Behind The Bastards: Trailer

From Hitler’s love of young adult fiction to Saddam Hussein's shameful romance novels, this podcast sheds new, weird light on history's monsters. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, everybody. I am Robert Evans, the new host of
the Behind the Bastards podcast, where we tell you everything
you don't know about some of the worst people in history. Now,
in my prior career, I was an editor at cracked
dot com and a journalist. I reported from Iraq, Ukraine,
the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and I talked to all
sorts of people who'd lived their whole lives under dictators

(00:20):
and monsters of varying types. And one thing I found
about these people is that, in addition to being you know,
just the worst, they're all way more interesting than I've
ever heard about in school. Uh. The worst people in
history are also often the most fascinating. For example, Saddam Hussein,
you know, genocidal monster war lord, also a romance novelist

(00:41):
who wrote the strangest book I've ever read, and we're
going to talk about that in one of our first
podcasts Adolf Hitler, you know, obviously worst person in history,
but also obsessed with a young adult fiction series that
was basically the German equivalent of Harry Potter. Uh, and
he in fact based his strategies in World War Two
off these children's books that he was obsessed with his

(01:02):
entire life. All of these terrible people have fascinating stories
like that in their background. Osama bin Laden obviously hated
America is something fierce, but he was also obsessed to
a pretty significant extent in American pop culture, and he
and his buddies in the mountains of Afghanistan would watch
American action movies to pump themselves up for activities against
the United States. There's all sorts of crazy details about

(01:24):
all of these people, and it's just endlessly fascinating to me,
and I think it's going to be fascinating to you
the collective Internet as well. So we'll be talking about dictators, warlords, terrorists,
awful people like Carlos the Jackal, and we'll also be talking,
you know, about broader subjects like you. When you think
about dictators, they all have these big families. They groom
their kids to take over for them. What kind of

(01:45):
parents are they? Uh? It turns out there really really,
really weird parents. So if you want to know about
all these terrible people I've talked about so far and
so many more, tune into Behind the Bastards. You can
find us online at Behind the Bastards dot com where
you can and check out, you know, pictures and links
to sources, so you can, you know, check up on
my work and you can also see things like the

(02:06):
incredibly gorgeous face of a young Saddam Hussein or the
ridiculously weird pistol packing man who wrote at all Hitler's
favorite books. You can also find us on social media Twitter, Instagram,
at at Bastard's pod uh so yeah, check out Behind
the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, and I'm gonna be here
every week talking about terrible, terrible nightmare people