Nicolae Ceaușescu emerges from a tumultuous Romanian history, tracing his path from a neglected child in Skornesesti to a communist underground operative arrested at 15. His early imprisonment alongside Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej taught him strategic silence during the volatile reigns of King Carol II and Marshal Ion Antonescu, who facilitated the Holocaust. While the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact stripped Bessarabia from Romania, Ceaușescu leveraged his low-profile survival tactics to infiltrate the future ruling circle, setting the stage for his eventual dictatorship. Ultimately, this biography reveals how personal ambition and historical chaos converged to create one of history's most brutal regimes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Behind the Bastards00:14:49
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Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
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Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
And also, at the same time, a podcast where I explore my Boston accent and see how much better I can make it.
And to help me today, we have professional Boston coach, Jeff May.
Jeff, welcome to the program.
Hey there, kid.
What's going on?
Wow.
Incredible.
Now, of course, yeah, I prefer to do my accent a little bit more authentic.
Let me run this one by you, Jeff.
Boy, Croikey, aim for boss.
That's more of a North Shore accent.
Like, that's what all clothes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's very much if you were to go up to like, you know, like Malden or something, like really get up there.
That's where you have it.
So the regional dialect is wild out there.
Critical question.
Brockton part of Boston or not?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, okay, I'll put one.
All right.
So you're on Jamie's side of this.
How much is she paying you?
But let me tell you.
I thought that cackle was in honor of Jamie.
But here's the thing, though.
Thank you, Jeff.
Is that I live 3,000 miles away from my hometown, right?
So if where I am now, when people ask where I'm from, I tell them Boston.
In reality, I'm from a small farming hamlet in central Massachusetts called Charlton, regionally related to Worcester, Massachusetts.
So it's hard for me when people are like, Jeff's from Boston.
And I'm like, yeah.
And then when someone presses me a little bit, I'm like, okay, not really, though.
But I've always counted, I mean, because Brockton, Brockton's like the sort of heart of fighting in Boston, which is something that I did for you.
That makes sense.
That makes sense.
So I relate that as Brockton once, and I did want to fight somebody.
Everyone would have fought you there.
Jeff's Boston accent was so much better than yours, Robert.
I'm sorry.
His was really strong.
It was strong.
It wasn't regionalized well, but it was strong.
Yours was very Marky Mark.
Mackie Mac.
The friggin Wahlberg.
You should do an episode on him.
That was so crazy.
The only people that like the Wahlbergs are the people that are related to the Wahlbergs.
Have you ever eaten at a Wahl Burger's?
I would rather fucking die.
It is absolutely.
Is that a real place?
I don't want to be mean, but it is the worst burger I've ever had in my entire life.
Well, so, you know, I think Mark Wahlberg getting a burger chain is evidence of one of the many crimes of capitalism.
And you know who hated capitalism?
Oh.
Donny Wahlberg.
That might be true.
But also the subject of today's episode, Nikolai Ceausescu, dictator of Romania.
We just start doing an entire thing about the Wahlberg family and never get to the actual topic.
I wouldn't put that in there.
I could do it.
I could do an hour.
I know.
I mean, we are talking about one corrupt family and another corrupt family.
So the Ceaușescus and the Wahlbergs, who has caused more death and destruction?
So, Robert.
Impossible.
I need you to say, welcome to, and you're ready for it, go behind the bastards.
Welcome to behind the bastards.
No, that's not it.
That was, you nailed it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jeff.
I got to be 100%.
Like, I thought that you had just replayed what I said back to me.
Yeah, yeah.
I've been practicing my mimicry, like whatever kind of bird mimics things.
You're like a Machijay.
Yeah.
Yeah, something like that.
Jeff, what do you know about Nikolai Ceausescu?
I try to not know as much as I can about Romanian people.
I know that he wore a lot of nylon sweatsuits.
He had a lot of cologne on.
Yeah.
I mean, look, if you want, because Romania is kind of like edge of the Balkans, right?
Sometimes it's considered part of the Balkans.
Some people will be like, nah, it's Eastern Europe.
It's not really in the Balkans.
Whatever.
This is not the place to litigate that.
But what you can say, what I can say about Romanians, which I can also say about Serbians and Bosnians and a number of other people in that area, is that their tracksuit game is incredibly strong.
Unbelievable.
They're like extras and the sopranos.
It's amazing.
If you've got a good Adidas track suit in that part of the world, you're basically a king.
Just squatting and smoking cigarettes at rules.
Romania is an interesting country.
And Nikolai Ceaușescu is interesting because we've got all these communist dictators like Stalin, who there are a lot of folks today, particularly on the internet, who will defend these guys, a lot of like weird authoritarian communists who have never met a dictator they don't like.
And one of the things that's interesting about our subject today, Ceachescu, is that he is the one that no one will defend.
I mean, I'm sure you can find a couple of Ceachescu stands out there, but almost nobody will back this guy up because he sucked so comprehensively.
It's funny.
It's funny when you look at it.
It's fascinating.
Yeah.
When you look at the old Soviet bloc and you look at like some of the dictators they had and you look at the old, like the older people that lived through it, then they're like, well, you know, sometimes you have to make hard decisions.
And it's like hard.
The guy killed like 100,000 people.
And they're like, well, you know, ruling is difficult.
It is very interesting to see the apologists of like the really terrible people in Russia.
They're just like, sometimes you settle for despet, it's a lot of people.
I like, what I do like is that his fate was sealed on, I believe, if I recall correctly, Christmas.
Yeah, he was him being murdered was a Christmas present for the whole Romanian nation and really the world.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit.
So we're going to talk about Nikolai Ceausescu, but we're also going to have to talk about Romania and give some history because I don't think most Americans know a lot about Romania.
It's a part of the world that, you know, it's interesting because like there was a period of time where Ceachescu was kind of like the good communist.
He was very close friends with Richard Nixon.
He was spoken of positively by Ronald Reagan.
It's amazing.
He's like a Stalinist who Nixon loved and Reagan was like, he's a good guy.
It's wild stuff.
Those are two people whose endorsements I could go without.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, but before we get into how he came to power and what he did, we're going to have to talk a little bit of history because there's some context that is important if you're going to understand how a guy like what do you know that he was when he was younger, he was extremely hot.
That we can discuss, Sophie.
I definitely don't see that because he looks like a Muppet as he gets older.
He's like a Muppet.
Yeah, that's Romania.
Yeah.
It's the land of the Muppets.
Well, it was known as Dacia, D-A-C-I-A, back in the day in like the classical period.
If you've ever seen, like, read a book about the Roman Empire and it talks about them fighting the Dacians and conquering the Dacians, that's Romania prior to Roman contact.
Dacia is like one of the last provinces that gets conquered by the Roman Empire.
And it's one of the first they abandoned.
So they're only hanging around there for a little bit less than 300 years and then they leave in 275 BC.
I do like the fuck this energy that they bring to living in Romania.
It's too dark.
Too many mountains.
There's like vampires are going to be a thing here.
Yeah, they're like, we conquered a lemon.
We're going to get the hell out of here.
Yeah.
Well, they kind of get out of here.
Obviously, like we talk about, oh, the Roman Empire conquers this place or leaves this place.
275 BC, when the Roman Empire leaves, most people living in the region probably would not have noticed much of a change because for one thing, they're still trading with the Romans.
There's still a lot of Roman soldiers in the region.
And in fact, the reason that we call it Romania now is because the like Roman soldiers who were stationed there like bred with the local population.
And this is something they're pretty proud of.
Like Romania, like the name Romania is kind of harkening back to the fact that there is a lot of Roman ancestry in the area now.
This ties back to for everyone that took like seventh and eighth grade languages.
Remember when you would take like an introduction to like Spanish or French or Latin or whatever?
And they would say, you know, whatever language you're learning, Spanish or French, they're like, they're one of the five Romance languages.
That's my, that's where I'm from in Massachusetts.
That's the accent.
And it's like you'd hear Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian.
And when they say Romanian, you're like, what?
Like, why?
Like, why, why them?
That doesn't make sense on a map that that would be the language.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is weird, especially since, again, if you're in that region and further into the Balkans, the language they're speaking is very different, right?
But, but in Romania, it is this kind of like Latinized tongue.
So that's cool.
Roman romance.
There's nothing as sexy as a man making a pizza and doing violent hand gestures.
I mean, you're not wrong about that.
Yeah.
The center of Roman Dacia is a place that is known today as Transylvania.
That's actually like the province that the Romans conquered.
So again, when I say they left because of Dracula, that is historically true.
Although Dracula didn't exist yet.
Yeah, we're going to talk about him for just a little bit later.
Did you do have you done Vlad yet?
Vlad Tepes?
No, no, no.
We are kind of doing a little bit of Vlad Tepis right now.
Let me tell you real quick.
I know you're about to do that, but as somebody who taught about the Middle Ages, and I used to do for my literacy classes, I would have them write a research paper, and I'm like, you can pick anybody.
I'm so, I got so burnt out reading term papers from eighth graders about Vlad Tepes.
And it's not that he's not interesting, it's just that it's boring when you read the same paper 30 times a year.
Well, Jeff, I'm going to try to give you a little bit different of a paper because we're going to be focusing on a slightly an aspect of Vlad's time running Romania that people don't tend to talk about as much.
Obviously, the thing everyone knows about Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, is that he impaled a bunch of people, specifically a bunch of Ottoman soldiers.
And if you like hang out and read sort of the weird right-wing kind of retellings of medieval history, a lot of them will focus on him as like the shield of the West.
And this is something that within the Romanian right-wing, it gets talked about a lot, that like Romania was what protected Christendom from the Ottoman Empire.
And Vlad Tepes, you know, was this was this heroic figure who was hard enough to like keep the Muslims out.
This is not in France.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is not accurate to the actual history.
Pieces of it are accurate, but the broad picture is wrong.
So first off, his name was legitimately Vlad Dracula because his dad was Dracul, which was a name he got when he got given an award by the Holy Roman Empire Emperor.
I think it was Sigismund.
And Dracula means son of the dragon because Dracul means the dragon.
But it also at the same time means son of the devil, which is why the guy who wrote the Dracula book thought he was a good pick for a horrible monster character name.
I like that you were like the guy.
Like his name isn't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That dude.
What's his name?
Bram?
The Dracula guy, but not Dracula.
Sharon Lewis and the other guy.
Yeah, Bram Stoke.
The guy who...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
From the shitty vampire book.
The first Twilight, we could say.
Yeah, the prelude to Twilight before we really figured out what we wanted from our vampires.
Sparkles and shizzled abs.
That's right.
That's right.
No cum gutters on the original Dracula, probably because he was riddled with various diseases.
I want to see Gary Oldman have like a huge six-pack in that movie with that stupid little hairdo, but he's just like, check out my rippling abs.
This is the thing we should be using that AI shit to do is go back and go back to like movies that were made decades ago and give the male leads back then who didn't have access to modern fitness technology just unbelievably shredded cum gutters.
Like go back to Gone with the Wind and throw some cum gutters in red and throw some cum gutters on that guy who dies too, you know, the Confederate boy soldier.
Vlad Tepes and the Ottomans00:13:41
I would like to see.
Come gutters all of them.
The rock into kill a mockingbird.
Like the rock.
And to kill a rocking bird.
Yeah.
Where he actually just kills everybody in town in order to stop that guy from getting the rock bottom as they're trying to take out.
I think that's a good idea.
Also, put Stone Cold Steve Austin in that the oh shit.
Now I've gone off the rails.
Citizen Kane.
We could do that.
No, no, no.
The movie where that guy goes to Washington, D.C. Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
But that man goes to Washington.
Yeah, throw Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mr. Smith goes to Washington and have him do a Stone Cold Stunner and all those old Congress fools.
Stone Cold Smith goes to...
What does this have to do with our script?
Very, very little.
The actual historical Dracula, who is kind of your first, he's often seen as like one of kind of the founding figures of Romania in like Romanian nationalist discourse because he's kind of this first figure on the scene.
And this is back when Romania is called Wallachia, who becomes super famous.
And he becomes famous, yeah, for the impaling people.
Vlad Tepes is the ruler of Wallachia on three non-consecutive occasions, which happens a lot, actually, in their history at this point.
They've got this weird system by which they pick who their ruler is going to be, where you have these basically this group of nobles who gets to vote on who's going to run things.
And it leads to a shitload of turnover.
From 1418 to 1476, Wallachia has 11 princes who are in power for about five years each.
So he gets into power, gets thrown out of power, comes back into power several times.
Common in Europe?
Yeah, common in Europe.
But in Romania, it is a particularly violent system.
And this makes sense when you look at just kind of where Romania is located, right?
Not only are they right next to the Ottoman Empire, but they're right next to Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire.
And they are just constantly dealing with different groups coming in and trying to basically run things.
So it's not only the Ottomans that they're fighting.
And repeatedly, Romanian leaders will side with the Ottomans in order to protect themselves against the Hungarians or whatever.
Like this is a common thing.
So Dracula, like actual Vlad Dracula, spends a decent chunk of his career fighting alongside the Ottomans.
He also, for a point of it when he's technically a vassal to the Ottomans, is leading like an illegal underground war against them.
All this stuff is going on.
But I think what's more to the point is that rather than kind of being a shield against like the Muslim world who is defending Christendom, Vlad is more concerned with maintaining his relative independence from an ocean of surrounding threats who covet Transylvania and the rest of Romania.
Transylvania is specifically the area that the Romanians fight with the Hungarians over a lot, and it changes hands all the fucking time.
And he is a pretty brutal, Vlad Dracula, a pretty brutal ruler to his own people.
And this is the thing that gets discussed less.
We talk about the impaling of all of these Ottoman soldiers as he's trying to throw back this invasion from the Sultan.
And I want to quote now from the wonderful book Children of the Night by Paul Kinyon, because this was a little piece of Dracula history that I hadn't heard.
It was around this time, during the first couple of years of Dracula's rule, that he organized a notorious feast for all the beggars of Targoviste.
The event appeared to be a great humanitarian gesture.
The hall was hired and tables were filled with food and wine.
Invitations were put out around the city to the cripples, the blind, the diseased, and the destitute.
They all congregated in a large wooden hall, toasting Dracula's generosity.
But towards the end of the meal, someone noticed smoke coming from the walls.
They ran to the door, only to find Dracula's troops had locked it from the outside and set the place ablaze.
Many hundreds were trapped and a bonfire of souls was left burning into the dark Wallachian sky.
The bonfire of the beggars, as it became known, was a warning.
Becking would not be tolerated.
It was a drain on the finances of the most decent and generous in society, said Dracula, a crime as evil as theft.
Wallachians were uneasy.
It was one thing killing the rich, but to massacre the poor in such violent circumstances.
On the other hand, Dracula's tactics did seem to be working, and crime fell.
It was said that Dracula's guards would test the townsfolk by leaving a purse full of gold coins in a busy marketplace.
When the guards came to collect it in the evening, the purse was always left untouched.
The admiration for authoritarian solutions would also resonate down the centuries.
So that is, this is kind of like, yeah.
That's got to be effective because, you know, of the murder.
Yeah, yeah.
When you murder enough people, you can decrease the crime rate.
And this is a lesson that no Romanian leader is ever going to forget.
And it kind of like he, Vlad is sort of setting the tone here for an awful lot of their history, right down to the fact that you've got this kind of peasant population that is getting mistreated by its leaders enough that many people are starving in the streets.
And so the solution of the ruler is, well, what if we just light those people on fire?
This would be, this is like a Facebook comments section gone to life.
Like this is, this is what a lot of people from my hometown would like to do.
Oh, Matt Walsh is totally down for this.
Oh, 100%.
Yeah.
The Daily Wire is already writing a think piece on how Vlad Dracula had the right, how literal Dracula had the right idea on improving our civic spaces.
Yeah, the New York Times is going to post an editorial that says, are there too many poor people?
Yeah.
What if we just light them on fire?
You know?
And I think, you know, this is one of those areas where my moral sort of compass is at odds with the intellectual side of me.
Because on a moral level, I think it's always okay to set fires.
But clearly, sometimes fires can be bad.
And this is something I'm still grappling with, Jeff.
Yeah, I mean, well, fires can have disastrous results, but fire itself is awesome.
Like I keep fire with me when I'm recording at all times.
I have to have an open flame near me.
Or else, what's the point?
What if wolves came in while I was recording?
Right.
You're not going to be able to keep the wolves away if you don't have a fire.
Like, I'm in San Francisco right now as we record this, and I have a fire on me at all times because famously, San Francisco is a city with a wonderful history of fires that I want to celebrate.
You know, all of the good fires San Francisco.
It's called knowing your history.
That's right.
That's right.
So Romania in the years after Dracula, who gets murdered before he's very old.
Again, none of these Romanian princes last all that long.
So Romania spends a lot of most of the medieval period as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.
And this actually, this state of affairs lasts until pretty recently.
The country does not get its independence until the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878.
It becomes an independent kingdom with a Hohenzollern regent.
So, you know, whenever they have these, because this happens a lot where you're having these chunks of Europe become independent from either their former masters or from the Ottomans or whatever.
And they all need kings, right?
Because it's still the attitude in the 1800s that every new country ought to have some sort of king.
So there's this kind of like constant, it causes a lot of conflict.
This is a lot of what sets up World War I.
But Romania, because of how close it is to Germany, winds up with a Hohenzollern region, which like theoretically should mean that they're going to side with the Germans on everything.
That's actually not what happens in practice, but that's certainly what the Germans think when they make sure Romania gets this guy who's related to the Kaiser.
Joe Tori are friends, yeah?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's also the mess that by the time World War I rules around, like the country has this Hohenzollern king, but it also has a queen who's one of Queen Victoria's grandchildren, which is also super common, right?
Everybody's got one of Victoria's kids or grandkids somewhere in their fucking royal family.
Yeah, they're collecting them.
They're like Pokemon.
Yeah, exactly.
And the Hohenzollerns have caught at least one.
And she's actually, she's actually kind of rad.
They have this horrible war in like 1912, 1913, where Romania tries, because when Romania becomes independent, they don't have Transylvania, right?
Transylvania is still property of the Hungarians.
So, at one point, they invade Hungary right before World War I, and it goes just absolutely terribly.
But Queen Mary, who's this victorious grandkid, winds up like working as a combat nurse in this frontline position.
And it really, she becomes very beloved by the Romanian people.
And she seems to be legitimately the only royal in Europe during this period of time who doesn't completely suck.
Because while the rest of them are starting a series of wars that will kill tens of millions, she's just sort of like working as a trauma nurse the entire time.
She's like trying to do good.
Yeah, she seems dope, actually.
The Hungarians, I don't know if you've ever covered this on the thing, but what do you know about like their nomenclature, right?
Like the history of that name.
That they were just the mass.
So it was the Magyars, right?
Yeah, so they're Magyars.
And then when people saw them, they were like, ah, they fight like the Huns.
It's sort of like how we called Native Americans Indians.
We were just like, ah, you're Indian.
It's just the whole like, ah, you guys are Hungarians.
You're like the Huns.
And they're like, no, we are our own people.
That reminds me of where the word barbarian came from, which is that the Greeks just thought everyone who wasn't Greek sounded like they were going bar all the time.
Yeah, it's very like, oh, Dirk, Derka, Dirk.
Yeah, racism before racism.
It's that deep racism.
It's true, pure racism.
Yeah, it's absolutely uncut by the later, you know, the corruption that went into racism later.
Yeah, before racism got so commercial, you know.
Yeah, just a bunch of guys looking at people who live over the hill near them and saying, sounds they, they all talk weird.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They did it for the love of the game.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the honus wagner of racism.
That's the Europeans in this.
Well, at least in ancient history.
Yeah.
So yeah.
So you got Romania.
They have this disastrous war where they try to take, and the reason why they lose the war, because it goes well for like a day, and then everybody gets sick from mosquitoes and starts dying, which is not an uncommon story.
This tale is old as time, really.
Yeah.
But outside of that, when kind of World War I starts to break out, Romania is kind of in a decent position because they've got this king, their first king, Carol I, who's in charge right up until 1914.
And he drops kind of right before the war drums start sounding.
And the king who follows Ferdinand is a pretty smart guy and is like, I don't think World War I is going to go well for anybody.
I don't want to get involved in this shit.
I just would like to, I can sell food and fuel because Romania's got a hell of a lot of oil.
I'll just sell that shit to the Germans and we won't send all of our guys off to die, which is a good strategy and would have been a winner if they had stuck with it.
But they are not going to stick with it.
Now, part of the reason why the new king is kind of hesitant to get involved in World War I and doesn't want to like is because he doesn't want to risk upsetting the peasants.
Romanian political history in this period up to pretty much The modern day, a huge amount of it is kind of based around the struggle between these urbanized populations, which are still a very small chunk of the country in the late 1800s, and the majority of the country, which is the peasantry.
And the peasants, especially in the late 1900s, late 1800s, they're not quite serfs, but they also are basically renting land from the whatever noble owns it and paying them kind of ruinous taxes in order to get to farm it.
So it's kind of a worse situation than being a serf because they're actually like they're technically free, but they have to pay their boss, being you know, whatever noble is in charge of the area, for the privilege of getting to work the land enough to produce enough food to not starve to death, which is a bad, like one of the most common foods that Romanian peasants live on in this period of time is like cheese that's infested with maggots.
That and like pickled vegetables is a lot of their diet.
That's right.
It's like still, it's like illegal, but it's like a super delicacy from there, right?
They still do that.
I don't know if it's from Romania.
I know there's a cheese in Sicily that's all maggoty.
Like I think there's probably a few different versions of it.
But back in the day, it is not a nice food, right?
I think maybe now it's become a delicacy.
But then it's like, well, we're not going to not eat this cheese just because it's filled with maggots because otherwise we'll die.
So speaking of maggots, the products and services that support this podcast will add maggots to any order you make.
Hit us up.
How to Earn Your Leisure00:03:03
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.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season of Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, take to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
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?
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.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
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.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities, not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
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We're back, and I just had a hoagie made entirely out of maggots.
Delicious.
And a maggot protein.
The British Revolt in Romania00:15:33
It was nice.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Maggot proteins, the cleanest burning protein out there.
You can't do better than maggots.
That's the motto of this podcast.
Behind the back.
You can't do better than maggots.
No, no.
It's the true super feud.
If you just get all you actually need in your diet, just a 50-50 mix of maggots and acai berries, and you'll never die.
Yeah, I looked up Kasu Marzu just to see that's the cheese.
And boy, that's the Romanian one.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like a pecorino from sheep's milk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is not a delicacy at the time.
Yeah.
So one of the big reasons that King Frederick doesn't want to go to war, doesn't want to get involved in World War I is because he doesn't feel like he has a good handle on the peasantry kind of as they go into this period.
And a big part of why is that there's an uprising in like 1907, right?
Which is pretty recent still in 1914.
And this uprising, this peasants' uprising starts because this guy named, I think it's basically pronounced John Dohescu, traveled to a protest outside of the mayor's house in a town called Flamazi.
And Dohescu and his fellow peasants, again, they're basically starving.
This feudal system that governs their lives is super corrupt.
And the way that it works is you've got these royals who own the land, and these royals basically hire a group of middlemen to manage it for them.
And so the middlemen get their money off of skimming what they can off the top.
And anything they're skimming is extra shit that the peasants are paying for, right?
In addition to the pretty ruinously high taxes that the royals are imposing.
Kenyon in his book notes that the peasantry in Romania is, quote, so comprehensively exploited that they were effectively paying their landlords for the privilege of working.
So there's this protest outside of the mayor's house and these peasants, including John Dohescu, wind up outside yelling at this estate manager, who's again kind of like this middle manager type guy.
And he throws a rock at one of them and it hits Dohescu in the eye.
This, for whatever reason, starts shit.
You know, sometimes like...
Yeah, that's going to start shit.
You ever been hit in the eye with a rock?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're not going to throw a punch after that.
No, sure, sure.
But this also starts shit on a bigger scale.
Like, everyone gets outraged on the behalf of this guy.
Shit like this, I don't know, it happens here too.
Like you'll have the same kind of horrible violence being done by the same people every day.
And then one day, suddenly thousands of people take to the streets, right?
And this is that version of that thing happening in Romania.
So the peasants around Dohescu form a mob and they start going through town and attacking all of the middlemen that these local aristocrats have been using to manage their land.
And for a variety of reasons, most of these middlemen are Jewish, right?
That's just who the aristocracy is like.
Yeah, we'll have these guys.
It's actually kind of a conscious decision by the aristocracy because, like, if you have, like, you have this group of people managing your stuff and they're all Jewish, when the peasants get angry, you can just use racism to deflect from the fact that you're really the one responsible for their suffering.
Um, so that that works very well in this case.
And so, the peasants' revolt that follows is both an act of protest against economic exploitation that is very justified and a vicious, rate, a vicious racist pogrom that is not justified.
You know what's funny is every time I do the show, that phrase vicious racist pogrom shows up.
And I'm just like, oh, yeah, let's bring it on.
Let's see, let's see who's doing terrible things to decent people.
To be fair, we keep bringing you on for episodes that are about Europe from like 1800 to 1950.
So, you're going to have to talk about pogroms.
It's going to be nowhere that doesn't have them.
A little playfully violent anti-Semitism to get us through the day every time.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, yeah, good stuff.
Good stuff.
So, the peasants' revolt starts with these peasant mobs marching through towns, dragging Jews out of their homes, and then lighting the homes on fire.
Um, but as the revolt wears on, because it's 1907, 1905, Russia's just had an unsuccessful socialist revolution.
And a lot of these revolutionaries who are kind of like on the run from the czar wind up heading over to Romania and they start preaching to the masses that, like, hey, guys, the Jews as a group are not responsible for your suffering, it's the property holding class who's exploiting you.
Um, and this actually has a positive impact.
There's there's less pogroms kind of later in the peasants' uprising, they were just attacking rich people, so that's good, yeah.
They relaxed a little bit, yeah.
Um, the whole thing comes to a head in April of 1907 when 6,000 peasants gather with axes to protest for redistribution of land, right?
And what they're protesting for is like, we want to own the land that we live on and work our entire lives rather than it being owned by some guy who can just like jack up the rent and starve us effectively.
So, the government of Romania is like, absolutely not, because the people who have control of the artillery are the people who own the land.
So, those people just have the military fire artillery directly into the crowd, killing 600 people in a matter of minutes.
Yeah, I know it's pretty, well, actually, by the end, I mean, the whole revolt, they kill about 11,000 people.
Um, so it, they do, they killed that's a good number of people killed.
That's pretty good, pretty good repressive.
It's solid for a few minutes, if I'm being 100% honest.
Like, it's it takes Manhattan project level shit to get numbers like that so quickly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, this goes on for a few months, but like 11,000 people, it's pretty bloody.
So, King Ferdinand, who takes over seven years after this, is like, we just tested the peasantry a little bit, and it we got closer to losing control than we want to admit.
So, I really don't want to like have to conscript a bunch of people and deal with the problems that that might cause.
Yeah, we dipped the toes in a little bit and found out that we get butchered.
So, yeah, and staying out of World War I absolutely would have been the right call for Romania.
But here's the problem, Jeff: British people exist, and British people keep whispering in the Romanian king's ear, Oi Gavna, you want that Transylvania, do you?
We can get what are you doing?
That's new.
It's my English oxen.
What the fuck are you doing?
I'm doing, I'm doing an English accent, Sophie.
He was like, Bruv, night, bruv, in a Jesus Christ.
We got a wool coming in, bruv.
So, so that's what the British Empire is whispering into the ears of King Frederick.
And basically the promise they're making him is again, like, hey, you, you guys are like, Transylvania is majority Romanian population.
It's controlled by Hungary.
We agree that's unjust.
If you come into the war on our side and like help us throw a wrench in the fucking German war effort, we'll make sure that you wind up with this greater Romania thing that all the nationalists in Romania are super gung-ho about when the war finally ends.
And eventually, this kind of thought of getting Transylvania back and all of these others, a couple of other provinces too, is too enticing for the king and sort of the nationalists in the Romanian government to not try to do.
So in 1916, Romania enters World War I on the side of the Entente and they attack the Central Powers.
This briefly goes well for about six weeks.
Romania takes back like a bunch of Transylvania.
They take a couple of other areas from Hungary.
They're like, they're having a real good time for like six weeks.
But then the Germans show up.
Now, the Imperial German Army is an army so competent that it took the entire world to beat them in this war.
Like literally everyone else.
It's a good reminder that the German military, and obviously, you know, when you trace back to Otto von Bismarck and basically his description of creating a country based on the world's greatest army, like that was his whole thing.
Yeah.
And like, so like, yeah, like that's gonna be, that's gonna be a big deal because they're so, they're just so good at war.
That's been like their whole thing.
They've been training for this.
And they are, the Germans at this point are obviously, they are tied up two years into the war on the Western Front, which has killed more men more quickly than probably any other war in history prior to this point.
They're also fighting all of Russia, which is a fifth of the planet's landmass, not that far from Romania.
And then Romania enters.
And so the Germans take like a tiny little chunk of their forces and they send it towards Romania and they just curb stomp them.
It's like, how fuck you?
Like, yeah, within days, it becomes clear that like, oh, they are going to occupy the entire country.
Romania will no longer be in it.
Like, they're coming for the capital.
The royals start fleeing, right?
They are fucking getting the hell out of town.
And so the British decide, well, first off, this didn't work.
Clearly, Romania did not have what it took to take the Germans out of the fight.
Yeah, they're like, so we fucked around.
And it turns out we found out.
They found out.
Yeah.
Which, you know, as the British Empire is always our preference, someone other than us find out.
But now we have this problem.
Romania has like basically the largest oil reserves in Europe, certainly at this point.
And Germany does not have any oil, right, on its own, pretty much.
So the Germans are about to gain access to these oil fields that would effectively allow them to gain an enormous material advantage in this war that is kind of a squeaker.
So the Germans send over, or the British send over a guy, this lieutenant colonel named John Norton Griffiths, who sounds like a war crimes guy and is about to do him a war crime because he lights every oil field in Romania on fire.
It's just like, set it all on fire.
Fuck this shit.
He does like a Saddam.
Yeah, I was going to say, that's like Iraq.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It like blots out the sun.
It's obviously it's an ecological disaster, but it's a military success.
He does stop the Germans from gaining access to Romania's fuel reserves, which, you know, is the smart play on a million.
It's just awful.
But yeah, that's weird.
It's the salting the earth of natural resources.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Romania does not do well in World War I.
They get occupied by the Germans, but a couple of years later, the Germans eventually do lose the war.
And when they lose the war, Romania actually kind of winds up in a really good position.
And we're not going to get into like all of the wheeling and dealing that occurs, but you know, a lot of folks feel like they kind of, a lot of folks who side with the central powers kind of feel like they get fucked over.
This is particularly an issue with the Italians, right?
Where Italy's like, we did all this fucking dying fighting Austria, and we got basically nothing at the end of the war.
Like, what the fuck is wrong with you people?
Romania does really well.
They get Transylvania.
Like, the British, to their credit, actually do give them what they had promised here.
And so, after World War I, Romania is like 30 or 40% larger and has a substantially larger population, a whole lot of resources, and really productive land.
That's called buying low and selling high.
That's right.
They're like, we're not going to do much to help you win this war, but we will reap the benefits.
They bought the dip.
Yeah, right?
European civilization.
Yeah, Transylvania to the moon.
Yeah.
So after World War I, Romania is in this really interesting position.
They are subject to a lot of the same forces that are, you know, going wild in Russia.
This is the height of the Russian Civil War.
So the left has this huge surge in popularity.
But Romania also has a pretty stable constitutional monarchy with this like parliamentary system, right?
And so because, and I, you know, it's interesting that it works this way, but rather than kind of all of the energy on the left that is obviously like plays a huge role in what happens in Russia, rather than that leading to the establishment of a super radical political party, left-wing political party in Romania that wants to get rid of the monarchy, change the nature of the state entirely, institute a socialist state,
they get a left-wing political party called the National Peasants' Party, which is very large.
I think it wins like 78% of the vote in its most successful election.
Jesus.
And is advocating for like a lot.
Well, it's because they're saying, like, we want land reform, right?
This thing that they had just had an uprising about.
But they don't ever get like an organized, large communist movement.
And in fact, for most of the 20s and 30s, there's maybe a thousand like organized communists in all of Romania, which is not a ton.
Like there's several million people in the country.
So it's a very small population.
Now, the organized far right is a lot larger than the communist left.
Obviously, it's still a smaller chunk of the country because Romania, the Romanian people tend to vote sort of progressive left in this period.
But the organized far right in Romania is very aggressive and very organized, and they start carrying out a lot of violent fascist marches and particularly attacks against the Jewish population of towns and cities.
This becomes more and more common in the 20s and 30s.
So, yeah, this is the country and the political situation that our hero for this week, Nikolai Ceaușescu, is born into on January 23rd, 1918.
So he like comes into being right as this, you know, post-World War I Romania starts to be a thing.
His father, whose name is Andruta, owned a small farm in a village called Skornesesti.
And I'm, I'm going to try on the names here.
I listen to pronunciations.
I'm not going to get all of these right, guys.
I'm sorry.
There's a lot of Romanian names, and I, I, I, I, look, I, I, I, Skornesesti is probably close enough.
Uh, his dad raised sheep and worked part-time as a tailor.
The family was about as poor as it is possible to be.
Uh, and any money that did come into them went swiftly to Andruda's drinking habits.
So, he is a religious extremist and an alcoholic.
Um, and for mystery, mysterious reasons, uh, Nikolai Ceausescu is going to decide he does not want to live around this guy for much longer.
Um, very shocking.
So there's this journalist, a Romanian journalist, Catalan Gruja, who interviewed people in Ceausescu's hometown after his demise.
Here's what he writes about Andruda.
He didn't take care of his kids.
He stole.
He drank.
He was quick to fight and he swore, said the old priest from Skornocesti.
His mother was a submissive, hardworking woman.
The family slept on benches along the walls of a two-room house.
Corn mush was their staple food.
Nikolai went to the village school for years.
The teacher taught simultaneous classes for different years in a one-room schoolhouse.
Young Ceausescu did not have books and he often went to school barefoot, an outsider from early on.
He did not have friends.
He was anxious and unpredictable.
You brought a lot of Boston energy to the beginning there.
Ceausescu as a Mixed Bag00:14:40
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
He was just like his father was a drinker.
He was quick to fight all the time.
Always down at the chowda house.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
Very good.
Getting into fights at the Dunkin'.
Yeah, and Ceaușescu, he doesn't ever fit in, right?
He's not, he certainly doesn't fit in in this small rural village.
He's an anxious kid.
He's got a stutter.
He seems to be pretty smart.
Surviving records indicate he did well in primary school.
He had like the third highest grade in his class.
But education was never going to be like a focus on his early life.
And in 1929, at age 11, he leaves home.
He just is like, fuck, fuck living with an abusive religious fundamentalist.
I'm going to go to Bucharest and live with my sister.
So he moves there.
Yeah, at 11.
I didn't do it.
Life was hard back then.
Yeah.
11 is like a hard 28 nowadays.
Yeah.
11 is like, 11 is like 28 from like the grizzledest guy that you knew in your 20s.
Right.
Yeah.
He's tough as nails.
This guy's like, I lived for ultimate fighting.
Yeah, he has as many stories of woe as like a 75-year-old Irish farmer by this point.
It's like when you see those like pictures of like 25 year olds coming back from war, you're just like, oh no.
Yeah.
So he gets to Bucharest.
He moves in with his sister.
He's working as a shoemaker.
And this is what first brings him into contact with Romania's fairly small communist movement because the guy he apprenticed for was a member of the Romanian Communist Party.
And he takes Nikolai under his wing.
This is an act of pure happenstance.
Again, the National Peasants' Party is pretty left-wing and a lot more popular.
So there's just not a whole lot of people who do fall in with the communists in this period.
And the fact that Nikolai wound up under the influence of one of the fairly few active communists in Bucharest is a wild stroke of fate that would prove pretty bad for everyone involved, including the communists.
At first, though, Ceausescu just did odd jobs for his boss.
The Romanian Communist Party had been made illegal by the king because royals don't tend to like communists and vice versa.
So even basic things like sending letters and distributing newspapers had to be done underground.
It was illegal to advocate for the Communist Party.
So Nikolai is kind of a low-level errand boy, helping them do this, helping them keep up communication between different cells, helping them distribute newsletters and all that stuff in this communist underground that's kind of growing up in Bucharest.
He did not occupy a privileged position.
And to his credit, he seems to be the kind of kid who had no problem throwing down in the street for his beliefs.
He is not like, he's not like taking the easy jobs, right?
His first arrest.
He's not a Twitter pundit here.
No, he is not a Twitter pundit.
One thing you have to give the kid is that he is putting his skin in the game.
His first arrest is at age 15 when he gets picked up in this massive street fight outside of a strike.
Basically, he's like siding with a bunch of striking workers and the police show up and he winds up brawling in the street with the fucking cops and such.
Hell yeah.
Next year.
If somebody's ever like, they were caught brawling in the street with the cops, you're like, all right.
Like our point.
Yeah.
At this point, he's a 15-year-old boy who's been arrested for throwing hands in order to defend striking workers.
That's cops.
Yeah.
The next year, he gets busted for circulating a petition protesting the treatment of rail workers who had unionized illegally, right?
So the state is punishing these workers because they're not allowed to unionize and they try to.
And he circulates a petition being like, that's fucked up.
And he goes to jail again.
So some historians, there's a debate here between at least the people that I've encountered as to whether or not is Ceaușescu a committed, ideologically committed communist, or is this kind of just something he falls into and winds up committing to because of other reasons?
Kitalin Gria puts it this way.
The switch from a world in which he couldn't find his place, his own village, to another in which he still couldn't find his place, the intimidating city, marked him.
His initiation into the marginalized movement of the communists was his alternative solution for integrating into social life, says sociologist Pavel Campanieu, author of the book Ceaușescu, The Countdown.
So that's one angle that Campanieu and it certainly seems Gruya are pushing, which is that he doesn't really fit in anywhere.
And the communist movement, even though it is a very fringe and dangerous to be involved with, it offers him like this sense of belonging that he hasn't found anywhere else.
So this is kind of his way of having a social life.
There's a different argument, and Paul Kinyon makes it in his book that is also kind of adjacent to that one.
It's just, it's interesting.
Quote, contemporaries said he had little genuine interest in politics and might easily have chosen the green shirts or the green shirts of Cadriano's Iron Guard, which is like the fascist movement.
But Nikolai Ceaușescu wanted to meet girls, and some of his friends had told him the prettiest were in the communist party.
So I don't know.
Maybe both of those things are true, that he falls in with the communists because it's the kind of the only place he fits in socially.
And also part of why he thinks he'll fit in socially there is someone tells him the prettiest girls are communists.
It seems like he might be just going with the flow, that his ideology are not ironclad, that he's just like...
Yeah.
Is there a pussy over there?
All right, well, I'm going to go to there.
I think that seems realistic, that like he's looking for friends and he's looking to hit on chicks and the communists offer him that opportunity.
And also over time, as he like fights with them in the street and does time, he just kind of gets more committed because when you do prison time for a cause, maybe you wind up reading about it, which I think is kind of the way his story goes.
Also, you don't want to double, you want to double down.
If you've done damn, if like you've damaged yourself because of your commitment to a belief, it's so much harder to reject that belief than it is to be like, let me tell you why I was right.
I still defend my choice to get a Sega Genesis over a Super Nintendo, even though I know I was wrong.
Well, and as I always say, being a Sega Genesis kid in the 90s is being a communist underground activist of 1920s Romania.
You know, same essentially identical experiences, right down to the fact that, Jeff, you in the 1970s wound up in charge of a small Eastern European nation that you then led into tremendous calamity.
How did I do it?
You know, things just happen.
You should, at least you didn't get a Dreamcast.
Then we'd be dealing with a death toll in the millions.
Oh, let me tell you.
I had a friend.
You could just bootleg games on Dreamcast.
What a time that was.
You could just burn games.
These days, you Ginziers don't know with your Steams and your whatever Nintendos you got now.
We used to have real variety in gaming.
There was that game with the Dolphin.
There was a taxi game that was kind of like Grand Theft Auto.
Crazy.
There was that Simpsons game that was a ripoff of that taxi game.
Oh, it was a glorious age.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
What a time to be alive.
I worked at a video game.
I worked at the Toys R Us video game section then.
So I'm like, oh, I can name all of these things.
So Nikolai Ceaușescu is, you know, he's the, he's the, he's the Sega Dreamcast owner of the, of the Romanian political spectrum, I guess.
By which I mean he was very, very vocal about his beliefs and very committed at a certain point, at least, to them.
But he was also not the most competent activist.
And a number of his fellow communists would later argue that like the fact that he kept getting arrested for the cause was not evidence that he was like a very good at what he was doing, more just that like he was, he had like a short fuse and would get into fights and he kept getting arrested and he was bad at hiding from the cops and not getting scooped up.
Everyone's like, let's put him in charge of everything.
Yeah, yeah.
This guy is fistfighting everybody in the streets.
One of the fun things about Ceaușescu is no one ever says that and he winds up in church anyway.
He's, you know, it's very Andrew Jackson energy.
Yeah.
Yes, he is, he, he'll have one or two things in common with Jackson.
Although I guess his big wheel of cheese would have been filled with maggots.
Although I think Jackson's big wheel of cheese was probably filled with maggots too.
So regardless, the fact that he keeps doing time and he keeps getting the fuck beaten out of him by the cops and tortured and all that stuff.
Obviously, this earns him respect, even from the people who are like, Jesus, dude, like try running, you know?
Like, try not getting arrested every time you go out into the street.
See, that's a New England thing, too, where it's like, I know I'm going to die, but I'm going to fight you in this public restroom.
Yeah.
What are you doing?
Yeah.
The entire world is his waffle house in South Carolina.
And yeah, he gets busted repeatedly.
His biggest prison sentence so far comes when he gets sentenced to two years in 1938.
And by that time, he is a pretty notable figure in the Romanian Communist Party, even though he's not universally respected.
Now, 1938 is an important year in Romanian politics.
After the death of King Ferdinand, his young son Michael was technically regent, but a council of guys governed in his stead.
They were sympathetic to the main conservative party in Romania.
And when the National Peasants' Party wins a resounding victory in the 28 elections, the head of the National Peasants Party decides to try and reduce his enemy's power by bringing in a new king, right?
So you've got this child king who has like this guy basically governing for him as regent.
And that guy is sympathetic to the conservatives.
So when this kind of liberal left party takes power, they decide, well, if we bring in a new king who wants to work with us, then we can sideline this guy and that'll be good for the peasants' party.
Unfortunately, the new king they pick is Prince Carol II.
Now, Carol II up to this point has been like a playboy royal.
He spent actually a lot of his life outside Romania because he falls in love with this chick, but he's not allowed to marry her because she's not royal enough.
So he's like, fucking.
I love the Justinian move, man.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to go live somewhere else with this broad.
And he had been, as far as I can tell, kind of apolitical most of his life.
Again, he's mostly interested in like fucking and partying and was probably most famous when at the outbreak of World War I, he's in a military unit like a lot of royals are, and he immediately deserts.
He's just like, absolutely not.
Hell yeah, man.
I am not doing a World War I.
So again, unproblematic so far.
But once he gets brought in as king, he, well, I mean, he immediately proves to be problematic, actually.
So Carol II effectively derails the progressive land justice oriented policies of the National Peasants Party while playing the conservative and the growing far-right parties off of each other.
And this is a pretty impressive balancing act at the time, that he's able to kind of like weaponize all these groups against each other to solidify his own power.
Throughout this period, the Great Depression hits, and Romania is obviously suffering as much as at least as much as everywhere else is.
And the fact that Carol II is kind of derailing the Peasants' Party's ability to push for real reform leads a lot of voters to abandon them and abandon kind of the progressive left and start siding with these weird domestic fascists that have started to become very popular in Romania called the Iron Guard.
That could never happen here.
No, no, no.
This only happens in Romania this one time.
So the Iron Guard are also called the Legionaries or the Legionary Movement.
Again, like Romania, there's a big hard on, especially in kind of like the nationalist side of things for Roman history.
So they are kind of consciously like talking back to their Roman heritage and calling these guys the legionary movement.
The Iron Guard are founded by a fascist death squad member and a medieval mystic named Cornelio Codriano.
And Cadriano, we'll do an episode on him at some point.
He's a fascinating fascist and one that we don't talk about enough.
He's fascinating.
He is fascinating.
He is kind of a mix between like there's an element of him that's like the Gavin McGinnis proud boy type where he forms this street fighting organization.
But he also like he becomes famous because he assassinates a dude.
Like he, one of the things he's, he tells his young followers is, you need to be forming death squads and murdering people.
And it's okay if we get executed.
Like that's actually dope if we get killed for assassinating leftists.
Like that's a thing that we should seek to do.
So he definitely sucks.
Another one of his beliefs is that he needs to father thousands of children with women at all levels of Romanian society because the saint that he liked, he believes did that too.
That's a good way to find a saint, man.
Which saint is all about straight fucking.
This horny fascist fucking mystic who, yeah, dresses like a medieval, like basically dresses in Renfair gear, marching from town to town and inciting pogroms, right?
That's Codrianu's like primary method of tour.
Like he's on an anti-Semitic tour.
Yeah.
Now, obviously, Hitler loves this guy.
Hitler is a big Codrianu fan.
And as his movement gains power, the Nazis start shipping guns over to the Iron Guard, right?
Kind of like underground, here, have some guns.
We'll be over there pretty soon, guys.
So get ready.
King Carol II, he finds the Iron Guard useful in some ways.
And he's, you know, perfectly willing to overlook a few pogroms, even though his mistress is Jewish.
Because he's like, hey, you know, whatever helps me, whatever helps me stop these peasant people from reducing the power of the royals.
Political anti-Semites were selective in their choice of enforcement.
That's unshocking.
Another thing that only occurred once in Romania.
So King Carol II generally considers the fascists useful, whereas the socialists and the peasants' party people, they want to reduce his power.
So he sides with them a lot throughout the 20s and early 30s.
But then in like 1937, the Iron Guard starts to win larger and larger shares of the vote.
I think they top out at like 22% of the vote in the 37 election.
Sharing Hot Stalin Photos00:04:39
And he's like, oh, shit.
Well, I can't really control these guys necessarily, right?
Like it was a good bet to back them earlier, but now Codrianu's like getting within spitting distance of real power, and he doesn't owe me anything, right?
Like he's not, I can't actually trust this guy.
He could fuck me up even worse than these Peasants' Party people would.
So Carol II starts to panic.
It's so hard for me not to hear you go, party people!
Whenever you say party people, by the way.
Yeah, I mean, most of these parties would have sucked ass.
I mean, I assume the National Peasants' Party parties would have been okay.
Not a lot of weep there it is happening at the end.
Yeah, apparently, hey, all the hot people are at the Communist Party, so that sounds like it could be good.
Although you might wind up fucking Nikolai Ceausescu, which is a mixed bag.
Although Sophie says he's hot, so you know.
Sophie is down.
Only one photo.
I take it back.
Only one photo.
Oh, he was just one of those guys that got caught at a good angle once.
So he's hot forever in history books.
It looked almost like a mugshot.
I don't know if it actually is or not, but there was like one photo.
And then you like look at the rest.
You're like, oh no.
It's like everyone sharing the hot Stalin photo.
Yeah, yeah, which is not accurate.
Shockingly, you can't rely on pictures of Joseph Stalin to know how he actually looked.
But you know what you can rely on, Robert?
Us and no one else?
And the products and services that support the show.
Well, sure.
I just don't separate between us and the products and services that support our show.
You know, we're one beautiful amalgam that you should just dive into and let it subsume you, swim in us.
I mean, I see.
Swim in us.
Stop.
Just absorb it in here.
You know what?
I love goods and services that are provided by the sponsors of this podcast.
As a matter of fact, it should be known that I am a subscriber slash purchaser slash user of all of these things.
Yeah, Jeff's buying gold.
He's joined the Washington State Highway Patrol.
He's doing all of the things our sponsors urge us to do.
He's engaging in sports betting.
Yep.
Yep.
I'm doing all those things.
Just really doing them.
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.
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Moderate Fascism and Pogroms00:14:54
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And we're back.
So in the 1937 elections, the Iron Guard win like 20% of the vote.
And the Peasants Party has like a collapse of their power.
You know, they'd gotten something north of like 70% a few years ago, and they get 32% of the vote in that election, which is short of the, I mean, that means that they have, they do technically the best, but they need 40% of the vote to form a government, right?
So since they don't meet that threshold, the king's going to get to help form the government.
And that's not going to end well.
And I'm going to quote from the book Children of the Night here.
And now it was for the king to decide who would become prime minister.
He knew the public wanted to change and began looking down the table of results.
In fourth place, behind Codriano's legionaries, was the moderately fascist National Christian Party, led by Octavian Goga.
The anti-Semitic poet was a great friend and supporter of the king and Codriano's most bitter rival.
He had scored just 9% of the vote.
As far as Carol was concerned, he was perfect for the job.
Anti-Semitic poet is the most fascinating combination of two words in history.
Yeah, just a racist poet, but a moderate fascist.
Yeah, they'll be like Nazi ballerina.
Like there's just, there's certain words that you don't necessarily conflate the two things together.
Yeah.
And you don't also, you don't hear a lot of moderate fascists these days, but I guess it is, I mean, it is actually a thing in this period.
Like it's reasonable to draw a line between the two of them because the Iron Guard and the National Christian Party are pretty, pretty bitter rivals and spend a lot of time fighting each other.
I would add this.
I would add that we have that here with the quote law and order.
That really they're like, well, you know, I don't believe in all of these things, but we should make sure that anybody that commits a crime is shot in the face.
Yeah, yeah.
It's those weirdos who are like, I think we should execute people for spraying graffiti during protests, but also fuck the January 6th folks, where it's like, yeah, you're a moderate fascist.
Yeah, just a diet fascist.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's who this moderate fascist poet, anti-Semite Goga, gets made prime minister by the king.
And within two days of his appointment, he has shut down both of the large Jewish-owned newspapers in Romania.
He has the Bucharest Bar suspend the licenses of every Jewish lawyer that they can find.
He rescinds the right to sell liquor and tobacco by Jewish shopkeepers.
And he withdraws citizenship from all 225,000 naturalized Romanian Jews.
I'm going to go out on a limb here.
Not cool.
Not cool.
Sorry if I'm courting controversy here, but that is an uncool move.
Kind of a dick move, some would say.
And this podcast is brought to you by the letter P for pogroms because that's what comes next is there's a bunch of pogroms.
Are they a sponsor?
Because I don't support that.
That specific one I do not do.
Do not consume that.
Yeah, I mean, we never know who's going to sponsor the show in the programmatic ads.
So it's not impossible.
But we do have a hard no pogrom line in our ad sheet.
And now back to our regularly scheduled program.
Yeah.
So there's a bunch of pogroms.
There's also fighting in the streets between Kodrianu's green shirts and between these moderate fascists, right?
Because the green shirts are angry that they don't get the full fascism.
They get some pogroms, but not all of the pogroms that they had wanted.
The idea of a moderate anything getting into a fist fight is just very irony.
I want racism.
I want slightly less racism.
I want a little less racism, but still some racism.
So this is all basically a con by King Carroll.
Like he knows that, well, if I put, you know, this fucking Goga guy in power, he's going to do a bunch of horrible shit.
And also the legionaries are going to try to do them an uprising.
And it's going to be this big, gnarly mess.
And it is this big, gnarly mess.
And he uses that to be like, hey, guys, parliamentary democracy just can't work for some reason.
So you know what?
We're putting an end to that.
I'm suspending the constitution.
And now I'm the dictator king.
So he does that in the 10th of February, 1938.
He becomes the dictator king of Romania.
So that's cool.
Good for him.
And he's not going to be good at this, right?
Carol II is kind of shitty at everything.
The good thing that he does, I will give him credit for one thing, which is that he has Kodrianu murdered.
They arrest him and a bunch of his supporters and just execute them at a black site, basically.
And that's okay.
I'm not against that.
But he mainly executes Kodrianu because he's creating his own fascist movement that is very deliberately ripping off the legionaries.
He basically does the fucking Kirkland brand Iron Guard movement.
And in fact, like Hitler and the Nazis will like make fun of him for being a fake fascist.
They're like, look at this guy.
He's not even like a real fascist.
He's just copying this dude he murdered.
It's like when Transformers came out and sci-fi had transmorphers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He is the transmorphers of Romanian fascism.
He also steals a huge percentage of the national budget to siphon into his private bank account for when he inevitably gets forced out of the country and has to abdicate.
We couldn't have this happening soon.
We would not have this happening anytime soon in America.
No, no, no, of course not.
Of course not, because we don't call them kings.
So it's fine.
Yeah, so it's something.
Yeah.
So the, you know, he's, he's not a very successful royal dictator.
He is not going to last long.
And while he is kind of trying to solidify his hold on power, the USSR and Nazi Germany are deciding that, you know, why can't we be friends?
Which is what that song is about, actually.
It's about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
So the USSR and the Nazis have them a pact and they're like, what if we, what if we met in Poland and kissed at the line we draw and enforce with an unbelievable quantity of human blood.
To be fair, by the way, that song is by the band War.
So it really, it really does fit.
It does.
It's actually kind of perfect.
So yeah, the USSR and Nazi Germany are like briefly BFFs in taking Poland.
And the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a lot of people don't know this, but it contains some secret provisions.
And one of those secret provisions is the Nazis saying, Stalin, you can take Bessarabia from Romania, which is Bessarabia is like one of the wealthiest parts of Romania.
It's like literally a third of like the population and the economy of Romania is in Bessarabia.
So when the Soviets move in and take it, Romania is like, Hitler, come on, guy.
We're kind of fascists.
You want to have our back?
And Hitler's like, no, man, you killed my boy Kodrianu.
Fuck you guys.
So this doesn't work great for anybody.
It certainly does not increase Carol II's popularity back home.
So that's going to be one of the reasons why he doesn't last very long.
And while all this is going on, right, in the late 30s, you've got this fascist movement becoming ascendant.
You've got increasing crackdowns on the communists.
There's maybe 700 of them, many of whom are not free in the country at this point in time.
But Ceaușescu, you know, manages to stay alive.
In part because the fascists are not, obviously, like the Romanian fascists, like all fascists, have a lot of anti-communist rhetoric.
But the communists are not the Iron Guards focus because there's just not that many of them, right?
It's not like they actually have bigger threats from the state.
And so that's who they focus on.
And so, you know, while Ceaușescu is continuing his string of getting arrested for a bunch of bullshit, he doesn't, you know, get murdered by the Nazis and he doesn't, I don't think, spends a particularly large amount of time fighting with them in the street.
What he does do is spend a lot of time hitting on the women of the Romanian Communist Party.
This is how, in 1939, he meets his future wife, Elena Petrescu.
She had grown up in a tiny rural village like Nikolai and become a communist after moving to the city.
Elena did not do well in school.
Unlike Nikolai, she does not appear to be a good book learner.
She failed basically every class.
But in the 1930s, she gets a job at a black market pill mill and decides that this means that she's a chemist.
So her lifelong ambition is going to be to become a chemist because she works at a pill mill that's basically reverse engineering diet pills and then pressing them.
I mean, look, just kind of, if you work at a place that's going to war a lot, having what is essentially speed on demand, that's great.
Give me some of that bootlegron or bad idea.
So in the summer of 1939, the Romanian Communist Party holds a picnic and a small fair that like includes a fundraising competition.
And the way they do this competition is that all of the girls get together and they give each of them a number.
And the girl who is able to basically sell the most tickets to raise funds at this party is named Queen of the Ball.
Now, Elena is not a charismatic person.
She is not good at talking to people.
She does not like crowds.
She is not social.
She is not someone who is going to be very good at selling tickets on her own.
But Nikolai seems to pretty much fall in love with her at first sight.
He has just gotten out of prison for distributing communist propaganda at this point.
And he is like, she obviously likes him too because he's this like hard son of a bitch.
She's just gotten out of prison.
He's like a fighter for the party.
And so they make eyes and kind of as his first gesture to win her favor, he threatens to beat up all of his friends if they don't buy tickets from Elena in order to so that she can win Queen of the Ball, which is both will show because in the future, he is going to do like the nationwide version of this, like sending out squads to beat the shit out of people who don't vote for the Communist Party.
Also, she looks like the kid from Dick Tracy.
Yeah.
Like she looks like the nerd from Can't Hardly Wait.
If you remember, like, she looks exactly like that dude.
Yeah, she is, that's a good way of looking at her.
And she's a handsome woman.
Nikolai Ceausescu looks like a Muppet version of a communist.
Like he's got that big head that you could, if you look at a picture of adult Ceaușescu, you can't imagine him talking normally.
You can only imagine the entire top of his head flapping backwards.
Yeah.
He looks like Sam Eagle.
Yeah, he does.
Yes.
He has strong Sam Eagle characteristics.
So this is, I don't know, it's kind of sweet.
There's a darker tone to it because he's going to like violently fake an election later in his life.
But it's kind of sweet now that he's doing that to, you know, make this girl he likes feel pretty.
So that's, that's kind of nice.
Um, in the future, yeah.
If she, if the thing is, this, like, look, not for nothing, but seeing her win a beauty contest, I'd be like, all right, well, this is clearly a fix, right?
Well, yeah.
Um, apologies to her family.
No, no, I mean, her family is terrible.
Um, anyway, uh, so yeah, that that goes great for uh him, and the two of them hook up and they get married, and he's gonna spend a lot more time in prison, but they seem to have legitimately been a love match.
Now, normally that's sweeter than it turns out to be because they are both some of the worst people who have ever lived, but I'll give him one thing.
They they seem to have been legitimately in love, so that's that's yeah, monsters can be in love.
That's the thing, yeah, yeah, there you go.
Um, in 1940, Carol II's dictatorship collapses with some help from the Nazis, and the new cat in town is a military man named Marshall Antonescu, who basically runs a military dictatorship with fascist trappings.
Um, he uses the Iron Guard, um, he like puts them adjacent to power, but Antonescu, he's a monster, but he's not ideologically a fascist.
Like, you can like, again, this is where we get into the terms because he like is a major player in the Holocaust.
He's a terrible, terrible person.
I'm not saying that to be like, he's not as bad as these fascists.
He just, he is a military dictator.
He is not a fascist dictator, and he doesn't really like the Iron Guard all that much.
He's willing to use them because he's a strong nationalist, but he considers them way too radical to actually run things.
And while all this is going on, all of Romania's communists are either in prison or hiding out in the USSR.
And again, there's maybe six or seven hundred of them in the country still.
The leaders of the movement in Romania are Anna Palker, a Jewish woman and a veteran revolutionary Stalinist, and Giorgi Giorgiude.
He's an electrician who became an illegal train union organizer and spends some of Ceaușescu's first arrests are like supporting his Giorgiude's illegal train strikes.
And he's also a Stalinist.
Everybody's a Stalinist, right?
So Georgi was a poor peasant with what Marxists considered unimpeachable proletarian pedigrees.
He's basically like the archetype of the kind of guy Stalin pushed as the ideal new Soviet man.
He's this like born poor, working his entire life, organizing unions and fighting in the streets to support the rights of workers to organize.
Pocker, meanwhile, she's also does a lot of time for the cause.
She is a tough lady.
In fact, she gets the nickname the Iron Woman of the Iron Lady of Romania.
But she's also an intellectual, right?
She's one of these people who comes to communism like through reading about it and is a like as opposed to like Georgiude does not read books, right?
Georgiude Rises from Prison00:06:41
Does not talk a lot about reading.
He's not citing a whole lot of like passages from Marxist tracks, which Palker is.
She is fiercely devoted to the cause, which, but the fact that she's also on kind of this creative ideological side of things means that she's going to run into conflict during the messy early years of the USSR.
And for a little while, Pocker is in Stalin's good books.
She flees to the USSR for a period.
She goes to this Soviet school for revolutionaries where she studies tactics to help her build the covert communist movement in Romania.
But she also encounters a lot of difficulties because, number one, she's Jewish and number two, she's a woman.
And so those things are not good at the time.
Not great at the time.
It's perfect for all of those people, especially in America.
Yeah, yeah.
Everything's fine now.
But back at the time, back in the day, difficult.
And she also runs into problems because she runs afoul of Stalin and she gets executed for, or her husband gets executed for being a Romanian spy, right?
I don't believe he is.
I've never seen any evidence that Pocker's husband was spying for anyone.
He seems to have been a really committed communist, but he gets executed over in the USSR, and Anna finds out about it while she's four years into a 10-year prison sentence in Romania.
She had formed a group of prisoners called the Women's Collective of Anti-Fascist Prisoners.
And when the news reaches them that Anna's husband has been executed, she doesn't even get time to mourn him before the other women demand that she explain why she'd married a traitor.
A criticism session is held in prison in which Anna is blamed for not warning the party that her husband was an agent provocateur.
And eventually Anna tells them, I am now racking my brain to find something, a sign of any kind that would have led me to believe he was an enemy of the people.
I'm not placing any doubt on the party's decision.
The party knows better than I, but I did not see anything.
And as much as I search my soul, my recollections, my memory, I don't find anything that could prove such a thing, which is like almost certainly true and kind of a devastating thing to imagine this woman who's stuck in prison, who's just found out the love of her life has been killed by the state and is now like, well, the party must have been right in killing him, but I just didn't see a sign of it.
It's super fucked up.
And that's the best way to handle that is to just be like, well, look, I'm sure the people that are still alive with the guns, they had great reason to do that.
I'm just saying, I personally didn't see it, but they probably nailed that shit.
I just, maybe he was tricking me.
It doesn't go well for her because she doesn't, she does not like repudiate him fully.
And so these ladies that she's formed into a group in prison, like send back word to Stalin saying, Anna won't denounce her dead husband.
And this winds up being one of the justifications Stalin would later use for backing Georgie over Anna because she winds up.
Yeah.
It would be funny if it was like a real true lies scenario where he was like this huge jacked like Austrian sounding guy.
It's like, I sell computers.
Yeah.
No, it doesn't, it doesn't work out that way, unfortunately.
But yeah.
In any case, Georgie Giorgiude also spends his war years locked away in a fascist prison.
Because the Antonescu regime is not quite as Nazi as the straight up Nazis wanted it to be.
Communists in concentration camps there did have a higher rate of survival than they did in like Germany.
So what actually happens is once all these people get thrown into these prisons, they kind of settle out what the communist government of the future Romania is going to be in these prison cells, which is a thing that happens every time you throw a bunch of radical revolutionaries into prison cells together is they wind up sorting out the future regime that they're going to bring into power at a certain point.
Yeah, I mean, they got time.
Yeah, exactly.
They've got time to like read books about communism and figure out who's going to do what when they eventually wind up in power.
When our number comes up, we're going to have to go ahead and make a perfect communist government.
Yep.
And that's exactly what's going to happen.
So Georgiude is obviously, I think everyone kind of is aware just because he's such a powerful person that he's going to wind up being like the top man if they ever do wind up in power.
And Ceausescu sees this.
And he is, again, he gets thrown into prison again during the World War II years for conspiring against the social order.
And he kind of turns himself into a gopher for Georgiude.
He makes himself available for like whatever sort of side jobs they need done.
He does everything that'll keep it like he doesn't care what he has to do, no matter how like banal or low the task is, as long as it's going to keep him on the lips of his betters, right?
I just want to stay around George Uday.
You know, as long as he keeps seeing me and knows me as like this guy who can handle anything he wants, like that's, that's what I'm going to do.
He's just jazzed to be on the show, man.
Yeah, just happy to be here, man.
Just happy to be here.
And this strategy worked splendidly, as Paul Kinyon writes.
They had a lackey in prison, a young hooligan who brought them food packages and ran messages.
His name was Nikolai Ceaușescu, a 22-year-old trainee cobbler who was regularly in trouble for fighting and delivering communist leaflets.
Some of his fellow inmates thought him weird and said that they avoided him because he was such a bore with absolutely no sense of humor.
In the presence of big men like George Uday, Ceaușescu remained largely silent and deferential.
He avoided speaking whenever possible because of a stutter so severe it made his legs shake.
But he also possessed a powerful memory and an instinctive intelligence and sat among the future leaders listening to everything they said and slowly learning.
And this actually works out well for him because since he's too kind of scared and nervous to speak up or say anything, he never winds up running afoul of George Uday, right?
He doesn't, he's never, he puts himself in positions to help with stuff, but he's never running anything that can like go badly and reflect poorly on him.
And he pays attention to the social relationships and kind of worms his way closer and closer to George Uday over time, which is the, I mean, this, Stalin does a version of this.
That's how he rises to power too.
This is a pretty effective tactic.
So if you are ever in a revolutionary underground movement that's seeking to overthrow the state and institute a new form of government, keep an eye out for like the weird quiet kid who just hangs around doing chores.
Shoot that guy pretty quick.
Okay, that's my assumption that I do need to have in my life.
Make a note.
Drop that kid before he gets too far.
That's where all the problems start.
The Quiet Kid's Strategy00:04:33
Yeah.
Gonna get on a moves ready, you know?
Legally.
And Robert does not mean that literally.
I do mean that literally.
Yeah, no, he does.
Before you overthrow the government, kill the quiet kid in your movement.
Just drop them all.
What is this?
Take a page out of Dracula's book.
Burn him in a thing.
Put them all in a building and light it on fire.
Only let the loud assholes inherit power because that will never go badly.
No.
We just mostly just get podcasts.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And I think that's going to do it for our part one of Ceausescu.
And boy, howdy.
Have you had a good time here, Jeffery?
It's all I could ask for.
Jeff Toberfest.
That's me.
That's who I am.
I'm glad that you got my name correct.
That's right.
That's right.
That's you and the festival dedicated to celebrating your many accomplishments every October.
I got to say, I love being here.
Love spending time with you guys.
It's a real blast.
I love relearning.
Sometimes I'm like, that degree I got wasn't worth anything.
And I do this show every once in a while and I'm like, that's good enough.
Jeff, you got to plug anything here before we roll out?
Are people still listening at this point in time when we do plugs?
Let's do it, man.
So depending on when this goes up, I run a stand-up show, a live stand-up show at a toy store in Burbank, California called Mint on Card at a store called Blast from the Past on Magnolia in Burbank, California.
You can check that out the second Friday of every month.
I have a great podcast called Jeff Has Cool Friends where I interview my friends that I think have really cool jobs and I think you should pay attention to them.
You can get that for free or you can get early access to uncensored episodes with bonus content at patreon.com slash jeffmeg.
It's just my name.
I also have shows like Ugg Find with Kim Krall.
Isn't that easy?
It's so easy.
Ugfine, my monthly show with Kim Krall, and I also have a great show called Nerd with Dre Alvarez that we do.
Um, we do on the Patreon and for free.
Um, and that is uh, we just do deep dives on nerdy shit.
I also do Tom and Jeff Watch Batman on the Gamefully Unemployed Network, which we keep needing to bring you on to.
I know you like you want to do Batman stuff.
I do want to do Batman stuff, by which I mean I want to beat up poor people in the street while wearing $10,000 in body armor.
In armor, yeah, yeah, of course, as an Olympic-level athlete, yes, yeah, as a man martial artist beating the shit out of a heroin addict in an alley.
Perfect, yeah, just breaking someone's back for stealing a Magnavox.
Yeah, um, and uh, you can also hear me on uh Unpopular Opinion and You Don't Even Like Sports, both on the Unpops Network.
Um, other than that, uh, you know, thank you.
This is fun.
We have fun here.
Yes, I had fun here.
Relax good time.
I'm on the other side.
I'm also saying, Sophie, look.
There were a lot of things said at the end there, buddy.
I'm not going to give our followers bad advice about how to form their underground anti-government terrorist cell.
The question is, why aren't you giving that advice, Sophie?
Because I really like having health insurance.
Well, I like making sure that some weird quiet kid doesn't wind up in charge after the revolution and murders.
I thought I thought there's a lot of hints you could be really not.
I've encouraged violence against so many less deserving.
I hear what you're saying, and I know that you're like, well, I know I'm worse.
And like, you have, but I particularly hate it.
Sophie, Sophie, do you like my invitation of you?
This is what I'm doing.
This is good.
This is, unfortunately, this was Sophie's choice to hate the thing.
Oh, yes.
Sophie's choice joke.
We did it.
Get it?
We did the whole thing.
We did the whole thing.
And she has a Boston accent in that movie.
No.
Yep.
Wow.
So do I. Anyway, that's going to be the episode.
Come back tomorrow.
Well, not tomorrow, but soon.
Thursday.
And there will be more.
More Ceaușescu.
Less Romanian history.
More getting into the weeds of Ceaușescu.
So stick around for that, folks.
It ends in tens of thousands of starving orphans.
As it always does.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
More Ceaușescu, Less History00:01:46
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On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail talked about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
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Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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And there is so much news, information, commentary coming at you all day and from all over the place.
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It's financial literacy month and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
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.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.