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[Assistant] The mattress industry has, for a very long time, forced consumers into paying notoriously high markups, with resellers and showrooms all taking their cut along the way.


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[Assistant] Casper is revolutionizing the system by offering obsessively engineered mattresses at a shockingly fair price.


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[Assistant] Made in America, these mattresses combine two technologies, latex foam and memory foam, that provide just the right sink and just the right bounce, and come together for better nights and brighter days.


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[Assistant] By cutting out all the middlemen, you can get a twin for $500, or a king for just $950, and if you've ever gone out mattress shopping, you know those are some pretty outstanding prices.


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[Assistant] On top of that, this is all risk-free. You can try sleeping on a Casper for a hundred days, and if for some crazy reason you don't like it, you can just return it and pay nothing.


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[Assistant] I of course now have a Casper mattress of my own, and the whole family approves.


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[Assistant] Mrs. Revolutions and I have slept great, and the boy has put it through a fairly rigorous product testing program that involves jumping onto it, jumping off of it, and then just sort of jumping around on it, and he couldn't be happier about this fun new toy that just showed up on his doorstep one day.


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[Assistant] In the wake of the massacre at the Chambre de Mars, it very much appeared that the Republican movement had been permanently suppressed. The radical leaders of the radical Paris districts were in hiding, and everyone else was busy putting the finishing touches on the Constitution of 1791, a constitution that would establish France permanently as a constitutional monarchy.


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[Assistant] And it nearly was permanent, which is to say, it almost lasted a whole year.


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[Assistant] But in the late summer of 1791, it definitely looked like the revolution was winding down. Especially because the triumvirate of Antoine Barnav, Adrian Duport, and Alexandre Lemaître had stepped forward in the wake of the flight to Varennes, seized the political initiative,


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[Assistant] And we're carefully guiding both the king and the national assembly towards the peaceful and reasonable shores of constitutional monarchy.


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[Assistant] Then pull back to take in the broader international implications of the flight to Varenne, and then circle back in to inaugurate the Constitution of 1791, and finally bid a fond farewell to the National Assembly.


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[Assistant] Now I don't need to rehash his life too much, since we already saw him lead the old parlemah in battle against the royal ministry, and then organize the liberal nobles into that influential society of thirty in the months leading up to the estates general.


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[Assistant] Once elected to that body, Duport was happy to abandon his seat in the second estate and go join the National Assembly.


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[Assistant] Where his eloquence, his reputation, and his keen intellect made him something of a go to authority for all things judicial. And he guided the reorganization of the judicial system that accompanied the great departmental reorganization of France.


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[Assistant] But though he had been ahead of the revolutionary curve for years, he was a staunch monarchist, and after the flight to Varenne he worked tirelessly to save the monarchy from destruction.


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[Assistant] More than anyone else, it was Duport who concocted and maintained that transparent fiction that the king had been abducted. Duport was a leading member of a committee that interviewed the king after the flight, and he skillfully deflected awkward questions and prevented anyone else from making outright accusations against the king.


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[Assistant] Then, Duport managed to convince the National Assembly that admitting the truth publicly would lead to anarchy, and the bloody clash on the Chambre de Mars seemed to support that claim.


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[Assistant] A year younger than Dupore was Alexandra LeMette. Born in 1760 and now 31 years old, Alexandra LeMette was actually one of three prominent LeMette brothers. All three were career army officers, and all three would be elected to the Estates General.


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[Assistant] Both Alexandra and his brother Charles served under Rochambeau in the American War of Independence. And not surprisingly, Alexandra and Charles both wound up forward-thinking liberals, while their eldest brother, whose name I won't trouble you with, remained a conservative.


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[Assistant] Alexandra was a member of Dupour, Society of Thirty, and after the Estates General were called, he was an early noble defector over to the National Assembly, and then played a prominent role in the night of August the 4th, happily stepping forward to renounce privileges he had never put much stock in anyway.


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[Assistant] He helped found the Jacobins and remained a prominent left-wing voice right into early 1791, and was actually one of the Jacobin leaders who denounced Mirabeau for the great orator's defense of the royal family, especially since it seemed to coincide with the sudden disappearance of all Mirabeau's debts.


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[Assistant] But like Dupour, and then as we'll see in a minute with Barnav, the sustained popular assault on the monarchy was making him nervous. And he was definitely in the revolutionary camp that feared radical mobs more than reactionary aristocrats.


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[Assistant] For LeMette, the revolution as such was now pretty much over. It was time to inaugurate the new constitution and enjoy the fruits of all their labor.


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[Assistant] He hailed from Grenoble and was deeply involved with Mounier's movement to convene the Dauphiné estate and defend the Grenoble parlement from being sent into exile.


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[Assistant] He wrote a hugely influential pamphlet in response to the May edicts called The Spirit of the Edicts, which gave him a bit of national prominence going into the Estates General.


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[Assistant] He was a third estate delegate from Dauphine, and though he and Mounier were personal friends and long-standing political allies, they drifted apart once the sweep of events got a hold of them.


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[Assistant] Of the three triumphs, Barnav's turn towards conservatism in 1791 comes with the most compelling personal story.


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[Assistant] He was one of the three delegates appointed by the National Assembly to go escort the royal family back from Varenne.


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[Assistant] By all account, it was on the return trip that Barnav would begin to feel a deep sympathy for the royal family, especially for the children, and then doubly especially for Queen Marie Antoinette.


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[Assistant] Upon his return, Barnav would take up a secret correspondence with the Queen and do everything in his power during the closing weeks of the National Assembly to preserve and even extend the power of the royal family.


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[Assistant] So the triumvirate of Barnav, LeMette, and Dupour represents a certain type of revolutionary. They were all educated, well-to-do liberals. They had been early leaders in the fight, passionately committed to enlightenment rationality, and the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.


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[Assistant] For them, the constitution of 1791 was supposed to be the crowning achievement of the whole revolution, the final settlement everything had been building towards, with its completion in sight.


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[Assistant] They dug in and fought as hard to keep France from falling into the hands of crazy radicals as they had fought to wrench it out of the hands of pig-headed conservatives.


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[Assistant] Of course, when the Constitution of 1791 turned out to be a spectacular failure, and France did fall into the hands of the crazy radicals, well I guess we'll just have to see what happens to the triumvirate then.


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[Assistant] But for now, they were still riding high, and these sensible, practical, dependable delegates of the National Assembly rallied around them after the flight to Varenne, and then especially after the massacre of the Chambre de Mars.


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[Assistant] The first order of business for the triumvirate was to make a clean break from the Jacobin Club.


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[Assistant] All three of our triumvirs had been founding members, and though they had not followed Lafayette out when the Society of 1789 started up, they were not at all impressed with the persistent, unrelenting, and freakishly virtuous drive of Robespierre and his radical followers, and they knew for a fact that a lot of other Jacobins felt the same way.


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[Assistant] So in the wake of the Sham to Mars, the triumvirate staged a mass walkout to go form a new political club that would better represent their beliefs.


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[Assistant] Most of the prominent and influential members of the Jacobins went with them, leaving Robespierre presiding over an inferior rump that for the moment was not completely off balance.


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[Assistant] But of course, Robespierre simply used the walkout as an opportunity to streamline Jacobin ideology and solidify his own personal influence within the club.


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[Assistant] So that when the time came, the Jacobins would come back stronger and deadlier than ever.


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[Assistant] To replace the Jacobins, the Triumvirate formed a new club called the Fouillon.


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[Assistant] Hopefully I'm getting that right cause it, it looks like fool yawns.


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[Assistant] Ah, anyway, the Fuya were, at their core, a club for constitutional monarchists. Their admission rates were jacked up to reflect their more elitist leanings, and they were soon joined by old members of the Society of 1789, who had grown weary of the reactionary reputation their old club had garnered.


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[Assistant] And this, by the way, basically marks the end of the line for the Society of 1789.


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[Assistant] Now in a vacuum, it looked like the Fuya would be the ascendant agenda setting party for the foreseeable future. And as soon as they got organized, they sent out a flurry of communiquees to Jacobin clubs out in the provinces, urging them to switch their affiliation to the Fuya.


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[Assistant] The triumvirate plan to occupy a new political center of constitutional monarchism and from there control national politics.


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[Assistant] But as it would turn out, they were just about the only ones who had any interest in the center.


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[Assistant] Though it was not apparent on the surface, the gravity of French politics was not coalescing in the center, but rather on the extreme edges of right and left.


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[Assistant] Only about 70 of the now hundreds of affiliated Jacobin clubs responded positively to Fuya overtures, and most of those eventually drifted back to the orbit of Robespierre.


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[Assistant] But for the moment, the triumvirate still controlled the levers of power, and they knew how to use them.


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[Assistant] In late July, they pushed through decrees that political clubs had to register with the municipal police, and that anyone who incited pillage, arson, or civil disobedience were subject to arrest.


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[Assistant] And then on August the 23rd came a biggie restricting freedom of the press, strengthening libel laws, and forbidding anyone from advocating disobedience or defiance to public authorities.


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[Assistant] Now this was all in direct response to the illegal demonstration and or massacre of the Shom to Mars, but added to the already existing bans on mass petitioning and worker strikes, it is clear that the delegates of the National Assembly had had quite enough of democratic street politics. Thank you very much.


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[Assistant] Then, in a fairly naked bit of cynical PR, the Triumvirate announced that they were dropping the minimum property requirements for delegates to the new legislative assembly.


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[Assistant] Those requirements had been an easy target for popular agitators to aim at. So removing them left those agitators with at least one less leg to stand on.


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[Assistant] Except, then you read the fine print, and you see that they were simultaneously raising property requirements for all the electors.


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[Assistant] So when elections to the new Legislative Assembly started up at the end of August, there were no formal restrictions on who could serve as a delegate. But, you know, good luck ever getting elected, Mr. Firebrand Populist Man.


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[Assistant] On the eve of the shuttering of the National Assembly, the Fouillante also promulgated one last little decree designed to clamp down on potentially seditious political clubs, like the Jacobins or the Cordilliers.


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[Assistant] They were no longer allowed to petition the government or send out organized delegations or really interact with public affairs in any coordinated way.


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[Assistant] But this last creed would never really be enforced, and in passing it, the Fuya helped sow the seeds of their own destruction.


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[Assistant] They themselves would adhere to the spirit of the law, and scrupulously turn the fuya from a political organ into a mere social club.


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[Assistant] Robespierre and the Jacobins, meanwhile, ignored the law and organized furiously.


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[Assistant] And you can imagine who would be better prepared to dictate the course of politics in the months to come.


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[Assistant] One of the big reasons that political power was not concentrating in the center was because of another direct consequence of the flight to Varenne.


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[Assistant] Everyone was convinced that at any moment the European powers were going to invade and France would be at war. And with that invasion looming, this was no time to get squishy.


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[Assistant] Everyone from the most conservative conservative to the most radical radical believed that the flight to Varenne had been about getting the royal family linked up with the Austrians so they could come storming back in to either save the day, so said the conservatives, or ruin everything, so said the radicals.


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[Assistant] And everyone was doubly eager, or nervous, because in the weeks and months after the flight to Varennes, the French army was basically paralyzed.


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[Assistant] Officers directly complicit in the flight, like General Debouye, wasted no time beating a path out of town.


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[Assistant] But their emigration seemed to be everyone else's cue to split too.


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[Assistant] By the end of 1791, something like 60% of the French officer corps had abandoned their posts and emigrated out of the country.


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[Assistant] This was a catastrophe. I mean, whatever you thought about the military aristocracy and where their true loyalties lay, just outright losing over half your senior officer corps overnight is an unmitigated disaster in terms of military readiness. If France was attacked, how in the world would the French army be able to fight back? It had no head.


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[Assistant] The impetus for the treaty had been the threat of yet another war between the expansionist Prussians, now led by King Frederick William II, and their old enemy Austria, led now by Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II.


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[Assistant] But the big upshot of Reichenbach was to begin an estrangement between Prussia and Great Britain, who had been allies since the diplomatic revolution of 1765.


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[Assistant] In a nutshell, Britain's foreign policy goal was to maintain the status quo balance of power on the continent, and Prussia's foreign policy goal was to upset that balance of power and gobble up as much territory as they possibly could.


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[Assistant] At Reichenbach, the British had worked behind the scenes to stymie the ambitions of their nominal ally, and the Prussians were forced to accept terms that did not satisfy the ambitions of their king one bit.


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[Assistant] So in the aftermath of the British betrayal at Reichenbach, the Prussians started pitching the Austrians on the benefits of cooperation rather than competition.


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[Assistant] Both were now being bombarded by pleas from the French émigrés to do something about the damned revolutionary dogs, and Prussia wondered aloud if maybe they shouldn't do something.


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[Assistant] But Leopold and his advisors saw no great upside to getting involved in French affairs, especially since Prussia was clearly only in it for the possibility of gobbling up French territory.


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[Assistant] Plus, as it turns out, Leopold was actually something of an enlightened constitutionalist himself. Far from being horrified by events in France, he was in fact quite in agreement with the basic aims of the revolutionaries.


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[Assistant] He had some sympathy for his sister Marie Antoinette, though he had not seen her in 25 years.


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[Assistant] But other than that, his big takeaway from the fall of the Bastille was, well, that's what you get when you refuse to listen to your people decade in and decade out.


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[Assistant] Leopold himself was following in the footsteps of his late older brother Joseph II and was trying to bring the Holy Roman Empire into the modern age from the top down rather than letting it boil from the bottom up.


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[Assistant] So Austria basically ignored the pleas of the emigres and told the Prussians they would take no action against the French.


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[Assistant] Now that's not to say there wasn't some troubling stuff coming out of France, as the case was in October 1790, when the National Assembly announced that treaties negotiated between princes did not bind nations.


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[Assistant] Which was basically a unilateral repudiation of all French treaties.


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[Assistant] Just that for the moment the French were in no position to enforce their universal visions. And, already bogged down fighting the Turks and the Balkans, the Austrians had no interest opening up a whole new military front.


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[Assistant] But Prussia couldn't take action against France alone, so King Frederick William II decided to brush aside the émigrés with a small loan, and then he turned his lust for territorial expansion eastward toward Poland, which also had the benefit of being a project the British would likely support.


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[Assistant] Because in the East, Prussian and British interests seem to align.


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[Assistant] You see, the Russians were in the process of whipping the Turks, which upset the British desire for everyone to please just stay in their assigned seats.


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[Assistant] Britain and Prussia began to devise an operation to dislodge Poland from the Russian orbit.


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[Assistant] Prussia, eyeing liberated Poland as a new protectorate it could dominate. Britain just happy to check the advancing power of Catherine the Great.


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[Assistant] So, as everyone moved into 1791, there was indeed a war looming in Europe, but it was probably going to be fought by the British and Prussians against the Russians.


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[Assistant] But just as Prussia was mobilizing for an eastern campaign in March 1791, their allies in Britain once again left them hanging out to dry.


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[Assistant] For a variety of reasons, military reality, domestic politics, and apparently some of the greatest Russian diplomacy of all time, the British backed out of the campaign at the last minute.


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[Assistant] This left Prussia absolutely furious and desperate to move in any diplomatic direction that would get them out from under the untrustworthy British.


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[Assistant] So the alliance system that had been built in 1765 was now officially falling apart.


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[Assistant] Absolutely livid with the British. The Prussians then went back to courting the Austrians.


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[Assistant] Now the Austrians had already declined to join the campaign in Poland, as there was no earthly reason for them to upset their alliance with Russia, but then came a little break.


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[Assistant] In May 1791, the reformers in Poland promulgated their own Enlightenment-influenced constitution and attempted to assert independence from Russia.


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[Assistant] Now, I am not versed enough in domestic Polish politics to explain this little revolution, but on an international level, it helped put the Austrians on the same side as the Prussians.


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[Assistant] Austria liked the idea of an independent Poland serving as a buffer between them and Russia.


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[Assistant] But they didn't want to upset their alliance with the Russians and still bog down in the Balkans. They didn't have the resources to support the Poles militarily. But the Prussians did.


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[Assistant] And it was the question of how to handle the situation in Poland, not how to handle the situation in France, that led Frederick William and Leopold to meet in Pilnitz in August 1791.


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[Assistant] So here we are now, a good two years into the French Revolution, and not only is France not a central concern of any of the European powers, it's barely on anyone's radar.


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[Assistant] Aside from the irritating matter about what to do with the French émigrés, and whether or not to comment on the struggle between France and the Vatican over papal lands inside the French frontier, Revolutionary France was something worth observing from afar, with a certain amount of satisfying schadenfreude, not something you actually wanted to get involved in.


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[Assistant] And that's when the flight to Varennes came along and finally put France on the radar screen of the great powers.


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[Assistant] When Leopold II briefly believed that the escape attempt had succeeded, he indicated in a letter that he was now willing to support the royal family with men, money, and guns.


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[Assistant] But then, when he learned that the escape had in fact failed, he returned to his policy of scrupulous inaction.


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[Assistant] Though, he did now kinda feel like he should at least say something about the plight of the royal family, if only to satisfy his sister's honor.


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[Assistant] So he issued a document called the Padua Circular in early July 1791, which called on his fellow monarchs to work in concert to restore the liberty of the royal family.


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[Assistant] But as expected, only Prussia signaled any interest in such a project. Desperate as they were to secure an alliance with Austria that would A, get them out from under the British, and B, point them in the direction of some new territory.


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[Assistant] In August 1791, when Frederick William and Leopold met at Pillnitz to discuss the situation in Poland, a situation that was about to get interesting as the war between Russia and Turkey was winding down and Catherine was about to turn her attention back to her rebellious satellite,


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[Assistant] The two leaders carved out some time to draft the now famous Declaration of Pillments.


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[Assistant] But Leopold inserted a really important clause that put lie to the surface meaning.


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[Assistant] That clause said only if all the other European powers cooperated in the operation would Austria and Prussia invade France. And of course, the other European powers hadn't cooperated on anything in their lives. The Declaration of Pilnets was a meaningless piece of paper.


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[Assistant] I mean, at that very moment, Leopold was taking the opportunity presented by the end of the war with the Turks to demobilize something like 25,000 men. And that's just not something you do if you're serious about invading France.


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[Assistant] To put it bluntly, Austria had no intention of ever going to war with revolutionary France.


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[Assistant] But I want to end this survey of the international scene by pointing out one fatal misunderstanding shared by both the Prussians and the Austrians. Having issued the Padua Circular and the Declaration of Pillnitz, they turned to observe the effects these threats had on French domestic politics, and the effects, to them, couldn't be more clear.


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[Assistant] Obviously afraid of being invaded, the French political classes elevated the moderate Fouillat to power, suppressed radical Republicans, and inaugurated the Constitution of 1791.


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[Assistant] Which promised to leave France stable enough to not collapse into anarchy, but not strong enough to threaten the other powers. Which is exactly what the other European powers wanted.


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[Assistant] But the Austrian and Prussian threats of war had nothing whatsoever to do with the rise of the Fuya. And in point of fact, Austrian saber rattling would help topple the Fuya and lead directly to the war they never wanted any part of, and a war that would then proceed to last for a generation.


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[Assistant] So I want to end today by circling back around to French domestic politics and finally close the books on the National Assembly.


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[Assistant] It had begun its life as the Estates General in May 1789 and was supposed to meet for a few months and then go home.


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[Assistant] Instead, it quickly morphed into the National Assembly and then morphed again into the National Constituent Assembly.


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[Assistant] Their objective morphed along with it. From finding a solution to the immediate financial crisis, to crafting from scratch a written constitution for France.


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[Assistant] The National Assembly had decreed all kinds of stuff, but it was hard to tell which decrees were meant to be embedded in the Constitution and which were simply run-of-the-mill laws.


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[Assistant] A committee of revisions had been set up back in September 1790 to help sift through the piles, and wouldn't you know it, Barnov, Dupore, and Charles Lamet were all on it.


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[Assistant] And so, when the National Assembly started winding down a year later, the ascendant triumvirate were positioned perfectly to decide what was in and what was out of the new constitution.


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[Assistant] So much so, that the Laments actually tried to revive Mounier's old program, with its two-chambered legislative body, an absolute veto for the king, and delegates allowed to serve as royal ministers.


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[Assistant] But the momentum of what had already been settled was too strong to overcome.


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[Assistant] Barnav, though, worked tirelessly to ensure that the king would maintain as many prerogatives as possible, that he would be able to appoint his own ministers and ambassadors and high-level army officers, and that the annual royal stipend would be enough to befit the dignity of the royal family.


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[Assistant] The constitution that emerged in September 1791 then was mostly composed of all those little pieces we've already talked about. A legislative branch composed of a single house to be called the Legislative Assembly.


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[Assistant] An executive branch composed of the king and his ministry, for the suspensive veto and the right to conduct day-to-day foreign policy and day-to-day military operations, but without the right to unilaterally declare war and peace.


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[Assistant] And then a streamlined and rationalized judicial branch housed within the new departmental administrative system.


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[Assistant] The Declaration of the Rights of Man served as a preamble to be followed by 210 separate articles outlining in detail the new constitutional monarchy that would hopefully govern France in perpetuity.


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[Assistant] In a move to help bolster support for the new constitution, the triumvirate ensured that the extraordinarily controversial civil constitution of the clergy was not inserted directly into the text of the constitution. It would remain a thing apart.


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[Assistant] Mostly this was to ensure that conservative Catholics could swear to uphold the Constitution without sacrificing their religious principles.


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[Assistant] On September the 3rd, 1791, the National Assembly presented the Constitution to Louis, and ten days later, over the vehement protests of his emigre brothers, he signalled his assent.


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[Assistant] On September the 30th, the National Assembly met for the final time.


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[Assistant] It had been in session for 30 remarkable months. In a rush of events so fast they could barely catch their breath, they had completely upended the ASEAN regime.


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[Assistant] They had begun, most of them anyway, as political neophytes, and emerged seasoned, if not utterly exhausted politicians.


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[Assistant] They had unilaterally declared themselves the sovereign representative body of the nation, abolished feudalism, with a few caveats, completely reorganized the administration of the entire country, and along the way sent into the dustbin of history institutions and abuses that had plagued France for centuries.


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[Assistant] No more venal offices, no more letras de cachet, no more hated salt tax, no more forced labor, no more feudal dues or internal customs, or 78 different special courts, none of which seemed interested in justice.


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[Assistant] And after years of work, they had finally crafted the first written constitution in the history of France.


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[Assistant] Sure, there had been an explosive crisis or two along the way, but they had weathered the storm and France was now a better place than they had found it. And it was time for them to lay down their burden, all of them, at the same time. Which, in retrospect, was a really bad idea. What am I talking about?


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[Assistant] Well, back in May 1791, Ropes-Pierre wound up making his first really great contribution to the course of the revolution.


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[Assistant] It seemed a minor point to the time, one that would simply signal that the delegates of the National Assembly were virtuous citizens interested in the welfare of France, not the permanent acquisition of power.


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[Assistant] So, the incorruptible Robespierre had gotten up and convinced his fellow delegates to sign off on a self-denying decree. That is, delegates in the National Assembly would be barred from sitting in the first session of the new Legislative Assembly.


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[Assistant] The effect of this little declaration of disinterested statesmanship was to ensure that not one single man who had had a hand in crafting the new constitution would be there to defend it when it came under attack.


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[Assistant] It also meant that every man who had been prominent enough, respected enough, educated enough, wealthy enough, to get elected to the first sitting of the Estates General in 175 years, I mean we're talking about the cream of the crop, these guys were all now on the sideline. And who would replace them?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, a lot of guys who had not been prominent, or wealthy, or respected enough to get elected to the Estates General, but who had learned in the streets and in the political clubs a whole new brand of revolutionary politics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And next week, we will see what happens when those guys get into power.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you better believe that the French Revolution is about to take a giant lurch to the left.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'll close out today with two brief announcements. First, just so you're prepared for it, I'll be back with an episode next week, but after that, Saturnalia is upon us once again, and family obligations are gonna keep me away from the show for two weeks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Second, in case you haven't noticed, accompanying the release of this episode is the announcement of my big fundraiser, and you should all go listen to it immediately. And then, go to revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com, and at a minimum, buy the five-sided cross.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fresh off the controversial heels of the last episode, we are now going in a more normie direction.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] See, last time we had a trans porn star. This time, my friends, I thought, hey, let's make all the people that got angry at the last episode for being too strange. Let's make those people happy. So I got the normiest guest of all time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got a guy that does, uh, Reddit reading videos.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He'll find a subreddit, and then he'll be like, hey, this has a bunch of content pre-done for me, I'll just read it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So a real genius of the craft. And uh, and that wasn't easy enough. He, you know, there's plenty of channels that do that. This guy was like, hey, I need more people. I can't quite hack it myself. So he got seven of his buddies and together they made a YouTube channel. It's called Soothouse. So here's episode three with Wilbert Soot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I just said his name wrong. Wilbur Soot. Tell the folks at home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nah, I think all Americans say soot. I don't think anybody says soot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So anyways, Sood House is like a, uh, can I call you a comedy collective?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Comedy Collective. And uhm, it's a, it's, how many people?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I knew that would be like, inner turmoil. Like people would be like, yo this fucker didn't even say one joke this episode. You know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, cause you started out as friends, so naturally, once you add money to friendships, it's gonna deteriorate in some way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, an unscrupulous issue. Those deep-seated issues that resolves itself with a poisoning at dinner.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Eh, it's weird how, uh, uh, Rihanna has mysteriously disappeared and now we all have a little bit more money in our paychecks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can get day laborers that have the same amount of work ethic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, no, no, that sorrow guy does it. I don't see why you can't do it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After you surpass four people, it's just people talking over each other.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah. Yeaah. The noise is tough. It does get a little bit much.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you had, if you could just teach one of those fuckers to edit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then they would, and they would edit one. And then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You would still have half a job, it's not like, I mean, you have the key to the fucking account, it's not like they're gonna take it from you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is the editing. Like, I would say 80% of the funny shit that happens in a video is because of the editing. Yeah, I understand. What's that guy that made like Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead and stuff? Edgar Wright. Yeah, that guy, like, that's, he's like the king of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just sitting back and go, Hey, some asshole on YouTube made a video on this. I could just play this shit and not have to do anything. Back off by my desk.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, so we did that video on, uh, what's his face? Oh, on those incels, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of our best, one of our best videos. Yeah, that, that was pretty good. The, uh, and have you seen the like crackdown that YouTube's had on, uh, on anything to do with Elliot Rogers? Yeah, like MomQ Joe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It couldn't even appeal to anyone. Nah, it couldn't even appeal. And, uh, uh, those videos, dude, were just fucking, ah, they were so perfect. I love those things where he's like, this dude was so caught up on him being,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know. He was like so pissed off that women weren't into him. And he had all these videos and he was like, dude, I'm good looking. I got money. Why don't women like me?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was, I don't know, I love that, that he's like pulled up like in the hills of fucking Hollywood or something. Next to his BMW.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he's like, I don't get it. I have these $300 glasses. This is how he talks too. And I have this, look at me. And he like backs up and he goes, I'm fabulous.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tell me what girl is gonna be like, oh my god, he right there. He's fabulous. What guy describes himself as fabulous?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What the heck? That guy blew up out of nowhere. Like he had this weird character, er, not character arc, uh, fuckin' career arc where he got huge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the 90s and then the Matrix hit and he was like in the stratosphere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then his career just kinda like petered out a little bit and all of a sudden he made John Wick, which is not an original movie. I feel like there's been eight movies that have been made like that. You know? You ever seen like Rolling Thunder? It's the same thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, I mean, it is a well made movie, but I didn't, I wouldn't think that it would, it was kinda like when Taken came out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, tell me you haven't seen a hundred movies that are just like taken.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think, I think, I thought that had to do with at the same time of it coming out. I thought, like the trailer came out and then the clown thing started because of how creepy it was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That is a paid collaboration, you know it. If you're gonna make any sort of money, you collab with TikTok.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, uh, apparently you can be transgendered in there, you know? Which, that's a whole lot easier than being transgendered in real life, so I might as well give it a go. You know what I mean? See, test the waters a little bit, see if I like it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did you hear that my previous guest was a transgendered porn star? Right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You should have seen my fucking discord after I released that clip. There was like a million people in the general chat just screaming about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's why I told my uncle, like my uncle was like against gay people, I'm like, well they're not fucking you. Yeah, it's not like they're just gonna rape you or something, I don't know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now I-I-I think what it is is I just like shitting on stuff. Like whatever it is, like if I know...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've always, when my first Twitter got, uh, banned, I was, it was actually a sigh of relief because about that time, that's when everybody's, uh, DMs were getting leaked and like everybody was getting in trouble for shit and like the amount of shit


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That I had just sitting in the DMs ready to be leaked. Was fucking huge. It was just on another level. And uh, and I'm very glad it happened. Cause like, I'll just, I don't care who, if I get into like a verbal argument with someone, dude, I'm whip, I just look at him and go, what will hurt this guy's feelings?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't care what it is, I have no holds barred, no moral, you know, if I see a guy, if I'm getting into an argument with a dude, he's got long curls on either side of his head. Yamaka on the top of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I've, I've been fine. But the, uh, so- Oh wait, you gotta tell me now? Alright, go for it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. Not as successful though, you passed me. Probably, maybe being nice is part of it. Is part of, uh, generating an audience, I guess. Maintaining an audience.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Every once in a while, every once in a while, dude, I'll see, like, I'll have an idea for something, and this is the scummiest thing in the world. If you have, every video that I have that's like over a million views, I thought of the title first, and then I made a video around it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like that Skyrim VR video, like I just, I had an idea for something. Well the Skyrim VR one was funny because every time my video circulates outside my audience, normal people start viewing it and they don't like me. Cause like that, I think it was like 10 things you can do in Skyrim VR that you like can't do in normal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, no, that one got fucking edge stripped off of it in the first two minutes, man. I think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it still, it still brought some people in. That's all that matters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know I was just thinking about the, uh, you were talking about the insult thing back to that. What always cracked me up about Elliot Rogers is he is, by the way, you know his last name is just Roger? Elliot Roger?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have to throw an S on it or else you sound like an idiot talking. Elliot Rogers, the thing about him is every, all these incels like on that board, I guarantee you, if you could just get like a, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That guy had his cheekbones chiseled by the gods themselves. You know, he was living in a nice place. He had it all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, he was fabulous. Yea, there was nothing wrong with him. Except for...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's really a be- they wanna all have like this 50 Shades of Grey relationship, you know? But if you- if you read 50 Shades of Grey, you know, cause I'm a fan of fine literature.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I read it, and uh, if you read that, uhm, you realize that there's one minor thing that the reason why this guy is able to have these sex slaves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That changes things. You can get anybody at that point. It's like, hey, I got a huge dick. I got a lot of expendable income and I'm also pretty easy on the eyes. I don't have any of those things by the way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For those of you that don't know what Wilbur Soot looks like, uh, imagine, uhm, okay, writing here, on, I'm gonna explain what you have on right now. Okay, go on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, it's not. But you wear the same thing every day. Plaid, button up, long sleeve, uh, shirt, like a lumberjack shirt. Is that right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, okay, then it's gonna be one of those long sleeves. It's gonna be one of those long sleeve shirts with the three buttons going up to the collar. I don't know what those are called. It's basically what lowerjacks wear underneath.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got Mr. FBI man looking at you through the webcam. And then, uh, and then he's got, uh, uh, one of those knit caps just on the back of his head.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With his little British curls, brown curls sticking out the front. Looking like a fucking Keebler elf. Skinny jeans, and a pair of some sort of leather boots.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, I was, uh, last episode, Miss Vex was fu- like, I was- I got her section of the audio, I couldn't hear it through Discord, but her section of the audio, she was like fucking-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you got that second channel, right? The, uh, uh, it's just called Wilbur Soot. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, I'm playing DayZ right now, actually. Not like right now, we're doing the podcast now, but hey, yeah, we should hop on DayZ.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you submit to the machine. And then you'll be the biggest YouTuber. There we go, I took care of it. I got rid of all the future competition. Alright.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, uh, what I was gonna say was the, uh, you said that Schlatzky guy or whatever his name is, right? What's his name? Yeah. Schlatt. Schlatt. Schlatt, you said he's on Keemstar's radar. Well, I think, I, dude, I fucked up any and all possibilities of talking to Keemstar unless he doesn't remember this. But, I, uh, it was during that whole, like, Rhino Crunch, do you know him?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which was, it was funny cause like an actual good pastor takes time to find


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Mm. And I don't think Rhino had the intellect to do that. Cause he would just, I think he would just like thumb through the Bible and open it up and be like, yeah, uh, right here it says, uh, thou shall not throw a stone at thy neighbor's wife. And I think that's important because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] About why it wasn't a good idea to stone some bitch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like, it was like the worst bible study of all time. I would watch every one of his videos just to skip to the end so I could watch the sermon part cause it, it cracked me up. That was the highest form of comedy I have ever seen. It was so great. And, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, anyways, so he, uh, there was some whole, like, rape allegation thing, right? And, and, uh, and I was- From a Christian? No. Yeah, right? Jesus. And-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was friends with, uh, Sir Winter. Still am, by the way. Sir Winter. And, uh. Yea, honestly. Yea, I was in his server. And for some reason, Keemstar, uh, one of like, it was either Winter, one of Winter's friends or something, had information on


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rhinocrunch or something. Keem was really into Rust at the time and Winter's a real big Rust guy. So Keemstar came into his server. And I had...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Weaseled my way in. This is my thing. What I do is I join another YouTuber's server and then I sit there and like bitch and moan and complain until I get access to like admin rooms.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like eugenics. I like something about eugenics. And then it'll say like in general chat, it'll like, it'll do a text to speech thing where it'll be like, Wilbur Soot endorses eugenics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anyway, so I had access to one of these rooms, and I saw Keemstar was in there, and then, uh, that other guy that doesn't like me, uh, he's another Rust guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Vertigo. Vertigo Gaming was in there. And, uh, I had never met either of them. But, uh, something tells me, mentally, something tells me that this might have been the turning point where he doesn't like me. Because I came in there, and all I said was, What's going on, my n-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then they just, what the fuck. They just went quiet and they left the room.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I never, they never said hi or anything. It was just, they just left the room.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, uh, and then I was never spoken to ever again. So anyways, point is, is that I feel, I feel like, uh, uh, any possible, uh, exposure gotten through Keemstar, cause you know, you gotta think about this, like a content creator, you're only here to use people, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unless I end up fucking raping a couple hookers or something. I'm sure I'll get on a show then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] See, this is why, uh, this is why I don't talk to any other YouTubers, man, they're fickle. Fickle beasts. Mmm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Your career, your YouTube career, I don't know what it is. They are just trampling that dude's life for the exposure of it all, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, I got a thing though, a little gripe about, uh, I guess what, not technically what you did, but, uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I guess technically about what you did. The idea of doing the official


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like condolences, apology, hearts and thoughts and prayers and all that shit. It just seems so wack to me, like why the fuck would anybody


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Think negatively of somebody for not doing a public, like whenever, uh, uh, whenever the fuck, like a school is shut up in America, everybody's just like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Talking shit about the gun carriers. I'm like, I don't fucking care like what he has to say.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fuck her! Who gives a shit? I don't know who the fuck she is. Does she make videos? No.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I really need to play on the schoolyard some more. I, I don't, I don't know the goings-ons of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wanted to go be, I want Keemstar to cover it as, and he's like not the biggest news source covering it. I wanted to be national news. I wanted to be something big. Where it's like the YouTuber, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's what I want. I want, I want there to be hour long videos of people breaking it down, like the timeline. Like it's the fucking, uh. Where did he go wrong? Yeah, like the Wyatt Earp case. Have you ever seen, I saw this YouTube video where this guy is like reconstructing the scene of the OK Corral shootout and the scene of, do you know about Wyatt Earp? You know who he is?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's like a, he was a wild west sheriff and he just, him and his brothers hunted down like this gang leader and shot him and they had a big shootout at the OK Corral and then later they tracked down somebody else, another part of the gang at this oasis.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Basically it was like a watering hole out in the middle of nowhere and they shot him, they had a big shoot out there and then based on like first hand accounts taken later of what happened, they re-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And where, and he's like, he's like, uh, this person said that they shot this person's horse, which is...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which isn't, uhm, it is factual because, uh, we used, uh, it was, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, that's the thing is, I think at the time, alright, this is a weird thing, I got two stories here, remind me to tell you about uh, uh, John Wilkes Booth, but uhm, Okay. I know who he is. We look at these things as a just,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We look back in time and go, oh, yeah, he just, okay, Corral, it was, uh, Wyatt Earp, he went ham, egg, and cheese on some people. And what it turns out was, at the time,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The gang leader, I think his name was like Wild Bill or something. Nah, it wasn't Wild Bill.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was also like, he was kinda like well respected, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he would like buy people drinks at the saloon. He would be like, this rounds on me. So everybody in town kind of liked him, but they were scared of him kind of thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so they're like, holy fuck, like it was like this, this story of, uh, law turned bad in the West. And that's how it stayed for like 30 years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Until Wyatt Earp was on his deathbed in like 1910 or something, I don't know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nobody had ever asked him his side of the story. But this journalist finds him, like, on his deathbed, and he's like, hey, can you tell us your side of the story? He's like, oh, sure. And so he tells his side of the story, which gets published into a best-selling book, and it, like, turns the tides. He's, like, apparently they weren't in the wrong, you know? They were in the right. And he deputized because, like, that...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In order to like wrangle this, uh, criminal gang from the town.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He deputized his brothers. One of his brothers got shot by the gang is what it was. And uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, the most photographed man of that year was Abraham Lincoln.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Why? Because he was a- he was a huge actor. He was like a- he was like THE actor of the year. He had-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was like in all these plays, he was a huge celebrity, everybody knew him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, he was against the abolitionist movement, I think is what it was. He liked slavery.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, uh, he, he shot, uh, Lincoln, jumped off the, the balcony and, uh, broke his leg and then ran off. And everybody's like, hey, John Wilkes Booth just jumped, broke his leg and ran off. And there was a loud bang. And, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like, thinking about it now, you're just like, oh, he was just an assassin. But like, that would be like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I watched this video, and you think that happened so long ago. I watched this video of this, uh, it was a TV show called, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, I have a, I have a, I have a secret. It was the name of it. And it was like in the 50s, right? And they, uh, and what it is is you bring up a guy, and then these other people, uh, they try to guess like 20 questions what your secret is. And,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They bring up this dude that is older than time itself. This dude, they had like people holding him under his armpits and he was like, uuuh, he looked like the old wizard guy from, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They, they say, uh, they, they try to ask his question or whatever. The point is, is that, what it turned out was, he was in Ford's Theater the day that Abe Lincoln got shot. And, but he was like nine years old.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, he was like 9 years old. And uh, and that's so fucking wild to me that I saw...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On YouTube, by the way, on YouTube, I saw a video of a guy that was on a TV show in the 50s that was alive when Abe Lincoln was shot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And saw it. First hand account. Fucking saw this man get shot. And everybody was like, well, what'd you do? Like, was everybody chasing down John Wilkes Booth? He's like, no, no, you gotta think about it in the time that it happened. We heard a loud noise. We look up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we see a man jump off a balcony and break his leg. Everybody's like concerned about the man with the broken leg.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, nobody knows that Abe Lincoln got his fucking head blown off. Everybody's like, oh, that guy broke his leg. What's wrong with him? Like everybody was concerned about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Jesus Christ, have you seen, uh, Jackie's ass when she fucking leans over and tries to like scoop up his brains? Dude, that-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The thickest first lady we've had. The thickest first lady. Her ass was fucking immaculate. Just saying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That first lady was looking pretty good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everybody had guns. So where was he shot? He was just on the railroad?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, eh, okay, wait, first, first it was Lincoln, then Garfield, 20 years later, they were probably like, we really need to tighten up security.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I think that's the birth of people's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Distrust of transgender people. Did you notice?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How easily he hid himself next to the woman's bathroom.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] God damn, I don't wanna see no women on this fucking train platform.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. Like, if you're a woman on a train, like, you get finger blasted on your way to work. Like, that's just something that happens. It's a really weird culture over there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, people always sit there and look at Japan like it's, that's what a post-industrial country


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, it's at an accelerated rate. You know what I mean? Cause it's an island. It's got a limited population. They've exceeded, they've used up all their natural resources. They're...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're finished. You know what I mean? Like they, they had their boom and they've plateaued, but they've, that's what America is going to be, is what people suspect. Like that's a small time, small scale version of what's in our future.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and they're sitting there making such a fuss over these new census questions in America about like, uh, what's your, I think it's, what ethnicity are you? Or sexual orientation or some shit? Is there, is what they're trying to add? And they say it's like a first amendment violation, but uh, I would be okay with them adding a gamer thing. What ethnicity are you?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How have you not seen that? And you sit there and your fucking channel, all you do is make videos on like Reddit and stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, and it's always like, uh, like beans in shoes and beans in weird places. And, uh, and I'm like, people use that thing for anything other than fucking porn. Like that's the only-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got on Reddit and I was like, ah, I'll follow all these communities cause this is like, it was around the time that I started talking to you. I was like, ah, this Sit House guys, you know, they make it, they really opened my eyes to the wonderful world of Reddit. And then I got on there, I was like, fuck all that gaming shit, dude.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What about these titty subreddits and shit like that? Like, there's all sorts of porn on there. I am not-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, it's like, you know, like once you discovered movies, you didn't just throw away your camera. You know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stupid, because what I do is I just save stuff, put it in there, and I never open it again. I'm always on the quest for new porn.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know? And I won't be able to hear it. I'm gonna be fully into another... Abby's gonna have to come over there and like, tap me on my shoulder while I'm whacking off.


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[Assistant] This is not what I wanted to see. This is not my preferred viewing angle, to be honest. But uhm, what the hell was I gonna say? Oh yea, the whole porn thing. Like, have you ever seen Norm MacDonald's podcast?


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[Assistant] Biggest shame to ever happen in the world of entertainment was


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[Assistant] It got, the rights to a show, I guess, got bought by Netflix. And they, his podcast was the best podcast to ever be recorded in the history of podcasts. It was fucking hilarious.


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[Assistant] And he, uh, and the premise of it was he would have old comics on that their careers had been over. They had peaked already. And so he was hoping that they would


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[Assistant] They would be willing to say things that would normally ruin the career of a normal person. You know? Like, they would be willing to say some shit that normal comedians wouldn't. And uhm, that worry about uh, you know, PR and stuff. And so he has a bunch of people on there. And then uh, and they say some wild shit.


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[Assistant] And then Netflix buys the rights to a show because it does really well. And then, but they know that once...


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[Assistant] They start pushing out his show on Netflix. People are gonna go view the podcast version and they're gonna be offended because it's 2019. And uh, and so they, they pulled all of his episodes off of YouTube and they're fucking gone. And if you, there's people that have them.


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[Assistant] And upload them and they get like immediately taken down by Netflix. So it's just, they're just gone. You can't, you can't even find it anymore. And it's the biggest shame. But one of the jokes they had on there was, uh, it was from Tom Green. It was the one reading it. Do you know who Tom Green is? He was like big in like the late nineties. He was a comedian.


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[Assistant] And like, I'm gonna butcher the shit out of this. It was, uh, I never would have thought that one day I'd need a computer just to masturbate.


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[Assistant] This is so true. Like I grew up in a day in the age where, uh, we had the cable box and I would go up to like the porn channel, which we didn't have access to. And so,


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[Assistant] Like when you didn't have access to a channel, like it just did like fucking warped fuzz, but it kinda gave you a little bit of the signal. And so you would see like this warped titty go like fucking flying across the screen.


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[Assistant] As the, as like titties go warping across the screen. And, and I remember we got a DSL, and we'd sit there, like I would,


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[Assistant] That was before streaming video was a thing. All you did was pictures. That changed everything. It's like I no longer had to use my mind. I got to use pictures of actual females.


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[Assistant] And you would click on a picture and it would load from the top down. And if you got to like the titties of it loading down, you got to like the titties and you're like, ah, I don't like those. And you have to close out of it. You wouldn't even let it finish loading. Like, ah, nah, nah, gotta find a different titty.


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[Assistant] Like I noticed my, uh, when I'm, uh, you know, like if I've been viewing a lot of porn, uh, you know, well of course like Wackenow too. Like my sex life is totally different than like,


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[Assistant] Like the best sex of my marriage is after like a fuckin' family vacation.


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[Assistant] Like I, and it is, it is a, it is like a carnal thing, like I turn into a caveman. It is a totally different thing. But if I've been watching, you know, uh, some girl getting, uh, blacked by five dudes, then uh, you know, then I just, I kinda mosey into the bed and I'm like, eh, eh, alright, I'm outta here, later. Real no heart and soul into it, you know.


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[Assistant] I'm 100% serious. You ever hear a lot of guys complain about pre-ejaculation? Right?


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[Assistant] I had like the opposite of that. And I found out what it was after a couple years. What it is is, uh, if you like look at porn and whack off a lot.


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[Assistant] And naturally, like, if you go, like, whack off once, right, you know, you're fine. But if you go whack off a second time, you know, you need to do a little bit more forceful in order to...


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[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like I had this fucking like karate grip. Where I was yanking on my dick.


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[Assistant] And, uh, and so, like, when I, yea, when I want to go have sex, I'm like, man, what if people so pumped up about this, the pussy don't feel nothing like my gorilla grip.


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[Assistant] Yeah, well, yeah, duh. But, I'm also Jewish. I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry, America. No, no, no. Think about it like this. Think about it like this. There is, I feel like, I'm gonna be one of the few people that is firmly in the center of whether or not people should be circumcised. And, the, uh,


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[Assistant] There's cases on both ends of the spectrum where I think naturally you're born with a certain amount of foreskin.


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[Assistant] And in those people, yeaah, get it trimmed back a little bit.


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[Assistant] And then there's people out there that don't have a lot of foreskin and then they get a circumcision and their dick looks like, uh, you know, have you ever seen those people that like leave to go to war and then they get burned in like a gasoline fire and they come back and their skin's like pulled really tight?


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[Assistant] Thing is a surface tension of a fucking submarine. That's fucked up. So.


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[Assistant] Yeah, there's a middle ground. Like, if you just have a medium amount of foreskin, just live with it. But if you got a lot, you know, and you have to...


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[Assistant] Dude, I, if I don't masturbate, but like, you know, once every other day, I'm fine. I can nut perfectly fine. I don't know.


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[Assistant] Yeah, but you've never experienced the other way either. This is like the perfect thing of like, it's an impossible argument unless there's a guy that's like 25 and then gets a circumcision. But nobody's like that.


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[Assistant] I heard of that dude that got his cock completely burned off with some- What? Yeaah, there was like some weird circumcision procedure that they would do with, uh,


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[Assistant] I think it was like electricity or something. And they would, and they would like use it to like, I guess cauterize the penis. And they ended up fucking just cauterizing this, this kid's dick off. Just gone. What the fuuuck. And, and so the parents decided to raise him as a, as a girl.


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[Assistant] You know? There's one thing that you shouldn't fail at. Actually, my brother has a failed circumcision. And the best part is, is he didn't know about it. He thought he was circumcised.


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[Assistant] I'm like, what, you think you're circumcised? Cause like, the doctor started doing it, he's like, he's bleeding too much, and so he's like, sewed it up, but he like, still has, he's just uncircumcised now, right?


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[Assistant] So, uh, uhm, what we should do is me and my brother should whack each other off and then we should do like a pleasure thing, like 1 through 10, like how pleasurable is this? And then we can, cause we have the same dick basically, but his just has foreskin. And then we can figure out who really is more sensitive. You know?


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[Assistant] Oh, that must hurt! No, I'm not- How much, like, how tight do you think it is without foreskin?


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[Assistant] What? You just pull the foreskin over the head like a normal person. Just like yours except I don't have it hanging off the end.


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[Assistant] They say there's reduced sensitivity because, uh, uh, when it's soft, you know, like your head's rubbing against your jeans or something like that all day. But I mean, I wear like, uh, uh, what are these things called? Boxer briefs. It just holds my cock up against my, uh, I was gonna say my thigh, but it ain't a long boy. Up against my balls.


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[Assistant] If I could just take a moment and pause this podcast.


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[Assistant] I had a perfect ender set up, right? And the way I record this is I record my side and then the guest records their side and that way I can have a nice high quality audio that I can slap together and uh, and it sounds good for you guys. Well, this ending.


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[Assistant] I had an ending set up where I asked Wilbur a very, uh, controversial question. And his answer was the first controversial thing he said and the funniest thing he said all episode. And when he sent me his side of the fucking audio,


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[Assistant] He cut his answer from the end. He redacted it, as he didn't want it to be on the podcast.


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[Assistant] I would like you guys to go personally thank Wilbur Soot for ruining this episode.


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[Assistant] But that motherfucker didn't have the balls to stick with what he said. And he pulled out.


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[Assistant] So you know what? You're getting this shitty ending. Sorry. Better luck next time. I'll see you on episode four.


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[Assistant] Last week, we talked about the efforts of successive royal ministries in the early 1770s to reform some of the more glaring problems with the Ancien Regime.


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[Assistant] And we saw how those efforts were frustrated by those who stood to lose the most from reform, whether they be aristocrats who weren't about to let their privileges be ignored, or peasants who weren't about to let free market experiments literally take bread off their table.


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[Assistant] With the failure of those reforms, the ministries of the late 1770s and early 1780s took a slightly different approach to solving France's problems. And though it would be an unfair exaggeration to say that that approach was, hey, let's pretend like nothing's wrong, as you'll see, that unfair exaggeration is not too far off the mark.


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[Assistant] Once we get done talking about that, we're gonna switch gears and trace the steadily declining reputation of Queen Marie Antoinette, because that steadily declining reputation finally cursplatted for good, just as the hey, nothing's wrong attitude was blowing up in the monarchy's face.


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[Assistant] As his reform package of spending cuts in the palace and free market economics out in the provinces left him with a list of enemies a mile long, it wasn't hard to see that Tergo would soon be on his way out the door.


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[Assistant] So, as the Controller General's influence waned, one man positioned himself as the best and frankly only candidate to replace him. Jacques Necker.


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[Assistant] After Tergo got the boot, it would take the king's advisors a good six months to get Nacare elevated into the ministry. But when he was finally brought on board, everyone was convinced that he would be able to lead the royal treasury out of danger and into the promised land of permanent solvency.


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[Assistant] Now one of the reasons it took a little while to get Necker into the ministry was that he had three pretty big strikes against him. He was a commoner, he was Swiss, and he was a Protestant.


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[Assistant] Any one of those alone would have made him suspect to the inner circles of Versailles. Combined, they would have torpedoed a lesser candidate.


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[Assistant] But Necker was no lesser candidate. He was widely viewed as a financial genius who had the answers to all of France's problems.


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[Assistant] Born in Geneva in 1732 and the care had been sent to Paris at the tender age of 15 to work as a bank clerk for an uncle.


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[Assistant] It became apparent immediately that an aptitude for banking didn't even begin to describe his talents. He worked his way quickly up the ranks and was made a full partner in his uncle's bank just after turning 30.


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[Assistant] Now a wealthy young superstar in the world of finance, Nacar founded his own bank and made even more money lending to the royal treasury and speculating in the grain trade.


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[Assistant] Around this same time, he got involved with a wealthy widow, but when said wealthy widow brought around a pretty swiss girl named Suzanne Kirchow, Nacare fell in love with Suzanne, and dropped, said wealthy widow.


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[Assistant] Interesting side note is that Suzanne had previously been engaged to none other than Edward Gibbon, but the engagement was broken off when she took up with Nacar.


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[Assistant] The couple was married and then had a daughter in 1766 named Germain, who Madame Necker raised on the educational theories of Rousseau, and when she grew up, Germain became a literary celebrity in her own right as Madame de Staal, who waged a ceaseless intellectual war against Napoleon, but now I'm starting to drift off topic.


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[Assistant] With the assistance and or prodding of his wife, Nacare started aiming for government office. In the late 1760s, he was appointed director of the East India Company, which like its British counterpart, was a privately chartered corporation that held a legal monopoly on the Indian trade markets.


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[Assistant] The company was failing badly from corruption and mismanagement, and despite his efforts to maintain its independence, the company was liquidated in 1769, and all its assets and debts were taken over by the Crown.


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[Assistant] But this will not be the last we've seen of the East India Company. It will be reconstituted in 1785, and then be at the epicenter of a massive scandal in 1793 that was a big part of explaining when and why the revolution began to eat its own children. So watch out for that.


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[Assistant] Returning to private business, the Necker spent the next few years building up Jacques' reputation as a financial wizard. Madame Necker hosted a well-attended salon that saw most prominent intellectuals and government officials pass through at one point or another.


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[Assistant] When Tergo took over as Controller General in 1774, Nacar started publishing economic tracks that attacked the physiocrat reforms, denouncing most especially the free trade in grain.


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[Assistant] So by the time Tergo was driven from the ministry, it was well known that Nicar was sitting on a slate of ideas that ran in the opposite direction to the discredited policies of the physiocrats.


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[Assistant] Still, as I said, it took a few months to bring him in, and even when he was brought in, in October 1776, Nacar had to take a less prestigious post because Protestants were not allowed to hold a major office like Controller General of Finances.


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[Assistant] But whatever the title, Nacare was now more or less in charge of the Royal Treasury.


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[Assistant] Like everyone else these days, he could see that taxes needed to be distributed a little more evenly across the three estates. But being a banker, Nacar was utterly convinced that actually raising taxes was unnecessary, and that the royal treasury would be best served by floating more loans.


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[Assistant] He was also in complete agreement with Mergen about the benefits of France getting into the American War. And he scoffed at Turgot's complaints that they just couldn't afford it. We won't even have to raise taxes, he said, we can just finance the whole thing and it'll be fine. Trust me, I'm a financial genius, remember?


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[Assistant] So off he went to raise the money, offering good rates and utterly self-confident assurances that the royal treasury was in great shape.


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[Assistant] On the strength of his personal reputation more than anything else, Necker got his loans. Even skeptics in the parliament only fought him a little bit on the first loan and then started registering future requests without complaint.


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[Assistant] Now, trying to figure out exactly what Necker was up to here is a little tricky. And though I haven't got a good source on this, I would bet that he was interested in taking France in the direction of the British, who, when they created the Bank of England back in 1694, more or less invented the idea of a permanent national debt serving as an engine for growth.


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[Assistant] As long as the interest is being paid, the state would always have a ready supply of cash.


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[Assistant] This would help explain Nicar's bookkeeping, without resorting to words like con artist, charlatan, and complete fraud. Because Nicar started dividing royal expenditures up into two categories. Ordinary expenses and extraordinary expenses.


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[Assistant] As the loans piled up to fund the American War, Nacare filed the interest on those loans as ordinary expenses.


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[Assistant] But he dumped the principle off into extraordinary expenses.


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[Assistant] He was happy to show anyone who asked the tally for the ordinary expenses, and with those apparently in good order, no one thought to ask about the extraordinary expenses, which would have sent potential lenders running for the hills rather than happily handing over more money.


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[Assistant] The peak of Necker's power, popularity, and influence, at least on this first go-around in the ministry, came in February 1781, when he convinced the king to let him publish for the first time ever a complete accounting of the royal finances.


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[Assistant] The resulting Comtrandu was meant to silence all critics and put to rest any whispers that all was actually not well in the King's pocketbook.


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[Assistant] The Comte Rondeau was a bona fide sensation, as nearly every educated man and woman in France wanted to get a look at the king's books. I mean, this was an unprecedented lifting of the veil.


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[Assistant] There were even mentions by later writers who were children at the time that they literally learned how to read from the Comte Rondu. It was seriously that big of a deal.


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[Assistant] And what did it show? It showed that the Royal Treasury had a 10 million libra surplus.


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[Assistant] But this was because the Compe-Rondu only dealt with those ordinary expenses, the regular cost of government, compared to the regular streams of revenue.


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[Assistant] But as I just said, things like, you know, the massive load of loans taken on to finance the war in America were just not even mentioned.


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[Assistant] Had they been, all of France would have seen that the treasury was actually running deep in the red.


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[Assistant] In the long run, the legacy of the Comte Rondeau was not just that it swept France's financial problems under the rug, but that it became impossible to believe Necker's successors when they revealed that the king was not only broke, he was catastrophically broke.


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[Assistant] I mean, how do you convince someone who literally learned how to read by flipping through the Comte Rondu that in less than five years the monarchy had somehow gone belly up?


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[Assistant] There were guys who right up until the end just couldn't believe it and thought that Calhoun was running some sort of shakedown operation when he presented his reform package to the assembly of notables in 1787.


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[Assistant] In the short term, though, the Comte de Rendue led directly to Nacar getting himself kicked out of the ministry.


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[Assistant] Believing that he was now indispensable, he demanded that the king let him into the inner circle of decision makers where he would resign.


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[Assistant] But like everyone in government, Nacare had his enemies, and they convinced the king not to bite.


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[Assistant] His bluff called, Nakair had to make good on his threat, and he resigned in May 1781.


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[Assistant] Though, critically for future events, his popularity with the public only grew as he was martyred by evil nobles who feared the influence of this commoner who the people of France had come to believe could do no wrong.


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[Assistant] Necker was succeeded by a guy named Jean-Francois Jolie de Florie, who was far more conservative in his outlook, coming from a staunchly anti-enlightenment family.


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[Assistant] He's not of major importance, and his name will not be on the test. But he was the bridge between Necker and Calonne, and so I have to mention that Fleury took one look at the books and said, holy crap, we have got to raise taxes. And thanks to his long-standing connection to the Parlemont, he was able to push through a third Vaatiem that would run through 1786.


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[Assistant] What the additional money raised was only going to cover the interest payments on all the previous loans. So just to keep going, Fleury had to borrow even more money and then go back to selling venal offices, a practice that had been slowly ratcheted down by previous ministries.


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[Assistant] Given what he had to work with, Fleury's days were always numbered. I mean, how do you ask courtiers and ministers to cut back on spending and submit to new taxes when the Comtrandu is sitting on their desk telling them that everything is fine?


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[Assistant] He finally called it quits in March 1783, just as negotiations to end the American War were getting underway.


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[Assistant] Fleury was succeeded by a guy whose name will absolutely be on the test. Charles Alexandre de Calonne. Because it will be Calonne who will spark the so-called pre-revolution when he finally gives up the ghost and says it's either major reforms or the kingdom collapses. Those are your options.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately, as we'll see, Calon was not a particularly good messenger for this dire warning, given his previous embrace of a little thing called useful splendor.


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[Assistant] So as we'll see next week, when it came time for major reform, there was major pushback.


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[Assistant] Cologne had been born in 1734 in Flanders into a respectable family of the rogue nobility. He was trained as a lawyer and then slowly rose up through the political judicial ranks, serving in the Flanders parlement and then securing positions in the central bureaucracy and eventually rising up to be an attendant.


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[Assistant] Along the way, he earned a reputation as a man far more interested in nailing down his next promotion than really doing the job that was in front of him, but he was savvy in business and at least clever enough to always land that next promotion when it became available.


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[Assistant] With the help of Foreign Minister Vergen, who was by now Louis's most trusted advisor, Cologne was brought in to serve as Controller General of Finances in November 1783. And he brought with him the rather novel idea that the best way to get out of debt was to spend more money.


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[Assistant] Now this is crazy of course, and it didn't work, but Cologne did have a plan.


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[Assistant] Like his predecessors, Turgot and Necker, Kallon believed that raising taxes was, at least for the moment, a political non-starter. His immediate predecessor, Fleury, had pushed the limits of the nobility's patience by initiating the Third Vatiem.


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[Assistant] Anything more would require a concerted row of push that the Ministry did not have the stomach for. Especially since it might eventually involve recalling the Estates General, which was a surefire way to completely lose control of the situation.


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[Assistant] So Kallon decided that the only way out was to keep borrowing and hope that maybe in time new loans taken at lower rates would pay off the loans with higher rates and then they could start getting ahead of this thing.


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[Assistant] So instead of cutting back spending at Versailles, Calonne conspicuously jacked it up.


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[Assistant] The idea being that if creditors saw that the monarchy was spending lavishly, they would be assured that the king was in good shape and see more royal loans as a safe investment.


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[Assistant] And for a while it worked, as Cologne took out hundreds of millions of Lira more in debt.


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[Assistant] But even the useful splendor was not enough to quiet doubts, and in December 1785 the Paris Parlemans balked at approving yet another loan, and they had to be marched as a group to Versailles and basically ordered by the king to approve it. And so they did.


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[Assistant] But as you might guess, spending your way out of debt turned out to be not a very good solution to the problem. Especially when Calon took to the books to survey the situation now that Florese Vaatien was set to expire at the end of 1786.


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[Assistant] He was mortified to discover that the crown was about to start running an annual deficit of well over a hundred million livre, which was a full quarter of expected revenue.


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[Assistant] And was only going to get worse as the interest started coming due for all the loans over the last few years. Once those started kicking in, something like half of all annual revenue was going to be going to debt servicing.


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[Assistant] This was a grind the wheels to a halt revelation.


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[Assistant] Kallon realized that there could be no more tricks. No more kicking the can down the road. The crisis everyone had been trying to avoid for the last decade was finally upon them.


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[Assistant] And so he retired to his offices and started drawing up a plan to completely overhaul the crown's finances. A plan that would touch on almost every part of the ASEAN regime, a plan that would ruffle every feather in the kingdom, and a plan that the king would not be able to implement by his own royal will.


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[Assistant] But we're going to leave the financial crisis there for the moment, on the eve of Calon presenting his reform package to the king.


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[Assistant] Because I want to close out today's episode by getting into a royal scandal that would break just as all of this financial stuff was coming to a head.


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[Assistant] It is a scandal too crazy to just breeze by without stopping to smell all the delicious details. Plus, it offers the perfect opportunity to talk a bit about Marie Antoinette, who wound up losing whatever popularity she had left as a result of the scandal, even though as we're about to see, she had nothing whatsoever to do with anything.


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[Assistant] So, let's talk about Marie Antoinette and the diamond necklace affair.


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[Assistant] Marie Antoinette was born Maria Antonia in 1755 in Austria, the eighth child and youngest daughter of Maria Theresa and Francis I, who were Holy Roman Empress and Emperor respectively, and in that order, Maria Theresa having inherited the throne from her father in 1740.


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[Assistant] Little Maria Antonia grew up in a fairly private and relaxed environment, and though she never took much to formal education, she excelled at singing and dancing and seems to have had a fairly happy childhood.


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[Assistant] But it just so happened that she was born right as Europe was undergoing the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, which we're going to talk about I think in two weeks, when we pull back to survey the international scene within which the French Revolution is about to explode.


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[Assistant] The Diplomatic Revolution meant that Austria had a whole new set of partners it needed to cement alliances with, including its long-time enemy France.


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[Assistant] It looked for a while like Maria Antonia wouldn't be called upon to play a major role in the new alliance system, but smallpox took its toll on the Austrian royal family. And by the time she turned 12 in 1767, negotiations were underway with the French to marry her to the future Louis XVI, himself just 13 years old.


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[Assistant] All the arrangements over the dowry and whatnot were finalized over the next few years. Maria Antonia was restyled Marie Antoinette, and shipped over to the custody of the French royal family, where she and Louis were officially married in May 1770.


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[Assistant] Now given that she was 14, and he was 15, and there was probably a room full of people milling around, as was the weird royal custom, it is not surprising that the marriage was not consummated on the actual wedding night.


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[Assistant] But as the days, and then weeks, and then years passed, the missing act of consummation became a mild concern, then a running joke, and then a downright threat to the Franco-Austrian alliance.


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[Assistant] Not that many in France were much concerned about that. Though Marie herself was fairly popular in the early going, the alliance with Austria was most assuredly not. And that's up to and including Foreign Minister Virgin and King Louis himself, who both chafed under an alliance and marriage that had been arranged by their predecessors.


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[Assistant] So as the time passed and Marie Antoinette continued to be ignored by King Louis, who preferred hunting and tinkering with locks, she took comfort with a small circle of friends and indulged in whatever frivolities happened to present themselves. Shopping for clothes, gambling, horse racing, attention from discrete male admirers,


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[Assistant] She was, after all, basically still just a kid, and was only 18 years old when her husband descended to the throne, and she became Queen of France.


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[Assistant] This title bump changed little for her though, including the constant barrage of letters from her mother berating her for not having bedded the king yet.


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[Assistant] A harsh spotlight hit this failure of royal intimacy when the king's younger brother had a son in 1775, and by now the gossipy underground press was having a field day, and there were rumors that Louis actually had a physical defect that eventually required surgery to fix, though that seems to have been just a rumor.


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[Assistant] Finally, in 1777, Marie's brother Joseph II, now Holy Roman Emperor, came to visit, and he was very much concerned about the state of the Franco-Austrian alliance.


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[Assistant] After badgering the couple to do their duty, the king and queen finally went to bed. Seven years after they were married.


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[Assistant] But Marie and Twinet only enjoyed temporary relief from public mockery when their first child turned out to be a daughter.


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[Assistant] But then in October 1781, she gave birth to the son everyone had been waiting for the last 11 years.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately, as we will see, the new dauphin, that is the crown prince, was a sickly kid, and he would die at just about the worst possible moment in the spring of 1789.