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[Assistant] Both of whom were saying, don't believe a word Bonaparte says. Revolutionary France is about naked conquest and sacrilegious atheism.


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[Assistant] So the leaders in Cairo started to talk amongst themselves about booting the French out.


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[Assistant] And they got a hold of some weapons and started to actively plot how to boot the French out.


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[Assistant] In mid-October, the Imams began to spread guns throughout the native population of Cairo and urging everyone to join in a holy insurrection to expel the foreign invaders.


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[Assistant] On October the 22nd, 1798, they launched an armed uprising using the Great Mosque as a base.


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[Assistant] It was a semi-organized bloodbath, and any Frenchman caught out in the open was simply killed, and that included the French general in charge of the garrison and one of Napoleon's aide-de-campes.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte himself was outside the city when the uprising began, but it did not take him long to rally a force to come pacify the city.


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[Assistant] He pushed his way in and then his men tore through the hastily erected Egyptian barricades.


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[Assistant] The French army then marched street by street, clearing everything in front of them and pushing the insurrectionaries back towards the Great Mosque.


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[Assistant] A brief standoff at the mosque ensued, but Bonaparte, who was in a wee bit of a mood,


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[Assistant] Opened up with the heavy guns. The French blasted their way in and killed everyone inside.


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[Assistant] Sooo, I guess we're not worried about desecrating mosques anymore?


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[Assistant] As further punishment, Cairo was hit with a punitive tax, their local divan was replaced by a direct French military commissioner, and anyone identified as a leader in the uprising was arrested and executed.


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[Assistant] These were harsh measures, but for the rest of the time Bonaparte was in Egypt, there were no more revolts.


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[Assistant] So at the end of 1798, the French occupation of Egypt was relatively secure.


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[Assistant] Though, how permanent it could possibly be given that they were completely cut off from Europe was an open question.


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[Assistant] Bone Apart, though, kept acting like it was going to be permanent.


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[Assistant] And in December, he gathered up a company of about 300 guys and headed down to Suez, the main port on the north end of the Red Sea.


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[Assistant] Now as I mentioned last week, one of the great dreams of the European powers was to carve out a canal that would link the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.


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[Assistant] As it stood right then, if you wanted to travel entirely by sea from Europe to India and China, you had to go around the tip of Africa, a long and arduous journey.


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[Assistant] You could cut the distance by something like 4,000 miles if you sailed up into the Red Sea, put in at Suez and handed everything off to hired porters or sold it to Arab middlemen and had them carry it up to the Mediterranean ports.


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[Assistant] But just adding those couple hundred miles by land jacked up the price of everything.


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[Assistant] I mean, just do the math on how many men and camels it would take to carry off the cargo that was loaded into just a single big ship.


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[Assistant] It was doable and the British in particular were doing it. They used the Red Sea as a primary link to India.


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[Assistant] And this is one of the big reasons Bonaparte was so interested in Egypt. It would force the British to rely entirely on that long route around the Cape of Good Hope, making it much easier to run out, say, a combined navy of Spanish, Dutch, and French ships to isolate the British home island completely.


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[Assistant] And then if the French could build a canal from Suez to the Mediterranean,


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[Assistant] The sea route would be cut by 4,000 miles and the French would have a near monopoly on the Asian trade.


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[Assistant] So like I say, Bone Apart had big fancy plans here.


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[Assistant] Now what his little expedition to Suez was looking for in particular was the legendary Canal of the Pharaohs that had been attested to in numerous ancient sources.


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[Assistant] It had allegedly been built back in the 500s BC, running west to the Nile, rather than north directly to the Mediterranean.


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[Assistant] This legendary canal was abandoned after it was cut off from the Nile by shifts in the course of the river, but after some methodical searching, the party actually found the remains of the Canal of the Pharaohs, and they set to work studying its course and construction.


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[Assistant] Now unfortunately for Bonaparte, he personally had to leave the mission in January 1799 because messengers arrived bearing the news that the Ottomans had finally been convinced to throw their whole weight against the French.


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[Assistant] They were massing to invade Egypt on two fronts. A land army swinging down through Syria and a sea army massing at roads that would sail down and put in at Alexandria.


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[Assistant] Napoleon likely expected something like this ever since the Ottomans had joined the war because it took him no time to launch a bold preemptive strike against the Ottoman army coming down through Syria.


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[Assistant] Rather than waiting for the Ottomans to come to him, he collected 13,000 men in February 1799 and marched them north into Syria to halt the Ottoman advance before they got anywhere near Egypt.


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[Assistant] And while he was at it, he would be able to capture a bunch of ports to strengthen the French position in the east.


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[Assistant] On March the 3rd, 1799, Bonaparte hit his first major objective, the port city of Jaffa, which is roughly where modern Tel Aviv is.


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[Assistant] Taking Jaffa was critical, because the rest of Bonaparte's campaign was premised on floating up heavy guns and siege equipment rather than hauling it over land through the desert, and for that he needed a local port. Bonaparte expected Jaffa to just give up, but they refused.


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[Assistant] The French assaulted the city for four days until they finally fought their way in on March the 7th.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte let his guys run wild for two straight days on a non-stop terror campaign. Thousands were killed in the looting and destruction that followed. So I guess we're not worried about pillaging the natives anymore?


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[Assistant] The siege and occupation of Jaffa was also right around the time the French army was hit with a problem that would plague them, not just for the rest of this campaign, but for the rest of their time in the east. The plague. Literally, the plague.


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[Assistant] In March 1799, the plague started spreading ominously through the ranks of the French army.


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[Assistant] Which impacted not just the basic health of the soldiers, but also their morale. The plague is a scary business.


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[Assistant] So before leaving Jaffa, Bonaparte set up a plague hospital to quarantine sick troops and allegedly went and visited the victims personally to prove to the rest of his men that there was nothing to fear. And there's a famous painting creatively called Bonaparte Visiting Plague Victims at Jaffa that depicts him laying hands on a sick man.


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[Assistant] But it is entirely possible that the entire visit was concocted propaganda.


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[Assistant] Napoleon personally commissioned this painting in 1804 on the eve of his self-coronation as emperor, and if there's one solid staple of semi-divine rule across time and space, it's the power of the ruler to heal the sick.


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[Assistant] After depositing a garrison to hold Jaffa, Bonaparte marched with the rest of his army north to the city of Acre, where a good portion of the incoming Ottoman army were stationed, awaiting further reinforcements from Damascus.


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[Assistant] The French began a siege on March the 20th, and Bonaparte confidently predicted that Accra would fall in a matter of days and then they could all move on. But instead,


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[Assistant] This was as far as his army was going to go in the Syrian campaign.


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[Assistant] The Ottoman defenders were well led by a French émigré officer who also happened to be a former classmate of Bonaparte.


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[Assistant] Supplied by the British Navy with provisions and equipment, the garrison at Accra settled in to outlast the French. And then came the critical blow.


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[Assistant] The flotilla bringing in the French siege equipment was captured by the British Navy, leaving Napoleon with only infantry to carry out his siege and no way to prevent the British from resupplying the city at will.


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[Assistant] To add insult to injury, the British then delivered the captured guns to Accra where they were used against the French.


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[Assistant] Napoleon dispatched 2,000 men under General Jean-Baptiste Clébert, a guy who I have been ignoring so far in the show in the interest of narrative clarity, but Clébert has been around for a while now.


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[Assistant] And he was part of that Mainz garrison that was forced to surrender way back in the summer of 1793 and was then transferred over to the Vendée, where they played a crucial role in defeating the insurrectionary Catholic and Royal Army later that year.


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[Assistant] General Clay Bear was one of the lead Republican generals in that run of battles out in the West in September-October 1793.


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[Assistant] Well now he's with Napoleon in Egypt, and he's off with 2,000 men to face 35,000 Ottomans. And despite the insane numerical difference, he actually liked his chances so much that he decided to go on the offensive.


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[Assistant] Claybear located the relief army camped at the base of Mount Tabor, and he scheduled a night raid for the wee hours of April the 16th that would hopefully confuse and scatter the enemy.


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[Assistant] But unfortunately, it took Claybear longer to get into position than he planned.


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[Assistant] And so when dawn broke on the 16th, the little army was spotted.


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[Assistant] Now holding out was actually pretty easy, but by the end of the day, the French were running low on food, water, and ammunition.


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[Assistant] But that is when Bonaparte showed up leading another 2,000 men.


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[Assistant] Having heard of the pickle Claybear had gotten himself into, Boneapart scrambled a relief effort.


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[Assistant] And when Napoleon arrived at Mount Tabor, his idea was to attack the Ottoman baggage and force them to divert attention away from Kleber.


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[Assistant] And this worked beyond his wildest expectations, because when Bonaparte attacked the baggage, the Ottoman soldiers suddenly believed that they were surrounded, so they panicked and retreated south.


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[Assistant] And as soon as they started to run, both Bonaparte and Claybear's armies pursued them and turned the retreat into a chaotic route.


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[Assistant] Just like that, this huge Ottoman relief army was busted and scattered to the four winds, leaving thousands of dead behind.


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[Assistant] But though they had stopped the relief army from coming, the siege of Accra still ended in failure for the French.


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[Assistant] The plague was continuing to spread and they had no real way of breaking into the city.


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[Assistant] After one last ditch of salt on May 10th, Bonaparte decided to give up. Sort of.


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[Assistant] He announced to his men that since they had defeated the Ottomans and taken a string of cities, that their work here was done.


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[Assistant] They were victorious already and didn't need dumb old Akre anyway. Basically, he declared victory and left. But the march home was pretty brutal.


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[Assistant] All the sick had to be kept quarantined in the back of the army, and the wounded could only move so fast.


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[Assistant] Their slow progress exposed the retreating French to repeated Ottoman raids.


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[Assistant] So eventually, anyone who couldn't keep up was just abandoned. And there is a story that after passing back through Jaffa, that Bonaparte ordered a surgeon to administer lethal doses of laudanum to men infected with plague, but the doctor refused to do it.


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[Assistant] At the end of June, though, Bonaparte arrived back in Cairo, and, keeping up appearances, he entered the city like some conquering hero.


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[Assistant] But the four-month campaign had cost him 600 dead of the plague, 1200 killed in action, and 2000 wounded, none of whom could be replaced.


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[Assistant] Because meanwhile, this other 20,000-man Ottoman army was being ferried by the British Navy from Rhodes down to Alexandria.


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[Assistant] And I have to think that right about now is the time Bonaparte looks around and says this is a hopeless situation. I'm cut off, I have no hope of reinforcement, I'm governing a probably hostile native population with a dwindling army weakened by plague,


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[Assistant] There is very little chance of permanent success to be had here.


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[Assistant] But, there was nothing he could do about his situation at the moment, except try to counter this seaborne Ottoman invasion.


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[Assistant] On July the 14th, 1799, that is the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille,


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[Assistant] The British Navy landed the Ottoman army at Alexandria and easily established a beachhead and captured the city, which was not particularly well garrisoned.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte arrived with about 7000 infantry and 1000 cavalry.


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[Assistant] So he ordered his men to attack, and they broke through the first Ottoman line before it had a chance to fully form.


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[Assistant] They had a tougher time cracking the inner line, but the French cavalry general, Joachim Murat, identified a weak point on the Ottoman flank, turned it, and charged in behind them.


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[Assistant] Murat charged so fast that he broke into the tent of the Ottoman high command and personally captured the Ottoman commander in chief, taking a gunshot to the jaw for his trouble. But Murat will live, as we'll see.


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[Assistant] The broken Ottomans tried to flee, scatter, swim back to the British ships, whatever.


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[Assistant] 1500 were captured, and 2000 just went missing.


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[Assistant] French casualties, again, numbered in the mere hundreds.


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[Assistant] But though here we are, with Bonaparte having won every open battle he fought in Egypt and Syria, and won them all in pretty spectacular fashion, none of it changed the larger strategic picture.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte's army was still cut off from home and could expect no relief or reinforcement.


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[Assistant] And then the British Admiral running the fleet that had been blockading Bonaparte from all possible relief decided it was high time to let news from Europe finally get through to the French.


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[Assistant] He forwarded dispatches that spelled out the scope of the disasters that had befallen the French army in the year since Bonaparte had left for Egypt.


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[Assistant] Disasters you had no knowledge of until that moment and disasters that we will pick our way through next week.


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[Assistant] Napoleon concluded that if France was going to be saved, and more importantly if his glorious personal ambitions were going to be saved,


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[Assistant] He was going to have to ditch the men he had dragged to Egypt and sail for home.


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[Assistant] Pretending to be headed merely on a scouting expedition to the Nile Delta, Bonaparte boarded a frigate with a small company of loyal associates as night fell on August the 22nd, 1799. Then he sailed for France.


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[Assistant] The next morning, General Clébert got up and read the proclamation, announcing Bonaparte's departure, and that he himself had been appointed commander-in-chief.


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[Assistant] Now this practically led to a riot. But Clay Bear told him, no, no guys, it's cool. He's just going home to get reinforcements. I swear.


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[Assistant] But this was a bald-faced lie. Bonaparte is not coming back.


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[Assistant] So all those men who had been licking their chops as they sailed from Malta to Alexandria in June 1798, and who counted themselves as lucky ducks for getting picked to go off on this grand adventure with Napoleon Bonaparte, were utterly abandoned to their fate.


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[Assistant] Those that weren't already dead of the plague or had been killed in battle or native uprisings, that is.


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[Assistant] Now just to wrap up the fate of these poor guys, since it will extend beyond the scope of the show, the French occupation went pretty much as you'd expect.


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[Assistant] His army dwindling, and with no expectation that Bonaparte was ever coming back, Clébert opened up negotiations with the British and Ottomans, promising to abandon Egypt if they were all just allowed to go home to France.


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[Assistant] But after agreeing to these terms, the British reneged in March 1800 and landed a huge Mammaluk army to destroy the supposedly fatally weakened French army.


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[Assistant] But Claybear won the subsequent battle of Heliopolis, but then he himself was assassinated by an angry native in June.


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[Assistant] The demoralized French hung out until 1801.


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[Assistant] When the last of them finally wound up holed up in Alexandria, besieged by a British expeditionary force that finally secured the French surrender in September 1801.


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[Assistant] And we'll end today by noting that this surrender is the reason why the Rosetta Stone sits today in the British Museum, not the Louvre.


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[Assistant] The details are sketchy, but it appears that the British knew all about the stone and just straight up jacked it and sailed it back to London, where it remains to this day.


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[Assistant] Next week, we will wind back the clock a bit and pick up that deteriorating situation back in Europe that I've now hinted at a few times. A deteriorating situation that led to the formation of the second coalition.


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[Assistant] A coalition that now included the Russians and the Ottomans and which General Bonaparte was convinced that it was his destiny to save France from so that he himself could proceed with everything else he believed destiny had in store for him.


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[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by Lynda.com.


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[Assistant] Lynda.com is the online learning platform with over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. For a free 10-day trial, visit Lynda.com slash revolutions. That's L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash revolutions.


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[Assistant] Lynda.com is for problem solvers, for the curious, for people who want to make things happen. Maybe you want to master Excel, learn negotiating tactics, build a website, boost your Photoshop skills. Go to Lynda.com and feed your curious mind.


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[Assistant] With Alinda.com membership, you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching. Stream thousands of video courses on demand and learn at your own schedule. The courses are structured so you can watch them from start to finish or consume them in bite sized pieces.


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[Assistant] So let's say you're an entrepreneur looking to expand your web design skills and wondering which Linda plan is right for you. Hi Scott.


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[Assistant] All the plans give you access to the tutorials on your iOS and Android devices, but the premium packages allow you to download the content onto the device and watch it whether you have an internet connection or not. They also give you full download access to the project files used in the tutorials to make it easier to follow along, watch, learn, and practice.


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[Assistant] Your lynda.com membership gives you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics all for one flat rate. Whether you're looking to become an industry expert, passionate about a hobby, or just want to learn something new.


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[Assistant] So we spent all of last week with Napoleon in Egypt. This week, we are going to double back and follow the development in Europe while Napoleon's army was trapped in the east. And as we will see in a moment, it was largely because Napoleon had gone east that things were going to start to go so badly for the French back home.


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[Assistant] Because everyone else is about to form a new anti-French coalition, dubbed by history the Second Coalition.


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[Assistant] To wind the clock all the way back to the fall of 1797, the French Directory was feeling pretty good after the Treaty of Campo Formio. And with the coup of Fructidor having purged Closet Royalis and frankly anyone promoting a generous peace with France's enemies, they were also feeling pretty aggressive.


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[Assistant] If you remember from two episodes back, the French negotiators at the Congress of Rustat were pretty well trying to dictate terms to get an even better deal for themselves. The deal Bonaparte had made at Campo Formio was actually pretty unpopular in the post-Fructador halls of the Directory.


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[Assistant] So the talks at Rustaut had quickly ground to a halt as the French tried to extract further concessions from the Germans.


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[Assistant] Every one of the nearly 2000 component parts of the Holy Roman Empire were trying to work the Congress to their advantage.


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[Assistant] In particular, the secular princes who had lost the lands west of the Rhine wanted to be compensated with lands east of the Rhines, and they eyed the various ecclesiastic principalities as the best source of new territory.


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[Assistant] So a bunch of the secular German princes actually now saw the French as diplomatic allies rather than enemies, because as we all know, there is nothing the French like more than stripping the Church of Land and giving it away practically for free.


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[Assistant] These princes were already pretty annoyed at the Habsburgs for not fighting harder to protect the left bank properties. And then when Bonaparte swung through Rostadt on his way back to Paris in December 1797, he made the Austrians agree to pull out of the critical fortress city of Mainz. And that is when the princes just threw up their hands.


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[Assistant] In response to the withdrawal from Mainz, the German journalist Josef Gores wrote,


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[Assistant] On 30 December 1797, the day of the handing over of Mainz, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, there died peacefully and blessedly at the ripe old age of 955 years, 5 months and 28 days, as the result of total enervation and a final stroke, completely conscious and comforted by the Holy Sacraments, the Holy Roman Empire of ponderous memory.


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[Assistant] And he was not far off. This was the beginning of the end.


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[Assistant] The Holy Roman Empire would formally dissolve just shy of ten years hence after the Battle of Austerlitz in 1806, and many of the seeds that helped that disillusion along were planted at the Congress of Rstadt.


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[Assistant] The Austrians, for their part, were blissfully unaware of their impending doom. They surveyed the scene and said, well, look, the French didn't beat us that badly. Sure, Bonaparte kicked us around in Italy, but every time the French had crossed the Rhine, we had booted them right back across again.


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[Assistant] So even as the Austrians were agreeing to things in principle, it was clear that they were beginning to view Campo Formio as a mere ceasefire, rather than the beginnings of a stable peace.


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[Assistant] So though the Congress agreed to French control of the Left Bank in March 1798, and then compensation to the affected princes with ecclesiastic property in April, there was an awful lot of kicking the can down the road going on.


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[Assistant] And then bone apart and 40,000 men sailed for Egypt a month after that, and that's when the Congress of Rostock really ground to a halt.


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[Assistant] The French thought they were about to conquer, like, the whole Mediterranean. And the Austrians just watched the one guy who had really given them trouble sail far, far away.


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[Assistant] The directories supreme confidence that they were on their way to being masters of the whole world, then got a little boost in the spring of 1798 when the Irish suddenly rose up in rebellion against the British.


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[Assistant] Now Bonaparte had convinced the Directory that attacking England itself would be folly, but helping to drag the British into a quagmire in Ireland? That still seemed like a perfectly reasonable ambition.


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[Assistant] Patriotic Irishmen in Paris, particularly the famous revolutionary Wolf Tone, had been telling the French for years that all the Irish needed was money and guns and a stiff backbone made up of professional French soldiers, and they could make serious trouble for the British in Ireland.


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[Assistant] Now they had tried this and failed once before, as we all know, in 1796. But that was just because of the weather.


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[Assistant] The failed French invasion of 1796, though, had put the British on notice that the Irish might actually be serious about rising up.


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[Assistant] So, the British authorities had begun to play Protestant patriots, mostly up in Ulster, against Catholic patriots.


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[Assistant] Both sides wanted an independent Ireland, and they had come together to form a coalition called the United Irishmen. But the British were doing a pretty good job convincing the Protestants that the Catholics were just going to turn around and hand independent Ireland over to the Pope.


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[Assistant] With the patriot movement internally divided, the British authorities then cracked down hard in March 1798. Ireland was put under de facto martial law, and the authorities swept through Dublin arresting everyone identified as a potential rebel leader.


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[Assistant] But though the sweep was thorough, the British didn't get everyone, and the patriot leaders who remained at large decided they need to get going now or lose any chance they might have.


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[Assistant] So these leaders planned a general uprising that would begin in Dublin and the surrounding counties, and then hopefully spread across the island. And they set it to begin on May the 23rd, 1798.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately, on the eve of the revolt, the entire plan was betrayed, and so when the Irish patriots in Dublin started gathering at their agreed rendezvous points, they were surprised by sudden swarms of British troops.


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[Assistant] The insurrection in Dublin itself was quashed before it even started.


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[Assistant] Now a few of the rebel groups in the surrounding counties managed to get their uprisings off the ground, but they were all put down within a matter of days.


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[Assistant] Then, a little late to the party, up in Ulster, Protestant Patriots decided to join the already semi-failed uprising in early June, but then they too were swiftly defeated within days.


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[Assistant] Now to deal with this sudden flare-up of rebellion, the British Ministry appointed a new Lord Lieutenant to Ireland. A man with both military and administrative experience. And that is our old friend Charles Cornwallis, he of Yorktown.


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[Assistant] Down in the Wicklow mountain south of Dublin, a rebel general and about a thousand men managed to open up a guerrilla campaign that wound up lasting for years even as the general himself surrendered in October 1798.


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[Assistant] Wexford was not supposed to be the center of the rebellion, but it sure turned out to be.


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[Assistant] An uprising there began on May the 27th, after the initial rebel defeats in Dublin. But once it got going, the Patriots soon had an army 10,000 strong. They expelled the British authorities, declared themselves to be the Colonel of a new Irish Republic, and then attempted to break out of Wexford County and spread the rebellion.


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[Assistant] When the Irish were beat at Vinegar Hill though, that was pretty much the end of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.


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[Assistant] So I know what you're thinking. This is a podcast about the French Revolution. Why are we talking so much about what's going on in Ireland? Where the hell are the French? Well, that's exactly what the Irish are thinking too.


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[Assistant] Not exactly Johnny on the spot. The French did not land their first wave of support until August the 22nd, and that first wave of support was just a thousand men under General Jean-Joseph Humbert.


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[Assistant] Yes, they landed two months after the rebellion had been pretty well suppressed.


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[Assistant] And when they did, they landed way up in northwest Ireland, which was nowhere near the center of the action.


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[Assistant] But when Umber landed, he told the locals, look, another 3,000 guys are on the way, do you want our help or not?


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[Assistant] About a thousand Irishmen rallied to Umber's banner, and a few days later,


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[Assistant] This combined French-Irish army actually beat 6,000 British militia forces in a battle that is called the Castlebar Races, because first the British raced to block the French advance on the fortress of Castlebar, and then the British raced away from the French when they got hit with their very first professional bayonet charge.


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[Assistant] After this initial victory, Humbert's plan was to march up into Ulster, hopefully rally a bunch more Irish to join the fight, but the French found few supporters, and no one really in the mood to take up arms. I mean, you guys heard the rebellion was actually crushed two months ago, right?


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[Assistant] So Lord Cornwallis then gathered up two pretty massive forces of about 15,000 men each, mostly militia, to protect Dublin and then go track down the French invaders.


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[Assistant] It took a while, but in September 1798, Umber's little army was finally cornered and surrounded. Umber surrendered on September 15.


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[Assistant] And the French soldiers were allowed to be taken prisoner under civilized terms and then be repatriated to France. Their Irish comrades, on the other hand, were either summarily shot, or, if they ran, tracked down and hanged.


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[Assistant] And that was the way it went all through the rebellion of 1798. After every confrontation, Irish rebels were shown zero mercy.


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[Assistant] So wait a minute, you say what about the other 3000 French?


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[Assistant] Funny thing about that, they took their sweet time getting moving, and they didn't land in Ireland until the middle of October 1798, that is, a good four months after the initial rebellion had been crushed, and a month after their French brothers had surrendered.


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[Assistant] This latest and stupefyingly late attempt by the French to land troops in Ireland then itself came to disaster.


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[Assistant] When they reached the Irish coast, a British naval squadron pounced, and after three hours fighting forced the French fleet to surrender.


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[Assistant] The great Irish revolutionary Wolf Tone was one of those captured, and that's how he winds up convicted, treason, and hanged in November 1798. If I decide to cover the Irish Revolution, we will talk more about Wolf Tone, I promise.


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[Assistant] Their efforts in Ireland were coming to naught, just as they were digesting news of Nelson's destruction of Bonaparte's fleet at Aboukir Bay. And it was that French defeat more than anything else that really got the ball rolling on the second coalition, because it brought in two new players into the game. The Russians and the Ottomans.


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[Assistant] Ever since the fall of the Bastille, Catherine the Great's Russia had been one of revolutionary France's harshest and most consistent critics.


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[Assistant] The Russian court was also the most stable and generous benefactor of the emigre princes, where Austria and Prussia and Britain treated the emigres as a nuisance. Russia showered them with money, gifts, and if any of them made it to St. Petersburg, they received a warm reception.


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[Assistant] But as you may have noticed, Russia was nowhere to be found when the first coalition formed against France in 1793.


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[Assistant] Oh sure, Russia closed its ports to French shipping, but Catherine declined to participate in any actual fighting.


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[Assistant] As she herself declined to participate though, she was actively pushing the Austrians and Prussians to declare war, no doubt hoping that if they got bogged down fighting the French, that she would enjoy a much freer hand in Eastern Europe.


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[Assistant] The Russians were in the process of jumping up and down on the Ottomans, and Catherine planned to move next on Poland as soon as she was done.


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[Assistant] Now as we've seen, things didn't exactly work out as Catherine planned, and when she did make her move on Poland, Prussia and Austria were right there to make sure that the subsequent Polish partitions didn't go on without them.


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[Assistant] After the third Polish partition in 1795, Catherine was still looking south towards Turkey and Greece as the center of Russian foreign policy rather than west towards France. And she secured a secret promise from the Austrians during the negotiations over Poland to support a Russian move south if she decided to go for it.


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[Assistant] It really wasn't until Bonaparte started whipping the Austrians in Italy that Catherine finally decided that the French Republic she so loathed might actually pose a threat to her rising empire.


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[Assistant] As the Austrians were getting pushed out of Italy, she promised to raise 64,000 men to come join the fight.


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[Assistant] But even here, her pledge came with a major qualification. The now neutral Prussians had to pledge an equal number of troops, which the Prussians had no intention of doing.


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[Assistant] So it's safe to say that Catherine the Great hated the French Revolution with every fiber of her being. She really did.


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[Assistant] But as long as no vital Russian interests were at stake, that hatred never translated into action.


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[Assistant] Russian foreign policy changed almost overnight in November 1796. Specifically, November the 17th, 1796, because that was the day Catherine the Great died, and her unstable son, Paul I, inherited the throne.


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[Assistant] Paul was even more anti-revolutionary than his mother, and he had spent a lot of time amongst the French emigres, and so when he became Tsar, he tossed aside whatever prudence his mother had been laboring under, and decided to make Russia aggressively anti-French.


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[Assistant] Before the Lyoban Peace Preliminaries were signed in April 1797, Paul offered to mediate between the Austrians and French, but his thumb would have been on the scale the whole time.


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[Assistant] The French abandoning the left bank of the Rhine would have been a prerequisite to any peace mediated by Paul. When the Austrians signed the Leoben peace preliminaries, the Tsar was incensed that they had given into French demands, and he started escalating Russia's involvement in the West.


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[Assistant] As the Treaty of Campo Formio neared completion in September 1797, Paul declared himself the protector of Malta, one of the few independent islands in the western Mediterranean.


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[Assistant] Then, in the early months of 1798, Russian spies began to report that the French were massing a huge invasion force in the Mediterranean under General Bonaparte. And where they were headed was of course a mystery.


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[Assistant] But Tsar Paul and his ministers decided that the French were going to take a stab right at Russia. Maybe try to fight their way into Poland and revive the Polish revolutionary cause, which would have been an insane thing for the French to do. Mucking around in Poland brings in Prussia and Austria and Russia all crashing down on their heads simultaneously. But that didn't stop Paul's paranoid flights of fancy. So, Russian escalation escalated.


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[Assistant] They were now in close contact with the British, who were naturally urging the Russians to join the fight. And soon enough, Russia had a fleet patrolling the North Sea, which freed up much needed British ships to go beef up their Mediterranean fleet.


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[Assistant] Then, it should come as no surprise to learn that when Bonaparte seized Malta, Tsar Paul took it as practically a declaration of war.


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[Assistant] And if Bonaparte's invasion was pushing Russia in the direction of open war, when the destination of the French invasion turned out to be Egypt, that put Russia's long time enemy, the Ottomans, on alert.


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[Assistant] So among the amazing accomplishments of Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt was the creation of something that would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier. A Russo-Turkish alliance.


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[Assistant] The Russians and Turks were, at that point, about as bitter a pair of enemies as you were going to find anywhere on Earth. And since the middle of the 18th century, Russia had been pretty well beating up on the Turks, most recently in a war that had run from 1787 to 1792.


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[Assistant] Basically, since the mid 1700s, Russia has been expanding at the Ottoman Empire's expense.


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[Assistant] The Turks and the French, meanwhile, had always gotten along fine. I mean, yea, the French Republic was in every way the polar opposite of the Ottoman Sultanate, but they were quite a ways away from each other, and the French and Turks had been trading partners and diplomatically friendly for as long as anyone could remember.


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[Assistant] So even as the French were cutting off the king's head and beheading the entire aristocracy, or so the stories went, the Turks were still inviting French military advisors and engineers to come over and help them modernize their empire.


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[Assistant] The first hint that France might be a danger to the Ottomans was when Bonaparte extracted all the Ionian islands that had once belonged to the Venetians.


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[Assistant] That put France right at the Ottoman Empire's doorstep.


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[Assistant] And then they were shocked to find that that fleet massing in Toulon was on its way to Egypt.


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[Assistant] I mean, sure, Egypt is one of the more independent regions of our empire, but still, you know, hey, that's ours, what are you doing?


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[Assistant] To say nothing of the fact that Istanbul was fed by Egyptian grain.


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[Assistant] The Turkish capital was hit hard by the French invasion of the Nile Delta.


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[Assistant] But at first there seemed little they could do about it. They were no match for the French on their own, and massing an army to go to Egypt might leave the rest of their territories under garrisoned. Yes, the Ottoman Empire was big, but that did not mean everyone was happy to be a part of it.


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[Assistant] But Nelson's smashing victory at Abacur Bay changed the whole equation. Suddenly Bonaparte's expedition was not this ultra-modern powerhouse that couldn't be stopped. It was a stranded and unsupported orphan trapped in a foreign land.


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[Assistant] The British now ruled the Mediterranean Sea, and the Russians were saying, hey, we need to set aside our differences and do something about what Paul I was calling the frenzied French Republic.


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[Assistant] And so that was how the Ottomans got into it, and why they wound up sending armies into Egypt, as we saw at the end of last week's show.


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[Assistant] So at the end of 1798, the craziest thing of all happened. The Russian fleet in the Black Sea was allowed to sail through the Bosphorus and into the Mediterranean to undertake a joint mission with the Turks to expel the French from all those islands in the Ionian Sea.


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[Assistant] I mean seriously, just six months earlier, the thought of the Turks inviting the Russians to sail on through past Istanbul would have been unthinkable.


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[Assistant] But the Russians just waved as they sailed by, on their way to fight their now mutual enemy, the French.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, back in France, the French were well aware that Europe was mobilizing against them.


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[Assistant] So to get going on their own mobilization, the on-again, off-again General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, now a delegate in the Council of 500, introduced in early September 1798 a new conscription law that would soon bear his name.


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[Assistant] The Jordan Law prescribed compulsory military service for all unmarried men ages 20 to 25.


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[Assistant] These young men were supposed to register according to their birth dates and if the government elected to activate the draft they would be taken in cohorts from youngest to oldest.


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[Assistant] And wouldn't you know it, just a few weeks later, September the 24th to be exact, the government activated the draft.


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[Assistant] But as usual, conscription proved to be very tough.


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[Assistant] But as the men came forward, nearly 60,000 were deemed medically unfit for service. The process of determining fitness for service was left to local administrators, who made a habit of exempting friends and relatives, neighbors, or anyone with a spare bit of cash.


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[Assistant] Then of the 143,000 deemed fit for service, only 97,000 actually showed up on the day that they were told to show up. And of those 97,000, about 25,000 deserted on the trip between their hometowns and the front lines.


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[Assistant] So, of the 200,000 men who were supposed to be reinforcing the armies along the Rhine and in Italy, only about 74,000 actually made it by the spring of 1799.


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[Assistant] And just to jump ahead a little bit here, these conscription issues were terribly alarming for the directory, because by the spring of 1799, war will have been officially declared.


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[Assistant] So in April 1799, the Directory is going to alter the Jourdan Law to allow for replacements to be purchased and volunteers to take the place of those drafted. This new system was supposed to raise another 75,000 men, but only 57,000 actually reached the front.


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[Assistant] Now these issues have two major impacts on the future of France.


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[Assistant] First, France is about to get pushed around in the campaigns of 1799.


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[Assistant] And second, it would further cement the professionalization of the French armies.


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[Assistant] The great patriotic amateurs who enthusiastically volunteered for the revolutionary armies of old now gave way to men who made the army their career, their way of life, and their home.


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[Assistant] This widened the chasm between civilian and soldier that helped make Bonaparte's empire possible.


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[Assistant] Nowhere was the Jordan law more despised than in Belgium, where the locals would be subject to French conscription for the first time.


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[Assistant] As I mentioned a few episodes back, this basically meant that Belgium in the fall of 1798 is the Vendée in the spring of 1793.


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[Assistant] The local peasants are already mad about revolutionary attacks on their traditional church and native aristocracy, and now they are infuriated that Paris is planning to draft them to go fight and die for the very men who exploited them.


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[Assistant] So the minute officials came around to start registering Belgians for the draft, riots broke out.


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[Assistant] And these riots soon led to a full-blown peasant uprising in October 1798 that not only tied up badly needed French resources as the Directory tried to pacify the region, but it also helped convince the burgeoning Second Coalition that the French Republic's hold on the territories it had acquired since 1795 was very, very weak.


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[Assistant] The British and Russians, for example, were soon deep in talks about a joint invasion of the Netherlands to expel the French occupation.


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[Assistant] But that would not be enough to help the Belgians currently in revolt.


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[Assistant] None of them had any experience or training or weapons to keep their uprising going for very long.


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[Assistant] So, though the Belgian countryside raged, by December 1798 the French army had the region mostly back under control.


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[Assistant] So as 1798 came to an end, it was pretty clear to everyone that, come the spring, war would resume.


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[Assistant] But still, the Austrians were not necessarily eager to get back into it. I mean, really.


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[Assistant] Though Tsar Paul was promising a huge army, that for the moment was still just talk.


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[Assistant] The British were, as always, interested only in their own interests, and all anyone could get out of the Prussians was a pledge of neutrality. Which was nice. But the still as of yet unofficial second coalition was not exactly the most stable thing on earth.


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[Assistant] The Austrians had no desire to get caught fighting the French alone again, so they were not eager to pull the trigger on anything just yet.


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[Assistant] Encouraged by the British, and with extravagant promises of support from the Russians, the still independent Kingdom of Naples that controlled the deep south of Italy decided that the French position in Italy was weak.


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[Assistant] And that the Neapolitan army could boot the French out of Rome and then roll up the peninsula and squeeze the French out of Italy altogether like some giant tube of toothpaste.


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[Assistant] The Austrians had told the Neapolitans bluntly to not do anything to provoke the French without Austrian approval, but the Neapolitans just ignored them.


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[Assistant] On November the 12th, 1798, a Neapolitan army crossed the border with the new Roman Republic.


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[Assistant] This attack caught the French general running realm, a guy named Jean-Etienne Championné, by surprise, and he had to scramble to get his garrison out of the city before it was trapped.


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[Assistant] The Neapolitans occupied Rome on November the 26th.


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[Assistant] But this occupation would be extremely short-lived.


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[Assistant] Championet regrouped and reinforced his army, and then came storming back into Rome, pushing the Neapolitans right back out the door they had come in. And then Championet just kept going.


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[Assistant] Pretty soon, he had chased the army all the way back to Naples, blew through whatever part of it hadn't run off, and then just occupied Naples.


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[Assistant] The Neapolitans begged the Austrians for help. But Austria said, no, we told you not to do anything, we are not coming to help you.


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[Assistant] And then up further north, the French used the Neapolitan attack as an excuse to go reinvade the Piedmont and occupy it rather than letting it just live on as a defeated but still independent kingdom.


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[Assistant] Then in January 1799, General Championnet abolished the Kingdom of Naples and declared it to now be the Parthenopean Republic.


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[Assistant] And this was in defiance of an order from the directory to not form any new sister republics. We have enough on our plate as it is.


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[Assistant] The Establish of the Parthenopean Republic put Championnet at loggerheads with the directories representative who was dispatched to Naples to supervise the occupation.


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[Assistant] The directory wanted to break this precedent of the army creating new political units, and so the representative immediately claimed jurisdiction over all land, spoils, and money that the French were seizing.


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[Assistant] Championet, of course, was having none of this and expelled the representative from Naples by force.


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[Assistant] Unsure of who was actually to blame for this drama, the directory recalled both men.


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[Assistant] It was time to bring the army to heel, they thought. Either that or get toppled by them by the end of the year. You know, whichever.


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[Assistant] Aside from the creation of the Parthenopian Republic, the misadventure of the Neapolitans put enormous pressure on Austria to finally make a decision about whether or not to go back to war.


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[Assistant] The Russian ambassadors were giving Vienna an earful about not leaping to the aid of Naples. They were now saying either start mobilizing for a coming war or we will not send our armies over and you'll be left to face a clearly aggressive France all by yourself.


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[Assistant] Then when the French found out that the Austrians were in fact letting Russian troops enter Habsburg territory, French ambassadors started giving Vienna an earful. They said, expel the Russians from your territory or we will declare war.


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[Assistant] Stuck in the middle, the Austrians finally decided to side with the Russians.


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[Assistant] The Russians would not be expelled, and if that meant war with France, then so be it.


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[Assistant] But on the eve of the war, the second coalition did not have a clear objective, nor even similar objectives. The Russians were looking to be an ascendant power in Europe, in Italy for sure, probably Greece eventually too. This was of course unacceptable to all their partners.


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[Assistant] The Ottomans didn't want them in Greece. The Austrians and British really didn't want them in Italy.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, the British wanted the Netherlands back badly, but no one else really cared about that.


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[Assistant] And the only other thing the British wanted was some kind of stable balance of power on the continent.


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[Assistant] So if the British decided one of their new partners was getting too far out in front of the rest, you could pretty well bank on the British doing something to block them.


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[Assistant] The Ottomans, meanwhile, just wanted to get the French out of Egypt, and the Russians off their backs.


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[Assistant] Once the French were expelled from Egypt, who knows how committed the Turks would be to further anti-French action.


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[Assistant] And as for the Austrians? The Austrians didn't really know what they wanted. Just to roll back the French, I guess. Restabilize their fracturing Holy Roman Empire.


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[Assistant] The French Directory, meanwhile, was stuck between its ambitions and the realities of their situation.


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[Assistant] General Jourdan had gone back to the German frontier in November 1798, surveyed the situation, and wrote back extremely pessimistic reports about the preparedness of the armies stationed along the Rhine and Danube frontiers.


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[Assistant] Most of the best men and supplies had either been diverted up to the men still camped along the English Channel or had sailed away with bone apart.


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[Assistant] Jordan asked the directory for more supplies. Reinforcements, guns, shoes, blankets, anything, everything. But he got almost none of it.


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[Assistant] Because the directory, A, did not have much to spare, and B, they were in a bit of a bubble when it came to how vulnerable they really were.


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[Assistant] The map of Europe clearly showed them controlling a string of sister republics with large armies stationed everywhere. But that was all on paper. In reality, Jordan was right.


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[Assistant] If the Austrians and Russians decided to, say, strike at Italy or up into Switzerland, he was going to have a heck of a time fighting them off.


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[Assistant] But the Directory was unconcerned with such dour predictions. Using the pretext of the Russians crossing the Austrian frontier, the Directory declared war on March the 12th, 1799. In the war, the Second Coalition had begun.


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[Assistant] Next week, we will begin with a string of French defeats in Italy and Germany and Switzerland that threatened to undo everything the French had achieved since 1795.


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[Assistant] Then we will head back to Paris for yet another political coup. A coup that will help set up the final coup of Brumaire that will end the directory once and for all.


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[Assistant] And of course, we will also see Napoleon Bonaparte return home to save France. And maybe while he was at it, seize control of France, and then go conquer all of Europe.


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[Assistant] Sure. Do you have an ETA on the mouse portion of Labs? There is an explosion of mice on the market and would love to get some info on them. I'll never cash this gift card if it's some time this year.


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[Assistant] Uh, let's see. Speaking of Berkeley, I'm curious if you have thoughts on the recent research paper showing that 55,000 plus VR users can be uniquely identified based on head and hand motion data captured in Beat Saber.


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[Assistant] No, no, basically you can just go whenever now. Uh, I know that, uh, Luke may want to step out.


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[Assistant] It might be the extra overhead of all the cables and pumps and things maybe?


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[Assistant] We ready? Yeah, I'm ready. You guys ready? Hit me, Dan. Sure. Hey guys, thank you for all the work and thank you for making my Saturday morning educational but also entertaining. Heck yeah. I was wondering what is beyond labs? You consider going into online education? Like what is after labs?


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[Assistant] How is the smart home going? Light switches and heating. Do you recommend Zigbee or WiFi? I purchase WiFi devices based on features, but now I'm having network issues due to the number of devices. Oh man, I mean it's all...


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[Assistant] Hello, Wancrew. Is the Labs hoodie the same as the Dropout hoodie? I recently got the Dropout and hoodie.


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[Assistant] Hey LLD, I love listening to you guys talk about product development. What is something that is significantly more complicated than you thought prior to LTT Store or Floatplane?


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[Assistant] LTT store whale here. I own multiples of almost all your merch and love the quality. The one thing the rest of my family loves is the onesie. When will we get a new design?


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[Assistant] It's basically this thing. I don't know. I haven't seen it. I'm not sure what the public perception is.


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[Assistant] And then when Todd Howard was asked, my understanding is that he said, yeah, it's canon.


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[Assistant] Got another one for us, Dan? I do. Hiwan.dll. I bought the Chevy Volt based on Linus' review and it's the best car out there. Love it. Any major, uh, repairs or tweaks that you had to do for the car and what should I do to keep it in good shape?


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[Assistant] Yeah. Linus, I remember from a previous WAN show you said you used to be an avid hockey fan. Ever considered AHL games. My local team recently played Abbotsford and it was a great time. I have heard it's a blast.


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[Assistant] Why still no ATX12VO? I really want to see it take off, and while the BTF format seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it, they're all still using the legacy specification. Intercompatibility, man.


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[Assistant] Okay, Line, Lukey, and Dano, what's your thoughts on automatically changing twitter.com to x.com? How did shenanigans like netflittwitter.com get past quality assurance?


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[Assistant] Yeah, break stuff and break a lot of stuff. Good job guys.


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[Assistant] Uh, just potentials left, feel free to curate or we can just go through. Humans are dust to dust, e-waste is sand to garbage.


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[Assistant] Whatever. TSA took my black shaft screwdriver, so I guess I have to buy a stubby. Line, as you mentioned, not doing another onesie. For other low volume products, would you consider doing similar to Massdrop?


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[Assistant] Sup, Duke, Dynas, Lan, and Lan Linus. Do you know, uh, do you ride your bike with your LTD backpack on? If so, how well does it do after a slide? Uh, we know.


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[Assistant] Hey LDL, you can fight over who is the first L. Thanks for all the entertainment over the years. What brand of optical DP cable are you running for your racked PCs for the game room? It's me, Infinite Cables. Yeah, shout out Infinite Cables. Uh, hey- I don't think we've even registered that.


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[Assistant] Anyway, nice. Hey, tall, short, and in between. If you could collaborate with any creator, brand, or celebrity on LTT Store, who would it be, and what would you make?


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[Assistant] What do you think about buying online movies you can't own and then pirating it or screen recording? Is it worth it to buy the movie? Sorry, what's the question?


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[Assistant] I personally run on a reverse case. There you go. Dan has them all. I have the one that supports it now. What is your favorite part of


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[Assistant] Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, there was, uh, I think this was supposed to go out next week, but, uh, registration for the Fox run will open on April 12th. Oh, okay. Uh, did, did we jump the gun? I think so. I'll throw some, uh, I'll throw some messages.


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[Assistant] Read the sign. No, did we do it though? No, we're, we're a little bit strange on time. Let's do sponsors and then, yeah. The show.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately. Oh, I see. Yeah, I've got some, uh, I've got some curated ones for ya here. Alright, hit me. Uhm, I dunno, what do you think about that top?


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[Assistant] Is this stop killing games? That's right. Yeah.


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[Assistant] Yeah, he had some really good thoughts, I think, I hope it was him, ages ago about always online games that are single player, that the companies go, oh well, you know, we can't afford the server upkeep anymore, and so the game that you have paid for, you are now no longer able to play.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so a lot of, a lot of people will take these servers and host them themselves. I know there's a bunch of different games that kind of have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's unfortunately a lot, uhm, and I think the worst offender is probably single player games. Sorry, Forge Alliance Forever was an example of a good thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There are good examples, and I think those are probably the outliers in the situation. It's mostly bad ones. It's mostly like this, uhm, right? And it's very frustrating, especially because there's still an active community, even though they may be small, but they're still active.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, that's right. I watched his video on the crew about a month ago. It came out. Dead Game News is the series.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ivory towers are very prolific in manufacturing companies. DoD subcontractors include it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like a couple frames can make you seem like a non-funny, like bumbling idiot. Or sharp-witted and hilarious. It's actual, like frames. It's nuts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just pulled up our podcast, cause I guess this is a podcast, Analytics, and Google Podcast is the third highest at 8% of, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Let's see. There should be other platforms that work like what you want, Luke. Oh, you still can't get it? Okay, cool. All kind of podcasts work the same way as it's just an RSS feed, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Greetings LDL. I have troubles for getting my point across whenever there's a collaborative discussion between me and ten other people in the group. Any advice for a timidly shy person like me? Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hello guys, do you think the PS Portal was a success? I've been trying, sorry, I've been trying to get one but they seem to be sold out everywhere. Live in a studio with one TV and wife can't sleep with light.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, I'm the guy who bought half a dozen of the old black hats and got a couple of the pro hats and recently, uh, uh, got a couple of the pro hats recently and loved the lack of button on top and clasp. What other small changes in products did we miss?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, g'day. Uh, actually I wasn't sure if you guys touched about this with the AI thing. Sorry. Uh oh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There we go. That's better. Can't remember if we touched on this when you were talking about AI. With AI, how do you think about disclosure of use of AI in your content? Should there be a consistent policy? Should we even care as viewers?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, Dynas, Duke, Lann, and Lavid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hi, LLD, good morning from Taiwan. Compute tax is coming up. Any Taiwanese food or places you're definitely gonna have to go?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Linus and Luke, if you were to wake up in a freaky Friday situation, what would be your first actions as each other?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can you relay to Luke that he has a very nice laugh and it is very contagious?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hi DLL, big fan of y'all. Luke, a few weeks ago you mentioned Mattermost, uh, having its own issues as a service. Could you elaborate? I work for a government organization that plans on using it for secure messaging.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hi Linus, Luke and Dan. This is weird, they're doing it normally. Uh. Who does that? What's wrong with that? How is daily driving high RR OLED? Is it more efficient than IPS LCD? Also, ever tried TinyOS 11? It's a stripped down Windows 11 OS. I use it and love it because it's no useless crap.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You got a seat in person, we'll grab it out for ya. It's something to behold, I'll put it that way. And we cover, we cover super cool applications of the technology in the video.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I mean they're fun, they're fun. I think I had one in here for you, Luke. Let me see if I can find it. None. Is this the secret part of the show where I get to talk about Slay the Spire 2?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, did they? Well, there was actually one in here about kind of Godot and stuff like that. Did they pivot? Oh, yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Love it. Next. Uh, hey DLL, I'm curious on your opinions. If any on Mega Crit switching from Unity to Godot, do you think more game companies should switch to open source engines? Also any updates on LTT socks?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Next one. Alright, let's see. Uh, how about a quick one. Hi Luke, Linus, and Dan. Tall size is soon. Please, I beg you, to give, I want to give you my money. Yes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, hi, Linus and Luke. I work with a, uh, work with a non-profit and I'm looking to start a camp for kids on building computers. How would you go about sourcing hardware without the option of electronics recycler?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, definitelynotlate.dllo. I heard a long time ago that having a hard drive at close to or at capacity negatively affects performance of the drive. Is that still a thing with newer drives like M.2? Uuuh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Why can't I be watching a short at the same time? This is a missed opportunity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, I think this one has premium currency. Oh my god. Oh, check that out! At the top, the diamonds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Her voice was very clean. Uhm, I've also heard a lot of people that take normal talking and will turn them into singing voices or make singing voices out of characters and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the backing music was far too good, and that was very concerning. Mind-blowing. Absolutely incredible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've got one final thought on this, if I can interject. Uhm, uh, when is it gonna be able to make, like, Death Grips songs?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, uh, that's, that's the thing is, is a lot of these are trained on massive amounts of the most generic thing. So like pop music is dead. Like this just kills pop music. Just like, uh, you know, the AR art generators are killing, uh, single person pinup art.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have no idea. I used to, I used to despise them because they were kind of outside of that, uh, understanding. I don't find artists that are like, I don't get this very often. And then Adam made me listen to them a lot and, and he said that they were good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so I had to revisit it, now I get it. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure that's Death Grips. Probably.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I ask myself that a lot. I think maybe go do some topics, and then if you want, you guys can move into After Dark yourself. You know what the, the light setting is, you know, we have the- Oh, you're leaving us! Well, we can either do some more topics,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Insta-Link, uh, sorry, Insta360. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Yeah, these things are cool. Wow, that's working great. Okay, uh, well, what was I doing? Okay, goodbye.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Good joke, good job Linus. X can't afford Mr. Beast. Uh, Mr. Beast and Elon Musk went back, hm, I don't know if there was much forth, but they definitely discussed the issue on X Twitter, what was the X


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was formerly ex-Twitter. Ex-Twitter. Hey, that actually works. Does anyone else call it ex-Twitter? No, but I kinda like it. Cool. Uhm, so we'll be talking about that as well as just sort of creator monetization and why it is such a challenge for platforms like ex-Twitter to afford a creator like MrBeast. Uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's the manufacturer sabotaged Polish trains with DRM. So we'll be talking a little bit about that. What else we got? Did I manage to pick your two?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah. That's why the nuclear football uses like floppy disks or whatever it does.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, Mr. Beast, Jimmy, why don't you upload the video directly to the platform instead of just


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Posting a link to where people can go watch the video, which historically does not perform very well compared to an organic tweet. Now obviously it's MrBeast, so his post is just, I uploaded, go watch or I'll dropkick you, and it has 66,000 likes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Simple, short, self-promotional tweets don't perform as well as when you try and come up with something really engaging and really unique that, you know, serves the Twitter audience really well. Uhm, so it's a, it's a really valid question. Why not just upload the content here and people can just watch it? Uhm, and Jimmy responded saying,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, hold on. First, Elon Musk pitched in. He goes, yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A thousand times about at least multiple dozens of alternate platforms. Linus, why don't you upload your videos here? I was about to say 2x as a, as a just a variable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The economics of it just don't make any sense. Because it, it can only be one of two ways, right? You've either got the ability to get a lot of views with a very very low per view monetization rate. That's YouTube.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or, you've got the ability to get very few views with a very high monetization rate. So that's gonna be something more along the lines of like a uhm, uh, what's that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The economics of anything that's not paying like this getting less than hundreds of thousands or millions of views just doesn't make any sense. Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Flowplain sits kind of somewhere in between, where people pay anywhere from the OGs, uh, pay $3 a month, anywhere up to, I think our highest tier is $10 a month,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And even then, you know, we have to put a ton of work into making that platform appealing to people. We have to upload a bunch of extra content. So it ends up being kind of a mix. It ends up being our regular content at a much higher monetization rate, but then it ends up being this other, much higher cost


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I shouldn't say higher cost, it's lower cost.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's not going to other platforms that also contribute to it, so Floatplane has to bear that cost completely on its own. So we have this other sort of exclusive or behind the scenes or whatever else it is content that sits on there that is paid for by those subscribers. So that kind of sits somewhere in between. So there's kind of your spectrum. And the reality of it is that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Twitter, ex Twitter's monetization is just not even close. Even if you're, if you're a person sitting in front of your webcam.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I am not sure if, even at, you know, let's forget about MrBeast, because there's only one person, if we do the math based on MrBeast, there's only one person to whom that's relevant. And his name is Jimmy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, whereas if we talk about it maybe more along the lines of, let's say someone who would have


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A quarter million to a million subscribers on YouTube. Okay, so you're someone who's getting, realistically, probably somewhere between 10-15,000 views a video to, you know, maybe 250,000 views a video, somewhere in that range.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even if you could port your entire YouTube audience over to xTwitter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You'd be looking at maybe tens of dollars for that video. Which, if it's just you and a webcam, may actually be viable. But if it's anything beyond that,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're, you're probably paying yourself less than minimum wage, and you might say, okay, well, are you really though? Because it's just purely incremental, right? Like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Why not just have the little ex-cherry on top of all your views on YouTube or whatever else, but you gotta understand from a creator's point of view, at least if you're a business-minded one, there's an opportunity cost for everyone who watches on this platform where the monetization is very low.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Often ask themselves, or ask out loud even, you know, why is it that YouTube has this seeming monopoly on VOD content? And there's a lot of answers for how it came to be the way that it is right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wanna get a foothold on YouTube? Why do TikTokers wanna make a transition over to YouTube? The answer is simple, and it's that people like to be paid for their work, and YouTube offers, by far, the best compensation for their work. And that's not, it's not just like, ugh, it's all about the money, it's like, think about it this way. If in the morning, you got dressed, brushed your teeth,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ate some oatmeal, and you had the option to go to one of six different places.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And one of them paid the most, and you did the exact same job, and your job wasn't, you know, to manufacture, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the train that runs over people, or you know, the lever that doesn't seem to work to prevent the train from running over people, or you know, whatever the case may be. As long as what you're doing is not, you know, obviously morally abhorrent. Yeah. W-w-w-w-which one do you drive to?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think it's a pretty obvious answer. You go to the one that compensates you best. And YouTube has this, for better or for worse, very powerful machine that ensures that if you are able to get views on the platform, you are able to be paid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Luke's calling someone. Yeah, don't worry about it. Well, this is very interesting. I know, I would love to know who we're going to be talking to live on the show today. Are we planning to tell them they're live on the show? We're not talking to anybody live on the show. We are not talking to anybody. We're not talking to them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anyway, uhm, we have, we actually do have monetization enabled on ex-Twitter, and I thought I would just share with you guys, uh, we don't upload a ton of video, but we have uploaded some videos that have gotten, you know, thousands of views or whatever, typically,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ah, man, I'm trying to think. I actually don't know what a thousand views is worth on YouTube. It really, it varies a lot. But the point is, we have a pretty active Twitter account, fair amount of engagement, and this should give you some idea of why people don't really, uhm, why someone like Jimmy might not bother.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So here's all of our, all of our payouts, uh, for the last, I guess, you know, three months or whatever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anywhere from, you know, 60, 60, oh, this, I mean, this could be 65 anything. Oh, 65.99. Okay, I don't know, could have been, there could have been another, there could have been another digit in there or something like that. Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Let's say for the sake of argument, how many typical views does Jimmy get on a video? 50 million to 100 million? Is that a pretty fair range? Why don't we say 100 million? Sounds fair. I don't really look at them, but that sounds about right. So let's say Jimmy is...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One hundred times our size. Let's say we get one million. Let's take, let's take kind of a mid to upper range for him. Let's take a lower range for us. We typically get a million to two million. So let's say we get a million views of video, and let's say he gets a hundred million views of video. He's a hundred times our size. He would make...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so let's say 150. So let's say, okay, let's say he's 150 times our size. So he would get around 10 grand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From Twitter. Assuming he had a similar strategy to us, you know, trying to kind of post everyday and meme or, you know, whatever else.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Totally trivial. Like, like he could, he could do a special edition popsicle stick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and then he could make a tweet about the popsicle stick, and it would eclipse his Twitter revenue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That he actually makes organically from the platform, like it's just, it's just not a factor for someone like that. Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's, that's, that's why I just don't think that as much as people want to see it, you're gonna see this mass exodus from YouTube anytime soon or...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] ByteDance? TikTok? Maybe had an opportunity, but they haven't managed to figure out either the monetization of the platform itself, or they haven't figured out how to share in a way that is enticing to creators. Like you still have people trying to migrate, trying to migrate their audiences.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did you know that there is a dedicated Windows shortcut key? Or a dedicated Windows shortcut to open up LinkedIn? Ah, that's what I was gonna troll you with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So guys, we're going to Linus Laptop. Okay, hold on, hold on, no, no, wait, we can look at Control-Alt-Shift-Win-L.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is amazing. Remarkable how bad that design is. I also just don't really understand why it logs me out. We've looked into it. You can't configure it to not do that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I find the approach that some services take to security very confusing. Like if you're gonna make the argument that I should be signed out every month because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Something. Then fine. Okay. Well, do it on my phone and on my laptop and on my desktop. But then you have something like Gmail, for example, which logs you out


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Man, it says every month, but I swear, my work computer is...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Way more often than that. There's no way that that only comes up 12 times a year. But on your phone, never logs you out. And you could kinda go, okay, well yeah, but you've got biometric authentication on your phone or whatever, but I'm sitting here going, well yeah, but I have biometric authentication.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At least have some consistency to this. And there's no consistency between the various tech giants. I mean...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, WhatsApp, great example. For years, Facebook would allow you to leave WhatsApp signed in perpetually on your phone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But wouldn't allow you to have it signed in or cloud synchronized with any other phone. Now they do that and just, you know, I don't know, why'd you change that? I don't know, not sure. Uh, but on the computer would log you out like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All the time. Like, I think it would stay logged at 7, 14 days or something like that. And then, meanwhile, you've got something like Teams that logs you out on your phone all the time instead of just being like, oh yeah, no, no, the phone is the single source of truth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That, you know, you can use to authenticate your other devices. And then, you know, Google's really funny because they'll sign you


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm trying to think of what- No, they don't sign you out of anything on your phone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But they are constantly signing you out on your computer. And then I'm trying to think if there's anyone that doesn't, that never signs you out on your computer. Uhm, can't think of anything right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's flippin' arbitrary. So on my computer, if it's my Microsoft account that I use to log in for authentication, I can stay signed in perpetually, but on my phone, where it's managed by my organization, and if there was ever a problem, we can just recover it no problem, you have to sign me out every 30 days!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hold on, okay, you're gonna have to, okay, back me up. So people, hold on, hold on. People are storing their 2FA backup codes in their password manager.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well now we're back to just one password again. And that was a pun. It's not a pun, but it's funny. One password actually does recommend this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They might just have the one 2FA. I mean, one of the ways that people commonly get past 2FAs is by...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Spamming login attempts and then like calling you in the middle of the night and you know trying to get it or whatever else like while you're groggy and stuff like they could social engineer one 2FA away from you without having access to your 2FA account.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They even tell you when they give you the backup codes. They're like, write this down. Print it out. That's what you're supposed to do. Backup codes are not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hate the tedium of 2FA-ing as much as probably anyone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, no, no, uh, poll? We really have to poll this, you guys? I, I, ugh, fine, I'll do, I'll do a poll. Uh, save to store 2FA password in your password manager. So is that, is that what we're asking? Uh, sure. Yeah. Okay. I...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ah, guys, I don't know, man. Okay, let's, let's bring up the results. Results time. Yeah, no! There's like 10% fi- Oh, oh, oh, it's swinging. It's swinging!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's definitely more convenient. Yeah. And, I mean, if you gave me the option,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, 10 years ago, when we were just getting into the idea of biometric security, if you gave me the option to have a setup like this, where I have to memorize one password that I just enter all the time, or if I have to start like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Entering my fingerprints and, you know, retinal scans and iris scans and facial scans into every electronic device in my life. I would probably have taken this path even with all the compromises. Here, check this out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's a completely different thing. This is, this is a different thing. Wait, what? They're saying not to turn on two factor authentication on a password manager?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Guessing from a new device without your secret key that's only stored on your devices so you don't have to type it every time you unlock one password in your printable emergency key. Wait, isn't that just a second factor then?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, alright, so that's fine then, because they already have a second authentication factor. I mean, okay, I have a remote access service that I use, that I do not have


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, 2FA, like I don't have it in Google Authenticator, right? Uhm, because every time I sign on from a new location, I have to validate via some other means. So I don't need that kind of- That's just really misleading.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, I do see their point that two factors is probably...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, however, I disagree that all factors are made equal. I don't think that that should be their default factor even. Uhm, like their default second factor, something that is static.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's almost like a, like a physical key. A physical key can be copied, whereas a key that changes every time you use the lock cannot be copied, and that's how something like Google Authenticator works.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All someone would have to do is have your computer compromised with a keylogger.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At a time when you are re-authenticating and they could force you to re-authenticate if they had some kind of access to your machine that allowed them to reroute you through a VPN or something.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because then it would appear as though you were logging in from another location. So I know I'm asking for a lot of stars to align, but that's not that far-fetched. For someone to have some kind of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For someone to have, if they have some kind of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Malware on your machine. I don't think it's that far-fetched that they could route you through some kind of, uhm, remote location and that they could have a keylogger installed. I don't think that's, like, science fiction.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You apparently, okay, so this is apparently the uhm, the, the one password, uhm, key is only entered when you first set it up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. Okay, okay, well then that's not too bad, because they'd have to have the keylogger at the time you first set it up. Yeah. They might though. Yeah, and you might...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You could potentially trick a user into entering that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not as bad as I thought it was, not even close, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm, I'm not a huge fan and I also don't really like the advice of, of not having... Okay, I should, I should clarify. When I say I don't like the advice of not adding multiple factors, I don't mean adding multiple alternate factors. I was dismayed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I realized that the way that Google accounts handle a, uhm, a physical device, like a YubiKey, if you don't have your YubiKey and you set up


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, when I initially set it up, I was like, it was at a time when I think we had just had an account compromise or something like that. And I was going like, I want three factors. I want my password, I want my UBQ, and I want my Authenticator app.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some sites worked this way for a very brief period of time, and now I don't know of any that worked. And what I didn't realize at the time was I was adding or factors. Some of them were and. Not and factors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] M4TZESS says, if a keylogger's on your system, you're already compromised. That's sort of true. Because in many cases, you are, well, the expectation, one of the reasons that you should use autofill with a password manager is that it makes it so you don't have to type your passwords. So if someone has a keylogger,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even if they have, man, even if they've, they've gotcha good and they have, you know, remote access to your screen, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, man, even if they can access your clipboard, the autofill service, I don't believe, copies the plain text of your password to the clipboard. So, as long as you're not Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V pasting your passwords,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm sure there's a way, but it would be very difficult to get passwords even if you had, even if they had your clipboard and even if they had a keylogger and even if they could see your screen because almost every password field that I've seen in the last 10 years just uses asterisks or dots or whatever else instead of actually pasting the text in there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One password apparently clears the clipboard after a time delay. Uh, as far as I know, it just edits the HTML. Doesn't copy your password. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Quinoge says be careful, seemingly giving security advice. Uh, I think what we're saying is fine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're saying that having more factors is good. And if they're strong factors, then that's better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, yeah, me neither. Yeah. That just, I mean...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think of Windows computers as just like, kind of probably compromised.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I don't, I don't like it and I do try to avoid it. Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh yeaah, okay, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a very interesting attack vector.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And security is just such a, such a myth, man.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Either way, having a second factor, definitely not a bad thing. Putting it all in one place, I'm just not sure if I can agree with that. I think that's really the bottom line for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] SMS needs to completely not be a thing for, for, to FA. Uh, do we want to move on to... What are we supposed to do? Oh, we're supposed to do, oh, oh my goodness. Yeah, people, people have, I think, found the, uh, the new item on the store. Yeah, yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ludwig's the day, the swipe and swipe plus are now available on LTTstore.com.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In both elongated and round forms. Okay, so the Swipe Plus, it's not inexpensive, but, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Without giving you guys too much information, let me just say it's, uh, you know, it gets pretty warm. You know, the water, the water gets pretty warm, which is good. Uhm, it doesn't have RGB, but it does have...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some colors, uh, some of the colors were, were, we were, we were told our best to avoid, but we, we definitely do have some, uh, some, some nice different, you know, gamer colors that you can, you can set your swipe plus to. Uh, we also have the regular swipe. Uh, let's see if I can find that. There it is.