Say you love me.
[00:24:10]  You know.
[00:24:12]  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.
[00:24:19]  What's up, everyone?
[00:24:20]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:24:21]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:24:29]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:24:32]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:24:35]  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.
[00:24:40]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:24:43]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:24:44]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:24:47]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Will Farrell's Dad Advice (15:38) ===

[00:24:52]  Yeah.
[00:24:52]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:24:55]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:24:57]  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.
[00:25:05]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:25:08]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:25:15]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:25:17]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:25:18]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:25:19]  Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:29]  Oh, we're back.
[00:25:31]  You know what I loved about those ads, Jeff?
[00:25:33]  Zero censorship of meathead podcast hosts.
[00:25:38]  I'm going to go out on a limb and say less than a thousand people trampled to death as a result of those ads.
[00:25:44]  It's going to be really awkward when you listen to the episode again.
[00:25:48]  There's a big people rushing blue April to death.
[00:25:52]  It's a new insurance company to you or a thousand people you know got trampled to death.
[00:25:56]  The Geico tramplings.
[00:26:02]  So Zar and Zarina settle into their new life, which, you know, he's working all the time, but not from the same place.
[00:26:09]  They travel constantly throughout the year.
[00:26:11]  Air conditioning isn't really a thing.
[00:26:12]  So like at the start of the year, they're in the capital in the winter palace, where a whole social season in St. Petersburg revolved around like partying while it's really cold outside with the Romanovs and their cousins.
[00:26:24]  So there's all these big dances and balls and things that I think I would rather die than attend.
[00:26:30]  You don't like big balls?
[00:26:32]  No, it depends.
[00:26:34]  Like if they're cradled properly.
[00:26:37]  But I certainly don't like dancing.
[00:26:38]  I don't know if you're a DC song when they were clever.
[00:26:41]  Oh, yeah.
[00:26:42]  Clever.
[00:26:42]  They're like, get it.
[00:26:43]  And you're like, we get it, man.
[00:26:44]  Yeah.
[00:26:45]  Yeah, I see, DC.
[00:26:46]  We understand the joke.
[00:26:48]  We get the bit.
[00:26:49]  This is a four-minute song.
[00:26:52]  All right.
[00:26:54]  So the czar spends a few weeks each year, you know, in the winter doing galas and balls and yada, yada, yada, these big insufferable parties.
[00:27:02]  And then in the spring, they go to their second, their like, their palace, the Peterhof, which is in an area that has nicer springs.
[00:27:08]  And then in late summers, they go on their Imperial yacht and sail around the coasts and the Baltic and all that stuff.
[00:27:14]  And then in autumn, they go south and travel to their castles in Poland and hunt throughout the fall.
[00:27:20]  Wow, that sounds so dope.
[00:27:21]  It does sound pretty rad, right?
[00:27:23]  That sounds like a fun life.
[00:27:25]  Now, I mean, he is like working 80-hour nightmare weeks and like heading religious ceremonies and all this stuff at the time.
[00:27:31]  But yeah, it sounds like a pretty fucking dope work schedule.
[00:27:35]  What's even doper is his like noble cousins and uncles who have that lifestyle, but also don't have anything to do, like have zero responsibilities.
[00:27:44]  That's the life, man.
[00:27:45]  That's the sweet spot.
[00:27:46]  Not the czar, but his like first cousin.
[00:27:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:49]  Like tight enough that the blood is very similar, but not so tight that you're going to get murdered in an uprising.
[00:27:54]  Yeah.
[00:27:55]  And when things go awry, you can just kind of bounce.
[00:27:57]  Yeah.
[00:27:58]  I'm actually Dutch.
[00:27:59]  Yeah.
[00:28:00]  Oh, thank God I spent so much time in Germany.
[00:28:04]  This worked out good for me.
[00:28:05]  I'm going to turn this accent on real quick.
[00:28:08]  Yeah.
[00:28:10]  So Nicholas keeps a rigorous schedule.
[00:28:12]  He wakes up at eight every morning.
[00:28:13]  He works until the night most days.
[00:28:16]  Simon Montfiore writes, refusing to delegate, Nikki signed off on trivialities such as every change of name and divorce in the empire and lists of staff to receive Easter eggs, as well as sentences of exile and death.
[00:28:28]  So he is, he takes this thing of like absolute autocrat very seriously and he is like micromanaging.
[00:28:34]  He's doing DMV shit.
[00:28:35]  Yeah, he's covering a lot of ground.
[00:28:37]  Yeah.
[00:28:38]  He's saying like he.
[00:28:39]  Congratulations, you are married and congratulations.
[00:28:42]  You are beheaded.
[00:28:43]  Oops.
[00:28:44]  And I signed the wrong paper.
[00:28:45]  Yeah.
[00:28:49]  It is like we talk about like he's working all the time, but a lot of it is stuff that like he doesn't need to do.
[00:28:54]  Like, hey, yeah, you can, you can delegate some of this, buddy.
[00:28:57]  But he doesn't.
[00:28:59]  And so he has a lot of like busy work.
[00:29:01]  He's again, like kind of the national DMV slash warlord pope.
[00:29:07]  It's a weird thing to do, man.
[00:29:08]  It is a weird way to set up your gigantic country.
[00:29:11]  Yeah.
[00:29:12]  Yeah.
[00:29:12]  To just be like, no, I have to sign off on every divorce.
[00:29:16]  Yeah.
[00:29:16]  Like no one expects this of you, Nicholas.
[00:29:19]  Yeah.
[00:29:20]  So fairly early on in his reign, Nicholas II had to make a crucial decision.
[00:29:25]  Would he follow in his grandfather's footsteps and push for reform, or would he be like his dad, an advocate of sacred autocratism?
[00:29:32]  He chose the latter, vowing that when he had a son, he would pass on to him an intact monarchy.
[00:29:37]  This would prove to be a problem.
[00:29:39]  Yeah.
[00:29:42]  Oh, Nikki.
[00:29:42]  Spoiler alert.
[00:29:44]  Yeah.
[00:29:44]  Does not wind up being that story.
[00:29:47]  This proved problematic for a couple of reasons.
[00:29:49]  But the first thing that stymied his goal was the fact that Alex just wasn't making baby boys, you know?
[00:29:56]  Obviously, that's not on her.
[00:29:59]  You don't have any choice in the matter.
[00:30:01]  But it's also the most important thing for him to do is to make an heir, right?
[00:30:05]  Like every czar, job number one is make another boy who can take over.
[00:30:10]  Keep fucking.
[00:30:11]  Yeah.
[00:30:12]  It's like, it's a big deal.
[00:30:14]  And like the reign is there's unrest in the kingdom and shit when you don't have an heir because people don't really know as clearly how things are going to shake out.
[00:30:21]  Because even if it's like your first cousin or whatnot, it's a lot messier if it's not the way it's supposed to go in this system.
[00:30:29]  So everybody's got a lot writing on he and Alex having a baby boy.
[00:30:33]  And by God, they try, but they are, they just keep making girls.
[00:30:38]  He has four daughters over the course of years.
[00:30:42]  Well, she has four daughters and he helps.
[00:30:46]  It's like a shake and bake situation, you know.
[00:30:49]  And to their credit, they're very devoted to them.
[00:30:51]  There's this story from his first daughter that like his wife starts sobbing when she realizes she's had a daughter because she hasn't done her duty yet and given him a son.
[00:30:59]  And he reassures her by saying, hey, we're going to have a son one of these days and he's going to belong to Russia.
[00:31:05]  This girl is ours.
[00:31:06]  This child is just our daughter.
[00:31:08]  And like, that's great.
[00:31:10]  Yeah, that's a sweet thing to say.
[00:31:12]  Like, that's in a situation that can't possibly be healthy, the healthiest way to think about this, I think.
[00:31:18]  I got to be honest, he sounds like a real wife guy.
[00:31:20]  He's a wife guy.
[00:31:21]  He is.
[00:31:21]  He is.
[00:31:21]  He's a super wife, dude.
[00:31:24]  I love that for him because apparently everyone else hates his wife.
[00:31:28]  They sure do.
[00:31:29]  And spoiler, his wife sucks, is trash.
[00:31:32]  His wife's bad, but he is too.
[00:31:34]  So it's a good match.
[00:31:35]  Like, it's like an Ava Brown-Hitler situation where it's both deeply unpleasant, but at least you found each other.
[00:31:44]  That's good.
[00:31:45]  Yeah.
[00:31:47]  I don't know.
[00:31:48]  Maybe some people should not ever do anything like Hitler, but we don't have that option.
[00:31:54]  Whoa, Who are you?
[00:31:56]  Canceling Hitler.
[00:31:58]  Who are you to judge?
[00:32:00]  Yeah, what was he supposed to do after not getting into art school?
[00:32:03]  What was the czar supposed to do other than be the czar?
[00:32:08]  Good job, man.
[00:32:09]  Yeah.
[00:32:09]  Quit, buddy.
[00:32:10]  Take your money and run.
[00:32:12]  Like, that's the thing.
[00:32:13]  Like, spend a year as the czar, socking shit away in Switzerland, then go on a diplomatic trip one day and just never come back.
[00:32:20]  Just Bruce Wayne at the end of the Dark Knight trilogy.
[00:32:23]  Just do a fucking Irish goodbye on being the czar of all Russia.
[00:32:27]  Yeah.
[00:32:28]  Russian goodbye.
[00:32:29]  Yeah.
[00:32:30]  I was hanging out.
[00:32:31]  Yeah.
[00:32:31]  He's like a tinsmith in like Boston.
[00:32:34]  Yeah.
[00:32:34]  Figure it out.
[00:32:37]  So when duty kept the czar and his wife apart, the emperor and empress would exchange letters on a daily basis.
[00:32:44]  They usually had telegrams.
[00:32:45]  And so they're like, again, they're like texting each other.
[00:32:47]  Like they are corresponding on a rate that is pretty much modern.
[00:32:51]  And they're like the Russian royal family really are the only people in the world who get to do this.
[00:32:56]  I guess there's some other royals like this.
[00:32:58]  But like they're basically texting all the time.
[00:33:01]  And so they talk to each other about everything.
[00:33:04]  And we unfortunately, as a result of this, know a dismal amount about their sex life and what they called each other.
[00:33:09]  Man, how awkward must that have been for the dude doing this telegram?
[00:33:14]  The guy who's like writing this down.
[00:33:17]  Okay, titties, one or two.
[00:33:19]  Yeah.
[00:33:19]  Or whatever goddamn Cyrillic letter we have.
[00:33:22]  Message back for confirmation.
[00:33:24]  Yeah.
[00:33:25]  Do you want to come on my neck?
[00:33:28]  Did you mean Nick?
[00:33:30]  Yeah.
[00:33:30]  All right, Nick.
[00:33:31]  Good for him.
[00:33:32]  His pet name or her pet name for him was Boise, like B-O-Y-S-Y, not like Idaho.
[00:33:40]  And his pet name for her was Lady, which is fine.
[00:33:44]  It's just some funny texture.
[00:33:45]  Not judging them, whatever.
[00:33:47]  Everybody has weird pet names.
[00:33:48]  One example letter reads, this is going to be hard to get through.
[00:33:52]  Do it in an accent.
[00:33:53]  It'll be easier.
[00:33:54]  Tell Boise that Lady sends him her tenderest love and kisses and often thinks of him in lonely sleepless nights.
[00:34:02]  Like, it's sweet they love each other, but I swear to God.
[00:34:06]  I expected something a lot more like graphically sexual to be able to do that.
[00:34:09]  No, they're too boring for that.
[00:34:12]  Here's how boring they are.
[00:34:13]  We do, they talk about their sex life a lot, but it's all pretty bland.
[00:34:17]  Because he's such a repressed dude in the 1800s, the czar is terrified to use the word period.
[00:34:22]  So when he's like messaging her on the telegram as he's driving back on a train and wants to know, like, are we going to be able to fuck?
[00:34:28]  Because he's obviously, he's not that cool.
[00:34:30]  So he's asking, like, are we going to be able to fuck when I get back?
[00:34:33]  And so he'll ask, is Madame Baker home?
[00:34:35]  That's his like slang for like, are you, are you having that's fair?
[00:34:39]  Cause remember, this is going through to yeah, other people are reading this.
[00:34:43]  Like it makes sense.
[00:34:45]  I mean, he's not going to be like, how's that puss?
[00:34:48]  He's not going to do that.
[00:34:49]  I mean, other people do in this period, and it's pretty funny.
[00:34:52]  But yeah, they're a little more coy.
[00:34:53]  He also calls it the military engineer.
[00:34:57]  I'll also remind you, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt again, but I would also like to remind you that we're talking about this now.
[00:35:03]  So he's very correct to not be too graphic about this because we're like, let's talk about this other dipshit telegraph that he wrote.
[00:35:12]  Yeah.
[00:35:12]  Google James Joyce love letters and see how it can go when someone, your shit gets into someone else's hands.
[00:35:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:35:18]  I'm good about that.
[00:35:20]  Yeah.
[00:35:21]  I don't know.
[00:35:22]  I just find it funny.
[00:35:22]  That's not a particular moral mark against them.
[00:35:24]  Like it is interesting to me that they are basically like sexting each other in the 1800s because they have the ability.
[00:35:31]  Like they get to use telegram machines that way.
[00:35:34]  But also it means that someone else has to do all of the actual sexting for them, which is awkward.
[00:35:40]  And some guy that's most likely wearing an official uniform.
[00:35:43]  Yeah, he's got the biggest hat you've seen in your life.
[00:35:46]  He's at work doing this.
[00:35:48]  He's at work sexting a wife.
[00:35:51]  Yeah.
[00:35:51]  How was your job, honey?
[00:35:53]  I don't want to talk about it.
[00:35:54]  Let me tell you, this baker lady won't go away.
[00:36:00]  She's there every month.
[00:36:02]  She shows up to her place.
[00:36:03]  It's really irritating the czar.
[00:36:06]  So Nicholas doesn't seem to have really liked his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm because nobody liked Kaiser Wilhelm.
[00:36:13]  Never, never.
[00:36:14]  Weird dude.
[00:36:15]  Horny for his mom's hands.
[00:36:17]  But he came calling regularly on, like Kaiser Wilhelm came to Russia to hang out with Nikki pretty regularly.
[00:36:24]  And this is for totally self-serving reasons.
[00:36:26]  Again, he wants to get back into an alliance with Russia.
[00:36:29]  So he's like always dropping by to be like, hey, can I borrow your entire military in the event of a European conflict?
[00:36:38]  Yep.
[00:36:40]  Yeah, that's kind of what usually happens.
[00:36:44]  And he starts trying to, like, as part of his plan to win back the Tsar, he tries to convince Nikki to expand in Asia rather than expanding into Europe.
[00:36:53]  Because like Germany's doing some expand-y stuff in this period, right?
[00:36:57]  They're unifying.
[00:36:58]  They're getting their shit locked down.
[00:37:00]  They're quarreling with a couple of folks.
[00:37:03]  And he doesn't.
[00:37:04]  That's a big deal.
[00:37:05]  Yeah, it ends fine.
[00:37:07]  But he doesn't want the Tsar to look towards Europe.
[00:37:10]  He wants him to look towards Asia.
[00:37:12]  And also, the Kaiser kind of has some designs for taking part of China, which is sort of falling apart in this period.
[00:37:20]  And so he's like, hey, why don't we steal a little bit of China?
[00:37:24]  And because he's the Kaiser and very racist, he describes this as setting Russia up to, quote, defend Europe from the inroads of the great yellow race.
[00:37:33]  All of the letters and that racist phrase are capitalized, I think, by the Kaiser, who also spoke great English.
[00:37:40]  I mean, at least they called him great.
[00:37:42]  He did say great.
[00:37:43]  Yeah, I don't think he meant it in a good way.
[00:37:46]  And he advocated working together to steal a bunch of ports from China.
[00:37:50]  And Russia really wants a Chinese port because China has some ports that don't freeze.
[00:37:54]  And all of the ports in Russia freeze at some point, right?
[00:37:57]  Like it's not, or all of the ports, at least on the east side of the empire.
[00:38:00]  They've got that problem.
[00:38:01]  He wants like a warm weather port and he wants to take it from China.
[00:38:06]  And this is kind of like, you know, the Kaiser is sort of like really pushing this, but Nicholas definitely wants, again, as we said, like every czar's job is to expand the empire.
[00:38:17]  And this is kind of the only real place to expand.
[00:38:19]  So Nicholas, he hasn't made an heir yet.
[00:38:21]  He can't put another boy into the imperial, you know, baby cavern or whatever you want to call it.
[00:38:29]  But he can conquer some land for Russia and maybe prove that he deserves to be the czar that way.
[00:38:35]  So he seizes Port Arthur on the Chinese coast because again, China's sort of falling apart.
[00:38:39]  And the Kaiser's like, yeah, this is a great idea.
[00:38:41]  Do it, do it, do it.
[00:38:42]  So he sends troops into the middle of the world.
[00:38:43]  He's like, shit talker.
[00:38:44]  He's like, yeah, man, do it.
[00:38:46]  Do it.
[00:38:46]  Yeah, it's going to go great for everybody.
[00:38:49]  It's like jackass.
[00:38:50]  Yeah.
[00:38:51]  Yeah.
[00:38:52]  I'm Nicholas II and this is invading China.
[00:38:55]  This is conquering the Chinese coast.
[00:38:59]  And his ministers in the Navy are like, this is a bad idea, bro.
[00:39:02]  You don't know what you're getting into, bro.
[00:39:04]  We don't have a lot of troops on that side.
[00:39:05]  It is far the fuck away from Moscow.
[00:39:08]  I don't know if you know how big your country is, but like, it's going to be a problem fighting in China for us.
[00:39:15]  But the czar is like, nope, I want a port.
[00:39:19]  And the navy's even like, well, this is a bad one.
[00:39:21]  If you're going to go through this, if you're going to like take all the risks of seizing a port from China, this isn't a very good port.
[00:39:27]  Why don't we like go further south and take a port in Korea?
[00:39:31]  And his prime minister at the time, a guy named Witt, who we'd met, you know, used to be running the trains and stuff, points out that this is going to fuck up the alliance that he already has with China.
[00:39:41]  He's got like treaties because he's building the Trans-Siberian Railway, which goes through territory China controls.
[00:39:47]  So he has like a treaty with China, and his prime minister is like, well, you know, they're not going to be happy with you if you start conquering them.
[00:39:56]  Yeah, I don't know if you know what a treaty is.
[00:39:58]  Yeah.
[00:39:58]  Do you understand how picking a fight with someone in the treaty is like, that's like a no-no.
[00:40:04]  Yeah.
[00:40:05]  And he's also, Wit is also like, Japan's not going to be cool with this because they're in the Japan is waging war in China right now.
[00:40:11]  They are actively conquering chunks of China.
[00:40:14]  And Japan and Russia are at peace at the moment.
[00:40:18]  And Wit is like, do you really want to like fuck with Japan in like their sphere of influence?
[00:40:23]  Because like, we're not, we're not great at fighting over there.
[00:40:26]  It's kind of far away.
[00:40:28]  But the young Tsar didn't listen.

=== Japan's Treaty No-No (02:49) ===

[00:40:30]  And again, his two issues, his two duties are to expand the empire and to make a baby.
[00:40:35]  So like this is, he sees this as like, this is the one thing I can do.
[00:40:39]  And during his world tour, that big road trip we talked about last episode, Nikki had met a prince named Esper who was really into Buddhism.
[00:40:48]  And this prince had claimed like, hey, people at Tibet are waiting for the great white Tsar to conquer Tibet from China and free them.
[00:40:55]  Everybody in Tibet wants to be ruled by the Tsar.
[00:40:58]  You just get you overthrow the British who are running things at the moment in there.
[00:41:02]  And like, they're going to be psyched with you, which is not.
[00:41:05]  Classic Tibet.
[00:41:06]  Classic Tibet.
[00:41:08]  Everybody just gets a picture of a Russian dude on their wall one day.
[00:41:12]  Yeah.
[00:41:13]  The Dalai Lama just has an Ivan Drago poster hanging up in his wall.
[00:41:21]  So Nikki was very superstitious and religious, and he was entranced by this vision of himself as a great white czar.
[00:41:27]  Driven by fantasies of a Russia expanded across Manchuria and Korea, he committed more and more of his troops to Asia.
[00:41:34]  Now, his brother dies in July of 1899 from tuberculosis.
[00:41:39]  And when his brother dies, that's like the last reasonable voice that he sometimes listened to.
[00:41:43]  You know, he's got wit.
[00:41:44]  He's got some like ministers that are reasonable, but he doesn't give a shit what they say because they're not the czar.
[00:41:50]  They weren't God-given.
[00:41:52]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:41:53]  He did kind of sometimes, not all the time, not often, listen to Georgie, but now Georgie's dead as shit.
[00:42:00]  So this isn't going to go great for anybody, least of all China.
[00:42:04]  Now, in 1900, we have the Boxer Rebellion, which is this big populist uprising against the West in China.
[00:42:09]  A bunch of embassies in Peking get besieged, and like everybody who's not China puts a big army together to go fuck up China.
[00:42:17]  It's pretty fucking rebellion's interesting.
[00:42:19]  Yeah, we'll talk about it.
[00:42:20]  This is like a criminally brief explanation of what happens.
[00:42:25]  I mean, it's a lot of people that it's some dudes that thought they were in Crouching Tiger.
[00:42:29]  And it did not go the way it was planned.
[00:42:32]  It did not.
[00:42:33]  None of this goes well.
[00:42:34]  Nicholas doesn't really want to send troops to China.
[00:42:37]  He's like very anxious about actually having his soldiers in Peking.
[00:42:42]  But he's also bullish on conquering a bunch of China.
[00:42:45]  So after his troops get back from the Boxer Rebellion, he sends 170,000 soldiers into Manchuria, which he does not control.
[00:42:53]  And his goal is to provoke a reaction that will justify like conquering all of Manchuria, which Japan is fighting over at the time and is owned by China.
[00:43:02]  So he's really just like sticking his national dick in a hornet's nest for no real reason.
[00:43:10]  I love that phrasing.
[00:43:12]  Yeah.
[00:43:13]  Yeah, he is about to fuck a hornet's nest.
[00:43:15]  But you know who won't fuck a hornet's nest, Jeff?
[00:43:18]  Go on.
[00:43:19]  Who would that be?

=== Boxer Rebellion Consequences (05:25) ===

[00:43:20]  Well, would.
[00:43:22]  Well, they'll have you cook one first.
[00:43:24]  Yeah, they would have you, they would have you, well, they would use, you would, you would marinate your dick in bee venom or hornet venom and then like a or something.
[00:43:34]  Yeah, probably do it.
[00:43:36]  Filled with hornets.
[00:43:37]  Filled with hornets.
[00:43:38]  Or the Washington State Highway Patrol, mostly hornets.
[00:43:42]  Anyway, here's some ads.
[00:43:50]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:43:54]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:43:57]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:44:00]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:44:03]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:44:07]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:44:11]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:44:13]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:44:18]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:44:20]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:44:22]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:44:24]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:44:26]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:44:28]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:44:31]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:44:35]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:44:37]  Trust me, babe.
[00:44:38]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:44:47]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:44:53]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:44:58]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:45:03]  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.
[00:45:13]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:45:18]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:45:21]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:45:24]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:45:26]  That's so funny.
[00:45:27]  Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:45:36]  Say you love me.
[00:45:39]  You know I.
[00:45:40]  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.
[00:45:48]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:45:54]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:46:00]  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.
[00:46:07]  From power to parenthood.
[00:46:09]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:46:12]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:46:14]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:46:17]  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.
[00:46:21]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:46:28]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:46:30]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:46:37]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:46:39]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
[00:46:42]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:46:50]  What's up, everyone?
[00:46:51]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:46:52]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:47:03]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:47:06]  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.
[00:47:11]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:47:14]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:47:18]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:47:23]  Yeah.
[00:47:23]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:47:26]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:47:27]  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.
[00:47:36]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:47:38]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:47:46]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:47:47]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:47:49]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:47:50]  Yeah.
[00:47:50]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:00]  Ah, yeah, we're back.
[00:48:02]  Jeff just got his first bleep.
[00:48:04]  I did.
[00:48:05]  And then you know what?
[00:48:06]  I got to be honest.
[00:48:06]  I feel great.
[00:48:07]  It does.
[00:48:08]  It does.
[00:48:08]  You're trying to censor me.
[00:48:09]  I'm the new Joe Rogan.
[00:48:11]  That's right.
[00:48:12]  You're going to crowdfund a half a million dollars off of this.
[00:48:15]  You can't censor me.
[00:48:16]  I'm uncensorable.
[00:48:18]  I'm a straight white man with a background in fighting.
[00:48:20]  You can't get rid of me.
[00:48:24]  You are the anti-Rogan.
[00:48:26]  We could get you guys to touch.
[00:48:27]  And yeah, we'd merge together like Time Cop.
[00:48:31]  Yeah.
[00:48:32]  And then you would produce season five of Serial.
[00:48:35]  I don't know how that works out, but it does.
[00:48:40]  That was a...
[00:48:41]  Anyway.
[00:48:42]  Jeff.
[00:48:43]  So how do you feel all this goes?

=== Secret Mission to Manchuria (15:30) ===

[00:48:45]  Getting involved in China, trying to take a China, fucksing with Japan, flipping them off a little bit.
[00:48:51]  Think this guy's good?
[00:48:52]  I've seen the Prince's Bride.
[00:48:54]  I know for a fact you never get involved in a land war in Asia.
[00:48:58]  You sure do not.
[00:49:00]  And you also, you really don't want to fuck with like early 1900s Japan.
[00:49:06]  They have their shit together.
[00:49:07]  They're doing okay.
[00:49:09]  They had some lulls.
[00:49:10]  They had some ups and some downs.
[00:49:12]  Japan's been pretty victorious, all things considered.
[00:49:16]  China, they did not have a great second half of the 19th century.
[00:49:20]  You kind of can fuck with China in this period, which is why the entire world does repeatedly.
[00:49:25]  I mean, Jesus Christ, how many drug-dealing wars did we have in order to protect our right to turn the entire country into opium addicts?
[00:49:34]  Yeah.
[00:49:36]  And it was all for tea.
[00:49:38]  That's right.
[00:49:39]  Everybody, look it up.
[00:49:40]  British invaded a country to force them to buy drugs so that they could get tea more easily.
[00:49:46]  Not so us.
[00:49:47]  Not even top 10 of British Empire crimes.
[00:49:52]  Yeah, man.
[00:49:54]  The open door policy in the opium wars is so wild.
[00:49:58]  We really need to get into that more on this because it is a fascinating period and it says just everything about the kind of individuals who were involved in colonialism in this period.
[00:50:07]  One of whom is Nicholas II.
[00:50:09]  So in 1901, the Tsar and Tsarina have their last daughter.
[00:50:14]  They've had four so far.
[00:50:16]  I think it's four.
[00:50:17]  Who can keep track of them?
[00:50:19]  Well, the Bolsheviks could.
[00:50:20]  Well, maybe.
[00:50:20]  It kind of were in little nesting dolls.
[00:50:23]  Each one's a new daughter.
[00:50:24]  She just keeps popping.
[00:50:25]  They have the one daughter and they just keep popping her in half and pulling out another daughter.
[00:50:28]  The man inside is a tiny little son.
[00:50:31]  A tiny little son who can't bleed right.
[00:50:35]  So about a month after they have their last daughter, two princesses who'd married into the Romanov family, they're called the crows in Simon Montfior's book.
[00:50:43]  They're kind of occultists.
[00:50:45]  They're really into like weird, witchy stuff, but like Christian, I think.
[00:50:49]  It's pretty dope.
[00:50:49]  There's a lot of that going around in this period.
[00:50:52]  They introduce Nicholas and Alexandra to a French healer.
[00:50:55]  These princesses were originally from Montenegro and they were part of like, they were into these really occult Christian traditions.
[00:51:02]  And they introduced the Romanovs into like the world of like weird spiritual healers.
[00:51:07]  And Nicholas and Alexandra fall hard for this shit.
[00:51:12]  And I'm going to quote from the Romanovs.
[00:51:15]  First, the sisters introduced Nikki and Alex to the epileptic holy idiot Mitka Colibia.
[00:51:22]  But when you're quirky pig right there, the fucking names.
[00:51:28]  That was amazing.
[00:51:31]  Yeah, but then one of the sister's sons falls ill and she consults a French peasant boy who working at his uncle's butcher shop had experienced an epiphany and set himself up as a hierophant, specializing in the power of psychic fluids and astral forces to heal sickness and cure female sterility.
[00:51:48]  Now, this guy's name is Philippe, and by the time the Tsar and Tsarina meet him, he's about 50, small with black hair and black mustache, very unsightly in appearance with an ugly southern French accent, as someone close to the Romanovs writes.
[00:52:01]  As Nikki and Alex struggled to conceive a boy, Philippe visited Petersburg at the palace of the Crows and one of the Crow women and her husband, the Grand Duke Peter, noted Nikki, this evening we met the amazing Frenchman.
[00:52:14]  So they like, they fall for this guy hard.
[00:52:17]  And it's, you know, it's a Rasputin kind of thing.
[00:52:19]  It's exactly that.
[00:52:20]  Yeah, these people are what we refer to as marks.
[00:52:23]  Yes, they are.
[00:52:24]  They would be devastatingly online and fall for every single scam.
[00:52:29]  Yeah, they'd be cue.
[00:52:31]  Number one, number one, the czar would have like a thousand NFTs right now.
[00:52:36]  They would be pouring bleach down their kids' throats.
[00:52:39]  They would have bought into everything.
[00:52:41]  They got trying to escape the palace.
[00:52:42]  They got caught with 17 pounds of bored ape pictures they were running out of.
[00:52:49]  Yeah, these are, these are, I can't emphasize this enough, not smart people.
[00:52:54]  My apes, my precious apes, my precious apes, all gone.
[00:52:58]  The Bolsheviks.
[00:53:00]  How could you do this to me?
[00:53:01]  This was the future.
[00:53:03]  Yeah.
[00:53:04]  And then you've got like Stalin in a room with, I don't know, one of the red generals.
[00:53:08]  And they're like, no, that Lenin is dead.
[00:53:09]  The bored apes can go to the people.
[00:53:12]  And Stalin looks at the bored ape and puts it in his pocket.
[00:53:15]  No, this is my ape.
[00:53:19]  All apes are stolens.
[00:53:22]  So the Romanovs fall for this guy fucking immediately.
[00:53:25]  They start calling him our friend with the F capitalized, which is what they call Rasputin decades later or years later.
[00:53:32]  And they take him immediately into their confidence.
[00:53:34]  Again, these people have like no guile at all.
[00:53:36]  Like they're like, a holy man who can heal using magic.
[00:53:39]  Let's tell him every state secret we have.
[00:53:42]  I would love for you to plant these beans.
[00:53:45]  It would have been better.
[00:53:46]  Already it would have been very easy to spy on the Tsar and Tsarina if like you are a little good at tricking people.
[00:53:55]  Like if you're a close-up magician, you can't just be the stringer pulling apart then.
[00:54:00]  Perhaps he would like to see this rupee behind your ear.
[00:54:04]  I've watched a man pull his finger in half.
[00:54:07]  We must give him our boy's health.
[00:54:09]  Yeah, or he will be pulling us all in heath.
[00:54:12]  Yeah.
[00:54:14]  So just lose every dime at a carnival.
[00:54:17]  Just one carnival would have ruined the Romanovs.
[00:54:23]  So the Tsar's actual doctors are like, you cannot take this man's advice.
[00:54:29]  He has graduated from no school and he has no medical license.
[00:54:33]  Like you can't take his advice on your wife's fertility or on the health of your children.
[00:54:38]  Like, what are you doing?
[00:54:40]  And the czar is like, oh, your problem with him isn't that he doesn't have a license.
[00:54:43]  Well, I'll make him a medical doctor by declaration and give him a medical license.
[00:54:47]  Oh, no, that's not how it works.
[00:54:50]  It does in Russia.
[00:54:51]  That's not.
[00:54:52]  Dude, that's not how it works.
[00:54:56]  It's very funny.
[00:54:58]  Simon Montfior continues.
[00:54:59]  Soon Philippe was giving political advice.
[00:55:01]  When Nikki met Kaiser Wilhelm, Alex told her husband, Our dear friend will be near you and help you answering William's questions, giving him the toughness to be friendly and severe so that he realizes he dare not joke with you, that he learns to be afraid of you.
[00:55:15]  As for reform, Philippe advised Nikki that a constitution would be the ruin of Russia.
[00:55:19]  In the spring of 1902, Alex fell pregnant, and our friend was prophesying Russia was chosen to dominate the Far East.
[00:55:26]  So this guy is reinforcing, again, he's doing the thing that helps you con powerful people.
[00:55:32]  You tell them what they want to hear.
[00:55:33]  The Tsar wants to hear, no, the people don't need a constitution.
[00:55:36]  And yes, you're going to conquer China.
[00:55:39]  Yeah, which is such a big gamble.
[00:55:42]  Yeah.
[00:55:43]  A horrible gamble.
[00:55:44]  Yeah, like you're going to be able to do this one very hard thing.
[00:55:48]  You sure about that?
[00:55:49]  Yeah, the guy who fell for my tricks are going to be able to tie this knot.
[00:55:55]  Yeah.
[00:55:56]  This fucking rube.
[00:55:57]  You're going to be able to take care of it all.
[00:55:59]  Oh, yeah.
[00:56:00]  It's going to go great for you.
[00:56:01]  Send more guys to China.
[00:56:02]  That's going to be really good.
[00:56:04]  Yeah, you know what?
[00:56:05]  I got a mustache.
[00:56:06]  Fucking do it.
[00:56:08]  So at this point, absolutely nothing but garbage is getting into the czar's brain, right?
[00:56:12]  Like his, his information funnel is just pure trash.
[00:56:17]  Now, he's introduced by Sandro, who's normally like, who's his cousin and is normally like one of the more level-headed people around him to a captain named Bezobrazov, who wants to be the Cecil Rhodes of Russia and basically is like, send me over to Asia and I'll conquer it for you.
[00:56:32]  I think your historic destiny is to conquer the East and I'm going to do it for you, right?
[00:56:36]  Me, Bezobrazov, I'm going to be the guy.
[00:56:38]  You like, give me troops and money and I'll conquer Manchuria for you and Korea too.
[00:56:44]  Give me enough troops and enough money and I could do it.
[00:56:47]  Yeah.
[00:56:47]  I mean, I feel like it wouldn't be that hard to, I mean, from what I remember of the Korean War, pretty easy war.
[00:56:54]  Honestly, I'm going to be like so easy that I barely even remember it happening.
[00:56:58]  Barely even talk about it.
[00:56:59]  It's like a forgotten war or something, probably because it was so boring.
[00:57:03]  So more like boring.
[00:57:06]  Japan is engaged at this point.
[00:57:09]  They're again trying to conquer China.
[00:57:10]  Well, congratulations, Japan.
[00:57:13]  Yeah, it doesn't work out different.
[00:57:15]  Okay.
[00:57:18]  They're not getting married.
[00:57:20]  You would not call this a marriage.
[00:57:23]  So they start clashing with Russia diplomatically over the fact that Russia's expanding into the areas that Japan is already trying to conquer.
[00:57:30]  And Japan does not want a war with Russia because it's a bad idea to go to war with Russia historically, most of the time.
[00:57:37]  Japan likes to avoid wars that are not defensive in general until they see the opportunity.
[00:57:45]  You don't want to leave the island for a war with Russia.
[00:57:47]  It's not a good idea.
[00:57:49]  I mean, especially you're already fighting this war with China, right?
[00:57:52]  Like you're trying to, you're engaged in conflict all over.
[00:57:55]  Your resources are extended and Russia's huge and rich.
[00:57:59]  You don't really want to fuck with them.
[00:58:00]  And they have a reputation as being a good naval power, too.
[00:58:03]  And maybe Japan doesn't really want to test this shit.
[00:58:06]  Yeah, just look at their czar.
[00:58:07]  He's dressed like a sailor.
[00:58:09]  Yeah.
[00:58:10]  Look at him.
[00:58:10]  He's got to be great with boats.
[00:58:11]  He's wearing that little outfit.
[00:58:13]  Dressed like a sailor his whole goddamn life.
[00:58:15]  Now, Japan is scared of getting into a fight with Russia, but because he's listening to Bezobrazov, Nicholas is not at all frightened of a war with Japan.
[00:58:26]  He thinks it's going to be a cakewalk.
[00:58:27]  And Bezobrazov convinces him that conflict is inevitable.
[00:58:30]  So the best thing to do is to start threatening Japan with open war and basically like, hey, if we lay our cards out on the table, they'll either fight us and we'll win or they won't fight us and we'll get our shit, right?
[00:58:41]  Like that's Bezobrazov's attitude.
[00:58:43]  He tells the Tsar, only the bayonet can guarantee the success of our activities in Manchuria.
[00:58:49]  It does not.
[00:58:50]  So despite the fact that this guy is kind of unhinged, Nikki gives him 2 million rubles and sends him east on a secret mission to set up a paramilitary force in Manchuria to help them conquer it.
[00:59:01]  Which Bezobrazov has, there's nothing in his background that would make him capable of this.
[00:59:06]  Yeah, that's when you make that Irish goodbye.
[00:59:08]  That's when you deserve like you just take that money and bounce.
[00:59:11]  Yeah, that is a bounceable amount of money to have.
[00:59:15]  But he does not bounce.
[00:59:17]  And when he finds out, Witt, who's, again, one of the few reasonable people in the Tsar's orbit, like laments that a quote, half-mad, preposterous adventurer is purely in charge of their policy in the East.
[00:59:31]  So Nicholas is basically like, yeah, crazy dude, do whatever you want.
[00:59:34]  You're in charge of Russia's policy towards China.
[00:59:37]  This is going to end well.
[00:59:38]  That's like giving Mel Gibson's character from lethal weapon in charge of that.
[00:59:43]  Like, it's just like a very unhinged existence to see somebody be in charge of anything with.
[00:59:48]  Yeah, it's not a great call.
[00:59:50]  And while Nicholas is edging Japan towards the brink of war, shit is not copacetic in the imperial interior.
[00:59:56]  This article by Shlomo Lambroza, writing for Oxford University Press, lays out the situation.
[01:00:02]  The lack of any substantive reform policy compounded by a deteriorating economy led to increased incidents of popular violence.
[01:00:09]  Poor harvests in 1902 and 1903 caused wide-scale unrest in rural areas.
[01:00:14]  Peasants roamed the countryside in search of work and food, occasionally resorting to violence.
[01:00:19]  In 1902, in the provinces of Kharkov and Poltava, peasants looted homes from the nobility, causing thousands of rubles worth of damage.
[01:00:26]  So that is a problem for the Russians, right?
[01:00:30]  It's not a problem if people are starving.
[01:00:31]  But now Richardson is a good idea.
[01:00:32]  It's time for the Russians.
[01:00:33]  Yeah.
[01:00:34]  Oh, shit.
[01:00:35]  Small pockets of the poor are rising up against the nobility.
[01:00:39]  Yeah.
[01:00:39]  I guess we should just do the same thing for the next 16 years.
[01:00:42]  Yeah, I guess we should continue taking no changes whatsoever and maybe start a war with Japan.
[01:00:49]  Yeah.
[01:00:50]  So economic, the fact that the economy is falling apart, it doesn't, unfortunately, like there are some isolated pockets, people going after nobles.
[01:00:58]  For the most part, they go after the people that Russian peasants go after and Russian nobles go after when they're angry.
[01:01:03]  They make the same call that Alexander III does.
[01:01:06]  They go after the Jews.
[01:01:10]  When in doubt.
[01:01:11]  Again, this is why like tens of thousands of Jewish people are leaving Russia every year because it's not an easy spot.
[01:01:19]  They're like, you know what's better?
[01:01:21]  Brooklyn.
[01:01:22]  Yeah, it sounds like that's a lot, gotta be a lot safer for us.
[01:01:26]  In 1903, all of this culminates in the first pogrom of the century in a city named Kishinev.
[01:01:32]  It started with what was basically a drunken party where several kids vandalize Jewish property.
[01:01:37]  So you get these like young kind of nationalist right-wing youth and they vandalize a synagogue and then some Jewish-owned shops and things just kind of keep escalating.
[01:01:48]  Thank God that doesn't happen in modern times anymore.
[01:01:51]  Yeah, we got that out of the species' system.
[01:01:54]  Thank God the Jews are no longer targeted by hate crimes anymore.
[01:01:57]  That's what everyone says about the Jews.
[01:02:02]  It's that things are simple.
[01:02:04]  Things are great for them now.
[01:02:06]  Yeah.
[01:02:06]  Yeah.
[01:02:07]  I'm going to quote from the Harvard Crimson here or Harvard Gazette here.
[01:02:10]  Sorry, not the Crimson.
[01:02:11]  Fuck the Crimson.
[01:02:12]  This is the Harvard Gazette.
[01:02:13]  Gangs of 10 or 20 armed with hatchets and knives stormed through the town's narrow streets and into its courtyards where Jewish families defended themselves with garden implements and other meager weapons.
[01:02:23]  In the end, 49 Jews were killed and an untold number of Jewish women were raped and 1,500 Jewish homes were damaged.
[01:02:30]  This sudden rush of hoodlum violence, prompted by accusatory rumors of Jewish ritual murder, quickly became a talisman of imperial Russian brutality against its Jews.
[01:02:41]  So, yeah.
[01:02:44]  Cut it out, guys.
[01:02:47]  Just cut it out.
[01:02:48]  It's not great.
[01:02:49]  Uncool.
[01:02:50]  Yeah, it's, yeah, maybe, maybe don't.
[01:02:52]  Have you tried not?
[01:02:53]  Yeah.
[01:02:54]  Have you tried not being a dick about it?
[01:02:56]  And his, his, his empire?
[01:02:57]  Maybe not.
[01:02:58]  So Nikki, when he hears about this big pogrom, he puts a dude in charge of dealing with it, a minister named Pleve, who has taken part in anti-Semitic violence before and is one of the most infamous anti-Semites in the Russian government.
[01:03:13]  And actually, Pleve becomes one of the more moderate people around him, which is not great.
[01:03:19]  But his move, he fires the governor of Kishinev, which fine.
[01:03:24]  And Nikki seems to barely kind of notice that a pogrom has happened.
[01:03:28]  This does not really take up a lot of cycles in his brain.
[01:03:30]  He's concerned with the fact that his wife is pregnant again.
[01:03:33]  Yeah, I was going to say he's probably too busy sexting.
[01:03:35]  Yeah, he is too busy sexting, does not care about this pogrom.
[01:03:39]  On the day of it, he's just kind of like writing home to his wife about shit.
[01:03:43]  This doesn't seem to have really left a mark on him at all.
[01:03:45]  And he and his wife continue to get all of their medical advice from Philippe.
[01:03:50]  This was deeply worrying to the old Empress, the Tsar's mother.
[01:03:54]  And so she sends a secret agent with the Okrana Russian Secret Service to investigate Philippe, this healer.
[01:04:00]  And the investigation realizes like this guy has been charged with practicing medicine without a license in France a bunch.
[01:04:06]  He's a green person.
[01:04:07]  He's like literally a con artist.
[01:04:09]  Yeah.
[01:04:10]  Yeah.
[01:04:10]  This one carney got close to the czar and immediately conned his ass.
[01:04:14]  Smooth as shit, man.

=== Ignoring the Pogroms (05:13) ===

[01:04:15]  This guy could talk himself anywhere.
[01:04:18]  And when this report was brought to the czar, he fires the agent who writes it, not Philippe.
[01:04:24]  And Philippe's health advice during this pregnancy that Alex is having is that she's not allowed to be weighed or inspected by doctors in any way whatsoever.
[01:04:33]  And the reason is because she's not actually pregnant.
[01:04:36]  She's like, some people, she may have had like kind of a miscarriage or something, basically.
[01:04:40]  We don't really know.
[01:04:41]  He may have just been lying to her and trying to get her to put on a little weight and telling her that she was pregnant so that he could try to get a bunch of money out of them.
[01:04:49]  It's kind of unclear exactly what happened, but he's definitely funny con.
[01:04:53]  Yeah.
[01:04:53]  He knows she's not pregnant because he's like, oh, yeah, don't let anybody weigh you and don't let the doctors look at you.
[01:05:00]  And also eat this hoagie.
[01:05:02]  Yeah, eat this hoagie.
[01:05:03]  Eat this six-foot party sub that I got delivered.
[01:05:06]  And the czar and Zarina are like, that makes sense.
[01:05:09]  Now, obviously, eventually, you can only hide from someone that they're not pregnant for so long.
[01:05:13]  There is a point at which it will become very clear that you were not pregnant.
[01:05:18]  This happens.
[01:05:19]  And when it does, this does kind of break the spell a little bit.
[01:05:22]  And Nicholas finally fires Philippe.
[01:05:25]  Simon Montfiora writes, before he left, laden with presents, including a Serpole motor car, he gave the Empress a little bell that would ring if dark forces lurked.
[01:05:34]  Philippe died soon afterwards, but not before he had warned that he would merely vanish and then reappear.
[01:05:39]  Sometime you will have another friend like me who will speak to you of God.
[01:05:44]  That's good.
[01:05:45]  You ain't never had a friend like me.
[01:05:48]  But Aladdin genieing.
[01:05:50]  He is genieing him, and he's also like setting him up for Ras Buten, which I kind of, he must have known he was an old man.
[01:05:57]  Like he must have known he didn't have that much longer.
[01:05:58]  I wonder if he was just like, I'm going to do a solid for the next con man who gets close to these idiots.
[01:06:03]  You know, like you got to get to look out for the next generation.
[01:06:06]  Yeah, he's really setting shit up for Rasputin.
[01:06:10]  Like another guy is going to come and con these rich people out of more of their stuff.
[01:06:14]  And I want it to be easy for him because fuck him.
[01:06:17]  There is something fascinating about these like mystics that the that the czars are pulling in at the end here at the Roman arms because like they say shit that's like oddly like it's an odd portent.
[01:06:31]  Like they'll say shit that they like because we talk about like Rasputin, he's like, yeah, he does the same thing.
[01:06:36]  Like some of them, like he's got some really prophetic sounding stuff.
[01:06:40]  The ones I remember being very specific.
[01:06:42]  He's like, you know, if you kill me, you are fucked.
[01:06:44]  Yeah, you're fucked.
[01:06:46]  This war is going to go bad.
[01:06:48]  But also, if you're Rasputin Butin and you're a pretty good con man and you know these people, it's a safe bet to be like, I'll just tell them things are going to get real bad because they probably are going to keep getting real bad because these people nailed me.
[01:07:02]  Yeah.
[01:07:04]  Yeah.
[01:07:05]  I don't know, Jeff.
[01:07:07]  But I do know that that's going to be the end of part two.
[01:07:10]  You got some pluggables?
[01:07:12]  Yeah, man.
[01:07:13]  Let's do it for this for this week.
[01:07:14]  You know, like I said, if you guys find me on social media, Twitter, and Instagram at Hey There, Jeffro, come say hi.
[01:07:19]  I'm actually pretty funny on the old on the old Twitter.
[01:07:22]  Damn straight.
[01:07:24]  We have a good time on there.
[01:07:25]  You can also check out my shows.
[01:07:27]  I have Jeff Hascool Friends, which is available at patreon.com/slash JeffMay for early uncensored episodes with bonus content, or you can listen to it for free a week later.
[01:07:34]  I have a lot of really cool friends.
[01:07:36]  If you're a nerd, you'd absolutely love it.
[01:07:39]  I also have Tom and Jeff watch Batman on the Gamefully Unemployed Network.
[01:07:43]  You can check that out with Tom Ryman, as well as You Don't Even Like Sports and Unpopular Opinion, both on the Un Pops Network with Adam Todd Brown.
[01:07:51]  Yeah.
[01:07:51]  Robert, what do you got to plug, man?
[01:07:53]  Tell me something.
[01:07:54]  Oh, tell me something good.
[01:07:55]  I got a novel called After the Revolution.
[01:07:57]  You can pre-order it now and get it signed.
[01:08:00]  If you Google AK Press After the Revolution, you can find my novel.
[01:08:04]  It'll come signed to your house.
[01:08:05]  So order that shit.
[01:08:06]  Check it out.
[01:08:07]  Hell yeah.
[01:08:08]  I'm going to do that.
[01:08:08]  I want you to know my address.
[01:08:11]  I will not, but someone at AK Press will learn your address.
[01:08:14]  Oh, hell yeah.
[01:08:15]  And we use it for unsettling purposes.
[01:08:18]  That's the guarantee.
[01:08:19]  Ooh, unsavory books.
[01:08:23]  All right.
[01:08:24]  Well, that's going to do it for us at Behind the Bastards this week.
[01:08:27]  Come back next week for several more hours of talking about Tsar Nicholas II.
[01:08:32]  So much, Nicholas II.
[01:08:33]  Way too much, Nicholas II.
[01:08:35]  And he responds to the possible amount of time.
[01:08:36]  Not enough Nicholas II, I would say.
[01:08:38]  That's what Nicholas II said right before he got shot by the Bolsheviks.
[01:08:42]  That's fair.
[01:08:43]  He's like, you know, maybe a few more weeks.
[01:08:45]  I feel like more of me would have been good.
[01:08:47]  I was really going to pull it out in the last quarter.
[01:08:50]  Give me a chance.
[01:08:52]  I can fix.
[01:08:53]  I can fix.
[01:08:55]  I can change, baby.
[01:08:58]  Tiny war.
[01:08:59]  Fine.
[01:09:01]  Perfect.
[01:09:01]  All right.
[01:09:01]  I'll see you next week.
[01:09:03]  All right.
[01:09:04]  Bam.
[01:09:07]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:09:15]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:09:17]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:09:19]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:09:21]  We always say: trust your girlfriends.
[01:09:26]  Listen to the girlfriends.

=== Math Magic Season Finale (01:53) ===

[01:09:28]  Trust me, babe.
[01:09:28]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:09:38]  You know the famous author Roll Dahl.
[01:09:40]  He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
[01:09:42]  But did you know he was a spy?
[01:09:45]  Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
[01:09:51]  All episodes are out now.
[01:09:53]  Was this before he wrote his stories?
[01:09:55]  It must have been.
[01:09:56]  What?
[01:09:57]  Okay, I don't think that's true.
[01:09:58]  I'm telling you, I was a spy.
[01:10:00]  Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:10:08]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:10:15]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:10:22]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:10:28]  I'm an alcohol without this probe.
[01:10:31]  I'm a guy.
[01:10:32]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:10:38]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[01:10:46]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[01:10:53]  Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
[01:10:58]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
[01:11:06]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[01:11:08]  Take-to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer Lisa Coffey.
[01:11:13]  Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:11:18]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:11:21]  Guaranteed human.