Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Napoleon III: The Worst Bonaparte
Aired: 2022-12-06
Duration: 01:12:26


=== The Failed Coup Attempt (15:02) ===

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[00:00:23]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:00:24]  I got that wrong.
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[00:01:49]  Wow.
[00:01:50]  Jesus gosh, I can't believe Sophie just said that about the entire nation of Paraguay.
[00:01:55]  Wow.
[00:01:56]  Strange.
[00:01:57]  Wow.
[00:01:57]  Strange.
[00:01:58]  Is this so?
[00:01:59]  I feel like I say that like once a week.
[00:02:00]  People are going to be angry when they hear this episode.
[00:02:04]  Wow.
[00:02:04]  Yeah.
[00:02:05]  I mean, it just like, first of all, Montevideo's in Uruguay.
[00:02:09]  I know, right?
[00:02:10]  Like, immediately.
[00:02:11]  Obvious problem.
[00:02:12]  But second of all, I just don't, I've never heard that particular stereotype.
[00:02:17]  And no, I'm shocked and appalled.
[00:02:19]  It's incredible.
[00:02:20]  Honestly, impressed with the creativity.
[00:02:22]  Say this every week.
[00:02:23]  How are you not picking up on it?
[00:02:25]  Wow.
[00:02:26]  Anyway, this is Behind the Bastards, Chief Bastard being our producer, Sophie Lichterman.
[00:02:32]  And her mother, I don't know enough about Paraguay to fill this joke out anyway.
[00:02:38]  Yeah, I had to dig into Uruguay to get something.
[00:02:42]  That's how little known Paraguay is to the staff of this podcast.
[00:02:47]  Yeah, I know it's one of the Guays.
[00:02:49]  Yeah, there's a second GUI.
[00:02:50]  Let's lean on that one.
[00:02:51]  I feel like it's a landlocked GUI.
[00:02:54]  I feel like all the Guays are landlocked, right?
[00:02:56]  Uruguay, I feel like, isn't landlocked.
[00:02:59]  Is that okay?
[00:03:00]  No, I think Uruguay is pretty landlocked.
[00:03:03]  Oh, well.
[00:03:04]  There's no way to answer this question with, for example, the devices we're all using to record this podcast.
[00:03:09]  I did Google what are major stereotypes people have about Paraguay and to what extent are they true?
[00:03:14]  And the first answer is the short answer, there really isn't anything special in quotes about it.
[00:03:22]  Wow.
[00:03:22]  There is little known.
[00:03:24]  So really, I think they really like, they really like Lady Gaga.
[00:03:29]  Oh, wow.
[00:03:30]  Yeah.
[00:03:30]  You can't get them shutting up about Lady Gaga.
[00:03:32]  Yeah, I think that's true.
[00:03:34]  Bunch of monsters.
[00:03:36]  Did she call them monsters?
[00:03:37]  Something like that?
[00:03:39]  Yeah.
[00:03:39]  I've forgotten most of the things about Lady Gaga.
[00:03:43]  Why?
[00:03:44]  What's she doing?
[00:03:45]  I don't know.
[00:03:45]  Nothing.
[00:03:46]  I just don't remember.
[00:03:47]  So much has happened since Lady Gaga was in the news.
[00:03:51]  Yeah.
[00:03:52]  It's like literally.
[00:03:53]  Yeah.
[00:03:54]  What do you remember about Aston Kutcher?
[00:03:56]  Very little.
[00:03:58]  Remember that his name's not Aston.
[00:04:01]  Wait, it's Ashton.
[00:04:03]  Ashton.
[00:04:04]  See, that's how little I remember.
[00:04:06]  I forgot his name.
[00:04:08]  I told you I don't remember much about the man.
[00:04:10]  This is my one interaction with him.
[00:04:12]  I was at a coffee shop.
[00:04:13]  He was ahead of me in line.
[00:04:15]  He forgot his wallet and went back to his car to pay for his $2 coffee instead of being an asshole celebrity that was like, well, I'm Ashton Kutcher, so I'm just going to take this.
[00:04:26]  Dude, I would have offered to pay for it.
[00:04:28]  And then when I got up there, I'd be like, Psych, you just got punked.
[00:04:33]  And then I would have waited for him to see if I was joking or not.
[00:04:37]  And then I would just be clever.
[00:04:41]  So clever?
[00:04:43]  That's very generous for this bit I'm doing.
[00:04:47]  Anyways, this podcast is not about Aston or Ashton Kutcher.
[00:04:51]  This is no, this is a podcast where I don't know.
[00:04:56]  Soprano's podcast.
[00:04:57]  Oh, okay.
[00:04:58]  Soprano's podcast.
[00:04:59]  Sorry.
[00:05:00]  Where we talk about, I don't know, Soprano's character Booka De Beppo.
[00:05:04]  That's right.
[00:05:05]  Man.
[00:05:07]  You got to learn names, man.
[00:05:08]  You got to know one of them's name is Soprano.
[00:05:11]  It is Tony, right?
[00:05:12]  Tony, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:13]  I got it.
[00:05:14]  I got it.
[00:05:15]  Remember that?
[00:05:16]  I remember that.
[00:05:16]  And I remember a lot about Napoleon III, who we are, who we are talking about.
[00:05:22]  Now, when we left off with our hero, he has just tried to take over France, failed, shot a man in the face for no reason, and then repeatedly attempted to commit suicide as he was taken to jail.
[00:05:35]  Yeah.
[00:05:36]  So not a great coup.
[00:05:38]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:39]  One of the worst.
[00:05:40]  But I respect the attempt.
[00:05:43]  I always respect a good coup attempt.
[00:05:45]  I always respect a good coup attempt, right?
[00:05:48]  This is, I have to, I think, you know, it's debatable.
[00:05:50]  Is this a worse coup attempt than Hitler's?
[00:05:53]  You know, Hitler's ended with him and all of his men getting machine gunned in the street.
[00:05:57]  And then he did try to kill himself.
[00:05:59]  But there's something about the impotence of shooting an unarmed man in the face for no reason whatsoever.
[00:06:06]  Yeah, in the mouth.
[00:06:08]  Like, come on, man.
[00:06:10]  Yeah.
[00:06:11]  He was just standing there.
[00:06:13]  It's a weird panic button.
[00:06:14]  You know what I mean?
[00:06:15]  Where you're just like, I'm panicking.
[00:06:17]  Oh, where's the nearest mouth?
[00:06:19]  Where's the nearest mouth I can put a fucking musket ball in?
[00:06:23]  Good lord.
[00:06:25]  Yeah, that's what you do when you panic.
[00:06:27]  Some people, you know, some people play better when they're panicking.
[00:06:30]  Not him.
[00:06:31]  Not him.
[00:06:32]  No, he did not.
[00:06:33]  He did not rise to the moment.
[00:06:35]  No, he didn't.
[00:06:36]  No, he didn't.
[00:06:37]  This is the opposite of Michael Jordan's flu game.
[00:06:40]  This is if Michael Jordan had the flu during game four of the NBA finals and then shot Scotty Pippen in the mouth.
[00:06:50]  Why didn't you say game four?
[00:06:53]  Because I forget which game was the flu game.
[00:06:55]  I mean, it might have been a game two.
[00:06:57]  And was it game five when he had the flu?
[00:07:00]  I believe it was game six.
[00:07:01]  Game so he won an NBA final with the flu?
[00:07:05]  That's crazy.
[00:07:06]  Let's find out.
[00:07:07]  Let's fact check that out.
[00:07:08]  That Michael Jordan, pretty amazing basketball player.
[00:07:11]  A lot of people of basketball.
[00:07:14]  1997 NBA Finals.
[00:07:17]  Against the Jazz.
[00:07:19]  God, I hate the Jazz.
[00:07:20]  Anyways, so Napoleon.
[00:07:22]  So the reaction in the media and the reaction in general from the government to coup 2 was very different from coup number one.
[00:07:30]  One newspaper proposed that Napoleon III might have dementia.
[00:07:33]  The government of Luis Philippe, who's the king, described the attack as a vain and vicious attempt to overthrow the government during which an unarmed soldier had nearly been murdered, which was accurate.
[00:07:45]  So this is, you know, the first time Louis Philippe kind of just wants to usher him out.
[00:07:49]  Like they have a court case, but he doesn't want him in the country.
[00:07:51]  He doesn't really want to like punish it too harshly.
[00:07:54]  To his, I don't know, very mild credit, Louis-Philippe reacts more stringently to this one.
[00:08:00]  But it, and it's interesting because his Louis Louis Napoleon's dad, uh, Louis Bonaparte, has mostly been very much against all the things his son has tried to do and was against this coup attempt.
[00:08:11]  But the invective against his son and like the public media and from the French government forces Louis Bonaparte to actually finally stand up in his son's defense.
[00:08:19]  Now, okay, okay, in my son's defense, yeah, he's really bad at everything and he didn't succeed.
[00:08:28]  And so, what you know, it was a win-win.
[00:08:31]  Yeah, he had fun, we had fun, everyone had fun.
[00:08:34]  It's interesting, that's actually not that far from what he does.
[00:08:37]  So, obviously, being the guy that he is and being a principled man, he can't defend his son's attempt to overthrow the government, nor he can he offend, like, defend like shooting a man in the face.
[00:08:47]  So, instead of doing that, he writes a letter to be published in the Italian press, which complains that his son is quote, the victim of an infamous conspiracy, seduced by flatterers, false friends, and perhaps from insidious advice.
[00:09:00]  So, he's basically saying fake friends.
[00:09:02]  He was, he was like, it's like a cult thing, right?
[00:09:05]  Like, he got wrapped up in by some bad people, but he's not a bad kid.
[00:09:08]  He just got given some bad advice.
[00:09:10]  You know, that is not completely wrong because that's part of what happened, right?
[00:09:15]  Louis Napoleon is not a very smart guy, and he's very vulnerable to the people around him if they're nice to him.
[00:09:21]  This is going to continue to be a factor in his life through his entire reign.
[00:09:25]  And I think some of this is that actually Louis Bonaparte kind of understands his son, um, but he also is a little blinded too because he can't believe that his son was really a driving force behind the attempt.
[00:09:37]  Writing that, quote, it is quite impossible that a man surely not lacking the financial means and common sense should have, with his eyes wide open, willingly thrown himself over such a political precipice.
[00:09:47]  Basically, like, look, if he, if he did, if he was a driving factor behind this, he would have had to be an idiot.
[00:09:52]  And I know he's not an idiot, right?
[00:09:54]  But Yuri, you are his dad.
[00:09:56]  I can't blame you for that.
[00:09:57]  He's your special little boy.
[00:09:59]  We all got that.
[00:10:00]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:01]  So, Louis Napoleon goes to court.
[00:10:03]  Uh, this time he's actually in country for it, and it does not go well for him law-wise.
[00:10:07]  Again, he's gotten kind of like he got off the hook basically last time.
[00:10:12]  Um, but yeah, he got $200,000, yeah, and acquitted.
[00:10:16]  He's not going to get acquitted this time, but it actually kind of goes better for him because Louis Napoleon is dumb in a lot of ways, but he understands some things about politics and the new mass media that no one has figured out yet.
[00:10:30]  Um, and as Hitler is going to learn about 80 years later, if you're on trial for trying to overthrow the government, you can do pretty well by firing off a populist rant that makes the case for your reign.
[00:10:40]  Yeah, um, yeah.
[00:10:42]  And uh, here's here's the speech that he gives, or an excerpt from the speech that he gives in court: For the first time in my life, I have been permitted to speak in France and to speak freely before the French people in spite of the guards on either side of me, in spite of all the accusations I have just heard.
[00:10:58]  I find myself here within the walls of the Senate that I had first visited as a child with Napoleon in your midst, you whom I know, gentlemen.
[00:11:05]  I do not believe that I have to justify myself, nor that you could be my judges.
[00:11:09]  A solemn occasion is offered me here to explain to my fellow citizens my conduct, my intentions, my projects, what I think and what I desire.
[00:11:17]  The nation has never revoked the grand act of sovereignty, the one that had established Napoleon Bonaparte's kingdom.
[00:11:22]  And as the emperor himself said, everything done without adhering to it is illegal, and that includes this trial.
[00:11:27]  And two, do not think for a moment that I might have wanted to attempt any imperial restoration in France without the backing of the people of this country through a plebiscite.
[00:11:35]  As for my undertaking it balloon, I had no other accomplices.
[00:11:38]  I alone am responsible.
[00:11:39]  I represent before you a principle, a cause and a defeat.
[00:11:42]  One principle, the sovereignty of the people, the cause, that of our empire, and a defeat, Waterloo.
[00:11:48]  So he's saying, like, you know, the government that my uncle established is still legitimate.
[00:11:53]  This court has no right to hold me for anything.
[00:11:55]  But also, I never wanted to become the emperor without a plebiscite.
[00:11:58]  I was only trying to do what I think the people wanted me to do.
[00:12:01]  Right.
[00:12:02]  I was just going to do a coup and then see if people were cool with that.
[00:12:07]  You know, that's why it's called a coup.
[00:12:09]  And it's not really a coup because like Napoleon's constitution is still valid, clearly.
[00:12:15]  Right.
[00:12:16]  Yeah.
[00:12:16]  Is it a coup if you guys are the ones who originally did the coup?
[00:12:20]  Exactly.
[00:12:21]  The bourbon restoration.
[00:12:23]  So.
[00:12:23]  Who coup?
[00:12:24]  Who coup?
[00:12:25]  Whose line is it anyway?
[00:12:28]  Who's line is it?
[00:12:29]  And he's dumb.
[00:12:30]  Whatever.
[00:12:31]  So this goes really well for him, actually, because again, Louis Philippe's a terrible king, right?
[00:12:36]  We're laughing at Louis Napoleon, but Louis Philippe is not a good king.
[00:12:39]  And his monarchy is kind of a shit show.
[00:12:41]  People are very unhappy.
[00:12:43]  And they hear this guy, he's hearkening back to this defeat, which still wounds the French soul, Waterloo, and the victories of Napoleon before it.
[00:12:50]  And he's saying, like, look, we never stopped being those guys who could win.
[00:12:54]  We just let guys like this tell us that we weren't that anymore.
[00:12:57]  And if we get them, we can make France great again, right?
[00:13:00]  That's great again.
[00:13:01]  Yeah, that's what he's saying.
[00:13:03]  And it works really well.
[00:13:04]  And the fact that this speech goes so well for Louis Napoleon does not at all mitigate the king's desire to see him locked the fuck away, right?
[00:13:11]  Louis Philippe decides, I got to keep this dude in a fucking cage.
[00:13:14]  And on October 6th, Louis Napoleon is sentenced to life in prison, which is honestly not an entirely unfair sentence for shooting an unarmed man in the face for absolutely no reason.
[00:13:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:25]  But just beyond the even attempted coup part, shooting a guy in the face.
[00:13:29]  Look, I'm not a carceral guy, but of the things you might lock someone up for, randomly shooting a man in the face is not a bad one.
[00:13:36]  Right, yeah.
[00:13:37]  I mean, we're talking like, you know, the 1840s France.
[00:13:41]  Yeah.
[00:13:41]  Chances are you're locking people away for far less.
[00:13:44]  Yes, exactly.
[00:13:45]  Exactly.
[00:13:47]  So broadly speaking, and again, his prison, this is not a hard prison, right?
[00:13:52]  He is not locked away in the fucking Bastille.
[00:13:54]  This isn't some like les miserables shit where he's breaking rocks or whatever while Javert sings at him.
[00:14:02]  He's got like a suite of rooms in what is effectively a castle.
[00:14:06]  He lives, he has all of the books that he wants.
[00:14:09]  He gets regularly visited.
[00:14:10]  He gets invited to dinner by the warden.
[00:14:13]  He is a celebrity prisoner.
[00:14:15]  He lives better than a lot of people do to just.
[00:14:17]  He's just doing interview.
[00:14:18]  He is in fact writing a book.
[00:14:20]  Yes.
[00:14:22]  So, and part of the, you know, obviously he shot a man in the face and tried to overthrow the government.
[00:14:28]  France has killed people for less.
[00:14:30]  They were still guillotining dudes.
[00:14:33]  That would not have been out of the, you could, again, as the leader of the country, you can easily make a case for doing that.
[00:14:39]  But Louis Napoleon or Louis Philippe, sorry, God, there's too many fucking Louises in this fucking series.
[00:14:45]  King Louis Philippe can't do that because there's unrest building all throughout the country.
[00:14:50]  And right around the time that Louis Napoleon is on trial, he has finally agreed and carried out this massive logistical hurdle to bring the corpse of Napoleon Bonaparte back to France a decade after his death.

=== Napoleon's Return to France (11:04) ===

[00:15:02]  So while all this is going on, the French government and military are preparing for this massive ceremony where Napoleon's corpse is being carried through the country and put on.
[00:15:12]  Oh, this is an actual thing?
[00:15:14]  Like, yes.
[00:15:15]  They're actually going to exhume his corpse?
[00:15:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:19]  They're going to take it and bury it in a crypt.
[00:15:21]  Yeah.
[00:15:21]  In France, back on his home soil.
[00:15:23]  Hell yeah.
[00:15:24]  Well, not his home soil because he was Corsican, but whatever.
[00:15:27]  Yeah, so this is, it's a dangerous time.
[00:15:30]  You don't want to be executing his nephew while everyone is like weeping as his coffin is taken through the streets, right?
[00:15:36]  Because people still love Napoleon.
[00:15:38]  The crowds to see Napoleon's casket numbered half a million men, many of them veterans.
[00:15:43]  So again, this is particularly a crowd of people you don't want to piss off.
[00:15:47]  Like there's half a million men in the street who have been under musket fire together.
[00:15:51]  They stood for hours to watch his, you know, the whatever, the thing with the coffin pass.
[00:15:56]  Even though it was, so half a million people standing for like a lot of them, eight to 12 hours to watch this procession when it is negative 22 degrees Fahrenheit outside.
[00:16:05]  That's how much people love Napoleon.
[00:16:07]  They really like this guy.
[00:16:08]  They really like Napoleon.
[00:16:10]  Yeah.
[00:16:11]  Yeah.
[00:16:11]  I mean, it says also a lot about how much, you know, the Bourbons are fucking up all the time, you know, because they like him at least.
[00:16:22]  Louis Philippe is a.
[00:16:24]  He's the Duc de Orleans.
[00:16:26]  Yeah, he's an Orleans, Orleans.
[00:16:27]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:28]  But, you know, I mean, he is part of that family.
[00:16:31]  He's just like the cousin.
[00:16:32]  They're all related.
[00:16:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:33]  They're all related.
[00:16:34]  They're all related.
[00:16:34]  Except for the well, now the Bonaparte's too a little bit.
[00:16:36]  Well, not the, yeah, but it just shows how much they fucked up in that, like at the end of like Napoleon's reign, everyone's like, can we get this guy out?
[00:16:43]  Because he keeps trying to do invasions and stuff.
[00:16:46]  We just kind of are tired of it.
[00:16:48]  And at this point, everyone's like, hey, remember when shit was cool?
[00:16:51]  Yeah.
[00:16:51]  Back when like Napoleon was around?
[00:16:53]  We were just kicking those fucking Austrians' asses.
[00:16:56]  Yeah, just like kicking everyone's ass.
[00:16:58]  Just like, oh, dude, shit was so sick.
[00:17:02]  And also there was order, and people love remembering order.
[00:17:05]  God, people do love order.
[00:17:08]  As noted by the documentary, whichever Star Wars movie was the most recent one.
[00:17:13]  Law and Order.
[00:17:14]  That's right.
[00:17:15]  Actually, a Star Wars-themed Law and Order could be a pretty fucking fun show.
[00:17:19]  You could do a lot with that project.
[00:17:21]  You know what's going to happen.
[00:17:22]  Disney Point.
[00:17:23]  You could make that work.
[00:17:24]  You could make that work very well.
[00:17:27]  Anyway, watch it.
[00:17:29]  Look, we're going to have to skip ahead a bit through the next piece of history because I have to tell you, this guy does so much in his fucking life.
[00:17:35]  He's involved in so much shit.
[00:17:37]  Anyway, to summarize the next part of his story, what happens after he gets thrown in prison, I'm going to turn to yet another book, The Last Emperor of Mexico by Edward Shaw Cross.
[00:17:47]  Quote, undeterred, six years later, while the prison was undergoing construction, Louis Napoleon, dressed in the clothes of a workman, picked up a wooden plank, put it over his shoulder, and walked out the front gate before fleeing to London.
[00:18:01]  It was so easy to break out of prisons.
[00:18:05]  He didn't even have to get like a Rita Hayworth poster and like a tiny little pickaxe.
[00:18:10]  Sacré bleu, he walked out.
[00:18:12]  Yeah, he's just like, excuse me, I'm just going to move this wooden plank.
[00:18:18]  This was before the invention of the door, so people really had no way to keep someone in something.
[00:18:23]  All prisons had worked on the honor system previously.
[00:18:26]  Exactly.
[00:18:26]  It was like, hey, where are you going?
[00:18:28]  He's like, oh, no, he's a workman.
[00:18:29]  He's the most famous person.
[00:18:30]  He's fine.
[00:18:31]  He has wood on his shoulder.
[00:18:34]  It can't be him.
[00:18:35]  He would never hold wood.
[00:18:37]  L'Emperor would never hold wood.
[00:18:39]  He is not Ben Shapiro at Le Home Depot.
[00:18:44]  Yeah, he's just holding a piece of wood in the Home Depot bag.
[00:18:47]  It is funny.
[00:18:48]  Excuse me.
[00:18:50]  150 years apart when the son of or the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte and rich guy Ben Shapiro need to feel like a cup pretend to be a common man.
[00:19:00]  They both pick the same tactic.
[00:19:01]  Can I get some wood?
[00:19:03]  Hold it up for my shoulder.
[00:19:04]  It's the number one thing that rich people think like working class people do.
[00:19:09]  Always just wood everywhere.
[00:19:11]  I think they just like hold wood and they go, ugh.
[00:19:15]  That's what they do.
[00:19:16]  That's what they do.
[00:19:16]  Just hold pieces of wood.
[00:19:18]  Hold pieces of wood and say, oh, my brow has beads of water.
[00:19:22]  Such sweat upon it.
[00:19:24]  All right.
[00:19:25]  I'm going to continue that quote.
[00:19:26]  And there it would have ended had it not been for the providential moment Louis Napoleon had been waiting for, the European revolutions of 1848.
[00:19:34]  After the abdication of the French king, a republic was hastily proclaimed and elections announced.
[00:19:39]  Despite no experience of democratic politics or a political party to support him, Louis Napoleon grandiosely told a cousin, I'm going to Paris.
[00:19:47]  A republic has been proclaimed.
[00:19:48]  I must be its master.
[00:19:50]  His cousin responded, You are dreaming, as usual.
[00:19:54]  And yet, this is the wild thing.
[00:19:56]  He's completely right.
[00:19:57]  He wins this election in a fucking landslide.
[00:20:00]  Um, obviously, the fact that he's a Napoleon is most of what a lot of the voters need to hear.
[00:20:07]  Um, and also that he had been very visibly in opposition to the hated king who had just been overthrown.
[00:20:12]  Um, but he's also he's he is particularly unpopular with the people who had been the political elite and the only people who were able to vote previously to the proclamation of the republic.
[00:20:21]  Uh, Alexis de Tocqueville, um, who is a political smart guy thinker, um, he was he was there, uh, he was there, uh, fucking um, I don't know, what's a terrible political columnist, right now, um, Brent Stevens, Bill Crystal, he's there, Bill Crystal, yeah, he's there, Barry Wise.
[00:20:41]  Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, he's Tocqueville's not talking about him, people are gonna be so angry at me.
[00:20:47]  I'll have to talk to the scholars in the audience, but he does not like Louis Napoleon.
[00:20:51]  He compares him to a dwarf who, quote, on the summit of a great wave, is able to scale a high cliff which a giant placed on dry ground would not be able to climb, which is actually a really accurate summary of what's happened, right?
[00:21:03]  It's not his own personal character because he has not accomplished a single thing in his life other than shooting that guy in the face.
[00:21:09]  But there's this wave, and he expertly, the thing that he actually is good at is number one, he's he does have this degree of understanding of the French populace, and he knows where to place himself to take advantage of this wave.
[00:21:22]  Um, I guess my only disagreement with de Tocqueville there is that, like, that is actually a skill, it's a really dangerous skill, but it is a skill.
[00:21:28]  Most people thing, you know, it's like we all want to, it's the same type of you know, like critique that people have of Trump, where you're just like, he's stupid, and he's it's like, yeah, man, he's an idiot, like he's dumb in a thousand ways, but he is very good at manipulating people and he has a high political IQ.
[00:21:49]  You would hope that like the thing we would get out of Trump and also guys like Dr. Oz and guys like what's the other fucking expert, Ben Carson, is that like intelligence isn't a thing.
[00:22:00]  People are good at things and they are bad at things, but nobody is smart, right?
[00:22:04]  Like that's not the way brains work.
[00:22:07]  Yes, exactly, exactly.
[00:22:09]  Like I'm really good at geography, but I'm an idiot.
[00:22:13]  So me being good at geography doesn't make me a smart guy.
[00:22:16]  It just means I'm good at one thing.
[00:22:18]  No, and Elon Musk being a competent engineer in some specific things clearly does not make him smart in other ways.
[00:22:26]  Yes.
[00:22:26]  Yes.
[00:22:27]  Very clearly.
[00:22:28]  Like knowing why a blue checkmark is a thing.
[00:22:32]  It's good.
[00:22:33]  So I'm going to continue that quote.
[00:22:34]  Writer and politician Victor Hugo pinned a series of vitriolic attacks on Louis Napoleon, one titled Napoleon Les Petit, exhorting the French to look at this hog wallowing in his own slime on a lion's skin.
[00:22:46]  Even Adolphe Terrez, leader of the conservative politicians in France who supported Louis Napoleon, thought him an idiot who could be easily controlled.
[00:22:54]  Certainly, Louis Napoleon did not seem to have his uncle's drive, except when it came to women.
[00:22:58]  Indeed, his mistress at this time and financial backer was a notorious English courtesan and failed actress, a combination too much even for French politics.
[00:23:07]  To the relief of many, the Constitution of the Republic limited the presidency to one four-year term.
[00:23:12]  Louis Napoleon, however, was not going to allow a constitution he had sworn to uphold to get in the way of destiny.
[00:23:18]  So obviously, when he comes to power here, 1848, this is a year of massive left-wing revolutions, a lot of which fall just kind of a little short of actually, you know, it's this kind of failed revolution year in a lot of ways.
[00:23:31]  Not everywhere, but in a lot of ways.
[00:23:32]  And prior to Napoleon III, most people who'd supported the return to monarchy anywhere were staunchly anti-democratic, right?
[00:23:39]  There was a wide understanding that democratic governments inevitably led to radical left-wing policies that would undermine and threaten elites.
[00:23:46]  Napoleon III's great innovation, and the thing that actually is kind of genius from him is that he saw that this was bullshit, right?
[00:23:53]  The masses would be perfectly happy endorsing hereditary authoritarian rule if you sold it to them the right way.
[00:23:59]  And in fact, that would make your rule more stable.
[00:24:03]  More than this, he saw that royalist coups and crackdowns against democratic instructions were fundamentally doomed.
[00:24:10]  But if you could put a monarch on the throne through democratic acclaim, that would act to legitimate the regime using the ballot box.
[00:24:18]  This is exactly what Napoleon did, holding two plebiscites in which he got voters to first back a coup against the Republic and then declare him emperor.
[00:24:27]  He won both with at least one of them was more than 90% of the electorate, right?
[00:24:31]  Yeah.
[00:24:32]  And this is the thing.
[00:24:34]  Every dictator who follows after him, Napoleon is kind of the start of the wave of like, now, if you're a dictator, you don't just say I'm the dictator and I'm in charge.
[00:24:42]  You say I'm the president or, you know, the premier or whatever, and I've been elected.
[00:24:45]  We do an election every couple of years and I get 98% of the vote, you know?
[00:24:49]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:24:50]  Now it's like you always have the guise of, you know, I am a democratically elected president or prime minister or any of that stuff.
[00:24:58]  Just make it up.
[00:25:00]  The elections can be fake as long as it looks like you're democratic and you do lip service.
[00:25:06]  That's all that matters.
[00:25:07]  Yeah.
[00:25:08]  And it's, I mean, yeah, that's interesting.
[00:25:10]  This write-up by history today provides more context as to why he was able to get so much, get so far with the electorate.
[00:25:19]  He was a fresh figure on the scene, which was a great advantage.
[00:25:22]  He had total faith in his destiny, which was another.
[00:25:25]  And he could parade as a person above party politics.
[00:25:27]  Karl Marx sourly remarked because Louis Napoleon, that because Louis Napoleon was nothing, he could appear to be everything.
[00:25:33]  His opponents attempt at ridicule, caricaturing him writing a goose he was trying to transform into an imperial eagle, merely rebounded to his advantage by reminding people of his Napoleonic connection.
[00:25:43]  He wooed the electorate with promises to restore France's lost glory and assurances of prosperity, advancement, and a happy future for every group and social class in the country.
[00:25:51]  As one of his biographers commented, he came down impartially on all sides.
[00:25:56]  Yeah, he was everything to everybody.
[00:25:58]  You could kind of just put your own politics into him.
[00:26:01]  And this is, you know, that Marx quote: history comes once as first as a tragedy and second as a farce.

=== Caricature and Political Rise (03:50) ===

[00:26:07]  Yeah.
[00:26:07]  He writes that about Louis Napoleon, right?
[00:26:10]  Napoleon Bonaparte is the tragedy because millions die and Louis Napoleon is the farce.
[00:26:15]  Right, because he's literally a parody.
[00:26:17]  He's literally a parody of his uncle.
[00:26:18]  Yeah.
[00:26:19]  Yeah.
[00:26:19]  Like we all, our version or vision of like Napoleon that we have now is actually just Louis Napoleon.
[00:26:28]  Yeah.
[00:26:28]  It's like he's very, very tiny, weird mustache, like bad goatee, looks like a clown.
[00:26:35]  That's that's the parody of his uncle.
[00:26:38]  Yeah, it's it's pretty fucking cool.
[00:26:40]  And you know what's a parody of bad products?
[00:26:45]  What?
[00:26:46]  The good products that support our podcast.
[00:26:49]  That's right.
[00:26:50]  Love that.
[00:26:51]  Love that.
[00:26:52]  Love that for us.
[00:26:53]  I'm just going to say it.
[00:26:55]  Hot as shit.
[00:26:57]  Robert, I sent the entire team the Columbus heat.
[00:27:03]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:27:14]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:27:20]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:27:30]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:27:34]  That's great.
[00:27:35]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:27:44]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:27:50]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:28:01]  If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
[00:28:08]  Russia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
[00:28:11]  They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
[00:28:13]  Pinky has financial issues.
[00:28:15]  I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
[00:28:18]  I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
[00:28:20]  On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Rail Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T. Everybody's talking about.
[00:28:34]  As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
[00:28:38]  I understand the game.
[00:28:40]  As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
[00:28:43]  At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
[00:28:48]  To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:28:57]  Hey, Ernest, what's up?
[00:28:58]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[00:29:03]  On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[00:29:11]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
[00:29:20]  Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
[00:29:24]  But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[00:29:28]  That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
[00:29:35]  If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
[00:29:41]  Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Two Democratic Ends (15:44) ===

[00:29:57]  Boy, howdy.
[00:29:58]  I tell you what, we're back, and I have never, I have never, never once.
[00:30:07]  So we're talking about Napoleon III and how he, how he got himself into the good books of the French electorate and won election and then became the emperor.
[00:30:19]  And is this strategy he makes of like being like, I'm going to restore our lost glory.
[00:30:23]  Everything is going to get better for everybody.
[00:30:25]  It works really well with like particularly the peasants, the country folks, who in fact, a big way in which they show there when kind of like these plebiscites are going on.
[00:30:34]  One of the ways in which Napoleon's strongest supporters show they love him is by marching around the streets, shooting guns in the air and getting wasted.
[00:30:42]  Oh, yeah.
[00:30:43]  Which that sounds right.
[00:30:45]  That sounds about right.
[00:30:46]  Yeah.
[00:30:47]  That sounds about right.
[00:30:48]  That's how we celebrate everything.
[00:30:50]  Yeah.
[00:30:50]  You know, if that's the modern way of celebrating, it was created by Louis Napoleon.
[00:30:55]  Yeah, I get it.
[00:30:56]  I get why that would be the way that would happen.
[00:31:00]  If you've ever seen any team from Philadelphia win a championship in sports of some sort, you'll understand that this is how we celebrate.
[00:31:08]  They also eat doo-doo off the street, but yeah, this is probably going on here, too.
[00:31:13]  A lot of vets who had fought with his uncle put on their uniforms and would march around.
[00:31:18]  They are, funnily enough, as they like march to the polls, they're shouting shit like death to the rich and aristos and usurers to the guillotine, which again, he is literally the nephew of the emperor.
[00:31:31]  But he does very well.
[00:31:34]  Quote, professional politicians were shocked, but the new president in most of France had had quite enough of them.
[00:31:39]  He went on to rid himself of the party of order and destroy the second republic with the support of a handful of Bonapartists in the National Assembly.
[00:31:46]  Steering his men into key positions in the army and the administration, he took advantage of an economic slowdown, downturn in 1851 to present himself as the strongman who would save France from socialism and collapse.
[00:31:56]  In December, he carried out a successful coup, put down his opponents by force, and sent the assembly packing.
[00:32:02]  And yeah, it's interesting to me.
[00:32:03]  I don't think this history is widely known outside of France, certainly not outside of Europe, but it's fucking fascinating to me that France has two democratic governments in a row ended by members of the same family.
[00:32:15]  It's like if Hitler had come along in the 1970s, like another one and ended German democracy again, like he's another Hitler.
[00:32:21]  Everybody's like, yeah, let's give him another shot.
[00:32:24]  Listen, Greg Hitler is different than his uncle Adolf.
[00:32:29]  Okay.
[00:32:29]  We can trust Greg.
[00:32:31]  Greg, a different kind of Hitler.
[00:32:33]  A different kind of Hitler for a modern era.
[00:32:35]  A modern Hitler for modern Germany.
[00:32:39]  Shows him like arm in arm with a rabbi.
[00:32:42]  Things are cool now between the Hitlers and the Jews.
[00:32:46]  Yeah, it's going to be different this time.
[00:32:49]  Yeah.
[00:32:50]  And he did what?
[00:32:50]  God damn it.
[00:32:51]  He invaded Poland again.
[00:32:53]  He did it again.
[00:32:53]  That son of a bitch.
[00:32:55]  Oh, I should have known.
[00:32:57]  Fool me once.
[00:32:59]  Yeah, it is kind of insane that like how quickly he went from like being president, you know, Louis Napoleon to just immediately being going like, what are we doing here?
[00:33:14]  We all know I'm going to be emperor.
[00:33:15]  And then boom, Napoleon III, just like that.
[00:33:18]  You know?
[00:33:19]  Yeah.
[00:33:20]  It's cool.
[00:33:22]  So on December 2nd, 1852, Louis Napoleon became Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte III.
[00:33:28]  And technically, it was wrong every time before this when I called him Napoleon III, but it's fine.
[00:33:32]  He's Napoleon III.
[00:33:33]  Edward Shaw Cross notes that he quote aimed to plow a middle way between liberalism and conservatism, much like Bill Clinton.
[00:33:40]  In this, he built the example of the recently overthrown king Louis-Philippe, lover of the centrist Juste Milieu.
[00:33:46]  But Napoleon III was willing to go further and based his regime on direct democracy as expressed through universal male suffrage.
[00:33:52]  As one of his aphorisms supposedly went, Do not fear the people.
[00:33:55]  They are more conservative than you.
[00:33:58]  And this is why I want to talk about this guy because he is kind of not kind of.
[00:34:07]  He absolutely is the model of all future authoritarian populists and democratic societies.
[00:34:18]  I find him fascinating for that reason.
[00:34:21]  It's weird because his instincts were dead on and remain true to this day.
[00:34:26]  Yes, he absolutely was not wrong about any of this stuff in terms of like how to get elected and shit.
[00:34:32]  I mean, he's a clown and he does all this like stupid shit.
[00:34:35]  He's shooting the guy in the mouth.
[00:34:37]  He's, you know, does a couple failed coups.
[00:34:39]  So you're kind of just like, this is like what the ultimate fail son, right?
[00:34:42]  Yep.
[00:34:42]  Or fail nephew.
[00:34:45]  But yeah, no, his instincts were 100% right on when it came to reestablishing the French Empire.
[00:34:55]  Yeah, it works very well.
[00:34:57]  So the early days, as we said, the early days of his domestic policies are a staggering success.
[00:35:01]  The French economy recovers from its long slump.
[00:35:04]  The nation begins to industrialize rapidly.
[00:35:06]  And just as critically, Louis Napoleon turns France into a major player on the European stage again, right?
[00:35:14]  The couple of decades after Napoleon, France is a bit of a pariah state, right?
[00:35:18]  Kind of the same way the Germans were, where everyone's like, I don't know if we can trust these guys given, you know, history, everything that happens repeatedly, which is, again, not an unreasonable thing to think.
[00:35:32]  But this is where that all turns around.
[00:35:35]  Brings France back into kind of the standing of a responsible nation state, right?
[00:35:41]  You can call that bullshit or not, but like that, that's he effectively changes the way people think about France in a big way by changing the way France acts as a power.
[00:35:50]  And the major way he does this, the first kind of big thing he does to turn around, you know, France's political position in Europe is to ally with Great Britain for the Crimean War in 1853.
[00:36:02]  three.
[00:36:02]  This is right after he, so this is basically one of the first things he does is l'Empere.
[00:36:07]  Now, the Crimean War is often considered the first modern military conflict, and it is one of the two wars, the other being the 1870 war between Prussia and France that we'll talk about at the end of these episodes, that sets up the preconditions for World War I.
[00:36:21]  And the gist of this war is that Russia and Turkey, they've been fighting for each other for centuries, right?
[00:36:26]  Like you got your Ottoman Empire and they keep trying to push into Europe and they got the Balkans and the Russians are seen by a lot of Europe for a decent chunk of time.
[00:36:35]  Russia is seen as like the great barrier to the Ottomans, right?
[00:36:38]  To the Muslim hordes.
[00:36:40]  And these periodic military conflicts are ever complicated by the political situation over in the Holy Land, which at the time is under Ottoman control, but the English are involved and like mediating things.
[00:36:51]  And you've got, it's not, you know, today we think about like religious conflicts in the Holy Land and it's like, oh, well, you got your Muslims and Jews and Christians and whatnot.
[00:36:59]  Back in that day, one of the big conflicts is between Greek Orthodox and Catholic monks who are rioting.
[00:37:06]  There are times where they'll kill each other.
[00:37:08]  There will be like riots over these like holy spaces where people are beating each other to death.
[00:37:13]  It fucking rules.
[00:37:14]  It's super funny.
[00:37:17]  Anyway, the czars see themselves as protectors of orthodoxy.
[00:37:22]  And since the Ottomans are in charge of the Balkans at this period, remember that, so the Ottoman Empire is still ruling what we would call a decent chunk of Eastern Europe today.
[00:37:30]  There are about 12 million Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule.
[00:37:33]  And Russia wants to take that area away from the Muslims and also add it to Russia.
[00:37:39]  And while you might expect all of the other Christian nations to back them, but everybody's scared of Russia.
[00:37:44]  They're considered a dangerous power.
[00:37:46]  And so for the most part, like, while they'll pay lip service to like, oh, yeah, we got to free those Christians from the evil Muslims.
[00:37:53]  Most of the other states in this period are like, yeah, we don't want Russia to have the whole Balkans.
[00:37:58]  Like, that's not a good idea.
[00:38:01]  Yeah, they're also scary.
[00:38:02]  Yeah, they're also very scary.
[00:38:04]  Both of these people are hordes people.
[00:38:07]  Yeah, I don't want to deal with hordes.
[00:38:09]  We just don't like hordes that much anymore.
[00:38:11]  Yeah, just like, could you thin out numbers a little?
[00:38:14]  Less hordes, more just hordes.
[00:38:17]  So for a lot of the 1800s, the British try to keep some sort of balance.
[00:38:21]  They're often brought in as kind of the mediators here.
[00:38:25]  Do and they, you know, they've got, again, another part of this is that like the British have massive financial interests inside the Ottoman Empire.
[00:38:33]  So they're like, because the Ottomans are kind of falling apart in this period, right?
[00:38:36]  They're being called the sick man of Europe.
[00:38:38]  And so the Russians are like, well, we actually, we could take them right now.
[00:38:43]  You know, we might be able to actually fucking push them out of here.
[00:38:46]  And the British are like, well, but that's not, that's actually not going to work out great for us.
[00:38:51]  We have a lot of, it works out really, we don't want to control.
[00:38:54]  We don't want to take over the Ottoman Empire.
[00:38:56]  That sounds like a giant pain in the ass.
[00:38:58]  That's just going to be expensive.
[00:38:59]  But right now, their government will basically do whatever the fuck we say.
[00:39:03]  And so we can make a shitload of money, you know, not doing anything.
[00:39:09]  It's, it's, it's, it's cool.
[00:39:12]  So there, you know, this goes on for years, for most of the 1800s, in fact.
[00:39:17]  And kind of massive conflicts are just barely avoided here and there.
[00:39:21]  But then in July of 1853, the Tsar invades Moldovia and Wallachia, which is like modern-day Romania.
[00:39:28]  Now, Louis Napoleon had no desire to start off his reign with another land war in Europe.
[00:39:33]  Campaigned on the premise that, quote, the empire stands for peace.
[00:39:36]  But the connections he'd built with the English prior to his rise for power, remember, that's where he's hanging out the whole time as he's like in between coups, means that he can't just sit back if they choose to get involved.
[00:39:47]  This is further complicated by the fact that a lot of French people hated the English, so they didn't really want to be on their side, but they hated the Russians too, which I think helped a little bit.
[00:39:59]  Ultimately, Lewis tells the French Assembly that he's sending his army, some 300,000 men, east to help England defend the Sultan against Russian aggression.
[00:40:08]  And this war effectively brings France back to the world stage as a major player.
[00:40:13]  And it is the, this is why, if you've ever wondered, given all of the centuries they were fighting each other, well, why do France and England wind up on the same side in World War I and II?
[00:40:21]  Well, it starts here, right?
[00:40:22]  This is kind of the first time where they wind up wrapped together in a major war.
[00:40:27]  Yeah.
[00:40:28]  And it's, yeah, it's a big deal.
[00:40:32]  Special relationship now.
[00:40:34]  Yeah, this is the start of that.
[00:40:36]  And this is often like in kind of the high-level summaries of like what happens in the Crimean War.
[00:40:41]  You'll hear it described as like, well, this is the first modern war.
[00:40:44]  You know, the French and the British had had better rail lines and better transit and like the Russians were so just like fuck-ups and stuff.
[00:40:51]  But also the French and British militaries are also disasters in this war.
[00:40:57]  This war is a terrible, terrible war for everybody involved.
[00:41:01]  And it's a shit show because the military that France has built since Napoleon isn't really good at fighting in conventional wars.
[00:41:09]  They become a colonial policing force built to like lock down Algeria and West Africa.
[00:41:14]  And Lewis is calling upon them to like fight these human wave attacks.
[00:41:18]  The logistical hurdles are made worse by the fact that Lewis picks his cousin Jerome Bonaparte as the divisional general who's running the military.
[00:41:26]  Now, Jerome gets the job because his cousin, also named Jerome, had fought alongside Napoleon Bonaparte.
[00:41:34]  I know.
[00:41:35]  It's so fucking stupid.
[00:41:37]  Pick new names, you assholes.
[00:41:40]  Like, God, I hate you.
[00:41:42]  There's Louis and there's Jerry.
[00:41:45]  No, there's only two kinds of names a person can have.
[00:41:48]  Call him Mitch.
[00:41:49]  Have a Mitch, Napoleon Bonaparte.
[00:41:52]  Like, fucking hell.
[00:41:53]  Derek Napoleon.
[00:41:54]  Derek Bonaparte.
[00:41:55]  God almighty.
[00:41:56]  Fucking A.
[00:41:57]  So Jerome gets this job because his uncle had fought with Napoleon.
[00:42:01]  But the thing his uncle was famous for was abandoning Napoleon Bonaparte during the march to Russia in 1812 and like fleeing the empire.
[00:42:09]  Because he did.
[00:42:10]  Yeah.
[00:42:10]  Which is not bad.
[00:42:12]  Look, not bad judgment.
[00:42:13]  Like not bad judgment.
[00:42:15]  Yeah.
[00:42:16]  But also that might be a red flag.
[00:42:18]  And sure enough, the instant cousin Jerome sees gunfire, he goes home.
[00:42:24]  He flees back to Paris.
[00:42:26]  It's in the blood.
[00:42:27]  It's in the blood.
[00:42:29]  He learned the thing his dad learned about war, which is nah, nah, nah.
[00:42:33]  Fuck that.
[00:42:34]  I don't want to be anywhere near that shit.
[00:42:35]  Yeah.
[00:42:37]  So this earns him the nickname Sans Plom or gutless Bonaparte.
[00:42:41]  That's what they call him now, is gutless Bonaparte, which is quite a nickname.
[00:42:46]  And I'm going to quote next from the book, The Shadow Emperor.
[00:42:50]  It was a grim beginning for what was to prove a very grim campaign under sweltering summer temperatures as dysentery, typhus, typhoid, and a most deadly cholera epidemic ravaged the ranks.
[00:42:59]  On the 15th of October, they fought and narrowly won the indecisive victory of Balaclava, where the 7th Earl, the mad general, Black Bottle Lord Cardigan, Louis Napoleon's landlord during his youthful exile in London, led his historic 661-man cavalry in the charge of the Light Brigade, of which only 414 young men, along with some 300 horses, survived.
[00:43:21]  So the Charge of the Light Brigade guy is his former landlord.
[00:43:24]  He hires his landlord.
[00:43:26]  He hires his land.
[00:43:26]  Well, the breed, you know, he does not in charge of the British army.
[00:43:31]  This was followed by the Allied victory at Inkerman on November 5th, 1854, and then began the unanticipated 11th month siege against the Russian Marshal Minchikov's 50 to 70,000 men in their stoutly defended port fortress of Sebastopol.
[00:43:44]  There, the French, who had failed to bring the heavy artillery for this war, were obliged to strip their navy of most of their guns to form 13 batteries of 30 and 50 pound cannon.
[00:43:53]  So again, he sends the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, an artilleryman, sends his army to war without heavy artillery.
[00:44:03]  And they take it from the boats.
[00:44:05]  They just take it from the boats.
[00:44:07]  It's not like there's any water near Crimea.
[00:44:10]  No, it's very funny.
[00:44:12]  And again, they win because this is also, look, you know, the Ukrainian military has gotten praised a lot for its stick-to-itiveness.
[00:44:19]  If you spend time talking to people who are there, talking to people who have been over there, it's still a bit of a shit show.
[00:44:24]  It's a messy military, right?
[00:44:26]  But again, as is the case here, the Russians are just so much messier, right?
[00:44:30]  Yeah.
[00:44:31]  That like you, you can, you can afford to fuck up some when the Russians are your enemy because they're going to make a lot of mistakes.
[00:44:37]  Yeah.
[00:44:38]  The Tsar is not going to be planning this very well.
[00:44:43]  You only need to be just a little bit more organized than Russia.
[00:44:46]  Just have your shit more together than the Russians.
[00:44:49]  Yeah.
[00:44:49]  But like barely.
[00:44:50]  But barely.
[00:44:52]  That is the case of everyone who wins a war against Russia.
[00:44:55]  Yeah, right.
[00:44:57]  So in the end, the Allies won, and the Crimean War was broadly good for Lewis's new regime.
[00:45:03]  But much of this was due to luck and great Russian incompetence, again, rather than good decisions by the emperor.
[00:45:08]  He sends 300,000 men into the Crimea, and 95,000 of them die, mostly from disease due to cholera outbreaks, because he doesn't have anyone in his army who can manage sanitation very well.
[00:45:22]  So, you know, some people will say he's kind of traumatized by this just because like that Louis Napoleon, that Napoleon I?
[00:45:33]  Yeah, yeah, he feels like bad about this.
[00:45:38]  Like that he's, because he's the one, he was the one who gets to make the decision, right?

=== War with Austria in 1859 (03:24) ===

[00:45:42]  He was the one man who sent them into war and 95,000 of them didn't come back.
[00:45:46]  And that does come out of the world.
[00:45:47]  This is what your dad has been telling you for ever.
[00:45:50]  This is literally what your dad was warning you about.
[00:45:53]  That's all he was saying over.
[00:45:54]  War is pretty bad.
[00:45:56]  War's bad and you're going to feel bad.
[00:45:58]  Don't do it.
[00:46:00]  And then he does it and he's like, damn, dude.
[00:46:02]  I don't know who's going to feel that bad, though.
[00:46:04]  Oh, and I should know.
[00:46:05]  His dad is passed on by this point.
[00:46:07]  His dad dies while he's in prison.
[00:46:08]  So he doesn't ever get to be like, oh, yeah, I get what you were saying about war being bad.
[00:46:13]  Yeah.
[00:46:15]  R.I.P. to a real one.
[00:46:16]  Yeah, but he's, you know, this is literally the exact thing you were told.
[00:46:23]  Anyway, he finally gets it.
[00:46:24]  After Crimea, Lewis reiterates his dedication to peace, and then he sends soldiers to Italy to crush an independence movement against the Pope.
[00:46:32]  This is basically identical to the independence movement he had fought for as a younger man and his brother had died for.
[00:46:39]  But now that he was king, you know, the church is kind of an important ally for him.
[00:46:43]  So he now, to be fair, he kind of makes up for this in 1859 when he goes to war with Austria and defeats the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph, who's a big old prick in battle.
[00:46:54]  For an idea of like Franz Joseph, massive piece of shit.
[00:46:58]  He loses a war in 1859 that like leads to the end of Austrian domination of Italy, right?
[00:47:06]  1859, Franz Joseph loses that war against Napoleon III.
[00:47:09]  Guess who the emperor of Austria-Hungary is when World War I starts?
[00:47:16]  Same guy.
[00:47:17]  Franz Joseph.
[00:47:18]  Same guy.
[00:47:19]  What, really?
[00:47:20]  Yeah, 54 years later, five years later, same guy, Emperor.
[00:47:24]  Yeah, he is in charge of Austria-Hungary for for fucking ever.
[00:47:28]  It is ludicrous how long this guy is running that fucking country, that fucking train wreck of a country.
[00:47:35]  It's nice to have that job security, though.
[00:47:37]  Yeah, Franz Joseph never dies.
[00:47:39]  It sucks so bad because he's terrible.
[00:47:41]  He's still around.
[00:47:42]  Yeah, he's still alive right now.
[00:47:44]  He's still running Austria.
[00:47:45]  Go over there.
[00:47:45]  You'll see him.
[00:47:46]  He's trying to get hungry to come back.
[00:47:48]  Yeah, I saw that.
[00:47:49]  There's that picture going around of that like one monk somewhere in Southeast Asia who looks like a skeleton because he's so old.
[00:47:55]  Yeah, that's that's Franz Joseph.
[00:47:57]  He's just fucking skeletor on the throne.
[00:48:02]  God damn it.
[00:48:03]  Fight Prussia.
[00:48:05]  So Algeria gets officially conquered in 1858.
[00:48:10]  And again, they've said this a couple of times, but they basically crack down on the worst of the uprisings again in 1858.
[00:48:17]  And after this point, with like kind of Algeria temporarily pacified, French power begins to expand rapidly across Southeast Asia.
[00:48:26]  During the time that Napoleon's like early to mid-reign, the French military will conquer Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lao, creating what, yeah, what eventually becomes known as French Indochina.
[00:48:37]  This is a nasty thing.
[00:48:39]  There are a lot, tens of thousands die, and eventually millions are going to die because of this.
[00:48:45]  Napoleon III lets it happen.
[00:48:48]  He is not a driving force behind it.
[00:48:50]  The people who orchestrate this and push this are his generals and admirals.
[00:48:54]  The French Navy is a big driving force with this.
[00:48:56]  And the primary thing that you should blame Louis Napoleon for is that, again, they kind of sit down and talk nice to him, and he just agrees to let them do whatever they want.
[00:49:04]  Right.

=== Conquering Indochina (04:08) ===

[00:49:06]  And yeah, he doesn't resist and he lets this thing happen in part because like people said nice things about him.
[00:49:17]  And he's kind of that's that's basically his big vulnerability.
[00:49:21]  He loves compliments.
[00:49:22]  He loves when you know it's like Trump with the Saudis.
[00:49:26]  They let him hold the globe, you know, the glowing orb.
[00:49:30]  And then he's like, all right, here, have some more planes.
[00:49:34]  You give an app man an orb and he'll have an orb for a day.
[00:49:37]  You teach a man to find his own orbs.
[00:49:40]  Yeah.
[00:49:41]  Teach a man to orb.
[00:49:44]  The new book by Robert Evans.
[00:49:47]  Teach a man to orb.
[00:49:50]  Funded by Peter Thiel.
[00:49:52]  Finally, going to get that Palantir money for something appropriate.
[00:49:56]  Speaking of Palantir, you know who sponsors this podcast?
[00:50:01]  Palantir.
[00:50:02]  Palantir.
[00:50:03]  So go spy on somebody.
[00:50:05]  You know, Palantir's new everybody's spy program.
[00:50:10]  Just record someone, anybody, anybody who doesn't know you're recording them, and then mail that in an envelope to Peter Thiel.
[00:50:17]  He'll stick it up on a Dropbox somewhere.
[00:50:18]  Don't worry about what happens to it.
[00:50:23]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:50:34]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:50:40]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:50:50]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:50:54]  That's great.
[00:50:55]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:51:05]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:51:11]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iTart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:51:22]  If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
[00:51:28]  Russia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
[00:51:31]  They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
[00:51:33]  Pinky has financial issues.
[00:51:35]  I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
[00:51:38]  I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
[00:51:40]  On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and a T. Everybody's talking about.
[00:51:54]  As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
[00:51:58]  I understand the game.
[00:52:00]  As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
[00:52:03]  At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
[00:52:08]  To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:52:17]  Hey, Ernest, what's up?
[00:52:18]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[00:52:23]  On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[00:52:31]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
[00:52:40]  Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
[00:52:45]  But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[00:52:48]  That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
[00:52:55]  If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
[00:53:02]  Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:53:12]  Ah, we're back.

=== Maximilian in Mexico (11:36) ===

[00:53:14]  Boy howdy.
[00:53:15]  I sure love recording people without their express consent.
[00:53:19]  Me too.
[00:53:19]  It's my favorite thing to do.
[00:53:21]  That's why I enjoy the services of Palantir.
[00:53:25]  Palantir.
[00:53:26]  If you touch it, you'll see Sauron's great eye.
[00:53:31]  It is so fucked up that a guy named a company that it's insane.
[00:53:35]  It's insane.
[00:53:36]  It's so on the nose.
[00:53:37]  People talk about like, I wonder what Tolkien would have felt about like the Lord of the Rings movies and stuff.
[00:53:41]  Like, no, I want to know what he would have felt about that shit.
[00:53:44]  That there's like, someone literally built a Palantir.
[00:53:47]  It's named it Palantir?
[00:53:50]  That's fucking ridiculous.
[00:53:52]  It's a bit on the nose.
[00:53:53]  Yeah, a little bit on the nose.
[00:53:54]  I don't know if that's an Oxford Dawn accent.
[00:53:57]  Whatever.
[00:53:59]  Irish British.
[00:54:02]  Irish me down under British.
[00:54:05]  The two accents I can do.
[00:54:07]  It would be funny to do a movie on JR Tolkien, but like hire somebody with what like a cockney accent to play him.
[00:54:20]  Gonna speak to you in Elfish Oyam.
[00:54:24]  That's right.
[00:54:25]  So Palantir Lawyer.
[00:54:27]  It's all dead, Brilli.
[00:54:31]  So it's probably fair to say.
[00:54:33]  Anyway, whatever.
[00:54:34]  They conquer Asia.
[00:54:35]  This is going to be a problem for tens of millions of people in the future.
[00:54:39]  And it all happens at least without any resistance by Napoleon III.
[00:54:44]  Back in Europe, the negotiations at the end of the Crimean War had made Napoleon III into one of the central diplomats of European power politics.
[00:54:51]  Italian unification would eventually owe a great deal to his lobbying and fighting with Austria.
[00:54:56]  He began to look overseas to the Americas, where Louis Napoleon was greatly concerned with the expansion of the United States.
[00:55:03]  He'd liked America and he had admired a lot of aspects of like America and our technologically driven culture while he was there, but he was candy enough to see like, well, they kind of like murdered their way into control of most of the world's resources.
[00:55:17]  They have like a dozen Europe's worth of country that they just own now.
[00:55:21]  And it kind of seems like they might become the preeminent power in the world.
[00:55:25]  And I should do something to stop that because I would like that to be France.
[00:55:28]  Yeah, yeah, that's supposed to be me.
[00:55:30]  That's supposed to be me.
[00:55:31]  So in the late 1850s, he begins courting Maximilian Habsburg, who's the brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, and trying to convince him to become the emperor of Mexico.
[00:55:43]  So first off, brilliant plan.
[00:55:46]  Incredible.
[00:55:47]  No notes.
[00:55:48]  Very, very incredible plan.
[00:55:50]  Yeah.
[00:55:50]  You know how Mexico's there?
[00:55:52]  Wow.
[00:55:53]  It needs an emperor.
[00:55:54]  What if, yeah, you know what the solution to all of Mexico's problems are?
[00:55:58]  A German-speaking guy.
[00:56:01]  Yeah, a German emperor.
[00:56:04]  I think it's a great idea, dude.
[00:56:06]  Fucking walking around Juarez right now.
[00:56:09]  You know, you guys got a lot of problems with cartels and not enough water, all this good stuff.
[00:56:14]  What if a German was in charge?
[00:56:16]  You think that'll help?
[00:56:18]  So first, I want to say hola coma estás.
[00:56:21]  Estás bien.
[00:56:23]  Great.
[00:56:24]  So I am going to be how you say el Jefe, right?
[00:56:28]  El Jefe.
[00:56:29]  And you people are just going to, you're going to be my amigos.
[00:56:35]  Do you comprende?
[00:56:38]  It's very hard to do austrian guy.
[00:56:41]  He's basically gotten all of it right, though.
[00:56:43]  That is this guy, fucking Maximilian Habsburg.
[00:56:47]  Just an out.
[00:56:48]  So one of the things that I do for fun is I will troll Edward Habsburg, who is the current heir to the Habsburg family and a monarchist piece of shit and like some weird liaison to the Catholic Church.
[00:56:59]  He's a fucking asshole.
[00:57:00]  He loves anime, though, weirdly enough.
[00:57:02]  Anyway, I will troll him and I will troll him specifically about the fact that Maximilian von Habsburg is eventually executed by a firing squad.
[00:57:10]  And every time I do, I get fucking royalists in my mentions being like, well, he was actually a great leader.
[00:57:15]  And if Mexico would fall, no, he wasn't.
[00:57:17]  They shot him to death.
[00:57:18]  That doesn't happen to you if you're a great.
[00:57:20]  Great leaders do.
[00:57:22]  Sometimes great leaders get assassinated by a lone guy with a gun share.
[00:57:25]  We've all seen that happen.
[00:57:26]  Great leaders do not get executed by the mass acclaim of the populace.
[00:57:31]  Right, exactly.
[00:57:32]  And then completely wiped from like the general history.
[00:57:35]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:57:37]  Like, I like to think I know a little bit about Mexican history.
[00:57:40]  And I totally don't celebrate this guy.
[00:57:44]  Yeah.
[00:57:45]  Like, so they know about like the whole like the profiriato regime that happened during that time and whatnot.
[00:57:53]  That all comes out of this, right?
[00:57:54]  Profirio Diaz, I think is his name, is one of the generals, one of the generals who fights Maximilian.
[00:58:00]  Yeah.
[00:58:01]  So anyway, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
[00:58:02]  Okay.
[00:58:02]  So the way that Napoleon III proceeds with cooking this shit up is he gets a handful of Mexican academics and politicians, most of whom are living in Europe and have been like, because Mexico, tons of civil wars, right?
[00:58:14]  So you have a bunch of like diaspora guys who are like in Europe trying to like raise money and support for some kind of revolution or another.
[00:58:21]  He gets a bunch of these guys back to back the idea that like the regular Mexican people are just like clamoring for a European emperor, just like the big countries, right?
[00:58:31]  Yeah, yeah, please.
[00:58:32]  There is zero evidence of this.
[00:58:34]  There's absolutely no evidence of this.
[00:58:39]  And in fact, so the like tuba music, we like tuba music.
[00:58:44]  For an idea of like how little the Mexican people wanted an emperor.
[00:58:48]  So there's this, you know, there's this, like Mexico gets its independence in like 1821 from Spain.
[00:58:57]  And the guy who like leads the independence movement is this dude, Augustin Iturbide, who then declares himself the emperor of Mexico.
[00:59:05]  And do you know what the Mexican people do to Iturbide?
[00:59:08]  They fucking murder him.
[00:59:10]  They fucking kill him because they don't like having an emperor.
[00:59:13]  Yeah, they're like, no, we don't.
[00:59:15]  We're not with that.
[00:59:16]  Yeah.
[00:59:16]  Which you might take as evidence that Mexicans don't want to have an emperor.
[00:59:21]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:59:22]  It seems to be historically true.
[00:59:24]  Napoleon III assumes this has to just be some like fluke of history, and he keeps on plotting.
[00:59:31]  And while he's playing power politics, Napoleon III also presides over the creation of modern Paris.
[00:59:37]  The city as we know it today, with its wide boulevards and iconic architecture, was largely created during Louis-Napoleon's reign.
[00:59:44]  And I want to quote now from a write-up in The Conversation by Samuel Raybone.
[00:59:48]  Quote, Louis-Napoleon inherited a cramped, crumbling, and crime-ridden capital.
[00:59:52]  Paris's one million inhabitants lived cheek by jowl in a vast tangle of densely packed buildings.
[00:59:57]  There was even a slum in the courtyard of the Louvre.
[01:00:00]  Modernizing Paris promised more than practical benefits.
[01:00:03]  I want to be a second Augustus, wrote Louis-Napoleon in 1842, because Augustus made Rome a city of marble.
[01:00:09]  It meant glory, so he hired a ruthlessly efficient administrator, Baron Hausmann, to knock down the old slums.
[01:00:15]  The city became a building site.
[01:00:17]  Charles Marvel's photographs record the squalor of the slums, the chaos of their transformation, and the spectacle of their rebirth.
[01:00:23]  Thousands of men were drafted into an army of construction, battling away on this new field of honor for the glory of the nation and its increasingly power-hungry leader.
[01:00:31]  Now, the downside of using populist rhetoric to get people to endorse your dictatorial regime is that you really can't afford to piss your base off too much, right?
[01:00:41]  Because that's how you've justified your power.
[01:00:43]  And Lewis had taken power, promising to renew France and bring hope for the working class.
[01:00:48]  One commenter noted that, quote, a week's interruption of the building trade would terrify the government.
[01:00:53]  Everything rode on continued mass public employment, so he's giving people jobs to do all this rebuilding and the perception of continuous progress.
[01:01:02]  To ensure that people believed this, Napoleon III turned to the still very new science of photography, which had only come about in the 1840s.
[01:01:09]  He commissioned the best photographers of the day to document the renovation of the Louvre, the construction of new bridges and an opera house.
[01:01:15]  These photos were published widely, building on a national and international image of Paris as a city being renewed.
[01:01:21]  Other photographers at the time noted that the pictures Napoleon III commissioned focus on the titanic scale of his new public works projects and the clean lines of new construction.
[01:01:30]  The workers erecting it, by contrast, were always tiny, quote, trapped in the labyrinth of scaffolding, as one commenter put it.
[01:01:36]  The mighty ins for Napoleon stamped on every new project dwarfed the humans who made them.
[01:01:41]  Raybone continues, As Napoleon III's interior minister knew, industry has its injured like war, and the rebuilding of Paris too had its glorious war wounded.
[01:01:50]  In 1855, Napoleon III ordered the construction of a convalescent asylum to care for workers injured during the building works.
[01:01:57]  Charles Negra visited the asylum around 1858 to photograph its buildings, patients, and staff.
[01:02:02]  To get paid, Negra knew he had to toe the party line, yet the bodies he encountered had been wounded in the war for Napoleon III's self-aggrandizement, giving the lie to his image of populist benevolence.
[01:02:13]  Negra's challenge was to celebrate Napoleon III's care for their suffering without revealing his culpability for it.
[01:02:19]  So Negra, and this is, this hasn't happened before.
[01:02:22]  Photographs have not been used in this way, and you can't use paintings and shit like this, right?
[01:02:28]  There are ways to use them for propaganda, sure, but not the way that photographs.
[01:02:32]  There's a sense that a photograph is a depiction of reality in a way that is not the case.
[01:02:37]  Everyone even always understood, like, yeah, the emperor puts up these fucking statues and these reliefs, but like, they're carvings in stone.
[01:02:43]  It's not like literal a photograph.
[01:02:45]  That's reality.
[01:02:47]  And so Napoleon is the first world leader to really comprehensively use photographs in order to like craft an alternate vision of reality in his propaganda.
[01:02:59]  Yeah, it's, you know, it's like as soon as we invent like a new mass media technology, we're like, how can I use this for political propaganda?
[01:03:07]  Yeah.
[01:03:08]  Negra positioned patients and medical staff angled towards a marble bust of Napoleon III.
[01:03:13]  His face clear and theirs indistinct, individually meaningless.
[01:03:16]  Patients could only be shown eating, playing, and reading.
[01:03:20]  Actual medical procedures were forbidden to be shown, as was evidence of permanent disability or injury.
[01:03:25]  Generations of authoritarians would build on the work Napoleon did to turn his photography into part of his cult of personality, but it all started here.
[01:03:35]  It just, yeah, it sucks so much because it's uh you realize that like a lot of these people, you know, the like you said, this empire's populist empire is built on like making sure the population is like loves you and stays in line.
[01:03:53]  And I think another big part of uh like the complete renovation of Paris and like basically these people were employed to destroy their own homes and build newer, uh, different homes and wider boulevards that made it much much harder to do a popular revolution.
[01:04:13]  That is also a big part of why they're redesigning Paris this way.
[01:04:16]  It's like, yes, we keep having governments get overthrown by the people, right?
[01:04:20]  Because like I want to make that harder.
[01:04:21]  I want to make it easier to shoot a lot of people very quickly, right?
[01:04:25]  Right.
[01:04:25]  They're like, they built it.
[01:04:27]  I think I remember it's something like they built it to be just the size of a whole regiment of like cavalry or some shit.
[01:04:35]  Like, yeah, this is this is him basically making it all those like cool barricades from the past like not possible.
[01:04:43]  And that sucks because there's so much institutional history of them building them barricades, dude.
[01:04:48]  Like, what are people going to do with that knowledge?
[01:04:50]  Yeah.

=== No Sequel for Crowe (07:35) ===

[01:04:51]  Now you're never going to get the sequel to Le Miserab.
[01:04:53]  Yeah.
[01:04:54]  That sucks, dude.
[01:04:55]  That's the tragedy.
[01:04:57]  There's not going to be another role for Russell Crowe to sing in.
[01:05:00]  Yeah.
[01:05:01]  Fucking, what's Russell Crowe gonna do with his career?
[01:05:04]  Yeah.
[01:05:04]  Did anyone think about Russell Crowe before they expanded the boulevards?
[01:05:08]  Once think about Russell Crowe.
[01:05:12]  I don't think so.
[01:05:13]  Not once.
[01:05:14]  Not a single time.
[01:05:15]  It's fucking bullshit.
[01:05:16]  And is that his greatest crime?
[01:05:17]  Greater than conquering Indochina?
[01:05:19]  Greater than killing all of those people in the rebuilding projects?
[01:05:23]  You know, greater than, yeah.
[01:05:24]  100%.
[01:05:25]  100%.
[01:05:26]  We're all in agreement.
[01:05:27]  Yeah.
[01:05:28]  Anyway, I love Russell Crowe.
[01:05:32]  Do you love Russell?
[01:05:33]  He's like, he's a character, man.
[01:05:34]  You know, he's just like...
[01:05:35]  How did we get on Russell Crowe talk?
[01:05:37]  I'm going to say it, Sophie.
[01:05:39]  He's the only actor.
[01:05:41]  That's not true.
[01:05:42]  He's the only actor.
[01:05:43]  No one else is an actor.
[01:05:45]  What about Pedro?
[01:05:47]  I know you love Pedro.
[01:05:48]  Yeah, that's not acting.
[01:05:49]  Not like Russell Crowe can.
[01:05:51]  I'd love to see Pedro Pascal badly sing all of the tunes in Le Miserables.
[01:05:57]  Exactly.
[01:05:57]  He couldn't memorize all those numbers.
[01:05:59]  You actually watched that.
[01:06:01]  He probably.
[01:06:02]  It was.
[01:06:03]  It is.
[01:06:03]  Look, there's some good parts to that visually, but man, Russell Crowe is not a singer.
[01:06:09]  It's like that.
[01:06:10]  That's the movie was paid for.
[01:06:11]  It was not.
[01:06:13]  He's in that band.
[01:06:15]  Like something, however many feet of grunts.
[01:06:18]  Yeah, I'm sure he's doing a lot of music.
[01:06:20]  That's what I think.
[01:06:21]  I mean, it's not, I will say this.
[01:06:23]  The Le Miserab adaptation with Russell Crowe is not nearly as bad as the adaptation of Sweeney Todd with fucking Johnny Depp, who it's heartbreaking because I love Sweeney Todd.
[01:06:34]  It's a great music.
[01:06:35]  It's a great musical.
[01:06:36]  Fucking Alan Rickman, incredible judge.
[01:06:39]  Like his voice, very wonderful.
[01:06:41]  The kid they get to play Toby, perfect voice, beautiful voice.
[01:06:45]  And then you've got fucking Sweeney Todd played by like Johnny Depp, outside of all of the other things that are wrong with Johnny Depp, not a strong singer.
[01:06:54]  And for fucking Sweeney Todd, you have to be a strong goddamn singer.
[01:06:58]  It's that's the lead.
[01:07:00]  That's the lead in a Broadway Sondheim musical.
[01:07:05]  Get a good singer.
[01:07:06]  God.
[01:07:07]  Someone like Russell Crowe.
[01:07:08]  Get Russell Crowe.
[01:07:10]  Make him be Sweeney Todd.
[01:07:11]  Yes.
[01:07:12]  They should have done it, dude.
[01:07:14]  That's the solution.
[01:07:15]  That's the solution.
[01:07:16]  Oh, I'm glad we figured all this out.
[01:07:19]  Matt Lieb, got any pluggables to plug before we roll out for the day?
[01:07:22]  So much to plug.
[01:07:25]  Follow me on Instagram at Matt Lieb Jokes.
[01:07:28]  But I do a podcast.
[01:07:29]  I do a couple of podcasts that are TV rewatch podcasts.
[01:07:34]  And Pod Yourself a Gun is a Sopranos podcast.
[01:07:37]  And I'm going to be doing a live show of Pod Yourself a Gun at San Francisco Sketch Fest Saturday, January 28th at 10 p.m. Piano Fight Main Stage.
[01:07:52]  Please, if you like the Sopranos or The Wire, because now we do the Wire podcast, check that out.
[01:07:59]  Go to sfsketchfest.com, look up Pod Yourself a Gun and buy tickets, please, because that would be support.
[01:08:06]  Matt.
[01:08:07]  Support me.
[01:08:09]  I'll say Matt.
[01:08:10]  Robert and I have a couple events coming up, don't we, Robert?
[01:08:13]  That seems like a lie.
[01:08:15]  Okay.
[01:08:16]  One of them is a live virtual event that we are doing with Moment House and featuring Margaret Kildoy.
[01:08:23]  It's a Behind the Bastards live stream show that will be happening on December 8th at 6 p.m. Pacific.
[01:08:29]  And if you can't make it, we'll be on demand for up to a week.
[01:08:34]  And you can get tickets at momenthouse.co/slash BTB.
[01:08:38]  And it should be splattered all over socials.
[01:08:42]  Is that how they say that?
[01:08:43]  Splattered?
[01:08:44]  I'm going with it.
[01:08:45]  Yes, splattered all over, sploooged all over social media.
[01:08:49]  And if I remember, I will link it in the description.
[01:08:53]  And Robert and I will also be at SF Sketchfest.
[01:08:57]  Hell yeah.
[01:08:58]  Yeah.
[01:08:58]  Hell yeah.
[01:08:59]  We will.
[01:08:59]  Yeah.
[01:09:00]  So, you know, what if we went on strike at Sketchfest?
[01:09:04]  You know, Matt, what if we struck for more.
[01:09:07]  Let me, what do I remember about Sketchfest?
[01:09:09]  They gave us a bunch of those waters that are like in big beer cans.
[01:09:14]  The liquid.
[01:09:14]  Let's strike for more of those.
[01:09:15]  Yeah.
[01:09:16]  Let's strike for more of that shit.
[01:09:17]  More liquid death.
[01:09:18]  And I think also, I forget, I don't know if Audible is a sponsor again this year, but if they are, I say we strike for more free credit codes and gift cards.
[01:09:30]  Because I like audiobooks and I don't like having to pay.
[01:09:33]  I don't, I love audiobooks and I hate paying for things.
[01:09:36]  So help us, help Matt and I strike against the good people at SF Sketch Fest who have volunteered, who have invited us to perform.
[01:09:47]  But definitely buy tickets, but also definitely buy tickets, but also support our strike against their evil not giving me like right now.
[01:09:56]  I would like one of those liquid death cans.
[01:09:59]  They don't have it and I'm furious, man.
[01:10:01]  They make caffeinated.
[01:10:02]  Anyways, I believe Behind the Bastards will be there on January 20th.
[01:10:06]  I don't have any more information when we're recording this, but I'm sure you'll see more in the future.
[01:10:11]  Also by Robert's book after the revolution.
[01:10:14]  Yes.
[01:10:15]  Did I do it?
[01:10:16]  Did I do the plugs?
[01:10:18]  Yeah.
[01:10:18]  All right.
[01:10:19]  Episode fucking over.
[01:10:20]  Bye-bye.
[01:10:21]  Goddamn right.
[01:10:23]  Bye.
[01:10:25]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:10:29]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 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.
[01:10:47]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[01:10:54]  Coming up this seasonal Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
[01:10:59]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower.
[01:11:04]  Or it's really like a stone sculpture.
[01:11:06]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[01:11:09]  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.
[01:11:19]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
[01:11:24]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[01:11:31]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[01:11:34]  Yes, which by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[01:11:38]  I actually, I thought it was.
[01:11:39]  I got that wrong.
[01:11:40]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[01:11:41]  We're pretty close, though.
[01:11:42]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:11:50]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[01:11:58]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[01:12:07]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[01:12:11]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
[01:12:15]  Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:12:22]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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