Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Nicolae Ceaușescu: The Dracula of Being A Dick
Aired: 2023-02-02
Duration: 01:15:36


=== Bad Guys on the Axis Side (14:10) ===

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[00:01:48]  Ah, what's mummified my persons?
[00:01:53]  This is Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, here with some exciting news from the world of museums.
[00:02:00]  New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute have adopted the term mummified remains and mummified persons to refer to mummies.
[00:02:10]  So we're good, everybody.
[00:02:12]  Finally, the long problem of people not respecting mummies is over.
[00:02:20]  We did it, everybody.
[00:02:21]  I just, I know there's a lot of activists out there in the streets who have been fighting for mummy rights for a long time.
[00:02:27]  And I just wanted to let you all know it was all worth it.
[00:02:30]  Jeff May, how do you feel about mummified persons?
[00:02:33]  I'm calling them mummies.
[00:02:34]  And I don't care.
[00:02:35]  Let the woke mob come for me.
[00:02:37]  All right.
[00:02:38]  They are mummies.
[00:02:38]  They've always been mummies.
[00:02:40]  I'm not.
[00:02:40]  Are they going to go back and change the classic horror film to the mummified person?
[00:02:44]  Absolutely not.
[00:02:46]  Nonsense.
[00:02:46]  Is it the M-word now?
[00:02:48]  Yeah, horrible.
[00:02:49]  If anyone ever calls it a mummified person to me, I am going to read from the book of the dead.
[00:02:56]  And I know from the movie The Mummy how badly that can go.
[00:02:59]  I would give somebody a DDT.
[00:03:02]  If somebody was just like, um, uh, do you mean mummified persons?
[00:03:06]  I would immediately just jake the snake Roberts, DDT them into the ground.
[00:03:10]  Now, I know you're talking about a martial arts term, but I assumed you were talking about the pesticide that was made famous in the book Silent Spring.
[00:03:18]  And now I assume that you always carry a full canister of DDT on you at all times.
[00:03:23]  Yeah, I gotta take, I gotta fight malaria.
[00:03:26]  I would say martial arts term is that's loose.
[00:03:28]  I would say a professional wrestling term.
[00:03:30]  It's where you put somebody in sort of like a like a headlock-ish kind of a thing here, and then you just kind of catapult the top of their head into the ground.
[00:03:38]  Well, that wrestling is the only martial art I respect.
[00:03:42]  So there.
[00:03:43]  Yeah, it's the only one you can do while you're dressed like a garbage man or town.
[00:03:49]  Jeff, this is Behind the Bastards.
[00:03:53]  It's a podcast about, you know, people who aren't great in history.
[00:03:58]  Speaking of which, today our subject in part two is still Nikolai Ceachescu.
[00:04:04]  How are you feeling about Nikki as we go into part two?
[00:04:08]  We love a bastard Nick on this show with you and I together here.
[00:04:13]  You know, he's something.
[00:04:16]  He's something.
[00:04:16]  All right.
[00:04:18]  He earned the name.
[00:04:20]  I know we were building up to it last episode.
[00:04:22]  It's fun to see that it's going to build up to the crescendo that we're going to see here.
[00:04:27]  There was a lot of background last episode.
[00:04:32]  You got to cover the background.
[00:04:35]  It's kind of like how if you really want to understand the humanity of a mummified person, you have to understand.
[00:04:40]  I'm sorry.
[00:04:41]  What did you say?
[00:04:43]  You son of a bitch.
[00:04:45]  Also, side note here, that the Chicago studies.
[00:04:50]  What was the name of the place?
[00:04:52]  The Chicago place?
[00:04:52]  The Chicago Institute of Oriental Studies, something like that.
[00:04:56]  Is that the same thing?
[00:04:59]  Can we still say that?
[00:04:59]  Yeah, yeah, it's referring to the region.
[00:05:02]  I know, I get it.
[00:05:03]  It seems like it's a weighted word.
[00:05:05]  Okay, you know what?
[00:05:06]  You do kind of want to know when they started calling it that.
[00:05:09]  And like, I wonder, I wonder Chicago.
[00:05:12]  Anyway, whatever.
[00:05:13]  I'm sure it's fine.
[00:05:14]  I'm sure it's fine.
[00:05:14]  You know who's not fine?
[00:05:17]  Marshall Antonescu.
[00:05:18]  So this guy winds up.
[00:05:22]  And again, Marshall Antonescu, he's this interesting character because he's ideologically, he is not a guy who is particularly interested in fascism.
[00:05:33]  But he winds up in bed with these fascists and becomes like one of the worst of them in terms of like his actual death toll.
[00:05:41]  Forest gump of fascism.
[00:05:43]  Yeah, it's weird.
[00:05:45]  He's a fascinating figure because of how he's the forest gump of the Axis powers.
[00:05:54]  So under Antonescu, Romania, again, when kind of, you know, there's this whole world war thing that starts up again.
[00:06:01]  And the last time Romania had gone with, you know, Britain, France, Russia, and sided with them.
[00:06:08]  And it had gone terribly for Romania, right?
[00:06:11]  The war kind of ends and they get some land, but they don't do well.
[00:06:14]  All of their oil fields are lit on fire.
[00:06:16]  All of their young men get killed.
[00:06:18]  And under Antonescu, they're going to back the opposite side in the next world war.
[00:06:22]  And you know what, Jeff?
[00:06:23]  It doesn't go well for them either.
[00:06:25]  World wars, not a good call for Romania.
[00:06:28]  Yeah, they're not the champions of world wars.
[00:06:31]  No, it only really goes well for us in Switzerland.
[00:06:34]  But, you know, that's a story for another day.
[00:06:37]  So Romania, and again, kind of the reason Antonescu sides with the Nazis, there's a lot of stuff going on, but one of the big ones is that he wants to get back Bessarabia, which based on the treaty that the Nazis had signed with the Soviets, the Soviets got to take from Romania just a little bit earlier.
[00:06:56]  So the Romanians side with the Nazis, who had agreed to give up this territory that now the Nazis are saying, hey, if you side with us, you can get this territory back, which may seem like a shitty deal to you.
[00:07:07]  Maybe not trustworthy of the Nazis.
[00:07:09]  I know this is going to like blow a lot of people's minds.
[00:07:12]  Yeah, historically speaking, this is really going to cause some people's tops to pop here.
[00:07:16]  Yeah, wild stuff.
[00:07:18]  So Romanian troops fight alongside the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa, which works really well for a little while, right?
[00:07:25]  There's a couple of months there where it seems like, hey, maybe a good call back in the Nazis.
[00:07:29]  We're taking a lot of territory.
[00:07:31]  Romania is suddenly much bigger.
[00:07:33]  What a cool time.
[00:07:35]  So it goes really well for a little while.
[00:07:37]  But then the bulk of Antonescu's military, the pride of Romania's army, a huge chunk of their young male population, winds up in an interesting position.
[00:07:48]  They are put watching the flanks of the German, I believe it's the Sixth Army, as it encircles Stalingrad.
[00:07:55]  Now, Jeff.
[00:08:00]  We all know where this is going, right?
[00:08:02]  How do you think that's going to play out?
[00:08:04]  I don't know if anybody's ever heard of Stalingrad, but it's pretty well known as far as battles go.
[00:08:10]  It's in like, I would say, as far as battles go, that's a top three historically.
[00:08:15]  Probably, yeah, probably a top three.
[00:08:16]  Very fair.
[00:08:17]  Yeah.
[00:08:18]  And if you're going to pick a position to be in in World War II, there's a lot of bad ones.
[00:08:23]  Sure.
[00:08:23]  But one of the worst is watching the flanks of the German army as they encircle Stalingrad.
[00:08:29]  Hard to get much worse than that.
[00:08:31]  Trying to get famed sniper Ed Harrison to take out Jude Law.
[00:08:35]  Yeah, Jude Law is fucking running roughshod over these Romanians.
[00:08:40]  It doesn't go well for them.
[00:08:41]  Romanian military gets its ass handed to them shortly before the German military gets its ass handed to them.
[00:08:49]  And things only get worse after that point.
[00:08:51]  It doesn't go well after Stalingrad.
[00:08:54]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:55]  I mean, you know, land war in Asia and all that.
[00:08:58]  But beyond that, too, like the Russians, this is like the guy at the bar that tries to pick a fight with the bouncer.
[00:09:07]  Yeah.
[00:09:08]  And the friends are like, I don't think that's a good idea, man.
[00:09:10]  This guy, you know, he got the job for a reason.
[00:09:13]  Yeah.
[00:09:13]  And it's like, I've taken a couple MMA classes.
[00:09:15]  I think I got it.
[00:09:16]  He's like three times your size.
[00:09:18]  There is a scar on his face bigger than your fist.
[00:09:21]  Not a real tooth in his mouth at that point in time.
[00:09:24]  Yeah.
[00:09:26]  So, yeah, things go downhill from there.
[00:09:29]  And despite being, again, on paper, Antonescu, he is not a guy that has a long history of like anti-Semitic agitation.
[00:09:36]  He's not a guy who, I think, under his own devices, would have cared much in either way about kind of Nazi policies in that regard.
[00:09:45]  More of a hobbyist.
[00:09:47]  More of a hobbyist, but his policies against Romania's Jewish population lead to an unprecedented level of mass death in Romania.
[00:09:56]  And this is not the subject for this episode today.
[00:09:59]  We will talk about this at some point.
[00:10:00]  Antonescu probably deserves his own episode, but more Jews are murdered by the Romanian government than by the government of any other Axis state besides Germany itself.
[00:10:11]  It is a Japan didn't have a lot of options there.
[00:10:16]  No.
[00:10:16]  Although there are a couple of interesting cases.
[00:10:18]  I mean, there's a couple of interesting cases of Japanese officials who save Jews in parts of the world from the Nazis, and at least one interesting case of a Nazi who saves Chinese citizens from rampaging Japanese troops.
[00:10:34]  World War II, lots of neat, interesting history moments there.
[00:10:38]  Yeah, it's like each country of doing horrendous things is like, these other guys need to calm down.
[00:10:43]  Kind of seems like there's some got bad guys on the Axis side.
[00:10:47]  They're massacring the wrong people.
[00:10:50]  So, yeah, Antonescu, nightmare monster, kills about 300,000 Romanian Jews, I think, something like that.
[00:11:00]  Now, supporters of Antonescu, because he's kind of been rehabilitated by some corners of Romanian culture recently, will note that he also saved 300,000 Jewish lives by refusing to deport those people to Poland when the Nazis ask.
[00:11:14]  So he could kill them himself?
[00:11:17]  I'm not sure that you get credit for saving 300,000 Jewish lives when you've just killed 380,000 or so Jewish people.
[00:11:25]  I don't know that.
[00:11:26]  Yeah, I'm not going to really give you credit.
[00:11:28]  In Vegas terms, they call that a push.
[00:11:30]  Yeah.
[00:11:32]  That's, I feel, I feel weird being like, look at all these lives he saved as he's massacring like a city's worth of human beings.
[00:11:41]  Yeah, no, we're not going to.
[00:11:43]  We're not going to, we're not going to be doing that here on this show.
[00:11:46]  That said, we're also not going to be getting that into the Holocaust in Romania.
[00:11:49]  Not that obviously it's a worthwhile topic, but I don't want to just like, you know, we should just, I'm just trying to acknowledge the extent of how bad it was.
[00:11:57]  We'll talk about it in more detail at some other point.
[00:12:00]  So I don't know what you're talking about.
[00:12:04]  Jeff, we may need to sit down and talk about that after class.
[00:12:08]  She's like, don't you have a history degree?
[00:12:10]  I'm like, I don't know how I got it.
[00:12:11]  Yeah, but it's from Florida.
[00:12:13]  So they're not allowed to have books.
[00:12:17]  Diary Ann Frank hasn't gotten approved by DeSantis yet.
[00:12:20]  No, yeah.
[00:12:21]  Yeah.
[00:12:23]  So as the war unraveled, resistance to Antonescu coalesced behind the scenes.
[00:12:27]  And there's this alliance of like liberals and royalists led by the new king, Michael, and a guy named Julio Maniu, who's the head of the National Peasants Party we talked about in the last episode.
[00:12:38]  And they decide we're going to do a coup and get Antonescu out of here.
[00:12:42]  But it's kind of useless for them to do a coup if the Allies aren't going to like stop doing a war on Romania, right?
[00:12:48]  Like there's no real point in getting this guy out if they're just going to have to fight the war more.
[00:12:54]  I mean, to be fair, historically speaking, we've seen it happen where people do a coup and then they pull out of the war and they're like, we're out.
[00:13:01]  Yeah, but it's also, they're trying to like make it less messy than it's otherwise.
[00:13:06]  Because like this, the Russians do that, right?
[00:13:08]  And in World War I, you get your revolution and then the revolutionary government kind of awkwardly winds up still at war with Germany for a while.
[00:13:17]  And it doesn't go great.
[00:13:20]  So they have this back channel to the Allies.
[00:13:23]  And the Brits, who is the people they're talking with directly, are like, look, we'd love it if you get Antonescu out.
[00:13:28]  It'd be real great for us.
[00:13:29]  But Stalin's really the guy you got to talk to because you're Romania.
[00:13:34]  So we are not going to be your main point of contact.
[00:13:37]  What a bummer that they're like, hey, you know who you need to talk to is our very stable friend Joseph Stalin.
[00:13:43]  Our sane and totally reasonable buddy, Jay Stall.
[00:13:47]  Send a guy.
[00:13:47]  Just send a guy.
[00:13:48]  Now, Jay Stahl, to be fair, it's not an unreasonable thing.
[00:13:52]  He says, hey, look, you know, if you want to work something out with us and coup this guy, that's great.
[00:13:57]  It'll save me some trouble.
[00:13:59]  But you got to bring the Romanian Communist Party into the coup government, right?
[00:14:03]  They got to be part of it, which is, again, not an inherently unreasonable thing, except for the fact that, again, there's like 700 Romanian communists, right?

=== Stalin's Stable Friend Joseph (08:25) ===

[00:14:10]  So it's not a major party.
[00:14:12]  Yeah, that'll take an afternoon to get them in.
[00:14:15]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:14:17]  So Maniu, the National Peasants' Party guy, is like, of course, look, man, this is a bad situation.
[00:14:23]  I'm not going to fight you over this matter.
[00:14:25]  But he is like, there's not really a whole lot of communists in Romania, Joseph Stalin.
[00:14:30]  Who do you recommend we put in?
[00:14:32]  And Stalin and the Soviets recommend a law professor named Lucretiu Patronascanu.
[00:14:37]  Petrashkanu, sorry.
[00:14:39]  Lucretiu, I'm sorry.
[00:14:40]  I did look these names up.
[00:14:41]  It's hard to keep them all straight.
[00:14:42]  Lucretiu Petrashkanu.
[00:14:45]  And he and Maniu, they plan to basically take Antonescu down by inviting him over for dinner and having the king be like, hey, Antonescu, you're under arrest now.
[00:14:56]  Fuck off.
[00:14:58]  Which is kind of a funny way to do it.
[00:15:00]  The classic Rasputin movie.
[00:15:01]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:02]  Come on over to this party.
[00:15:04]  Come on, weird going on.
[00:15:06]  No, no, it's fine.
[00:15:07]  We just want to all hang out together in a room.
[00:15:09]  It's going to be totally cool.
[00:15:10]  You know how we don't agree on a lot of stuff?
[00:15:13]  Come on over to my house.
[00:15:14]  Come on in a room.
[00:15:15]  Leave your guards.
[00:15:16]  Leave your guards.
[00:15:18]  And it's very funny.
[00:15:18]  The coup actually works great.
[00:15:20]  And there's this moment where like they're like, hey, Antonescu, do you have a gun?
[00:15:23]  And he's like, I don't need a gun.
[00:15:25]  You know, my authority doesn't derive from a gun.
[00:15:28]  And then they're like, okay, cool.
[00:15:30]  Well, you're under arrest and then we're going to have you executed.
[00:15:33]  And they do.
[00:15:34]  It works out great.
[00:15:35]  This part works out really good for them.
[00:15:37]  Should have brought that gun.
[00:15:38]  Yeah, should have brought that gun.
[00:15:40]  And the National Peasants Party guy, Maniu, is kind of an old man at this point.
[00:15:44]  He's like, look, man, running a coup government, that's young man's work.
[00:15:48]  So this communist Petroshkinu winds up being kind of the first person to take a public role in the new government.
[00:15:55]  And he's actually a pretty reasonable dude, all things considered.
[00:15:59]  Like, I think he handles this about as well as it could have been handled.
[00:16:03]  So one of the things that happens, though, is because this guy is kind of your public-facing dude and the National Peasants Party, all of the liberals who are much more numerous and the royal folks who are much more numerous and actually in like the, you would suspect be the people who would wind up in charge are all kind of scared.
[00:16:23]  Right.
[00:16:23]  Because they've just cooed the other leader.
[00:16:26]  There's still a bunch of German soldiers in the country, so they don't want to make too much of a public stink.
[00:16:31]  Meanwhile, the communists, even though there's not many of them, these guys have been beaten and imprisoned and starved.
[00:16:37]  They're all like hard sons of bitches.
[00:16:39]  So the communists are like, well, why don't we just immediately take power?
[00:16:43]  Which they do, and it works pretty well for them.
[00:16:46]  They get in and they basically like put themselves in a lot of positions that are going to kind of give them the ability to control the direction of Romania, or at least help with that.
[00:16:56]  Obviously, the fact that the Soviets are so nearby helps too.
[00:17:00]  And the Romanian or the Red Army enters Romania soon after that.
[00:17:03]  So the communists kind of, despite the fact that up until this point, there had been very few of them and they'd had no power, when World War II ends, they're kind of the preeminent power in Romania.
[00:17:15]  And Stalin, yeah.
[00:17:16]  They stepped up.
[00:17:17]  Yeah, they stepped up.
[00:17:18]  And they have an election and Ceaușescu gets to practice his faking at election skills and goes about making sure that the communists win that election.
[00:17:28]  Even though, again, there'd been about 700 of them in the company prior in the country prior to World War II.
[00:17:34]  I mean, to be fair, if the people that actually stepped up to rule are running for something, it wouldn't be the worst to be like, I mean, I guess I'll vote for the guys that actually said they would do it.
[00:17:46]  No, again, and it's not an unreasonable thing that as Romanians in World War II, you would see the communists taking over, given everything that happened with the Nazis, and be like, maybe this will work out better.
[00:17:57]  Hey, not like anything else had been working very well.
[00:18:00]  It's the opposite of a Nazi, a communist.
[00:18:03]  Nothing could go wrong.
[00:18:04]  Let's try it.
[00:18:05]  Yeah.
[00:18:07]  So Georgiude, that peasant who had been like the leader of that railroad union that had done all those strikes that Ceaușescu had helped support, he becomes one of the leaders of the country.
[00:18:21]  Now, there's a bunch of, this is, it's more complicated than that.
[00:18:25]  Anna Pocker, that other lady, is also kind of one of the people who's running Romania initially after the communists kind of take over.
[00:18:34]  But, you know, you know how it goes.
[00:18:36]  You get your show trials.
[00:18:38]  You get your people start getting put in jail and locked up on bullshit charges.
[00:18:42]  And over the course of time, Georgiude kind of consolidates his power.
[00:18:46]  One of the things that this means is that he executes this guy, Petrashkinu, who got the king out, who helped overthrow, or who not that got the king out, who got Antonescu out, who like overthrew the dictator.
[00:18:59]  They come after this guy on bullshit charges and they kill his ass.
[00:19:03]  It's so crazy when it's just such a throwaway thing.
[00:19:06]  And then they executed that guy.
[00:19:07]  And then they killed him.
[00:19:08]  Let's move on.
[00:19:08]  That cool dude.
[00:19:10]  You know, that cool dude who was the communist that Stalin picked to take over.
[00:19:15]  Yeah, they fucking killed his ass.
[00:19:18]  Yeah.
[00:19:18]  And Pocker, they get rid of Pocker.
[00:19:22]  It's as ugly as it usually is when a guy consolidates power.
[00:19:27]  It's real end of the Godfather energy when that shit happens.
[00:19:32]  And it's a gradual process.
[00:19:34]  And Nikolai Ceaușescu is a quiet figure for most of this.
[00:19:38]  He does not stick his neck out.
[00:19:41]  He does not try to take any big fancy jobs for himself.
[00:19:44]  He sticks close to day and he kind of like just sort of keeps him as happy as possible.
[00:19:50]  And I'm going to read a quote from journalist Catalan Gruya here.
[00:19:53]  Under the protective wing of day, whose favorite he had become while in prison, Ceausescu struggled, flattered, adapted, worked, and raised himself up step by step, tenaciously, stubbornly, and with a real instinct for power.
[00:20:05]  At 27, he was the leader of the Communist Youth Organization and later of the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers' Party.
[00:20:12]  At 28, party instructor in Constanta and Alincia.
[00:20:15]  At 29, deputy in the Grand National Assembly after he had mobilized motorized troops in the electoral precinct to convince electors to place ballots in the urns, which had already been filled by the communists ahead of time.
[00:20:27]  His meteoric rise continued, culminating with his election at age 37 to the Politburo as Minister of the Interior.
[00:20:34]  Now, this gave him a lot of control over what's called the Securitat, which is Romania's answer to the KGB, which means he is in a position to put people into the Securitat, the organization that is surveilling everybody in the country.
[00:20:49]  Sweeping out corruption.
[00:20:51]  Good position to be in if you're a guy like this.
[00:20:54]  And everyone's kind of like, well, yeah, we want like you want someone dumb and pliable in that job.
[00:20:59]  If you're not going to be running that, if you're someone with power in the Romanian communist infrastructure and you can't be doing that job, you want a dumb person in that job, right?
[00:21:08]  You want somebody who like you feel like is controllable.
[00:21:10]  And everyone kind of feels like Ceausescu is just sort of this like not a very serious person, right?
[00:21:17]  So they're like, yeah, give him the job.
[00:21:18]  You know, what's the worst that could happen?
[00:21:20]  He's not that, he's not that dangerous.
[00:21:22]  No.
[00:21:23]  No, the worst that could happen is pretty rough.
[00:21:26]  Yeah, the worst that could happen is about to occur.
[00:21:29]  But for a while, everyone's like, yeah, you know, at least, you know, if someone's going to have that job and it's not going to be me, we might as well have it be this lick spittle who kisses everybody's ass and who isn't very threatening.
[00:21:40]  He's not, you know, really worth fearing.
[00:21:42]  And he's not worth fearing as long as Georgiude is healthy and doing good.
[00:21:49]  And given that he is an old-time communist street fighter who smokes like a chimney, surely he's going to live forever.
[00:21:56]  Yep, that's classic.
[00:21:58]  It's my favorite Bob Seeger song.
[00:22:00]  Yeah.
[00:22:00]  Yeah.
[00:22:02]  So as Nikolai climbed the ranks of the Romanian Communist Party, there's this combination of ass kissing and convincing everyone else that he's too dumb to be a threat.
[00:22:10]  His wife Elena experienced numerous career benefits as well.
[00:22:14]  All of the different wonderful things that nepotism can provide to you.
[00:22:17]  He's an A-plus wife guy, by the way.
[00:22:20]  Oh my God, you have never wifed a guy as hard as this guy wife's.
[00:22:24]  Yeah.
[00:22:25]  Shout out to this guy for just being just like a good.
[00:22:27]  He's like the Rob Zombie of wife guys of Romania.
[00:22:30]  Just being like, I don't care what you can or can't do.
[00:22:33]  I'm still giving you opportunities.

=== The Communist Street Fighter (03:46) ===

[00:22:35]  I wish I could, given that this is Romania, I should have been able to make a Dragula joke, but I'm really not sure how to work it out.
[00:22:43]  I gotta be honest, I threw you a curveball with that.
[00:22:47]  It's not coming to me, Jeff.
[00:22:48]  It's not coming to me.
[00:22:49]  And I feel ashamed for that.
[00:22:51]  But you at home, make your own joke about Rob Zombie's hit song, Dragula and the Romanian historical figure, Dracula, while Jeff and I listen to some ads.
[00:23:07]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:23:10]  I said, hi, dad.
[00:23:12]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:23:19]  This is this badass convict.
[00:23:22]  Right.
[00:23:22]  Just finished five.
[00:23:24]  I'm going to have cookies and milk.
[00:23:26]  Yeah, mom.
[00:23:28]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:23:36]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:23:45]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:23:53]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:23:59]  Open your free iHeart radio app.
[00:24:01]  Search the Ceno Show and listen now.
[00:24:08]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:24:13]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:24:21]  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.
[00:24:30]  If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for a pitch is like, what?
[00:24:35]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:24:38]  They believe everything.
[00:24:39]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:24:42]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:24:46]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:24:50]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:24:52]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:24:53]  They do not have homes.
[00:24:54]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:24:58]  Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:25:07]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[00:25:15]  Here, the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:25:20]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
[00:25:24]  Who do you think he is?
[00:25:25]  I don't know.
[00:25:27]  You meet the president?
[00:25:29]  You think English the president?
[00:25:30]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:25:31]  You think China has a president?
[00:25:33]  La Vlog Cruzette.
[00:25:36]  God, I love that thing.
[00:25:37]  I use it all the time.
[00:25:39]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
[00:25:43]  It's like the old Polish saying, Not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:25:46]  Yep.
[00:25:47]  It was a good one.
[00:25:48]  I like that saying.
[00:25:48]  It's an actual Polish saying.
[00:25:51]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:25:52]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:25:55]  Yes.
[00:25:55]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:25:58]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:25:59]  I got that wrong.
[00:26:00]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:26:10]  Oh, Jeff.
[00:26:12]  That all got me pumped up.
[00:26:13]  I got to be honest, man.
[00:26:14]  I'm going to consume all of the things that were just advertised.
[00:26:18]  Gonna slam them in the back of my Dragula.
[00:26:21]  Was that his car?

=== A Romanian Textbook Debate (15:21) ===

[00:26:22]  Was that Rob Zombie's car?
[00:26:23]  Well, it's the Munsters car, isn't it?
[00:26:26]  Are you serious?
[00:26:27]  Is that song about the Munsters?
[00:26:29]  Yeah, I think Dragula is the name of their car.
[00:26:33]  That's cool.
[00:26:36]  It's cool.
[00:26:37]  Because he wrote a cool, heavy song about the Munsters.
[00:26:40]  Are you serious?
[00:26:42]  Yeah, I mean, there's a reason he did it.
[00:26:43]  Oh, my God.
[00:26:44]  You're right.
[00:26:44]  It is based on the Drag Racer Dragula from the Munsters.
[00:26:48]  Yeah.
[00:26:49]  You want to know how I know that really well, aside from the fact that I study this shit?
[00:26:53]  The pinball machine.
[00:26:55]  The Munsters pinball machine has a Dragula thing.
[00:26:58]  Wow.
[00:26:58]  Wow.
[00:27:00]  That's sad, right?
[00:27:01]  That's kind of sad.
[00:27:02]  What a baffling piece of pop culture.
[00:27:04]  Why did that song go so hard if it's about the Munsters?
[00:27:07]  Because Rob Zombie did it.
[00:27:09]  I guess that makes sense.
[00:27:10]  It does make sense that Rob Zombie would do a song about the Munsters.
[00:27:14]  And he would go hard.
[00:27:16]  Yeah, and he would go bafflingly hard with it.
[00:27:19]  Speaking of bafflingly hard, Nikolai is bafflingly hard for his wife, Elena, who sucks ass.
[00:27:28]  That actually worked out pretty well.
[00:27:29]  So there we go.
[00:27:31]  As Nikolai climbs the ranks of the party, he starts putting his wife in jobs.
[00:27:35]  Now, at first, she's just kind of like raising their kids and stuff while he's in, you know, moving on his way up to the Politburo.
[00:27:43]  But she's got this ambition to be a chemist from the time when she worked in that illegal pill mill.
[00:27:48]  She thinks it would be really cool to be in chemistry.
[00:27:52]  So she starts taking college classes in chemistry, hoping that she can achieve her lifelong dream of being a serious scientist.
[00:27:59]  Now, in most cases, that's a perfectly respectable thing to do.
[00:28:02]  In fact, I have a lot of any woman who could raise three kids, support her powerful husband in his career, and get a complex degree in science, that's incredibly impressive.
[00:28:11]  Robots, you know?
[00:28:12]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:28:14]  Unfortunately, Elena was nearly illiterate and she had no interest in actually being taught anything by the tutors that Nikolai got for her, who become increasingly desperate with the fact that, like, oh my God, we have to, we have to teach her how to be a chemist.
[00:28:27]  And she does not want to read anything or like a chemist.
[00:28:32]  Yeah, she wants to put on a white coat and pour things in beakers.
[00:28:36]  Yeah.
[00:28:36]  Yeah.
[00:28:36]  Really?
[00:28:38]  Isn't it like that?
[00:28:38]  I think it's a Romanian textbook.
[00:28:41]  There's like a Roman, or there's a textbook.
[00:28:43]  I forget what country it's in that has Jesse Pinkman on the cover of their chemistry thing of him like pouring and shit.
[00:28:53]  I'm looking that up right now.
[00:28:55]  Yeah, Jesse Pinkman textbook cover should give you exactly where it's if it's from Romania.
[00:29:00]  That's the symmetry for that is unbelievable.
[00:29:03]  Yeah.
[00:29:04]  Because it is just satisfying to see.
[00:29:07]  Because you know, it's just a cursory Google image search for chemist.
[00:29:11]  And that one clearly has the best look because it was, you know, directed by Vincent.
[00:29:16]  I do not think that language is Romanian.
[00:29:19]  It's definitely not Romanian.
[00:29:20]  Oh, Sri Lanka.
[00:29:21]  Okay.
[00:29:22]  Oh, okay.
[00:29:22]  There it is.
[00:29:22]  Yeah.
[00:29:23]  It's a shame.
[00:29:24]  That would have been beautiful.
[00:29:25]  Jesse Pinkman.
[00:29:26]  Jesse Pinkman actually is objectively a better chemist than Elena Czechescu, which is unfortunate because of the job she's about to have.
[00:29:35]  So these tutors who are just struggling to teach her something get a brief reprieve because she's caught cheating on her exams and expelled from university in the mid-1950s.
[00:29:45]  But by 1960, Nikki is in the Politburo.
[00:29:48]  So you can't keep her out of university just because she's cheating and a danger to herself and everyone else around her.
[00:29:54]  So he forces the scientific establishment of Romania to give his wife a job.
[00:29:59]  She's made a junior technician at the Central Institute for Chemical Research.
[00:30:03]  And then she gets promoted to run the institute five years later.
[00:30:07]  Now, again, her credentials are was kicked out of college for cheating on her exams at this point.
[00:30:13]  I mean, five years, it's time to learn, right?
[00:30:14]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:15]  You can, you learn on that.
[00:30:16]  You learn most of that shit on the jab, like Jesse Pinkman, actually.
[00:30:18]  You're going to learn most of that shit on the jab anyway, right?
[00:30:21]  He didn't do good in school either.
[00:30:22]  He flunked out.
[00:30:23]  And look at how Jesse did.
[00:30:24]  Science bitch.
[00:30:26]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:30:27]  So she was as bad at this as you would expect.
[00:30:30]  When her scientists would request supplies of ethyl alcohol, which is needed for a lot of experiments, she would turn them down with a note that said she knew they just wanted the alcohol to get drunk with.
[00:30:40]  Now, I'm going to say this for Elena.
[00:30:43]  I'm sure she wasn't wrong 100% of the time.
[00:30:46]  This is the Eastern block, right?
[00:30:48]  Like, I'm sure 100% of the time she wasn't wrong.
[00:30:52]  But what's really funny is the researchers realize that, like, okay, if we request ethyl alcohol, she's going to like really drill us and turn it down because she thinks we're going to drink.
[00:31:03]  So they put in the exact same request, but they use the chemical name for ethyl alcohol.
[00:31:07]  And Alina would grant it every time because she doesn't know anything about chemistry.
[00:31:12]  She's a dumb guy.
[00:31:13]  Yeah.
[00:31:14]  Now, over time, she is aware that she doesn't know anything about chemistry and she has imposter syndrome because she's an imposter.
[00:31:22]  She's an imposter.
[00:31:23]  Because she's actually an imposter.
[00:31:25]  Imposter syndrome is not always wrong.
[00:31:28]  Some people who have imposter syndrome are imposters.
[00:31:31]  And Alina starts avoiding actual chemists, you know, the people she's managing, because conversations with them would inevitably reveal she had no idea what she was doing.
[00:31:40]  My favorite example of this was how she pronounced CO2, calling it kutu or kodoy in Romanian, right?
[00:31:48]  So she wouldn't call it kutu, but like she called it kodoy, which is the equivalent of calling CO2 kutu.
[00:31:55]  Right, because she's just kind of sounding it out, because she doesn't know how you're supposed to read um, chemical names.
[00:32:01]  Now, Kodoy in Romanian is a slang term or it's at least close to a slang term for someone who has a huge ass.
[00:32:08]  Right like it's.
[00:32:09]  It's like a dump truck ass, like Kadoy, that's kind of what that means.
[00:32:13]  So, since Elena herself has kind of a big butt again, this is what historians will say, um, her scientists started calling her Kadoy, behind her back like big ass.
[00:32:23]  Basically um, she got that cake nice yeah she's, she's.
[00:32:28]  She is caked up.
[00:32:30]  She's uranium caked up, baby.
[00:32:32]  Yeah well, please don't let her around the uranium.
[00:32:34]  That would have gone very badly for everybody.
[00:32:37]  Yeah, we could have had a Chernobyl incident.
[00:32:39]  Yeah so, like most incompetent people who wind up at the heads of large, complex organizations, Elena decided to focus her efforts on the one thing she knew how to do, which was deny people resources in order to save money.
[00:32:54]  Right, with a big old ass yeah, you swagger in with that big butt and start cutting money.
[00:33:00]  Um, it is kind of the thing that if you don't know anything about an organization and you're promoted to lead it, just start trimming the budget.
[00:33:07]  You know um, you can always make it look like you know what you're doing then and you can fuck with the people who are actually good at their jobs.
[00:33:15]  This is not a thing that you or I or any of the people we've ever worked with have had experience with ever in our careers not once.
[00:33:22]  It only happens in communist states.
[00:33:24]  So that's good.
[00:33:25]  It's good that we are immune from that here now.
[00:33:27]  This basically drives all Romanian efforts in the chemical sciences into the ground and it stymies basically all of their progress on chemistry and shit.
[00:33:36]  Uh, but her institute did spend less money over time, so that's good um, probably probably worthwhile.
[00:33:43]  Now it's the Roger Corman of chemistry labs.
[00:33:46]  They're just like, look, we're making it at a low budget.
[00:33:50]  You say that, but i'm waiting for the James Cameron, uh to to appear in this story.
[00:33:54]  There's the we.
[00:33:55]  We still don't have that here.
[00:33:57]  Uh, probably because Alina would have had him purged.
[00:34:00]  Yeah 100 yeah, you know maybe, maybe that would have been for the best.
[00:34:04]  It would have would have would have saved us that whole period of time in which everyone thought 3d tvs were going to be a thing.
[00:34:10]  I'm sorry, but I will not sacrifice true lies.
[00:34:13]  No yeah, that is, that is True Lies.
[00:34:15]  Uh, Strange Days.
[00:34:17]  The Terminator films oh, he was involved in those.
[00:34:20]  Huh, that's interesting.
[00:34:21]  Um, I wonder if people know that we're talking James Cameron, right?
[00:34:26]  Yeah, I was just okay, all.
[00:34:27]  Yeah, I got really confused and i'm like, did I say a wrong name?
[00:34:30]  No no no, this is David Fincher and i'm like you know, he did Terminator too.
[00:34:34]  I do kind of want to see David Fincher's Terminator too.
[00:34:36]  That would be something right.
[00:34:39]  So in person, Alina was extremely antisocial and quick, Quick to anger.
[00:34:44]  She was jealous of any of the other Politburo wives that she thought were more attractive than her, and she preferred to spend her time avoiding social engagements altogether.
[00:34:53]  She was disgusted with the other wives because they were traditional homemakers, whereas she had a career of her own.
[00:34:58]  Now, the fact that her career was an absolute sham does not seem to have upset Alina.
[00:35:04]  It is also worth noting that she was a pretty piss-poor mother.
[00:35:08]  Look, some people with, well, with a large ass.
[00:35:16]  That's all up to personal up to personal judgment.
[00:35:21]  So Nikku Ceaușescu, her son, born in 1951, was the baby of the family.
[00:35:26]  And from the jump, seemed to realize that his parents' position made him untouchable.
[00:35:31]  He was disruptive in school.
[00:35:32]  He threatened teachers and classmates.
[00:35:35]  No one could discipline him.
[00:35:36]  He would just start punching teachers and students whenever he got angry because, you know, his dad is helping to run the country.
[00:35:42]  Nobody can actually punish him.
[00:35:44]  It's a good situation.
[00:35:46]  We call this like the Uday and Kusay route, right?
[00:35:50]  That's kind of where, if you believe, now I'll say this.
[00:35:54]  A lot of our sources on Niku Ceaușescu come from a guy who defects from the country after running the secret police.
[00:36:00]  So there's some debate over how accurate all this is because maybe he has a vested interest in making the family sound worse than they were.
[00:36:08]  That said, the idea that Nikku Ceausescu would be a violent asshole, not a big stretch either.
[00:36:16]  So I don't know, you know, grain of salt.
[00:36:20]  According to this guy who later defects, who we will talk about later, at age 14, Nikku rapes one of his classmates.
[00:36:27]  At age 15, he gets his first boat and he drunk drives it before he gets his first car at 16, at which point he becomes one of the leading causes of car accidents in the capital of Bucharest.
[00:36:38]  Because he is just a, you know, he's a dictator's son, right?
[00:36:44]  This is all pretty standard dictator's kid stuff.
[00:36:46]  It's, you know, golden weapons and, you know, side palaces and shit.
[00:36:51]  Yeah, he doesn't have the panache of Uday and Kusay.
[00:36:54]  So he's not, I don't know, firing a golden machine gun into a crowd at a party.
[00:36:59]  But he is crashing his car constantly.
[00:37:02]  So he's got that, he's got that good Assad energy, the Assad kid who fucking killed himself in his car drunk driving.
[00:37:09]  He's that kind of dictator's son, as opposed to more of the, more of the Uday-ish, Uday-esque variety.
[00:37:18]  So for the first decade or so that communist Romania is doing its thing, the Soviet Union keeps a bunch of soldiers in country, right?
[00:37:25]  Because, you know, they want to make sure things keep going in a direction they're comfortable with.
[00:37:31]  Now, this means that for a while, Romania's Communist Party is a subservient branch of the party in Moscow.
[00:37:38]  George Uday, who's running the country and his Politburo, are not happy about this, especially once Stalin dies and Khrushchev takes power, because Khrushchev kind of repudiates some of the stuff that Stalin had done, right?
[00:37:50]  He gives this speech where he's like, hey, you know what?
[00:37:53]  Everything Stalin did wasn't perfect.
[00:37:56]  You know what it was?
[00:37:57]  George Uday where I read the Uday podcast.
[00:38:00]  Oh, George Uday.
[00:38:02]  Yeah, George Uday.
[00:38:03]  Yeah.
[00:38:03]  George Uday.
[00:38:05]  That is my personal headcanon, like fantasy fiction mashup between George Bush and Uday Hussein.
[00:38:11]  Mainly, oh, actually, no, you know, that's that.
[00:38:14]  Yeah, that's the, that's, that's what I'm shipping them together, right?
[00:38:17]  That's what you'd call it.
[00:38:18]  We ship them.
[00:38:18]  Yeah, we ship them.
[00:38:19]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:38:20]  Yeah.
[00:38:20]  Ship George Bush and Uday Hussein.
[00:38:22]  Somebody, somebody get some fan art going.
[00:38:24]  Use that chat GPT.
[00:38:25]  Make it real horny and make sure they're both caked up in honor of Elena.
[00:38:29]  Just huge asses on both Uday and George Bush and just sweaty grinding against each other.
[00:38:37]  Get him in there.
[00:38:38]  Yeah.
[00:38:39]  And then you could have George H.W. Bush and Saddam Hussein looking down on them both from heaven.
[00:38:44]  Smiling, smiling, proud.
[00:38:46]  Both ended up in heaven.
[00:38:48]  As George Bush paints Uday done up like the chick from Titanic, but instead of the heart of the ocean, it's a golden AK-47.
[00:38:55]  Somebody do this.
[00:38:57]  It's perfect opportunity for someone to do that.
[00:38:59]  We're giving you gold points in AK-47s here.
[00:39:03]  Yeah.
[00:39:03]  And do it AI-wise.
[00:39:05]  So everyone has really fucked up, unsettling hands.
[00:39:08]  George Bush has like three long fingers painting.
[00:39:11]  It'll be great.
[00:39:12]  Oh.
[00:39:14]  Somebody able to call you a loser on the internet for doing that.
[00:39:17]  Let's get a t-shirt out.
[00:39:19]  I mean, that's up to Sophie.
[00:39:21]  Sophie, make the merch.
[00:39:22]  Yeah, I think this will.
[00:39:24]  Is she still there?
[00:39:25]  I'm here.
[00:39:27]  Only if the people demand it.
[00:39:29]  I think the people are going to demand it.
[00:39:31]  Not you.
[00:39:32]  That's what I want.
[00:39:32]  Not you.
[00:39:33]  As of now, that's 100% demand.
[00:39:35]  Yeah.
[00:39:37]  So, yeah, as a Stalinist, Day is not thrilled by the fact that Khrushchev has repudiated some of the stuff that Stalin did.
[00:39:47]  So they're all kind of figuring how can we get a little bit more autonomy from the USSR?
[00:39:52]  How can we get these soldiers out of our country?
[00:39:54]  How can we kind of like take actual control for ourselves?
[00:39:57]  In 1956, protests in Hungary boil up into an uprising, which is again right next to Romania.
[00:40:04]  Now, that includes the destruction.
[00:40:06]  Like in these protests in Hungary, they destroy a bunch of statues of Stalin in Budapest.
[00:40:11]  Unrest spreads widely from there, and it reaches Romania by October of that year.
[00:40:16]  You know, the way protests do.
[00:40:17]  You get protests in one capital, they move over to the other soon.
[00:40:20]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up by the Wilson Center here.
[00:40:23]  On the 29th of October, railway men in Bucharest held a protest meeting calling for improved conditions of work.
[00:40:29]  And in the Assyri, there were street demonstrations in support of better food supplies.
[00:40:33]  An exceptionally poor harvest had drastically cut food production and queues in Bucharest, and the other main towns were commonplace.
[00:40:39]  Georgiude and a Romanian delegation cut short a visit to Yugoslavia in the 28th of October to address the crisis.
[00:40:46]  Thousands of arrests were made in the centers of protest, especially among students who participated in meetings in the Transylvanian capital of Cluj in Timișoara.
[00:40:54]  One of the largest meetings took place in Bucharest.
[00:40:56]  On the 30th of October, the Timișoara, Oradia, and Iassi regions were placed under military rule as Soviet troops were brought in across the Romanian border in the east and concentrated on the frontier with Hungary in the west.
[00:41:08]  Important question.
[00:41:09]  Did that postpone trick-or-treating?
[00:41:13]  I don't think there's a lot of trick-or-treating going on in Georgiude's Romania.
[00:41:18]  Some of the Draculas.
[00:41:19]  That's the time for Draculas.
[00:41:21]  It would have been perfect.
[00:41:22]  It would have been perfect.
[00:41:24]  But I think it's interesting here.
[00:41:26]  One of the things you're seeing, Georgiude is a railway man, like Ryan, like was the guy organizing an illegal railway union and spent a shitload of his life in prison for doing so.
[00:41:36]  And now that he's in charge, he's cracking down on protests by railwaymen and throwing a bunch of them in prison.
[00:41:41]  Always fun how that keeps happening.

=== Lung Cancer and Power Consolidation (06:07) ===

[00:41:43]  Cyclical life is the circle of life.
[00:41:46]  Yeah, it's beautiful.
[00:41:47]  It's beautiful in its own way.
[00:41:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:52]  Or it's the flat circle thing.
[00:41:55]  So the Hungarian crisis concludes when Soviets sent tanks into Budapest to crush the uprising.
[00:42:02]  And this actually, the Romanian Communist Party is going to benefit from this hugely because Soviet troops helped them stop protests in their own capital from turning into an uprising.
[00:42:12]  And the fact that the Romanian regime is so supportive of crushing these protests means the USSR is like, well, we can't trust Hungary because we just had to send in tanks here, but we can trust Romania.
[00:42:23]  And so now the Romanian Communist Party and Georgiude are like, hey, you know, we don't need all these troops in our country, Khrushchev.
[00:42:29]  You know, you guys, you guys need those dudes in Hungary.
[00:42:31]  Why don't you send all those troops to Hungary and we'll take care of Romania?
[00:42:35]  You know, we can keep a lock on things ourselves.
[00:42:39]  So, and this works.
[00:42:40]  The Soviets withdraw troops from Romania.
[00:42:43]  And as a result, Romania is going to have a lot more autonomy than other countries who are kind of in the Warsaw Pact in the region are going to have in this period of time.
[00:42:52]  So, in 1965, George Uday gets sick with lung cancer, which is a huge surprise for a communist dictator in the 1960s to have lung cancer.
[00:43:04]  Just absolutely shocking stuff.
[00:43:06]  Because that was back when cigarettes were really good for you.
[00:43:09]  Yeah, this is back when doctors recommended them.
[00:43:11]  You know, he's smoking the good ones.
[00:43:13]  He's smoking the lucky strikes, which I'm sure every doctor listening.
[00:43:19]  Plus, the air quality was general, like the air quality was roughly the same as a cigar lounge.
[00:43:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:26]  The way they would do it is they would just light giant piles of lead on fire every time you bought gasoline in celebration.
[00:43:33]  That's what we were all doing.
[00:43:34]  It's why everyone grew up in the 60s.
[00:43:37]  He has such a good brain.
[00:43:38]  They're like, we found these rocks that radiate heat.
[00:43:40]  So we've been just hovering around them like that one episode of Star Trek.
[00:43:44]  Yeah.
[00:43:46]  So George Uday gets his ass some lung cancer.
[00:43:50]  And it's, he's the, whoever, it becomes clear that like whoever is going to inherit power from him is going to inherit a really centralized, strong state in Romania that's more independent than basically any of the other countries in the Soviet bloc other than Yugoslavia.
[00:44:08]  I mean, whether or not you want to, anyway, whatever.
[00:44:12]  It's a lot of power coming into whoever takes over for this guy.
[00:44:17]  And because he had been such a private man, effectively, right?
[00:44:22]  He was number one in total power, but he was also, because he was in power, able to hide the fact that he was sick until the signs of the fact that he had terminal cancer got too obvious to ignore.
[00:44:32]  I like that you read that like a baseball stat.
[00:44:34]  You're like, you know, he was actually number one in total power.
[00:44:36]  Yeah.
[00:44:37]  Like Mark Maguire in 1998.
[00:44:39]  He was the Mark Maguire of the Warsaw Pact.
[00:44:43]  A lot of people, right down to the, well, I mean, cigarettes were steroids for dictators.
[00:44:50]  Yeah, if you're a member of a communist dictatorship, you're really, the performance-enhancing cigarettes really get through you.
[00:44:58]  I guess we'd probably say that Tito was the Nolan Ryan, just because I think he probably could have cold cocked anybody else in the Warsaw Pact if he had to.
[00:45:07]  Yeah.
[00:45:07]  Yeah.
[00:45:07]  And longevity.
[00:45:08]  Yeah.
[00:45:09]  And longevity.
[00:45:10]  Yeah, he really did stay in there a while.
[00:45:12]  Nolan Ryan throwing 103 miles an hour when he's 44 years old.
[00:45:15]  That's something.
[00:45:16]  That is Tito energy.
[00:45:18]  Yeah.
[00:45:19]  So Ceaușescu, you know, the fact that, so first off, like all of these other guys, because everyone in the Politburo, right, either has someone else that they want to take over for George Uday or wants that job themselves.
[00:45:31]  But they don't realize he's sick until he's very close to death.
[00:45:35]  Now, Ceaușescu, again, he's the ass kisser.
[00:45:37]  So he's in there daily.
[00:45:39]  He's seeing George Uday all the time.
[00:45:40]  He's talking to him all the time.
[00:45:42]  Hey, man, how are you doing?
[00:45:43]  Yeah.
[00:45:45]  You're looking like you're losing weight, man.
[00:45:47]  And hair and some skin.
[00:45:49]  Yeah.
[00:45:51]  You seem to be wasting away more.
[00:45:53]  You want to sign this piece of paper real quick?
[00:45:55]  Don't ask about it.
[00:45:55]  Yeah, you're good.
[00:45:57]  So all of these other guys kind of suddenly find themselves scrambling to figure out how to set themselves up for the post-George Uday world, whereas Ceaușescu knows exactly what's going on.
[00:46:08]  And I'm going to quote from Paul Kinyon again here.
[00:46:11]  The list of possible successors was short.
[00:46:13]  The nine-member Politburo was hardly overburdened with talent.
[00:46:16]  Five of them had barely completed elementary school, and three were former rail workers from George Uday's union days, who had been elevated for loyalty, not literacy.
[00:46:25]  Not only had George Uday purged the upper echelons of the party, he'd impoverished the entire country with his anti-intellectual policies.
[00:46:32]  Children of political detainees were denied a university education.
[00:46:36]  Their extended families were considered stigmatized.
[00:46:38]  Schools were barred from teaching critical thought.
[00:46:40]  Academics were regularly arrested and detained.
[00:46:43]  All this was designed to eradicate opposition, but had inadvertently starved the Romanian Communist Party of even moderately capable minds.
[00:46:51]  You know, so maybe don't purge people who know how to do things from your, although it does make it easier to stay in power.
[00:47:01]  So really, it's a tough situation that they were in.
[00:47:06]  Yeah.
[00:47:07]  Yeah, that kind of happens when somebody withers away and dies and is surrounded by morons.
[00:47:13]  Yeah.
[00:47:14]  This is this is actually a version.
[00:47:16]  I mean, it's interesting because Georgie Day is a staladist.
[00:47:18]  This is basically the same kind of thing that happens.
[00:47:21]  It's a little less severe, right?
[00:47:23]  The Politburo that kind of Stalin leaves behind are more capable than the guys that Georgie Day had around him.
[00:47:31]  But yeah, it is, it's interesting kind of some of the similarities here.
[00:47:35]  But you know who else has carried out a series of anti-intellectual purges in order to ensure that no one capable can force them from their position of power.
[00:47:48]  Pol Pot.

=== Financial Literacy Month Sponsorship (03:10) ===

[00:47:50]  Pol Pot, who is the primary sponsor of this podcast.
[00:47:54]  Oh, wow.
[00:47:55]  Yeah.
[00:47:55]  Yeah.
[00:47:56]  No, no, we got the big pole pot.
[00:47:58]  Is it a cookware?
[00:47:58]  It's a cookware cookware company.
[00:48:00]  Pole Pots Pots.
[00:48:02]  Yeah.
[00:48:04]  He's selling cast iron skillets, and you do not want to see what happens if you wash one of them with soap.
[00:48:10]  It's either that or it's like some clever weed brand.
[00:48:16]  It'll make you so stupid, you'll be anti-intellectual.
[00:48:20]  Just go ahead and if you've got some of this weed, just throw your glasses away.
[00:48:24]  You don't need them.
[00:48:26]  It'll, I don't know.
[00:48:27]  I don't know how to keep making polls.
[00:48:29]  Welcome to the smoking fields, everybody.
[00:48:32]  That's a poo boy.
[00:48:34]  Yeah.
[00:48:34]  You'll be stoned out of your skull.
[00:48:37]  Let's get let's break to ads now.
[00:48:44]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:48:47]  Hi, dad.
[00:48:48]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:48:56]  There's this badass convict.
[00:48:58]  Right.
[00:48:59]  Just finished five years.
[00:49:00]  I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
[00:49:05]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:49:13]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:49:21]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:49:29]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:49:31]  And without this program, I'm going to die.
[00:49:36]  Open your free iHeart radio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
[00:49:44]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:49:49]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:49:57]  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.
[00:50:06]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
[00:50:11]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:50:14]  They believe everything.
[00:50:15]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:50:19]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:50:22]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:50:26]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:50:28]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:50:30]  They do not have homes.
[00:50:31]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:50:34]  Listen to Eating Wildbrook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:50:43]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[00:50:52]  Here, the Nick Dick and Poll Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:50:56]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
[00:50:59]  He's the writer director.

=== Bringing Pol Pot Into Romania (15:20) ===

[00:51:01]  Who do you think he is?
[00:51:02]  I don't know.
[00:51:04]  You meet the like the president?
[00:51:06]  You think he's the president?
[00:51:07]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:51:08]  You think China has a president?
[00:51:09]  Lozlaw proves that.
[00:51:12]  God, I love that thing.
[00:51:14]  I use it all the time.
[00:51:15]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it like it's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:51:23]  Yep.
[00:51:23]  It's a good one.
[00:51:24]  I like that saying.
[00:51:25]  It's an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
[00:51:28]  Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
[00:51:31]  Yes.
[00:51:32]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:51:34]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:51:36]  I got that wrong.
[00:51:36]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:46]  Oh, we're back and we're talking Pol Pot.
[00:51:51]  Well, no, we're not.
[00:51:52]  We're talking the end of George Uday's time in charge of the Romanian Communist Party.
[00:51:57]  We're not joking about Pol Pot.
[00:51:59]  We're talking about stuff.
[00:52:00]  Just having a couple of people.
[00:52:02]  This episode isn't horrible enough.
[00:52:04]  Pol Pot.
[00:52:04]  Yeah.
[00:52:05]  Bring a little bit of Pol Pot in there.
[00:52:07]  So.
[00:52:08]  Let's have a holiday in Romania.
[00:52:10]  Yeah.
[00:52:11]  Yeah.
[00:52:12]  Now, there are only three veteran members of the Politburo who had any degree of competence, but all of them had what the party considered to be unhealthy origins.
[00:52:21]  One of them is German, another is Ukrainian, and the third is Bulgarian.
[00:52:25]  And as Catalan Gruya notes, the three prerequisites for the future leader were one, to be Romanian, two, to be an activist, and three, to be part of the working class.
[00:52:34]  So no one in power likes Nikolai or considers him a good choice to replace Georgie, but Nikki had maneuvered himself into an incredible position.
[00:52:43]  And it was one that surprised his colleagues.
[00:52:46]  His job in the Politburo at this point was secretary for organization in Cadras.
[00:52:50]  And this is kind of a boring job.
[00:52:52]  It's pretty low prestige within the Politburo jobs, but it provides him with this opportunity to make a lot of little decisions about who's in position where.
[00:53:00]  Who's booking the boss's schedule every day, right?
[00:53:03]  Who gets to like set George Uday's schedule?
[00:53:05]  All these different people, who's working in his house.
[00:53:08]  He's kind of picking all of these low-level functionaries.
[00:53:11]  And it turns out when that's your job, when your job is to hook a bunch of people up with these little jobs that determine everything about the boss's life, you kind of control the boss's life, especially when he's dying of cancer and doesn't have as much wherewithal as he used to have.
[00:53:27]  So because Nikki is in charge of the people making the boss's schedule, Nikki effectively has control over who gets to visit George Uday every day.
[00:53:36]  And once the man gets sick, Nikki's able to exercise near total control over who sees the boss and when.
[00:53:42]  The last weeks of George Uday's life were a constant series of Politburo members trying to get him to confirm his successor and Ceaușescu being like, nah, he's sick today.
[00:53:51]  He doesn't want to talk politics.
[00:53:53]  Don't come around another day, you know?
[00:53:55]  You just got to let him chill out.
[00:53:57]  And Ceaușescu is doing this because he knows he's in the best position.
[00:54:01]  He's a Romanian.
[00:54:03]  You know, he's got peasant credentials.
[00:54:05]  He's the best positioned to take over for George Uday.
[00:54:10]  And so if he can just kind of keep the others away from him and stop them from getting him to agree to make someone else's successor, he's got a pretty good shot of getting the job.
[00:54:19]  Now, George Uday, despite his illness, realizes what Nikki's doing and he sees it as a major threat to the country.
[00:54:25]  And this is kind of a thing that happens with Lenin and Stalin, right?
[00:54:28]  When Lenin's on his last legs, he's like, I don't really think this Stalin guy is a good job to follow me up.
[00:54:34]  I think this could go badly.
[00:54:35]  Trotsky's like, excellent point.
[00:54:37]  I'm going to Mexico.
[00:54:40]  Yeah.
[00:54:41]  Yeah, that's how that went.
[00:54:42]  So, in snatched conversations with old comrades, he warns of Nikolai's feverish maneuverings, but the boss has already been outmaneuvered himself.
[00:54:50]  While half the Politburo is angling to try and get Georgie to make a selection, Nikolai is getting the other half to line up behind him.
[00:54:58]  And he promises them, hey guys, you know me.
[00:55:00]  I'm a blank slate, right?
[00:55:02]  You can just make me do whatever.
[00:55:03]  I'll do anything you want.
[00:55:04]  You know, it's fine.
[00:55:06]  Yeah, I'll be your guy.
[00:55:08]  I'm a fun-time guy.
[00:55:09]  I just want the title, you know?
[00:55:11]  You guys will be the power behind the throne.
[00:55:13]  I just want the title.
[00:55:15]  I'm just a fun-timing guy.
[00:55:17]  Ain't nothing wrong with me.
[00:55:18]  Again, Georgiude has pretty systematically purged anyone, most of the people who are good at things.
[00:55:25]  So all of the other Politburo guys are like, well, this seems reasonable.
[00:55:28]  Why would he lie about this?
[00:55:31]  Why would somebody in a position of power lie?
[00:55:33]  It's like, dude, what war do you think you just lived through?
[00:55:38]  We're surrounded at all sides by wild liars.
[00:55:43]  So this works incredibly well for Ceausescu.
[00:55:46]  The boss dies on March 19th, 1965.
[00:55:50]  And Ceausescu is shortly thereafter confirmed as prime secretary of the Romanian Socialist Republic, which is a new term.
[00:55:58]  They've been using other terms for their leaders before that.
[00:56:00]  He decides, I'm going to pick a new title, you know, new guy at 47.
[00:56:04]  I think he's the youngest leader in Europe at the time when he gets power.
[00:56:09]  And certainly very young.
[00:56:10]  Josh kissing ain't the worst thing out there, is it?
[00:56:13]  Yeah, yeah, he's doing good.
[00:56:14]  These guys, everyone else kind of running communist countries in Europe at this point in time is a lot older.
[00:56:19]  He's young.
[00:56:20]  He's considered handsome.
[00:56:23]  He's the JFK of communism, right?
[00:56:25]  That is actually kind of how he's viewed when he takes power.
[00:56:29]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:56:30]  And to be fair, he does pretty well at first.
[00:56:33]  You actually wouldn't be, there were not initially warning signs that like this was going to be worse than kind of anything going on around him, right?
[00:56:42]  It's like, hey, this guy, he's not going to do like a genocide or anything, right?
[00:56:46]  Yeah, not purposefully.
[00:56:48]  So despite being essentially, he is an old-fashioned Stalinist.
[00:56:52]  He's pretty consistent about being a Stalinist, particularly like economically, most of his career.
[00:56:58]  But he supports a lot more liberalization than Georgiude had allowed.
[00:57:03]  He opens up some space for private enterprise.
[00:57:05]  Mostly what he does is he kind of opens up space for foreign trade, which means Western music's getting in, right?
[00:57:12]  People are getting to listen to like rock and roll and that kind of stuff, which is cool.
[00:57:16]  Some movies and some TV is getting in, and that makes people really happy.
[00:57:21]  He also provides a little bit more space for public speech.
[00:57:24]  He allows newspapers.
[00:57:26]  You can't criticize the system, but you can kind of poke around at edges of like certain programs that might not work.
[00:57:32]  Well, it's a lot more than they'd had, right?
[00:57:34]  Under Georgiude, because it's a pretty, pretty strict system under him.
[00:57:38]  So he liberalizes quite a lot.
[00:57:40]  And people are really optimistic.
[00:57:42]  This is actually considered a lot of Romanians.
[00:57:44]  It was like, it was not a bad time, you know?
[00:57:47]  There's plenty of food.
[00:57:49]  People are like, the state was actually doing a decent job of taking care of people.
[00:57:55]  It seems good.
[00:57:56]  Everything's going to be fine.
[00:57:58]  Like, that's it.
[00:57:58]  That's the show.
[00:57:59]  Stop there.
[00:58:00]  Just a pretty cool breeze of a dude.
[00:58:03]  None of these guys ever stop there.
[00:58:07]  And part of why things are good is that he kind of wants, he's part of one of the things Ceausescu is doing is, like, anyone who takes power in a system like this, you got to consolidate it, Nick's, right?
[00:58:17]  You got to push out your rivals.
[00:58:19]  You got to jail some people.
[00:58:21]  You got to force them out of their jobs so you can take total power.
[00:58:24]  And you don't want to be cracking down on the people while that's going on, right?
[00:58:28]  You want to keep them happy while you're taking power, and so that's kind of part of what he's doing in this period of time.
[00:58:34]  And in fairly short order, he forces out all of these guys who'd agreed to vote for him to take power.
[00:58:39]  He pushes them out of their jobs, right?
[00:58:41]  Um, some of this he does, he opens an investigation into the purges that had been carried out by Georgiuday.
[00:58:48]  That dude Petronascu, who had forced the uh and who had taken out Antonescu, he uh he does an investigation into that guy's execution.
[00:58:56]  And obviously, Ceausescu had helped with that, right?
[00:58:59]  He had been a part of killing that guy and purging all of these people, but now he's being like, Yeah, we're gonna look into this.
[00:59:04]  That was really bad.
[00:59:05]  We gotta get these bad actors out of here, you know?
[00:59:08]  That's like when the police are like, We're gonna have an internal investigation on this massacre that we did.
[00:59:14]  Well, it turns out we found out we did nothing wrong, so yeah, it was just those five guys who happened to be rivals to my power.
[00:59:21]  So, 800 million dollars more, please.
[00:59:23]  Yeah, yeah, this is it, it's very much that sort of thing.
[00:59:28]  Um, and while he does this, he also supports a drive towards Romanian nationalism, and he's he's gonna back anything that he thinks will make people feel an identity separate from the Soviet Union.
[00:59:39]  And one of the because again, while he's he is a strong communist by this point, and and so is obviously the Romanian Communist Party is a communist party, that doesn't mean that they're like want to be part of Russia, right?
[00:59:53]  This is actually a big thing for a lot of countries in the Warsaw Pact.
[00:59:57]  And Romania has this, as we've talked about, this kind of long history of being oppressed and attacked by their neighbors.
[01:00:03]  So, they don't, he doesn't want, and obviously, it's bad for his own personal power, too, if everyone in Romania feels like, ah, we're just a satellite of Russia.
[01:00:10]  So, he starts backing, he starts like really supporting a series of like books and uh uh kind of questionable historical tracts about guys like Vlad Dracula and the Emperor Trajan, who he kind of turns into a Romanian.
[01:00:24]  Um, and what's really funny is like, while they, while he's kind of backing guys like Dracula and Emperor Trajan, they have to be framed as proto-socialist, right?
[01:00:33]  They're not communists, obviously, because communism didn't exist back when Dracula's walking around, but you have to say that like Dracula actually, when you think about it, was like a pre-socialist leader.
[01:00:43]  You know, he had a lot of these tendencies that we that we've now figured out as communists and like the Emperor Trajan, classic proto-socialist, right?
[01:00:51]  Yeah, really was big about redistribution of wealth.
[01:00:55]  Yeah, what a weird, um, what a weird person to try to reframe the national yes, the emperor Trajan, socialist the people's hero.
[01:01:03]  Yeah, he's like, you know, who actually was a good person?
[01:01:05]  Elizabeth Battery, yes, let's talk about how great she was.
[01:01:09]  She loved unions, couldn't get enough of unions.
[01:01:12]  She was real, just a union darling, really.
[01:01:15]  Yeah, um, so obviously, all of this was very questionable from a historic standpoint, but again, why is anyone going to complain?
[01:01:24]  For one thing, at least you're getting to read more books now.
[01:01:27]  You know, more the papers are out there, you're getting some music.
[01:01:30]  Um, life is pretty good.
[01:01:32]  Uh, now, what do you think the most popular song was when they're hit in what 1965?
[01:01:38]  Um, I know, I don't know if it's in 65 quite yet, but uh, the fucking stones were pretty popular in Romania.
[01:01:45]  Um, yeah, I mean, obviously, um, the Romanian stones get no sites fiction.
[01:01:54]  It's just like the Beach Boys, because it is the 60s.
[01:01:57]  I'm sure the Beach Boys are fucking blowing up out there.
[01:02:02]  Um, surfing surf in USA, big popular song in Romania, yes, Romania's famous surf culture, yeah, yeah, they really get heavily into like that shit.
[01:02:15]  Yeah, um, so Romania had been one of the major breadbaskets of the region.
[01:02:22]  It was actually the Soviet Union back when they were still kind of occupying the country, their pitch to the Romanian Communist Party was like, hey, we'll do all this industrializing.
[01:02:32]  You guys basically grow all of the food for the Warsaw Pact, right?
[01:02:36]  That'll, why don't we just do it that way?
[01:02:38]  And the George Uday had kind of been like, well, no, I'm a railway union man.
[01:02:43]  I want to industrialize too.
[01:02:45]  I don't want us to just be your garden, basically.
[01:02:48]  So he had industrialized the country pretty rapidly.
[01:02:52]  And one of the reasons why a lot of Romanians suspected that he'd been because there's this conspiracy theory develops that he had gotten cancer because the Russians had poisoned him because he was so independent.
[01:03:03]  I don't know how likely this is.
[01:03:04]  There's a lot of reasons why George Uday might have gotten cancer.
[01:03:08]  But anyway, there's a myriad of reasons.
[01:03:13]  Not hard to get cancer being that guy.
[01:03:16]  Ceausescu, though.
[01:03:17]  I will add that Romania, I looked up some of their number one songs and it looks like they only charted like the international stuff around 95 that I saw quickly.
[01:03:25]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[01:03:26]  The first one that shows up is You Are Not Alone by Michael Jackson.
[01:03:30]  Oh, that's nice.
[01:03:31]  It's like mostly American stuff.
[01:03:34]  It's surprisingly close to what you would think of.
[01:03:38]  Yeah, it was like the top charts in the United States.
[01:03:42]  I know that Ceausescu's favorite TV show is Kojak.
[01:03:48]  Yeah.
[01:03:49]  Kojak can just shoot anybody he wants and Ceaușescu identifies with that.
[01:03:54]  Telly Savalis wrote a book, I think, about getting ass, which I think is just really hilarious.
[01:03:59]  Like it's just a way to get ass.
[01:04:02]  Wait, what?
[01:04:03]  And I'm super into that.
[01:04:04]  The idea that Kojak was writing a how to pick up women.
[01:04:11]  Yeah, it's interesting.
[01:04:11]  It's always interesting, like when you look at kind of these countries while they are under communism, what American TV shows are really popular.
[01:04:19]  I think it was Hungary where, oh, what's its name?
[01:04:23]  The Peter Falk's show.
[01:04:27]  Colombo.
[01:04:28]  Colombo.
[01:04:29]  Colombo was like huge, I believe, in Hungary, where it was like people were absolutely out of their fucking minds for Colombo, which makes sense.
[01:04:38]  Isn't that weirdly enough?
[01:04:40]  I think that's one of the main points of WandaVision.
[01:04:44]  Oh, is it?
[01:04:45]  So like, if you saw Wandavision on Disney Plus, the whole point of it was that she, you know, where she grew up was clearly the Eastern Bloc.
[01:04:53]  And they just like they had these old DVDs of old sitcoms.
[01:05:00]  I've talked to a couple of people.
[01:05:01]  Like there were like folks who grew up in countries where like The Simpsons was illegal, who would get like smuggled Simpsons DVDs where like one person, you would just have some like random lady who would read in the local language like over who would basically do these like underground dubs of shows like The Simpsons and how it's like even now that they have access to the show as it actually is, the voices sound wrong because it's like, well, no, I grew up with like Vlad from the village over was the guy who did the voice.
[01:05:32]  It was like this.
[01:05:33]  There's a documentary about the woman that did that.
[01:05:35]  It's fascinating stuff.
[01:05:36]  It's all it's, I love this kind of like weird culture bits like that.
[01:05:41]  It's always really interesting.
[01:05:42]  It's kind of like how you had, I mean, one of my favorite stories from Castro's Cuba is that during the AIDS outbreak, there was like, there were basically punks who, you know, a lot of, there was heavy restrictions on what music you could listen to and what music you could play.
[01:06:00]  And so you had these punks who realized that like, well, if we get AIDS, the government will put us in these like basically medical facilities where because we're all dying, there's not the same kind of restrictions.
[01:06:12]  So if we just infect each other with HIV, we can play and listen to whatever music we want.
[01:06:18]  It's a, it's a fucking, there was an NPR documentary about it.

=== Nightmarish Abortion Policies (03:56) ===

[01:06:21]  It's not the most far-sighted way to gain.
[01:06:25]  I think that's about the most punk rock anything could be.
[01:06:28]  Oh, I'm not saying, I wouldn't say punk rock is something that is not short-sighted.
[01:06:33]  Well, yeah, that's probably fair, given the lifespans of a lot of those guys.
[01:06:36]  Yeah, like the crust punk lifestyle is not designed to make it to, you know, you're not going to die of old age if you're like really like, you know, who I love?
[01:06:48]  GG Allen.
[01:06:50]  Important to note, Ceausescu, through none of this period, is not listening to punk music.
[01:06:56]  He is, however, watching Kojak.
[01:06:58]  It is interesting that like the dictator of Romania's favorite TV show is a fucking cop show.
[01:07:04]  Yeah.
[01:07:05]  A Greek cop.
[01:07:06]  Perhaps not surprising.
[01:07:09]  So yeah, Ceausescu has this plan to continue Georgie Day's policy of industrializing Romania.
[01:07:16]  He wants to build it into this consumer goods mecca.
[01:07:19]  His plan is to turn Romania, instead of it being a breadbasket, and Romania is very well suited to produce a shitload of high-quality food.
[01:07:26]  He wants it producing consumer goods, appliances, refrigerators and televisions, all sorts of electronics that can then be sold all throughout Europe, including Western Europe.
[01:07:37]  Now, doing this, Romania, not a huge country, he's going to need a bigger population.
[01:07:42]  If you want to be an industrial nation, you need a lot of workers.
[01:07:46]  So in order to provide this needed base of industrial workers, Nikolai and Elena calculate that the country should shoot for a population of 20 million people.
[01:07:55]  Now, what's the best way to incentivize basically doubling the population of your country?
[01:08:00]  Well, first, you got to make sure people don't have condoms.
[01:08:04]  And then you have to ban abortion.
[01:08:05]  And you know what?
[01:08:06]  You might as well just make it illegal to provide much of anything in the way of sex ed or contraceptives.
[01:08:12]  Just get rid of all that and people will naturally make more of themselves.
[01:08:16]  Now, there's some consequences to this.
[01:08:19]  For example, the fact that over time, a huge number of Romanian women seek abortions anyway, but they don't have access to decent medical care or information about their bodies that would allow them to do that in anything that even approaches a safe way.
[01:08:35]  And so during the time that Nikolai and Elena are in power, between 10 and 20,000 Romanian women die due to botched abortions.
[01:08:44]  So that's pretty bad.
[01:08:46]  Not going to help the population.
[01:08:48]  Well, overall, I mean, they do reach their population goal.
[01:08:52]  We will talk more in another episode about the other things that happen as they reach their population.
[01:08:56]  I do like the idea that his goal was just like, you know what, why don't we become like Japan?
[01:09:01]  Yeah.
[01:09:01]  And it's like, just, I don't know, I think they got a lot of assistance from America in that regard that you're not getting in Romania.
[01:09:09]  Yeah, you're not going to get that in Romania.
[01:09:11]  You know, you don't have, there's a lot of things that like maybe you shouldn't immediately assume that you can go from zero to like producing everybody's televisions when there's a lot of competition for that role.
[01:09:25]  And yeah.
[01:09:25]  Yeah.
[01:09:26]  Getting a magna box or a sorny, you know?
[01:09:30]  It's not going to work out well.
[01:09:31]  A lot of none of this is going to work out well.
[01:09:34]  But, you know, in the early kind or in the mid to late 60s, while you still have this, I mean, this abortion policy is pretty nightmarish and that's going to cause a lot of suffering.
[01:09:44]  You could be forgiven if you're.
[01:09:46]  Yeah.
[01:09:46]  Yeah.
[01:09:47]  If you're living in Romania, you could be forgiven for thinking, well, shit, this is actually kind of working out okay.
[01:09:54]  Right.
[01:09:55]  And that's, that's the point at which we're going to end right now on an up note, aside from the 10 to 20,000 people who die in a nightmarish totalitarian anti-abortion policy.
[01:10:05]  That's called dipping your toes into the pool, baby.
[01:10:08]  Yeah, dipping your toes into the pool.
[01:10:10]  And we will come back and we will talk about what happens when Ceausescu dips a little bit more of himself into the pool.

=== Living in a Working System (03:19) ===

[01:10:17]  But first, Jeff, who are you, Jeff?
[01:10:23]  Where do you come from?
[01:10:24]  Oh, great.
[01:10:25]  Where did you come from?
[01:10:25]  This is the part where you go, Cotton Eye, Jeff.
[01:10:29]  Well, you know, I'm a comedian and podcaster.
[01:10:31]  The one thing I will say is that if you are in the New England area and you want to see me performing live, I'm going to be doing one show Wednesday, February 22nd at Redemption Rock Brewery in Western Massachusetts.
[01:10:44]  It's my one show that I do out there.
[01:10:46]  Limited tickets, but it's a great stand-up show.
[01:10:48]  And I love doing stand-up and I don't get to do it enough, so I'm very happy to do that.
[01:10:53]  You can also see me live the second Friday of every month at Blast from the Past on Magnolia in beautiful Burbank, California for my show Mint on Card.
[01:11:02]  I love Burbank.
[01:11:03]  Podcast-wise, God, I got a lot of good ones.
[01:11:06]  I got Jeff Has Cool Friends, which you can hear for free anywhere, but you can get early access to uncensored episodes with bonus content at patreon.com slash JeffMay.
[01:11:15]  One word.
[01:11:15]  You also have access to shows like Nerd with Dre Alvarez, which is a nerdy deep dive podcast.
[01:11:21]  You can do shows like Ugg Find, me with Kim Krall.
[01:11:23]  That's monthly.
[01:11:24]  You can go to Gamefully Unemployed, and you can hear Tom and Jeff watch Batman with Tom Ryman, who's been a guest of the show a million times.
[01:11:33]  You can check that out.
[01:11:34]  You can also check out You Don't Even Like Sports, a sports podcast for people that hate sports and unpopular opinion, both on the Unpops network with Adam Todd Brown.
[01:11:43]  Other than that, I'm around.
[01:11:45]  You can find me on social media.
[01:11:47]  Yeah.
[01:11:48]  You can find Jeff on social media.
[01:11:50]  That was so thorough.
[01:11:52]  That was very thorough.
[01:11:53]  That is what happens when you do these plugs seven times a week.
[01:11:58]  You did it.
[01:11:58]  And you can find me next to Jeff, waiting for him to get sick and die so that I can take over for him.
[01:12:06]  Much like Cheucescu.
[01:12:08]  I'm going to be the Ceausescu of Jeff May.
[01:12:12]  Yeah, it's going to be good.
[01:12:13]  And then I'm going to turn Jeff's apartment into a manufacturing hub for Southern California.
[01:12:19]  We're going to open up all my toys.
[01:12:22]  We're going to melt them down and turn them into those big old style TVs.
[01:12:27]  The ones that weighed like 700 pounds.
[01:12:30]  The ones with like a radon tube in the back.
[01:12:32]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:33]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:34]  The ones that are like 80% of a nuclear bomb.
[01:12:36]  Like you basically have a dirty bomb if the TV goes out.
[01:12:40]  That's the kind of TV that has that fizzy static on it when it's been off for the whole time.
[01:12:45]  Yeah.
[01:12:46]  Yeah.
[01:12:46]  The one that glows at night and you just wonder, is there something always going on in there?
[01:12:51]  Yeah, well, God, I miss old TVs.
[01:12:53]  There's something in this TV.
[01:12:54]  It's humming all the time.
[01:12:56]  Unplugged, still humming.
[01:12:58]  Yeah, the one that could kill a family of four if it fell over while you were eating your fucking TV Swanson dinners.
[01:13:06]  God, things were so much better in the 90s.
[01:13:09]  Well, we'll be back on Thursday, everybody.
[01:13:13]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:13:16]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com.
[01:13:21]  Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:13:26]  Now, everybody over here?
[01:13:27]  Oh, it's one of my other favorite places.
[01:13:29]  The Twilight Gazebo.
[01:13:31]  Sunset Gardens.
[01:13:33]  Twilight Gazebo.
[01:13:36]  What's next?

=== Behind the Bastards Outro (01:59) ===

[01:13:37]  Dead Man's Grove?
[01:13:38]  Mom, could you please try to be a little bit positive about this?
[01:13:43]  From Kenya Barris, the visionary creator of Blackish, comes Big Age, an Audible original about finding your way in life's next chapter.
[01:13:52]  This audio comedy series follows a retired couple's reluctant relocation to Sunset Gardens, a Floridian senior community that is anything but relaxing.
[01:14:02]  Starring comedy legends, Jennifer Lewis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Nicene Ashbetts.
[01:14:07]  Through its blend of outrageous comedy, Pea Party Anyone, and touching revelations, Big Age explores what it means to grow older without growing old at heart.
[01:14:16]  Go to audible.com/slash big age series to start listening today.
[01:14:22]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:14:29]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:14:36]  The entire season two is now available at the bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:14:42]  I'm an alcoholic, and without this probe, I'm a guy.
[01:14:46]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:14:52]  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.
[01:15:00]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[01:15:07]  Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
[01:15:12]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, or it's really like a stone sculpture.
[01:15:20]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[01:15:22]  Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[01:15:27]  Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:15:32]  This is an iHeart Podcast.
[01:15:35]  Guaranteed human.