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[Assistant] These were fairly banal reforms, and had the triumvirate inside the directory been a bit more self-confident themselves, the elections of year six could have marked the beginning of a contentious, but ultimately stable republic, with two parties vying for power, and the loser settling into being the loyal opposition upon defeat. But the triumvirate didn't want that.


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[Assistant] They wanted legislative councils who would be compliant and docile, a mere rubber stamp for their wishes.


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[Assistant] So this burgeoning opposition party had to be killed before it could grow any bigger.


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[Assistant] Of course, the regime was itself responsible for the growing confidence of the left. As they had targeted conservatives and royalists in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the coup of Fructador, the directory found it useful to encourage the activities of committed republicans, as long as they attacked conservatives and royalists.


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[Assistant] Their papers were not touched after freedom of the press was revoked, and semi-official clubs of the directorial regime called Constitutional Circles invited all good Republicans into a coalition against the monarchists.


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[Assistant] But as the elections of year six approach, the directorial regime felt like it had a pretty good handle on the right wing, and that it now had to block the left if it was going to stay in power.


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[Assistant] And the elections scheduled for the spring of 1798 were critically important.


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[Assistant] Not only would this election clear out the last of the old Termidorians, who had been in power since the national convention, but it was also slated to fill all the vacancies created by the coup of Fructador.


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[Assistant] So unlike the elections of year five, when the directory waited for the voting to run its course and then react to the results,


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[Assistant] For the elections of year 6, they made careful plans to control the process from beginning to end.


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[Assistant] In January 1798, they passed a credentialing law that said that the outgoing legislative councils would have the right to confirm the elected delegates before they would be allowed to take their seats.


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[Assistant] This law further implied that the outgoing legislative councils would be the ones verifying the election results and passing final judgment on any electoral disputes.


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[Assistant] And then, this is key, they sent agents out to make sure there were as many electoral disputes as possible.


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[Assistant] Then in February, the regime passed a further law that the next new director would be elected by the outgoing legislative councils rather than the incoming legislative councils. So this whole thing was rigged from the get-go.


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[Assistant] The primary electoral assembly started meeting at the end of March 1798, and right away supporters of the regime worked hard to muddy the waters.


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[Assistant] The basic tactic was to intentionally create schisms within the various electoral assemblies. So you take for example a Parisian electoral assembly that has 609 total electors.


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[Assistant] Agents of the regime then determined that two thirds of those guys were ready to vote for opposition candidates.


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[Assistant] So they go out, gin up a technical violation, and lead 212 electors in a walkout, reconvene them down the street as the true and legitimate electoral assembly, and elect a list of pro-regime candidates, mostly drawn from the ranks of government appointees who owed their jobs and livelihoods to the existing regime.


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[Assistant] So now there would be two rival slates of candidates. So oh no, I guess we have to submit our dispute to the sitting legislative councils and have them decide which slate of delegates is legitimate. This sort of maneuvering went on all over the place.


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[Assistant] The most useful technical violation was to trot out the law that had been imposed by Lazar Carnot that said candidates and electors had to swear a hatred of monarchy and the Constitution of 1793.


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[Assistant] So wherever anti-regime leftists won, the regime candidates would just assert that they were for anarchy and the constitution of 1793, and had just perjured themselves.


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[Assistant] The anti-regime candidates would of course deny it, and then lo and behold you've got another disputed vote that needs resolving.


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[Assistant] With the returns starting to come back, and those returns not looking good for the regime,


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[Assistant] The legislative councils then announced on May the 2nd that they had uncovered a conspiracy between royalists and the left-wing anarchists to undermine the republic. This is just as Robespierre had once denounced Hebert as an agent of the foreign plot who was trying to discredit the revolution.


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[Assistant] So, the accusation now is that all these left-wing candidates wore the white cockade of royalism under the red cap of liberty.


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[Assistant] With this alleged threat looming, the legislative councils decided it would be prudent to quickly process all those utterly contrived electoral disputes.


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[Assistant] With so many contested elections out there, going through them one by one would drag on well into the summer.


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[Assistant] So on May the 7th, the directory submitted a list full of summary judgments on which delegates would be allowed to take their seats and which would not.


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[Assistant] The Cool Florial was not quite as sweeping as the Cool Fructidor.


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[Assistant] Though the directory altered results in 49 of the 96 departments, only 8 departments had their elections outright annulled. And of the 437 open seats, only 127 candidates were declared invalid and replaced with regime-approved delegates.


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[Assistant] But that said, denying over a quarter of the men elected by a majority vote the seat that they had won was not going to earn the directory any awards for meritorious conduct.


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[Assistant] And as it would turn out, many of the delegates who were allowed to take their seats because they weren't implacable opponents of the regime became disillusioned enough with the government that they would not lift a finger to help the Directory during the coup of Brumaire.


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[Assistant] Among those allowed to take their seats, for example, were two of Napoleon Bonaparte's brothers, former ambassador to Rome, Joseph, and energetic younger brother Lucian, who will play a central role in the coup of Brumaire.


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[Assistant] In one of their last acts, the Sitting Council of Five Hundred and Council of Ancients replaced the oh-so-recently-appointed Nouchateau in the directory.


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[Assistant] And in case you're wondering why the oh so recently appointed Neufchateau was still eligible for the retirement lottery, it was because he had taken over Carnot's seat.


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[Assistant] So even though he himself was new, the seat he occupied was one of the original five.


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[Assistant] Neufchateau was replaced by Jean-Baptiste Traillard, who we just met at the beginning of this episode, asserting that the Rhine territories did not constitute new territorial acquisitions.


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[Assistant] What Treyar's election meant was that the Directory was now firmly controlled by men who would push aggressively for the projection of French power abroad rather than making any compromises with the rest of Europe that might tend to reduce the chances of a future war.


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[Assistant] Now while all of this was going on in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte was down in Toulon, preparing to embark on the Egyptian expedition that would really super reduce the chances of avoiding a future war.


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[Assistant] The directors, as I mentioned, were quite happy to see him off. The leftist candidates they had just purged from the legislative councils were likely feared not half as much as the invincible little corporal who would now be thousands of miles away from home, either winning the Republic a great victory or disappearing into the sands of Egypt.


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[Assistant] The directors, Talleyrand, and a few of Bonaparte's closest aides knew. But other than that, everyone was kept in the dark.


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[Assistant] So, though British intelligence was alerted to the fact that the French were massing forces in Mediterranean ports, they did not know where those forces were headed.


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[Assistant] But of course, Napoleon did not just gather soldiers for his expedition. He also famously assembled a company of scientists, engineers, intellectuals, scholars, and artists to travel along with the army and make a great investigation of Egypt.


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[Assistant] Numbering 167 men in all. These guys were brought along for three big reasons.


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[Assistant] First, let it not be said that Bonaparte was not a child of the Enlightenment and an advocate of its progressive scientific principles.


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[Assistant] These academics would quite simply advance the sum total of human knowledge. A self evident good.


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[Assistant] Second, on a more immediately practical level, these guys would be available to improve the supply lines for the French army. Map out roads, identify sources of food and supplies, and then make sure it could all get from there to here.


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[Assistant] They would also hopefully get started on fulfilling one of Western Europe's great engineering dreams. Building a canal that would link the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and dramatically shorten the travel time to India and China.


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[Assistant] If that canal was built and controlled by the French, that would give them an insane strategic advantage over their rivals.


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[Assistant] Third, Bonaparte was a master propagandist. By bringing along all these scientists, he was able to paint the expedition as one of discovery, and himself as an enlightened leader interested in the advancement of mankind, rather than simply another general making a grab at Egypt to cripple the British and build his own personal powered base.


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[Assistant] Even as things started to go badly for the French army in Egypt, the scientific hangers-on worked diligently and wound up producing a wealth of new observations and discoveries, the most famous and most consequential of which was of course the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.


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[Assistant] And next week we'll get into why the Rosetta Stone is currently sitting in the British Museum and not the Louvre.


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[Assistant] When Napoleon led the fleet out of Toulon on May the 19th, the ultimate destination was still unknown.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte had given a rousing speech to his men, but only hinted towards a foreign land, rather than saying dudes were off to Egypt, because he was still trying to keep the British in the dark.


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[Assistant] And in this, he was actually quite successful.


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[Assistant] The British were of course well aware of the troop mobilizations, but do not appear to have seriously considered Egypt as the target. There's a famous anecdote where the British Secretary of War says, well maybe they're making a run at Egypt. And the Foreign Secretary says, try to think with a map in your hand.


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[Assistant] Basically, the French aren't going to send their best general and 40,000 men to the other side of the Mediterranean, you jackass. Except, that's exactly what the French were doing.


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[Assistant] Now the biggest reason the British intelligence was so imperfect, and Napoleon could even dream of this kind of campaign in the first place, was because after Bonaparte started kicking the crap out of the Austrians in Italy in 1796, and then especially after the Spanish were forced to switch sides,


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[Assistant] Maintaining a fleet in the Mediterranean was very dangerous for the British.


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[Assistant] So the Admiralty pulled the fleet out and stationed them at the mouth of the Tagus River, basically Lisbon, from which they ran a blockade of the Spanish port of Cadiz, and then went after any merchant vessels trying to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar that they thought might be trying to aid the French cause.


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[Assistant] But with the French obviously up to something, it was time to head back through the Straits of Gibraltar.


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[Assistant] Now the first order of business would be figuring out where the French fleet actually was and where it was headed.


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[Assistant] For this, the Admiral in charge of the Mediterranean Fleet, appointed Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson.


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[Assistant] By this point, Nelson was already well on his way to becoming one of Britain's great naval heroes.


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[Assistant] Though his greatest triumph will come after we have left the French Revolution behind. But the success he will enjoy next week forms a major part of the legend of Admiral Nelson.


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[Assistant] Nelson had just returned to the Mediterranean fleet from London, where he had been recuperating after having one of his arms amputated from wounds suffered during a failed attempt to take the Canary Islands back in July 1797.


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[Assistant] Nelson was given command of a six ship squadron and told to go find out where the French were and where they were headed.


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[Assistant] On May the 9th, Nelson crossed through the Straits of Gibraltar back into the Mediterranean.


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[Assistant] What followed was something of a comedy of errors for both sides, as bad intelligence plagued everyone.


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[Assistant] Nelson's little squadron arrived at Toulon on May the 21st and discovered the French had just departed.


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[Assistant] But then a storm came through, and scattered the squadron. Nelson's flagship and another ship of the line wound up anchored off the southwest coast of Sardinia.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile Bonaparte's fleet was hugging the coast, passing Genoa, picking up more ships and men and supplies, before crossing down and heading south along the east coast of Corsica and then Sardinia.


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[Assistant] On June the 3rd, a Bonaparte was alerted to the fact that the British had ships on the other side of Sardinia, and he sent a squadron to investigate, but by the time they got there, Nelson, which was the ship they were talking about, had already sailed back to Toulon, trying to link back up with the rest of his squadron.


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[Assistant] Not realizing how close he had come to spotting his quarry.


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[Assistant] So while Nelson sailed northwest towards Toulon, Bonaparte turned southeast towards Sicily,


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[Assistant] Then a few days later, the French captured a British merchant who said, oh yea, I just saw Nelson. He's got a whole fleet and he's right on your heels. This caused Bonaparte to panic a little bit, and he ordered his fleet to race for the island of Malta.


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[Assistant] Now Malta was still run by the Knights of Malta, an old Crusades-era Brotherhood of Knights. And after the Grand Master of the Knights refused French entrance into the main harbor, Bonaparte fired his guns, landed some troops, and just took it.


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[Assistant] The Knights never really stood a chance, especially because half the 2,000-man garrison were French themselves and had no interest in fighting their countrymen.


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[Assistant] Nelson had linked back up with some reinforcements, but he was nowhere near the French fleet. And even after he got moving again on June the 10th, he was told that the French were at Syracuse, when really they were on Malta.


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[Assistant] So, this is a big problem with being out at sea with only stray captured vessels to rely on for information.


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[Assistant] It wasn't until June the 20th that Nelson finally learned the French had been at Malta. And even then he was told that they had disembarked on June the 16th, when really they hadn't left until June the 19th, like literally the day before Nelson got this news.


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[Assistant] So he was just 60 nautical miles away from the French and had no idea and no way of even having an idea. But one thing had become clear to both sides. The French were headed east.


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[Assistant] Before leaving Malta, Bonaparte finally decided it was safe to reveal to his men that the next stop would be Alexandria.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, Nelson huddled with his officers and concluded that the French were either headed for Constantinople or Egypt, with Egypt being the most likely target. A shrewd and correct guess.


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[Assistant] So next week, we will follow everyone to Egypt.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte will successfully land his army outside Alexandria and begin his great campaign.


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[Assistant] But then Nelson will swoop down and obliterate, and I mean obliterate the French Navy anchored at Abacur Bay.


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[Assistant] Casper is an online retailer offering premium mattresses for a fraction of the price. The mattress industry has for a long time forced consumers into paying notoriously high markups, with resellers and showrooms all taking their cut along the way.


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


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


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


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[Assistant] In anticipation of baby number two coming along, and needing the crib, we just transferred the boy into a big kid bed.


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[Assistant] Specifically, we gave him our twin-sized Casper and he loves it. Seriously. He thinks it's the greatest thing on earth.


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[Assistant] This week, I want to pick up right where we left off. Push the Italian campaign through to the preliminaries at Lyon, before hopping back to France to cover the elections of year five, which will bring a whole bunch of conservative delegates into the legislative councils of the Directory.


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[Assistant] Ben will cover the events of the summer of 1797, culminating with the coup of Fructador in September, wherein the Directory will bail on the Constitution in order to save the Constitution, and the Treaty of Campo Formio in October.


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[Assistant] Wherein, the war of the First Coalition will come to an end.


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[Assistant] General Napoleon Bonaparte wasted no time getting back to work after the fall of Mantua.


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[Assistant] Capturing the fortress was a key part of his larger plans, but in and of itself it was just a thing to check off the list. Next up was charging at the Austrians and flat out winning the war.


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[Assistant] Napoleon wanted to make sure his holiness didn't get any smart ideas when the French pushed their way out of Italy.


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[Assistant] So just days after the fall of Mantua, Bonaparte targeted a 7,000-man Papal army at Fienza, allegedly defending the frontier of the Papal states.


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[Assistant] A 9,000 man French division marched south, and the resulting battle wasn't even a contest. The now highly trained, highly disciplined, and very experienced French troops endured no casualties, forcing the Papal Army to surrender.


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[Assistant] On February the 19th, the Pope signed the Treaty of Tolentino.


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[Assistant] This treaty required the Pope to hand even more hard cash over to the French and recognize the right of the French armies to loot valuable treasures and works of art from the Vatican.


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[Assistant] Included in this total capitulation was also a further seeding of territory, both inside Italy and within the boundaries of France, because remember, the Pope still claimed sovereignty over Avignon and the Comtas Venesans.


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[Assistant] Those papal enclaves had been annexed by the French way back in 1791, but the Vatican had never recognized it.


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[Assistant] With the situation now critical, Austrian Archduke Charles, the young hero of the Rhine Campaign of 1796, was sent down to try to contain the French army on the Italian side of the Alps. But there was very little he could do.


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[Assistant] The French Directory had finally woken up to the fact that Bonaparte was like, winning the war, and sent him a bunch of reinforcements, bringing his field army up to 60,000 men.


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[Assistant] He peeled 20,000 of those right off the top to garrison the northern alpine passes into Italy, and then himself led 40,000 across the Brenta River northeast towards the Austrian army, who were trying to hold on to their last little foothold on the Italian side of the Alps.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte's main hope in rushing back onto the offensive was to drive through the Austrians before Archduke Charles really had a chance to organize a proper defense. And this is pretty much how it went.


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[Assistant] Charles allegedly had 50,000 men at his disposal, but they were spread out all over the place.


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[Assistant] Over the course of March, the French either captured the Austrian forces they encountered or forced them into a retreat.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte approached in two columns. He led the main force of 30,000 himself, while another 11,000 paralleled him a bit to the north.


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[Assistant] Those 11,000 men moved so fast that they were on top of the critical pass at Tarvis before Charles could send reinforcements.


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[Assistant] When reinforcements did arrive at Tarvis on March the 21st, they found the French had already taken the pass. The Austrians managed to dislodge the French after a day of hard fighting, but the next day a French counterattack pushed the Austrians into a full-blown retreat, running back through the pass that they were trying to defend.


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[Assistant] They were treated so rapidly that 4,000 Austrians were trapped on the wrong side of the line. Surrounded and cut off, those 4,000 men surrendered on March the 23rd.


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[Assistant] After the French captured Tarvis, Archduke Charles decided his position was untenable, and he evacuated Italy entirely, hoping to draw a new line of defense on the other side of the Alps.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte, meanwhile, was fanning his men out all over northeast Italy to hold down strategic points that he had just acquired, like Trieste and Palmanova along the northern Adriatic, which he planned to now use as his supply and communications base for the push into Austria.


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[Assistant] Then, on March the 31st, Bonaparte sent a letter to Archduke Charles asking if the Archduke was interested in an armistice. I mean, you're in it in a really bad way here, man, so why should we spill further blood?


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[Assistant] Charles did not immediately respond, so Bonaparte kept up the pressure.


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[Assistant] But at that moment, the French forces were actually a bit spread out themselves, and Bonaparte's position was not as strong as he was letting on. So to keep up the bluff, he ordered his men to march and march fast towards Vienna.


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[Assistant] They marched up through the Alps, and by April the 7th had made it as far as Lioban, which was just 100 miles southwest of Vienna.


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[Assistant] And that is when Charles finally said, okay, stop.


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[Assistant] Austrian envoys arrived in the French camp asking for a five day ceasefire.


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[Assistant] When that five day ceasefire was up, it was renewed for a further five days.


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[Assistant] And when those five days were up, real talks to put a stop to the fighting got going in earnest.


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[Assistant] Negotiating on behalf of the Republic, with exactly zero authority to do so, Bonaparte and his Austrian counterparts agreed on April the 18th to what we now call the Lyoban Peace Preliminaries.


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[Assistant] As we'll see at the end of today's episode, the terms of the preliminaries at Leoben form the basis of the Treaty of Campo Formia.


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[Assistant] Austria ceded Belgium and the West Bank of the Rhine to France and recognized the new independent republics Napoleon had created and was still creating in Italy.


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[Assistant] But at Leoben, Bonaparte included a controversial enticement to get the Austrians to say yes to the deal.


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[Assistant] Since the main French ambition at this point was to secure the natural boundaries of France, getting Austria to abandon claims to everything west of the Rhine was the main goal, and offering Venice as compensation was a generous way of getting them to agree. But this would prove to be a controversial move by Bonaparte.


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[Assistant] For one thing, as I've mentioned repeatedly, he doesn't really have the authority to be doing stuff like this.


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[Assistant] But for another, the revolutionary optics do not look good at all.


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[Assistant] For the most part, the French still believe they own the moral high ground in the war. They were a republic of citizens, freeing their fellow man from the despotic shackles of old Europe. And here Bonaparte was horse trading territory like the most arrogant ASEAN regime diplomat.


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[Assistant] But Napoleon was able to justify screwing the Venetians, thanks to an ill-timed anti-French uprising in Verona, which was in Venetian territory.


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[Assistant] On April the 17th, the 400-man French garrison was attacked by locals and slaughtered. Bonaparte used this as an excuse to dictate terms to the Venetians with a very heavy hand.


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[Assistant] The Austrians agreed to all of this, and couriers were dispatched to the Rhine frontier to tell everyone over there to stop fighting. And those couriers got there just in time. Well, almost just in time.


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[Assistant] So just to wrap things up along the Rhine. You remember how General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan had basically been left out to dry by both Pichigrew in 1795 and Moreau in 1796?


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[Assistant] Well, as a reward for getting hosed by his colleagues, the Directory decided to blame Jourdan for the failure of the Rhine campaigns. As preparations for the renewed offensive in 1797, the Directory relieved Jourdan of his command.


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[Assistant] And in his place, they promoted Lazar Hosh, the conqueror of the West, whose flagship had eventually made it back to port after getting blown out into the North Atlantic during the disastrous invasion of Ireland.


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[Assistant] Hoche was pretty excited about the chance to rehabilitate his image. In the second week of April, he led his army across the Rhine and defeated an Austrian army at Neuwind on April the 18th.


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[Assistant] But within days of that victory, the messengers arrived with news that a deal had been struck at Lyoban. A deal that would end fighting in Europe for two full years.


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[Assistant] Now as I mentioned last week, Bonaparte's victories were really helping the directory out. And news that he had brought the Austrians to their knees was really good news.


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[Assistant] But it did not come soon enough to save the regime from the political bloodbath they were about to endure.


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[Assistant] The national finances were still a total mess, and the French economy was still struggling, even with the influx of all those spoils from Italy.


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[Assistant] The new territorial mandates, the paper currency that was supposed to replace the Asenya, were dead on arrival. Within six months of their creation, the territorial mandates were as worthless as the worthless Asenya.


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[Assistant] The directory tried a few tricks over 1796 to try to prop up the new currency, but nothing seemed to work.


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[Assistant] In February 1797, the directory admitted defeat and just stopped printing them.


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[Assistant] After that, no new paper currency would be issued.


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[Assistant] France returned to a money economy based on hard specie.


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[Assistant] The revolutionary experiments with paper money were over.


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[Assistant] All of these economic problems helped further bolster conservative arguments that the Republican government was itself the cause of all this misfortune. I mean, seriously, ask yourself, are you better off now than you were four years ago?


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[Assistant] Aside from a few speculators who everyone hated, the answer was no, not at all.


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[Assistant] So in the lead up to the spring elections, conservatives began to mobilize to exploit all the disenchantment.


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[Assistant] A new movement called the Friends of Order began to attract adherents and they started setting up a new sort of political club called the Philanthropic Society to spread the conservative gospel of a return to the stability and normalcy of monarchy.


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[Assistant] But remember, within the conservative camp, there was a split between absolutists and constitutionalists. So though they were all ostensibly working towards the same common goal of getting conservatives elected into the legislative council,


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[Assistant] A small absolutist clique formed, called the Legitimate Sons, who still dreamed of overthrowing the Republic, rather than slowly undermining it from the inside.


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[Assistant] Some of these legitimate sons got it into their heads that the reason the army garrison at Grinnell had been impervious to the overtures of Babuff and the conspiracy of equals was because the garrison was secretly royalist. So in January 1797, the legitimate sons made their own play at using the Grinnell garrison to launch a coup.


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[Assistant] But this plot was exposed in an even more proto-state than Babouf's attempted uprising had been, and the leading conspirators were all arrested.


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[Assistant] All this aborted attempt really did was prove to the other conservatives that the only way to go was victory at the ballot box.


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[Assistant] The elections of year five were held from March the 21st to April the 9th, 1797. And with ominous conservative stirrings everywhere, the nervous directors tried to rig the vote by disqualifying potential royalist voters.


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[Assistant] Many former emigres had returned to France since Thermidor and were eagerly awaiting their chance to vote and vote conservative.


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[Assistant] But the directory still had a list of officially prescribed emigres from the old days of the Committee of Public Safety. And they said, if your name is still on that list, you are not allowed to vote.


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[Assistant] Then, at Lazar Carnot's insistence, the Directory ordered in early March that all candidates for the Legislative Council swear a hatred for both monarchy and the Constitution of 1793.


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[Assistant] This forced a lot of monarchists to either stay in the closet or stay at home.


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[Assistant] But none of this was enough to overcome the prevailing conservatism of the electorate.


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[Assistant] Well that's not exactly right. The prevailing attitude of the electorate was a combination of exhaustion and apathy.


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[Assistant] As usual, the turnout for the elections of year five was pathetic. It's really one of the defining features of democracy during the French Revolution. There wasn't a single election where turnout wasn't comically low.


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[Assistant] But of those who voted, the conservatives formed by far the greatest part.


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[Assistant] 234 members of the directories legislative councils were up for re-election. All of them holdovers from the national convention. The voters re-elected 11 of them. That's it. 11.


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[Assistant] And those 11 were the most conservative of the lot. The rest were just turned out.


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[Assistant] Which means that this resounding defeat of the incumbent regime was not just a defeat of the directory per se, but also everything that has happened since August the 10th, 1792.


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[Assistant] This was of course alarming to the remaining committed Republicans in the directory.


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[Assistant] Those committed Republicans were led by the little three-man triumvirate within the five-man directory.


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[Assistant] So we're talking about Louis Marie LaRabelière, Jean-Francois Rubelle, and Paul Barrault.


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[Assistant] Now though Barah was always a wild card, the catastrophic losses in the election seems to have driven him into a working alliance with La Rebelliaire and Rubelle to preserve the Republic at all costs. One more election like that, and the royalists would actually have working majorities.


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[Assistant] But Lazar Carnot, their slightly more conservative colleague in the directory, retorted with the crazy notion that the directors ought to work with the councils the voters elected. If we don't respect the elections, then what are we all doing here?


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[Assistant] Now, if those delegates break their oath and support monarchy, we can deal with them then.


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[Assistant] When the new Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients met for their first sessions though, they did nothing to alleviate the fears of the triumvirate. The Council of Five Hundred elected newly minted delegate General Pichigrew to be their president.


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[Assistant] Pichigrew still enjoyed the glow that came from being the man who had conquered the Netherlands, and his treasonous correspondence with Louis XVIII was at that point merely suspected at the highest levels. It was not common knowledge, nor was there any proof of his treason.


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[Assistant] But still, Peshagru, in charge of the Council of 500, was a warning shot across the bow.


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[Assistant] Now the first order of business for the incoming council was replacing the first director who would be selected by law to resign.


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[Assistant] Luckily for all the major players, the name of the inconsequential Francois Etienne Latourneur was selected from the hat.


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[Assistant] This is reported to have been a genuine luck of the draw, but I personally have a really super hard time believing that, especially given what is going to happen down the road.


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[Assistant] To replace Latonier, though, the Councils appointed Francois-Marie de Barthélemy, a conservative diplomat whose claim to fame was negotiating the Treaty of Basel that removed Prussia from the war.


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[Assistant] The triumvirate was not at all happy with the selection, but there was nothing that they could do about it.


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[Assistant] Now one of the big reasons Bartholomew was a provocative choice is that one of the key issues on the directories table was negotiating the end of the war with the Austrians.


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[Assistant] Now, you would think that ending the war would be pretty non-controversial.


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[Assistant] The triumphs were in favor of even more aggressive expansion.


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[Assistant] The war machine is finally fired up. It's finally kicking ass. So why stop now?


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[Assistant] Oh, also, the spoils of war are just about the only thing propping up our national finances.


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[Assistant] But Carnot and Bartolome both advocated signing a peace treaty to bring the long and costly war to a close.


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[Assistant] In general, opinion in the legislative councils trended towards supporting a peace treaty.


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[Assistant] But even among those who wanted the war to end, opinion was split.


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[Assistant] Conservatives wanted to make a generous peace with the Austrians as a first step towards securing foreign support for the restoration.


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[Assistant] The old Termidorians, meanwhile, wanted to extract serious concessions from the Republic's enemies. And those Termidorians had a key ally. The army.


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[Assistant] The army was not at all thrilled about rumors that the politicians back in Paris were going to return territory to the Austrians that had been captured by their sweat and blood.


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[Assistant] So the alliance between the republicans in the directory and the generals and soldiers out on the frontiers got stronger.


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[Assistant] Speaking of that newly won territory, General Bonaparte was seriously just still off on his own, and continued to organize Italy to his own specifications.


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[Assistant] Pro-revolutionary elements within the Republic of Genoa, though, decided to preempt direct French intervention by organizing a local coup in May to kick out the old oligarchic regime.


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[Assistant] They proclaim themselves to be a French-aligned Ligurian Republic.


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[Assistant] The famous banking operations of Genoa were now at Bonaparte's disposal.


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[Assistant] The Cispidane Republic, the first new republic Napoleon had created, held its own initial round of legislative elections in April 1797.


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[Assistant] And just as had happened in France, the electorate returned a slate of very conservative, very anti-French delegates.


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[Assistant] This was much to Bonaparte's great annoyance, so at the beginning of July, he erased the Cispedane Republic and the Transpedane Republic from the map, and merged them into a single unit now called the Cisalpine Republic, with a capital in Milan.


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[Assistant] Milan was by far the most pro-French region Bonaparte had come across, so he submerged any nascent conservatism or Italian patriotism under the thumb of his Italian supporters in Milan.


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[Assistant] Back in Paris, Bonaparte's unilateral reorganizations of Italy was met by fears that he was setting up personal client states for himself.


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[Assistant] And the fact that he had taken over a huge palace to serve as his headquarters allayed no one's fears.


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[Assistant] But there was no possibility of just recalling him, or censuring him in any way. Even conservatives did not want to mess with his success.


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[Assistant] Though a big part of the Termidorian reaction had been the acceptance of freedom of worship and church-state separation, technically, refractory priests were still outlawed.


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[Assistant] The conservatives wanted to start easing up on this a little. But for the Republicans, it was one thing to tolerate those guys, and quite another to rehabilitate them completely.


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[Assistant] The Republicans were happy with the whole, we won't actively come break down your door, if you stay behind that door, arrangement. But at the end of June, the Council of 500 voted to repeal the law outlawing non-juring priests. The law was vetoed by the Council of Ancients, but still, it was obvious where this was all headed.


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[Assistant] The reactionary priests who had done so much to turn France into a religious war zone would soon be coming back out into the light.


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[Assistant] Where they would no doubt fully support restoration.


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[Assistant] The other source of tension between Republicans and conservatives was the directories, revenues, and expenditures.


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[Assistant] The Legislative Councils technically controlled the budget, but the Directory itself executed tax collections through its Treasury Ministry.


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[Assistant] But this ministry had become a hotbed of conservatism, and together with allies in the councils, the conservatives started annulling, cutting off, and or depriving the directory of all its various revenue streams.


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[Assistant] The immediate goal was to starve the executive branch of funds to further prosecute the war, and so force them to agree to more lenient terms with the Austrians.


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[Assistant] The longer term goal was to break the independence of the executive arm, pack the legislative councils with monarchists, and then vote to invite the king to come home.


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[Assistant] And this moment also happens to be the moment when the directory was given final proof of Pichigrew's correspondence with Louis XVIII.


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[Assistant] The damning correspondence had actually been captured by General Moreau during the campaigns of 1796, but he and Pichigrew were old friends. Moreau was himself no royalist, but he didn't want to rat on his friend, and so he sat on the evidence.


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[Assistant] Eventually, however, word of the letters reached Bonaparte, and he forwarded everything to Barah.


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[Assistant] So as it turned out, the current president of the Council of 500 was in league with Louis XVIII.


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[Assistant] This revelation appears to have come as a complete shock to Lazar Carnot, who pivoted away from his argument that the directory should passively respect the will of the voters. Not that this pivot would come fast enough, or be strong enough, to save Carnot from the events of Fructador.


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[Assistant] In response to all this, the triumvirate took steps to secure their position.


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[Assistant] They ordered General Hoche to lead some men from the Rhine frontier back to the west, and if he wouldn't mind coming by way of Paris, that would be just super.


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[Assistant] Now this was actually an unconstitutional order, as there were rules about troops in the capital. Aside from the Grinnell garrisons, Paris was supposed to be off limits to the army.


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[Assistant] Triumvirate was already getting over constitutional niceties.


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[Assistant] When Hoche and his men passed through Paris, the directory had them stick around for a minute. Just to rest, you understand. Just for a minute.


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[Assistant] Once the troops were in Paris, the triumvirate then implemented a radical reshuffling of the executive ministries on July the 14th.


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[Assistant] But the directory was having trouble finding a man with the requisite experience and standing to take on the job. And that's when Paul Barraugh said, well, I've got a guy.


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[Assistant] And that guy turns out to be, dun-da-da-da.


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[Assistant] Of course, if the Triumvirs thought Tallyrand was going to run anyone's program but his own, they were oh-so-sadly mistaken.


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[Assistant] So when last we left him, everyone's favorite slippery card shark of an ex-bishop had been booted from England in 1794, and then exiled to Philadelphia, where he spent the next two years.


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[Assistant] As soon as he found out about the Termidorian reaction, though, Talleyrand immediately set to work trying to get his name removed from the list of prescribed emigres.


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[Assistant] And in this, he had a key friend in Madame de Staulle, the daughter of Jacques Nacar, who was just starting to become a key centre of intellectual gravity in the Paris salon scene.


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[Assistant] She was close to Barah, and through him, managed to get Taliran's name removed from the prescribed emigrate list at the end of 1795.


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[Assistant] Talleyrand then happily ditched the United States in the spring of 1796.


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[Assistant] He landed back in Europe in Hanover, where he remained for a few months to get a feel for the situation, before he actually re-entered France. I mean, who knew what the scene would really be like for a noble archbishop of questionable morals and a checkered political past.


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[Assistant] But with the coast appearing clear, Talleyrand came back to France in September 1796 and then proceeded to bide his time and wait for an opportunity to get back in the game. That chance is finally coming right now.


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[Assistant] The triumvirate needed ministers who had experience and who could maybe be trusted, and so Barah tapped Talleyrand to serve as foreign minister.


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[Assistant] But if the goal of this ministerial reshuffle was to preserve the directory, putting Talleyrand in a key role was not the hottest idea going.


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[Assistant] As soon as he was inside the government, Talleyrand took a look around and said to himself, well, this is never going to last. I better start planning for the future.


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[Assistant] It took him exactly three seconds to survey Europe and go, whoa, who is this kid Napoleon Bonaparte who is kicking so much ass in Italy?


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[Assistant] Talleyrand immediately started up a regular correspondence with Bonaparte, sucking up to the young general and flattering his ego to the hilt.


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[Assistant] Talleyrand congratulated Napoleon on the deal he was striking with the Austrians, even if he kept his reservations about handing neutral Venice over to the Austrians to himself. So the coup of 18 Brumaire is officially in the making.


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[Assistant] Talleyrand entered the Foreign Office at an auspicious moment, but his own role in the subsequent negotiations would be a minor one.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte himself was leading negotiations with the Austrians, and negotiating envoys had already been sent to Lille to meet with the British to see what they wanted to do now that they were about to have no allies.


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[Assistant] But as the days and weeks tick by in Lille, the French envoys started to suspect that the British were intentionally stringing them along. And they were right.


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[Assistant] British intelligence had it that the conservatives were on the rise, and that if they waited, they could get a much better deal than the one offered by the current government.


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[Assistant] One back channel recommending that they stall turned out to be the new Foreign Minister Talleyrand himself, who as I said believed from day one that the directory was fatally flawed and would eventually collapse one way or the other.


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[Assistant] So it's safe to say that Talleyrand spent his entire time as the directory's foreign minister, arranging its demise.


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[Assistant] Oh, also making an absolute gob-smacking amount of money. He did that too.


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[Assistant] The combination of the influx of troops into Paris and the ministerial reshuffle led to perfectly justified fears inside the legislative councils that the triumvirate was planning something.


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[Assistant] Because within a few weeks even more regular army troops had arrived in the capital.


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[Assistant] This time, they came from the army of Italy, and were led by one of Bonaparte's key lieutenants.


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[Assistant] As an institution, the army was clearly aligning itself with the current republican government. Napoleon himself had just hold his troops, but he would personally lead them all back to France with an eagle swiftness, if he felt the republic was threatened.


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[Assistant] So inside the legislative councils, delegates started discussing how to protect themselves.


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[Assistant] They tentatively approved a plan to rebuild the National Guard, and in the meantime, support irregular armed bands inside the Capitol, mostly drawn, I presume, from the Muscadans, who had proved so useful to conservatives in the past.


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[Assistant] But none of these plans were going to roll out fast enough to stave off the triumvirs, who now believe that they had to destroy the Constitution to save the Constitution.


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[Assistant] At the end of August, conservatives once again attempted to repeal the laws against refractory priests, and this time they got the Council of Ancients to agree.


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[Assistant] And that was when the triumvirs decided that they had to strike now, before things got any worse.


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[Assistant] Soldiers occupied all the key strategic positions in Paris.


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[Assistant] Issued arrest warrants for 53 council deputies and their two directorial colleagues, Carnot and Bartolome.


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[Assistant] With the full support of the army, these arrests were carried out swiftly and efficiently.


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[Assistant] Then a carefully chosen quorum of loyal council delegates met under the protection of armed soldiers to officially sanction the deployment of troops in Paris and approve the subsequent arrests.


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[Assistant] Then, this loyal Republican quorum dropped the real bomb.


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[Assistant] The coup from above was carried out quickly and professionally. There was no pushback. There was no fighting in the streets.


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[Assistant] The nascent thrust to restore the monarchy was successfully parried.


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[Assistant] In the immediate aftermath of the Fructidor coup, Pichigrew and the other arrested delegates were tried, convicted of treason, and then exiled to French Guiana.


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[Assistant] Many of them managed to survive the subsequent ordeal, though, including Peshagru himself, who would eventually escape to the United States and from there to London, where he attached himself to the staff of a Russian general during the War of the Second Coalition.


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[Assistant] He then slipped back into France in 1803 to help organize a royalist coup against now first consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, but Pichigrew was betrayed and arrested in early 1804.


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[Assistant] Shortly thereafter, the guards discovered he had accidentally strangled himself to death.


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[Assistant] And it's pretty clear that Carnot got a bum rap here.


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[Assistant] His only real crime was advocating generous peace terms for the Austrians.


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[Assistant] But this wasn't because he was looking to bring back the monarchy. Carnot was a staunch Republican.


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[Assistant] It was simply that he had been the guy running the war for three years, knew intimately how destructive and destabilizing it had been, and when it was put to bed, he wanted it to stay in bed.


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[Assistant] He believed that the hard line advocated by the triumvirate would simply sow the seeds of the next war.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte himself seems to have recognized that Carnot had been swept up in something that he should really not have been swept up in.


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[Assistant] Carnot would be recalled from Switzerland in 1800 to briefly serve as Minister of War, and then in the Legislative Councils of the Consulate.


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[Assistant] But then for the rest of Napoleon's reign, Carnot would have an on-again-off-again relationship with the little corporal.


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[Assistant] Carnot finally retired from public life in protest when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, but then later came back to serve in the War of the Sixth Coalition, and then the Hundred Days.


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[Assistant] He was exiled but not killed for being a regicide after the restoration and died in Prussia in 1823.


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[Assistant] Now we'll get into the broader impact of the fructidor coup next week when we talk more about the directorial terror that is about to unfold, but just so you know, historians use fructidor to divide the directory from the second directory.


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[Assistant] The directory was a constitutional government that lasted from August 1795 to September 1797.


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[Assistant] The second directory was a revolutionary government that simply did whatever it took to stay in power.


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[Assistant] Engineering and annulling elections to suit its own purposes, until it itself was taken down by the coup organized by Bonaparte and Talleyrand in November 1799.


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[Assistant] We'll wrap up today with the treaty that finally does end the War of the First Coalition. Because after this treaty, there will be no more coalition.


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[Assistant] It seems that both the British and the Austrians have been stringing out negotiations to see how the political situation in Paris unfolded.


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[Assistant] When that political situation unfolded into the coup of Fructidor, the British and Austrians had opposite reactions.


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[Assistant] The British broke off peace talks and decided to carry on with the war. The Austrians, meanwhile, signed basically the same deal they had agreed to at Leoben. Meeting at Campo Formio in October 1797,


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[Assistant] Bonaparte and an Austrian diplomat, whose name I won't trouble you with, signed the Treaty of Campo Formio.


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[Assistant] In a mixture of nine public and eleven secret clauses, the French got all the territory west of the Rhine, the Austrians got Venice, and everyone recognized the independence of the new Italian republics.


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[Assistant] Also included in the treaty was the release of certain prominent prisoners of war.


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[Assistant] Frail, but in good spirits, after five years in captivity, Lafayette was let out of jail and reunited with his family. Hooray for Lafayette.


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[Assistant] With Austria out of the war, and the war on the continent now over, only the British stood against France.


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[Assistant] When the conflict had started in 1792, the British had done everything in their power to avoid getting involved.


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[Assistant] But now that they were involved, they were going to stay involved. Allies or no allies.


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[Assistant] Next week, the directory, the second directory, will recall Bonaparte from Italy and order him to prepare an invasion of the British Isles.


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[Assistant] But as we will see, Bonaparte will survey the prospects for victory in the British Isles and say, yeah, this is not really a good idea. If you really want to hit the British, you'll let me invade Egypt.


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[Assistant] What is up everyone, and welcome to the WAN Show! We've got a bunch of great topics for you guys today, including a special guest! That's right, we've got- oh, there he is. He's kinda in the middle of the frame now. Oh, he's leaning, he's leaning out of the frame now. It's got the- there we go! We've got David on the show to talk about the...


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[Assistant] It's been an extremely long, actually, couple weeks. So the first thing that happened in order to make this April Fool's shoot work was, uh, because we accidentally double booked it with my vacation, I actually had to fly home from Japan. Do you know this? I didn't know that was why. I had to come back a week early.


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[Assistant] The issue was not that his idea was bad, in my opinion. I think it was great. It just wasn't what I had had in the back of my mind for the last two or three years or whenever I originally came up with this idea.


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[Assistant] So that was what, that was what uhm, David told everybody was, in order to make it feel lived in,


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[Assistant] Not about that, but it wasn't, I mean realistically, I don't feel like you were digging in that much based on the difference in creative opinion. It felt like a lot of it was just like, everyone's gonna hate me.


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[Assistant] Okay. Yeah, so I called him and I basically went, okay, here's the pitch.


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[Assistant] It was shockingly organized. We booked two days for the shoot and I don't think we went over


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[Assistant] And, I was, I wasn't thinking about this at all, I was like, hey, uhm, it was Andrew shooting at that point, I think, right? Yep. Yeah, I was like, hey Andrew, uhm,


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[Assistant] So he just starts doing it immediately, and it just happened. That everyone like, like st-


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[Assistant] Hey guys, sorry to be shooting you a work email on Easter Sunday. Saw this super odd post on threads from your account and wanted to reach out to confirm whether it's real or a joke. I've attached a screenshot. Uhm, and it's that one that's like, guess who's moving?


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[Assistant] You know, we had a good script review, I think everything's in, probably in pretty good shape, I think it's in capable hands, but you never know. What's my first big project?


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[Assistant] But when I saw the rough cut for review, and I saw that they had left it in, I went, you know what, it kind of, it kind of works. But that was it. I hadn't seen it yet. That was, that was the moment I walked in the door. I was like, okay, because I saw the editors there.


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[Assistant] Don't read too much into a joke. There is, knowing Gary, do you guys have any idea what his background is? The guy's, the guy's ethical. There's no way he's holding Intel stock and boosting ARK.


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[Assistant] If it takes off, he was there before it took off. He's an early adopter, uhm, to a fault, right?


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[Assistant] Yep. Uh, man, there's honestly, there's like, there's so much that we could talk about.


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[Assistant] Oh man, there's a lot of jokes that did not make it into, uh, the YouTube video. Cause, cause the script was kind of rough, like there's scripted parts, but then there's parts of the script that just say,


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[Assistant] Uhm, yeaah. Anyway, there's some stuff that definitely didn't make it in. The energy was...


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[Assistant] It was great. Was incredible. Yeah. Uh, just, you could tell people, it's the kind of thing that feels like a chore in the moment, or like as you're getting ready for it, but then you do it and then it's over and you look back at it and you're like, I'm glad, I'm glad I participated in that. Type 2 fun. I can't, I couldn't believe the commitment to the bit.


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[Assistant] I c- I couldn't believe it, like, the- and the poor editors, like, they were there almost all day on their buckets.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I got a pretty good idea of what the vibe was gonna be like when David messaged the general chat and he goes, Hey, does anyone have any camping chairs or five gallon buckets? I need as many as I can get.


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[Assistant] Fun fact, that riding crop that Dennis is using to hit Gary with during the, uh, the torture scene,


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[Assistant] It was actually an inspiration piece for the ultimate cat teaser.


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[Assistant] Yeah, cause I had told those guys I wanted the quality to be, uhm,


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[Assistant] When we asked the tenants, uhm, if they were chill with it.


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[Assistant] Uh, November 20th. Wow. Was when we, was when we pivoted because we had originally planned something else and we realized that it was not going to be possible to execute in time. I think I was still a shooter at that point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that was, that was our initial outreach. Uhm, oh no, that wasn't even initial outreach. That was like, Yvonne connecting everyone to talk about it in more detail. Wait, what did Ludwig just do? What did Ludwig just do? Oh no. Oh no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We have a curse. Ludwig video released during WAN show. Woah woah woah woah woah woah. What does this say? Yeah, what did he do? What is this about? Is this, is this, is this something to- Ludwig video just dropped. Okay, hold on. Woah woah woah, why is everyone talking about this? Oh no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stop doing this. Emergency stream? Is that it? That's live right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can tell the difference after we labeled it April fools. This, this should tell you after we labeled it April fools, the problem went away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A significant number of our previous April fools have needed the label sooner rather than later, or it's been a real problem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I, I just, I don't really know what, uh, I don't really know what to say other than, I think, was it George Carlin who famously said, think of an average person, half of people are dumber than


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, there was no preview like that. There was no thumbnail preview. Or, uhm, like a timeline preview, that's the one. So the video was just, uhm, yeaah, 10 minutes of it just sitting in the yard. So this was, I think, the third time I had unboxed this case.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't even know what I'm saying. I watched the server room on Fire1, that one's not funny.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I, I, cause my kids asked if we had ever done a prank on our staff for April Fools, and that one, if I recall correctly, you guys didn't know, didn't know, but like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Luke, the fire pole meme is still alive. Still alive. David, can you tell us when was the last sighting of the fire pole? It's in the April Fools video!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so, here's a- here's a video- oh look, we've got David just floating here, I love it. Hello! Look, it's a David. Uhm. He looks like a suggested video. I-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I get credit for this one, go Linus. Uh, but going out my executive exit. Oh wait, no that's not the one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can't really think about watching it again, but I feel like I have to. There are, especially for someone who actually worked out of this office.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you gave me six months to do it on my own, right? Like this is not something that could have been done in one mind. It needs many minds. I couldn't have come up with this many references and I worked there the whole time. Yeah. Like I, yeah, it's absolutely brilliant. People are like, whoa, I missed that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I just wanted to razz you. Yeah. Oh man, so yeah, floatplane. If you are not subscribed on floatplane, now is the time to do it. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is that pricing is actually going up in a little while. I've heard about this. But because of our commitment to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, to, to, to honoring our agreements, uh, anyone who subscribes at old pricing will be grandfathered in at that pricing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's cool, uh, because I haven't confirmed we can do that yet. So, we'll figure it out! No, they have to be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, the other, the other reason is that it is full of amazing content right now. They did Spring Break on Float Plane, uhm, which involved a whole bunch of exclusives. So we've got Labs Hide and Seek, we've got Extras from the, uh, Bidet Shoot with, uh, Ludwig, we've got Tanner Revisiting,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Much depth to everything that was going on, that there was absolutely no possible way that it could be absorbed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the behind the scenes has all this additional context and all this additional interaction, uh, you get to see, you know, just everyone kind of goofing around, like the energy on the shoot was so


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Don't make the cut, uhm, but they, but they do go into the behind the scenes and, uh, oh yeaah, I gotta give credit to Sammy for just being an absolute unit because while, you know, Andrew did awesome, you know, getting the, the real video shot, the YouTube video shot, when Andrew could turn off his camera and take a break,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, I think that was it for merch messages that were explicitly directed at David. Oh, okay, now that we started acknowledging them, a couple more of them came in. Uhm, okay, no, no, okay, no, I think, I think you're good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I thought it was hilarious. It's one of those things I was a little worried about, because you know, I mean, you know how Reddit can be, the fact that, the fact that actors have to have it in their contract, that they can't, like, be mean,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can I trust the audience to be smart enough to know that this is a line? I am playing a character!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No matter what, let's go! That's pretty cool. Alright, so, uh, here it is. Just head on over to WaysToGive over here. You can donate once, you can donate monthly, uhm...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, absolutely incredible, incredible organization. Alright, thanks Dan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, okay, should we jump right into the show? Yes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, it was available at 27 of their 44 Amazon Fresh grocery stores and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The idea was that it was supposed to allow customers to scan in at the door, then have the items that they pick up tallied and automatically rung up by a machine vision system using cameras and sensors. My understanding was it was more than just cameras, like there were weight sensors on the shelves and stuff like that. However,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Amazon cl- I mean, I'm sure they'd rather be working on this than, you know, training, like, gore algorithms or whatever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know. No, seriously though, what does mechanical Turk mean? Like, like, what, what, what is the, what is the,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can I just say that that use of the word diverse?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, Amazon claimed that these workers were mostly tasked with improving its machine learning algorithms by annotating training footage. And that is totally a thing. That doesn't mean that AI is just low-wage workers from overseas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So anyway, hold on, hold on, okay, so back to, back to that, just because you are using humans to validate the data, that does not mean that it's not machine learning. It can still be machine learning. Machine learning needs to be reinforced.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you can't just have another machine reinforce the other machine. You actually have to have humans go in and say, okay, no, no, that was, that was a sandwich. Uh, that was not a rap, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But anyway, this is, this is 100% still machine learning. The fact that 30% of them worked without human intervention is, is something. Uhm, but that's more like probably where they expected to be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Within a few months of launch, not where they expected to be eight years on from the launch, uh, according to a report by The Information, around 70% of transactions required the intervention or assistance of an unseen offsite employee as of 2022.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Amazon will, however, continue with another cashierless feature that it's been experimenting with since 2020, Dashcarts, which are a combination of shopping cart slash self-checkout.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, this is similar to another odd case discovered in December when a supposedly AI-powered drive-through, Presto Automation, which also needed, uh, overseas workers to step in 70% of the time according to a filing with the SEC.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, uhm, so our discussion question is, uhm, what is the value of making it feel like something is totally automated even when it actually still takes a lot of human work to pull off? Uh, one thing not mentioned in our notes here is apparently one of the other issues was that however, whatever labor they were saving in cashiers,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were more than paying for in the army of people that had to go around and make sure that all of the products were perfectly faced so that the cameras could tell what people were taking off the shelves. Oh wow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know what, I mean, I made a video about it, because I legitimately thought it was really cool. It seemed, I, I expressed at the time, some...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't see like, you know, machine vision indicators of any sort. They don't have like a dot code on it that, you know, whatever angle it can kind of catch a glimpse of and be sure. Like I was really impressed, but turns out I got BAMBOOZLE!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, well that tells you everything you need to know about how much people are being paid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because unless they can do 700 assignments per hour. Well hold on, Amazon's definitely taking something.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just hold on, hold on. No, no, I know, but that's not the math. And that's also minimum fee. I know. That's not the math though. The math is that unless a worker- Oh, okay, I get it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can do 700 assignments per minute, which would be, uh, per hour rather, which would work out to, what, 11 per, uh, 11 per second? No, hold on. I'm not, I can't math. Math me. Help me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 700. Let's say, let's say, let's say 600. Let's say we're aiming for $10 an hour. Okay? So they've gotta do...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They've gotta do what? A hundred every six minutes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, a thousand every six, a thousand every six minutes. Okay, hold on, one cent. Oh my God. So that's a thousand things. So they've got to do a hundred every six minutes. Right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. Okay. So 10 a second. So about 10 a second.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, 100 divided by 60. Here we go. So they have to do about 1.7 of those a second. And that assumes they are being paid $10 an hour, which is not a good wage. And that assumes Amazon takes nothing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, every six minutes? Six minutes is... How many seconds? A hundred every si-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Help me out. Ah, I'm so tired. I was walking you. Oh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They tried metric time, people hated it. Okay, okay, okay. Okay, so hold on a second, okay?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, okay, okay, so it's one second, uh, it's point, uh, one cent per interaction. Okay, so it's a hundred interactions to a dollar. It's a thousand interactions to ten dollars. Right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we've got a thousand interactions. If we want to get paid ten dollars in an hour, we divide a thousand by sixty. That's the number per minute.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that is 16.6 interactions per minute. We divide it by 60 again. That means we've got about 4 seconds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What the heck is going on here? Has anyone worked for this? I...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, someone else said, I did SMMTurk in college, never saw a cent. Uh, someone said, I knew someone who did work for MTurk, they said it was mostly just transcribing documents. Yes, I did it for beer money in college, it's not full gig stuff. Uhm, interesting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've worked for less with a family business. Okay. I mean, yeah, fair enough, I guess.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In theory, says Mad Economist, I think that's one cent ones are supposed to be click on the picture containing a bicycle. I mean, man, for how long it takes me to solve a capture sometimes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hope so, because you're reviewing video footage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can be very time consuming. It's not just scrub through, yeah, we're good, because they need to, they need to be sure. That's the whole idea, because if they're training


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The machine vision model, and they, they feed it incorrect data, that's, that's a disaster. Like, I mean, obviously people are human, they make mistakes from time to time, especially if they're being paid, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the more of that noise that you feed into your model, the worser it is going to get. The more perfect the data you give it, the better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a very wide range of tasks apparently. Some will give $5 for a 15 minute server. I have worked for MTurk and used it to find participants for studies. Interesting. Interesting. Alright, well there you go. MTurk, man. I don't know how I'd never heard of this before.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, cause it's gonna be like, in people in every time zone around the world, just like, sitting there waiting for a gig to show up. Crazy. Yeah. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I love Twitch chat. All this Mechturk stuff looks like outsourcing low-paying jobs to third-world countries legally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's true. You guys can interact with the show using a merch message. Don't do a super chat, don't do a twitch bit. The way to go is merch messages.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've got the limited edition shirt that we did for April Fools.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These are going to be printing, and I believe the next week or so, well, going to printing in the next week or so, and then they will, yea, so it's gonna be available, oh, until tomorrow, this is, this is available until tomorrow, and then we're gonna be hopefully printing them, yea, over the next few weeks here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh boy. Well I didn't want anyone to be jealous about the fact that he's getting free upgrades for his car.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so when you leave a merch message right in the box in the checkout, you will either have it show up down here, you are going to get a reply from Producer Dan,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or, it will be forwarded to someone internally, and that person might be me and Luke, where we will address your merch message on the show. We're gonna show you guys how it works, Dan's gonna pick us a couple curated merch messages, but first, I've got a quick poll for him to set up for you guys before we do those, so that you guys can weigh in on what you want to see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we want it to have like a, like a name tag holder mechanism of some sort.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we want your feedback on what you think is the best. So option A is a little reinforced D ring.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's, uh, like a little, a little metal ring, so this is how it would sit. Alright, there's option A. Luke, are you gonna weigh in on this? Sorry, I got linked to something that was... Option B. D-ring with a little carabiner that can be tucked into the pocket when it's not in use. Kinda like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, alright, hold on. So right, right, right, this one has, uh, options. So you can either hang it right off the D-ring, or you could hang it off the carabiner if you have to, uh, scan in on doors and stuff like that. Ah, okay. Okay, option C.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a, it's a, it's a, yeah, it's a, it's an office, office worker.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when I say worker, I don't mean like you just have to sit at the computer. You can wear it for that, it's great for that too, but we want it to be a little bit tougher than that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think Nike said it best. Just do it. Yeah, I, I don't really know what else there is to say. You, you, you have to decide what's important and you've gotta, you've gotta commit. No excuses.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everyone knows that they should go grocery shopping on the weekend and cook their meals, but not everyone in the moment is going to feel like working out right now or going grocery shopping and cooking right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I, uh, I never book badminton by myself. I book it ahead of time because I know that, you know, I should go exercise and, you know, do stuff. And then when it's time to go,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, there's a lot of obstacles to not going. I'm gonna have to pay anyway because I signed up ahead of time. And I'm not gonna be there, so they're gonna be short people, so the rotations are gonna be off. So I better go?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I actually hate you. No super chats. Just buy something from me and I'll mention your comment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Still mad. Cause they don't have to spend, cause they don't have to spend chipping costs on their donation. Then just buy a gift card and never use it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I mean, if you are the one running the services, I don't think there's much that you have to do to keep your family safe. Uhm. They're a threat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unless you are some kind of, I think a jellyfin server, and like having a port open on your router, probably fine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Probably. Probably right. It's probably fine. Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, change your default passwords. Keep everything up to date. You know, the basics, the basics. Just make sure you're going in and making sure everything's chill. Uh, check the logs for the devices that have connected to your network once in a while. Use guest wifi. Guest wifi.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Totally awesome. Uh, if you wanna be, if you wanna be a little bit, if you wanna be a little bit more careful, you know, have a really strong password on your main wifi, like there's just-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, that's another one. I mean, we don't know that you do. It's possible that you've got a separate IoT network. Yep.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if you're that person, then I shouldn't be advising you on cyber security anyway. Go figure it out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do you wanna do another ti- oh, we should do sponsors. Let's get sponsors!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the hardest parts of our April Fools prank, or video, was trusting Dennis to be in my house again. Uh, my notes just say briefly talk about the car break-in prank. So, I come out of the house,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A bunch of stuff is spilled. You can tell I'm not chasing super hard. Because I- Yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So anyway, I come out of the house and there's a bunch of stuff from my car just like dumped on the sidewalk and there's a guy running away in a hood and uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We have a floatplane exclusive where you guys can see the whole setup, how they got this all ready, and uh, how they bamboozled me. Uh, they had Vance borrow my keys to like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's fully modular, it's 80 plus gold certified, and the best part is Seasonic is running a bunch of promotions on their power supplies this month.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So just because you don't want to cheap out on a power supply doesn't mean you don't want to save, so why not check out Seasonic at the link down below. We really believe in their products, we love them, and we are proud to promote Seasonic. The show is also brought to you by, ugh, look at that, another long time partner, Squarespace. Some companies


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They have beautiful websites. You know how they do it? Using our sponsor, Squarespace. Uhm, they might not-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Plus with 24-7 support, someone will always be there to answer your questions. So head to squarespace.com slash when and you can get 10% off today. Finally, the show is brought to you by MSI.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can now get the pre-built MSI Aegis RS2 gaming PC. Yeah, MSI mentioned this to me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It delivers solid performance for all your gaming adventures, plus it has liquid RGB cooling. Whatever that means.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With MSI's LED button, you can easily adjust it with their Mystic Light software, and you can enjoy all the latest features from MSI's motherboards, including Blazing Fast Wi-Fi 7 support for DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5. And don't forget to dive into the fun with MSI Center for even more customization.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Get your hands on the MSI Aegis RS2 at the link down below, and, oh yeah, that's it, at the link down below. Alright, cool. Huh. That's different. Okay. Let's pick some bones.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was the contents of my glove box. So basically, there's a power inverter, there's some napkins, there's some sanitary pads, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's like, uh, oh there's some extra hardware for my offset license plate mount. There is nothing of value in my car.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ever. Like if I go into a restaurant, you've seen me do this. I bring my backpack in with me. I mean, look at that stupid thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If that's not a high profile target, I don't know what it is. Totally. So I make sure there's nothing in it. It's clean. You look in the window and you're like, damn, that's a clean car. Like, nothing. Not even crumbs of food. There's nothing in there. So that's number one. What am I chasing him for? Nothing. So you had that thought?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I know there's nothing in my car. But your, your glass is broken. Number two.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That glass is not gonna be unbroken by catching the guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm going to go through the exact same insurance rigmarole, regardless of what happens with him. So, what difference does it make? Number three. What if the guy's armed?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, but I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go put my body and my life, which I value by the way, I'm gonna go put that in, even if the, even if the risk was 1%.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The glass cannot be unbroken through anything other than insurance and dealing with the hassle of taking it to the shop means. Finally, number four, I caught a glimpse of his face and I thought it might be Dennis.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You got me. Because even though I, I had all those thoughts, and even though, I thought, and he actually found the frame, where like, Yea yea yea yea. Where I was like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The fake glass. The fake glass was what convinced me. So they rolled down the window and they made sugar glass. And like put it... So I've gone through that before. I've actually had my car broken into multiple times. And that feeling of kind of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Shock? Not, not shock, but like that feeling where it actually takes a second to process. When you, when you come into a building,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's been broken into. Everything is right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Except the things that are wrong. And it can actually take a second. So this one time, I parked my car outside of our garage overnight because there was like something in the way, and I come out in the morning, I sit down all the way in my driver's seat, and the first thing that registered for me was actually that the seat was way back.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then I noticed the shattered glass all over the passenger seat. So, like, it can take a second for something to click, and uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My car's been broken into- like the glass was the- the thing that made me realize


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like a, a, a, a, a, a, an experience I've had before. He tapped into a memory. There's no way he knew that. And recalled that emotional state that made me sort of be dismissive of my suspicions and kind of go, my car's been broken into.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, it wasn't the right color? And like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So uh, here's where they're, here's where they're setting up, uh, I don't know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so he, uhm, he kind of planted the seed in my mind of cars being broken into.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I honestly at the time I was like, why are you telling me this? Like cars can be broken into anywhere. Like I, I don't really sure, I guess. Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Dennis told me, by the way, this might be in the video, I'm not sure, but he told me at the time that they carefully did not get any sugar glass in my car.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There was definitely some in there, eh? There was sugar glass in the car. There was sugar glass in the car, they got, they, they burst one of the ketchup packets that was in my glove compartment, and it got all over the passenger seat. Oh no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sedge. Definitely the scratched floor. That is permanent. Yeaah. That's forever. It's like a diamond.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Badrin asks, why do you have ketchup in your glove box? Well, where else would I keep it? Under the seat?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They don't give out ketchup packets by default at fast food restaurants anymore. Oh, so it's for if you like, forget to ask? Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh yea, 100%. And like, man, I, I, you need exactly the right amount of ketchup, I take my fry, and I like, you've probably seen me do this. I know this, yea, I've seen that. I put a strip of ketchup on the whole fry so the ratio is right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sure, Dan. I don't think we have that many this week. We're a little out of order


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, I haven't paid enough attention to it but Luke might know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And Buddy spent like $500, so I guess we can, uh, yeah, bought a screwdriver, a backpack, a other more different screwdriver, a stubby screwdriver, a banana for scale, a whole bunch of bits, a sticker pack, and a shaft extension.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Forged Alliance, or wait, Forged Alliance Forever is the community takeover of the game that was allowed to happen after gas-powered games went


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We enabled that, but it's pretty cool.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, I mean, look, I'll say this is not a creator that I'm personally, I'm not personally acquainted with, so I don't. Yeaah. Uhm, but, you know, what I do know is I agree with the cause.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if all you're being asked to do is sign a petition that says that you don't think this is okay, then I think that's something that I can wholeheartedly recommend without, like I already said, doing any due diligence on this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I intend to sign the petition once the show is over and I, I can do that. Uhm, I do think that- Please don't right now. Yeah, no, I'm busy right now. I, I do think that these companies need to be held accountable and I think that if there are no monetary consequences, not only is nothing ever going to change, it is going to get.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So much worse. Because a lot of especially younger consumers don't even understand what they've lost yet. Even the games that do still exist.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The, the, the, the, the modes, the ways of playing them that have changed as games as a service evolve are gone. I mean, think back to, think back to what it was like when you finally quit WoW and how badly you wanted to just play.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Classic wow again. And Blizzard finally did it, and then my understanding is they kinda bunged it up, cause didn't they start like, updating it again?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, if I had to guess, I would say it's because it hasn't been a priority to fix it. I mean, they're so...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So many things in Windows or Gmail or basically anything you use that uhm, just haven't been updated because it's not the most important thing I can work on today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right. And I mean we run into that all the time, stuff that theoretically is a quick bug fix, but in practice is just never the thing that's on fire today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I guess people make mistakes, we get things wrong. Uh, this is a suggestion. Quantum Rand in Floatplane Chat says, uh, try asking Dave's Garage on YouTube if there's anyone who is likely to both A. No and B. Dish. I would say that it would be Dave's Garage. Uhm.