Part One: The Man Who Invented Fascism

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
What's back to my old introduction style? My podcast host
Who's out of Ideas? I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards,
the podcast where we talk about terrible people, and more importantly,
I completely botched the introduction every time, and after a
hundred some odd podcasts, I shouldn't be doing that anymore.

(00:24):
But I'm not a professional. I am a hacking of fraud.
But you know who isn't a hack in a fraud?
Sharine Lonina's air horn, airhorn, airhorn. Never I've never felt
more like a hack in a fraud than I am
when I'm always what why is that? I don't think
I'm smart enough for this? No? I am. Well, the
point of this podcast is nobody's very smart, or none

(00:46):
of these people would be getting away with all the
ship they get away with. True, true, true, true. No.
I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for having me back.
I'm excited to know what. Thank you out there sucking
up the world. Well, Sharine, I'll tell you who we're
talking about day. I want to ask a question of
your first, what in your mind qualifies someone as a

(01:06):
ladies man? A ladies man, well, um, someone that's like
a charismatic, smooth talker. You know, maybe he gets away
with a lot of like things that unless capable person
would get away with. Um yeah, he's popular, but um uh,

(01:36):
I don't know, Like you know, like if someone's a
creep and they're good looking, you give them a pass
because they're good looking, like not like you, but like
I'm just saying, like the general society, I kind of
think of that as like a ladies man, but also
you can be a good kind of ladies man and
be nice to ladies um and treat them well. He's
a double edged sword. Yeah. Yeah, I've known some guys
that I would I would describe as ladies men who

(01:58):
were very respectful what I mean, some guys are ladies
men who are like absolute sociopaths. Like it's but it
always is one of the two. They're either like the
best person you know and they're just incredibly charming because
they're really decent people, or their utter like soulless monsters. Yeah.
I think there's definitely there's definitely a dichotomy there where

(02:18):
there's like one side where they're like charismatic, the life
of the party. Everyone's like attracted like a magnet and
the other side where it's like a dark brooding they
just got all the girls because they're just like yeah, rude,
yeah yeah. Well, today, Sharine, we are talking about the
quintessential ladies man, one of the men in fact, for
whom that term was coined. And the guy we're talking

(02:41):
about today is also the inventor of the concept of fascism.
Oh that's a nice little blend of attributes. Yeah yeah, this,
this is this is a hell of a tail. Um.
So I'm I'm curious for a woman's perspective on this
guy's I don't fully understand this guy's appeal, but it

(03:04):
was undeniable like in his lifetime. But I find him baffling. Um,
So maybe you can help me make sense of this.
Have you ever heard of Gabrielle de Nunzio. Nope, alright,
well neither had I really until I started digging into
him a little bit back. So, so he's not very
well known today outside of Italy. Um, but he is

(03:27):
an important figure. So. Gabrielle de Nunzio was born on
March twelfth, eighteen sixty three, in the city of Pescara, Italy.
Now the nation of Italy itself was only about two
years old when he was born Um, because it had
just you know, like after the Roman Empire, felt it
had mostly been a collection of city states, and big
chunks of it had been ruled by other countries and

(03:47):
kingdoms and ships, so like Italy had just started being
a thing like in the modern sense when this guy
is born Um and Pescara, his hometown was a small
coastal city buttressed by mountains and pine trees. It was
a particularly like hustle and bustily place, and Gabrielle's father,
Francisco Paulo, was the mayor. Today, we'd probably consider Gabrielle's

(04:08):
family to have been upper middle class. His dad was
a small time landowner and a wine merchant with a
terrible habit of spending much more money than he could
actually afford. So they made a good living, but they
were always kind of like on the edge of their means.
Now as the biggest man in town, because Francisco Polo was,
you know, the mayor, uh, he needed to be seen
displaying conspicuous wealth. So some of Gabrielle's earliest memories during

(04:30):
carnival where of his father standing on the balcony and
tossing gold and silver coins down into a crowd of
partying poor people, which was like not just his dad
did that in any town, the guy who occupies his position.
That's like a tradition. So you show off your large esse, right, Um,
so he was going to be able to like he well,
I mean I think he was very popular. Yes, he

(04:51):
was perceived as a good guy. But this was also
like what you do if you're if you're a mayor,
if you're the richest man in town, you throw money
into crowds on carnival. It's just what happens. Yeah, yeah,
there's more traditions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I prefer other forms
of income redistributing that that one's throwing money at me.
That can work, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, it's better than

(05:12):
what we have now where they don't do that at all,
just heard at all. Yeah, So I can imagine. I
can imagine like if that happened now, it would be
like very riotous, like just clamoring for that one dollar,
like whatever scent is on the ground, if you really
like me, you know, because times are rough. Times are rough.
I I do think if like I wonder because like

(05:34):
I think part of why so many rich people are
are against both war and and and uh Sanders who
both have wealth re distribution platforms. Um is that they
like they and they while they're in favor of like
charity and stuff. There's number one, they spend less money
on charity, but number two like then it's them. Then
everybody gets to see like, oh, this this great rich

(05:55):
person bought this hospital, as opposed to like, well this
guy paid his taxes. Like one of those feeds your
ego more maybe for like, look, you have to give
up x amount of money, but you can toss it
into a crowd of partying people like let's let's compromise.
That's a good that's a good question there. Yeah, So
Francisco Paulo, like, you know, Gabrielle's dad, he grows up

(06:18):
like seeing him doing all this stuff. He's it's very
ostentations and displays of wealth are a big part of
his childhood. His dad also had a hobby of dying
doves in a variety of colors, using like new high
tech dies at the time and letting them fly around
inside the house, which is weird. That's an interesting hobby.
They didn't have TV or radio, so you know, you

(06:38):
have to entertain themselves by Yeah, torturing animals is about
all you got. That's quite the quite the activity. I
don't want to keep like leading back to my pro
dog fighting agenda, but you know, in a time with
less entertainment, you have a pro dog fighting agenda. I've
been on the loops some dog fights, some dog legal

(06:58):
dog No, I'm so. As a young boy, Gabrielle was
the beloved center of his family's world. He had a
brother and three sisters, but Gabrielle's family immediately recognized that
he was special and treated him that way. And generally,
when we say someone was a child genius on this podcast,
we're repeating the lies of a narcissist. This is not

(07:19):
the case with Gabrielle. Basically, everyone who's ever covered this guy,
ever written about him, agrees that he was like everyone
kind of knew he was a genius from a very
early age. Um His most prominent biographer, Lucy Hughes Hallett,
absolutely despises him and thinks he was a monster, but
repeatedly emphasizes that just everyone who knew him as a
kid recognized that this kid's brilliant, right, So he's he's

(07:42):
not exact lying about that. Um. Now, Gabrielle was a
mama's boy, later writing of his mother that her glance
has made my heaven. He was surrounded by women from
an early age, maids, sisters and aunts, and his grandmother.
He was the center of their world, and he in
turned learned how to manipulate and to please women. Um,
he's adoring male. Yeah, exactly. That is something like all

(08:03):
the guys I know who who I would describe that way.
Most of them, um, grew up with like either a
single mom or like but like like usually they grew
up raised primarily by women. I think they definitely have
to have a female influence so they can understand the
female how a female brain can work, not that it
works so different, radically different, but it does in some

(08:24):
certain circumstances with like intimacy and bonding. Yeah, you know,
I mean it's kind of like it's just like you
grow up like wanting because they're like the center of
your world, like really wanting to please the women around you,
and then if you go out into the world, that
remains like one of the centers of your your being. Um,
and I do think that's sorry, no go ahead. Sorry,
I just keep saying yeah and agreeing, and then it

(08:46):
sounds like I'm about say something more. But I have
nothing profound to say. But I will say that I
think having being raised around women and understanding women in
the real world, that leads you to almost like speak
their language, and you're able to like establish a bond
with someone like immediately better than like someone else. It's
not like that doesn't have sisters, that wasn't raised by

(09:08):
a single mom, because there's already like this understanding there.
And I think that gets you in there bubble. You know,
you break that barrier so much easier because if you
raise mostly around men like I was, you you, you
you grow up starting every conversation with just a series
of fist fights, and and that that only works in
certain situations. It's very helpful at like the taco bell,

(09:30):
but outside of that, the taco belt, really you're gonna
get into I can navigate a taco bellt like nobody else.
It's just a bunch of right crosses. But um, yeah,
good to so. Pascara, the city he was born in,
um is located in a region of Italy called the
Bruzzi um and there was vanaging, and it was kind

(09:51):
of like a rural area, so there was vanishingly little
to do their outside of religion, and basically any monuments
around him were either churches or these perilous ly carved
caves that had once been occupied by monks and been
turned into like sites of worship um and faith. There
was a mix of extremely strict Catholicism and ancient Italian
pagan traditions like fortune telling, palm reading, and other manners

(10:12):
of like what we'd call witchcraft. UM. One of Gabrielle's
earliest memories was being taken in by an aunt of his,
who was a not a monk am a nun um,
into a part of the convent where males were not
allowed to go, and then breathlessly watching her perform like
a pagan fortune telling ritual. UM. So he grows up
both with this intense like ritualistic pagan influence in his

(10:34):
life and also with a lot of his earliest memories
being because he's seen a special taken into places he's
not allowed to be UM. Those are both kind of
like you can see like the kind of person that
makes like this idea that like the rules don't apply
to me, like I'm not bound by the same things
as everyone else, and then the world proves him right
by letting him like fall into place he's not allowed.
So it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. Absolutely proves right. Yeah.

(10:59):
Gabrielle never religious and nursed all of his life, a
deep contempt for priests, but he also grew up with
an abiding love of ritual and the trappings of faith,
if not at any actual like belief in faith. Um.
He would later write of himself, quote, I come from
an ancient breed. My ancestors were anchor wrights in the Maya. Uh.
They flagellated themselves till the blood came. They throttled wolves,

(11:19):
they stripped eagles of their feathers, and they scratched their
seals on giant rocks with the nail Helen took from
the cross. So damn a lot of pagan influence, you
could say. Now. Gabrielle de Nunzio was an infamous liar,
but the books and stories he published later in his
life give us deep insight into the sort of things
he would have experienced as a boy in Piscara. Because
writers write what they know. So I'm gonna quote now

(11:41):
from the biography of Gabrielle de Nunzio titled Gabrielle de
Nunzio Poets, Seducer and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes
Hallett uh And this is a quote from that biography
about one of his early books. Quote. In Denunzio's first story,
set in or around Piscar, he conjures up a place
where the bustle of port and barracks and market are
contrasted with the frustration of women confined to small dark

(12:01):
rooms who watched the life of the street through chink
shutters or small high windows. The church bell clangs out
the hours, Priests pass in the streets, carrying extreme unction
to the dying. Young people, strictly segregated as a rule,
furtively press up against each other in the merciful darkness.
When the church lamps are extinguished in Holy Week to
mark Christ's passion, funerals to be air followed by a
long lines of hooded mourners, their faces covered all by

(12:23):
but a slit for the eyes. Or processions of girls
and sacrificial white on the way to their first communion
provide the town's main spectacles. Many of the stories de
Nunzio related about his childhood concerned dying animals. There was
the death of his little Sardinian horse, a bay with
a white muzzle named Aquilino, whom he would feed with
apples and sugar lumps in the piece of the nighttime stable.
There was the quail the farm manager gave him in

(12:44):
a cage made of twigs. Half a century later, do
Nunzio can still recall how the tiny creature had dashed
itself against its makeshift bars, gashing its head until the
bone showed. On killing days, the howling of stuck pigs
and their blood spurting into basins so appalled him that
he would hide in a corner, face to the wall,
his hand for his contorted mouth. Life scared me as
though it stalked me with a pig sticking knife in hand.

(13:04):
After the massacre, he sobbed all night. So that's that's
a little insight into his childhood. Fuck that he's not
a bad writer. No, that's wait, that's he wrote that
about himself. So yeah, yeah, like a lot of that
included a lot of quotes from him. Yes, yeah, um,
I mean yeah, that's I mean, he he's called a

(13:26):
poet and a seducer, is what I remember from you.
That's the biography title. Yeah, I mean that's very poetic.
That's a very graphic way to describe everything. The bone
and the Jesus Christ would an intense would an intense life.
One of the things Lucy Hughes Howett, his biographer, emphasizes

(13:48):
is that he was really his writing at a real
visceral quality. Um, just in the way he like both
in the way he described bodies and like his romance books,
and like in the way he wrote about like it
was there's a lot of blood, a lot of a
lot of like. He was one of those like shove
your hands into the meat kind of writers. Um, which
is part of why he had such an impact on people.

(14:09):
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Um. Anyway, back to Gabrielle,
he'd almost been choked by his call while he was
being born. Uh. And because people are dumb, this was
the focus of much superstition. Baby is born this way
In Italy were believed to have the second site, and
the call itself was supposed to protect the person from drowning. Um. Now,
the call, if you weren't to wear is the amniotic
membrane that surrounds a fetus. Gabrielle's parents dried his and

(14:32):
put it in a little silk bag, which they hung
around his neck for his entire childhood. So that's cool,
that's so fascinating because if he was already born with
this idea that like this child, second site, this child
is special, Like how much of it is nature versus nurture?
Like how much of it was like I know I'm
special because everyone's telling me I'm special, And how much
of it is like you have a genius brain and

(14:53):
it just so happens that everyone already knew that about you, Like, like,
that's so fascinating. How much it was him living to
the standard that everyone had of him, and how much
of it was just like actual intelligence. I don't know
his his whole story has convinced me that my idea
towards how you should raise a child as correct, which

(15:15):
is when they're five, you put them out in the
woods with a knife and you just you leave them,
and if they come back home, if they find their
way back home, you know, then they get to continue
to grow up. And if not, well, you know, I
don't mean this is in a bad way. But I
don't want you to have kids anytime. So I'm just

(15:35):
gonna say, if if someone had done that, to get real,
he's not going to grow up think any special. You
know for sure, you're out in the woods with all
the other five year olds and you have to form
your own society if you're going to get back to
your parents. And then yes, and like, they must have
had an awful life. I mean not awful, but they
must have had very much like a complex about themselves

(15:58):
with this like special profit child around them all this time.
I don't I don't know much about how his siblings
thought of him. He was very charming, and you do
get the impression that everybody was kind of in love
with him when he was. He got away with it,
He got away with everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, his
most significant childhood memory was of one of his sisters

(16:18):
showing him a fake pearl, and he was so taken
with the object that he immediately started climbing the nearest
tree to steal an egg from a bird's nest, because
kids are fucking stupid. His parents rescued him before he
fell down and killed himself, and they freaked out about
the whole ordeal. Uh and I'm gonna quote from his
biography again. His parents were there, his mother trembling, his
father pale and threatening to beat him. He was lifted
back through the window and laid faint and shaking on

(16:40):
a bed. In retrospect, he saw them, the mother, father child,
as a secular trinity. His aunts hung over him, weeping
as the sorrowing Mary's wept over the dead Christ. But
the family's communion was interrupted. The crowd, now gathered in
the street, believing the child to be dead, began on
the chilling eulation's customary at funerals. Gabrielle's father picked him
up and carried him limp and white faced, back out
onto the balcony. The keening turned to shouts of joys.

(17:02):
Describing the incident an old age, do Nuncio made of
this his first balcony appearance important. He was marked out
from childhood, so he asserted for a public life. So
this is is like defining childhood. Memory is almost dying
on a tree, and like the whole town turning out
because they hear his parents and shouting and yeah, and
this is basic. This is he's recounting this from his memory.

(17:24):
So there's a there's an element of like loftiness that's
in this memory that is he he's a child. There's
no way there's every like every time you remember something,
it becomes distorted. So yes, by the time he's recounting this,
I'm sure it's not one factual, but I will say
that I went from like having this like Christ image
of everyone gathered around him and being sad, to like

(17:47):
the lion king, of like being on my pride rock
on this balcony. There's like lifting up this child, being
like this will save us. I think he sees himself
a little bit that way. Yeah, he definitely sees himself
as a Christ like figure. Um, and he was like
he was absolutely a narcissist. Like, there's not a doubt
in my mind that the way he recounts as his

(18:08):
memory is very telling him Now. His school reports from
the time describe him as very unbelieving in God and
as a boy, his favorite books where Paradise Lost in
Kine by Byron, both of which were epics about heroes
who rebel against God. Um. In school, he got in
trouble for telling his teachers, who were priests, that if
God existed, he was a villain or an imbecile who

(18:28):
created mankind to amuse himself by watching us suffer, which
is not an unreasonable theory. No, I feel the same
way a lot of the time. Yeah, I could. I
get on board with that. I feel like, if you're
at all a thoughtful person, you at least consider that
possibility at some point in your childhood's like what is
going on in this world? Yeah? I mean like when

(18:50):
I was twelve, I told my mom I didn't believe
in God because I just like I thought he was
so cruel and just amusing himself by making everyone suffer.
And then she started crying, and I was like, oh,
I'm too young to be to speak my mind. I
to keep it to myself. But I will say that's
a very normal thing for a child to think, especially
if he's being raised by God loving, god fearing people.

(19:10):
So yeah, yeah, I think even if you wind up
being very religious, at some point, if you pay attention
to the world, you have to wonder, is if there's
like a space guy in charge of all this, Is
he a fucking lunatic? Like what the hell is happening
up there? Yeah? Yeah, I think that's he's on the
money with at least I will agree at this point.

(19:31):
So far you got me there, Okay, one for you.
Gabrielle grew up in an exciting time for Italy. Giuseppe
Garibaldi had conquered Sicily in eighteen sixty with just a
thousand men, defeating the vastly superior military of the Bourbon Monarchy.
King Victor Emmanuel had united Italy is a single polity
for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Nationalism was sweeping all throughout Europe in this period, but

(19:53):
nowhere was it stronger than Italy, and nowhere in Italy
was it stronger than in the heart of young Gabrielle
the Nunzio. The idea of being Italian very new at
this point. For most of history you hadn't No nobody
would have cared like. Nobody thought of themselves as Italian.
You thought of yourself as I'm a Venetian, you know,
I'm I'm a Roman, I'm a whatever, a Florencian or
Florentine whatever they call people from Florence um. But there's

(20:16):
this new found like nationalism that was like very prize,
and from from an early age he really identifies with
this as an Italian, and he's kind of one of
the very first, like major Italian thinkers in the Italian
Peninsula to identify as an Italian. Um. Now, when he
was eleven years old, Gabrielle's parents sent him off to
a boarding school the sisso ganini sisogny Jesus. This is

(20:40):
like supposed to be my ancestral tongue, and I don't
know anything about it, So I apologize. I did not
know that. I'm my whole family's very Italian. We came
in like the eighteen nineties on a boat um to
the to the US. But yeah, they come from like
Transalpine gall like the real the chunk of the Alps
that's on the Italian side of the peninsula. That's fast.
Look at you now, yeah, look at me now. At

(21:04):
the time, sending your kid off to this boarding school
was like the thing to do for wealthy parents. Um.
But I think in a modern terms we would consider
this schooling experience to be profoundly abusive. One of the
school's rules was that new pupils could not return home,
not for holidays, not for summer vacations, not for any reason,
for their first four years from age eleven to fifteen,

(21:24):
Gabrielle is just in this school, totally isolated from this
very loving family that he's grown up in. So it
is from this like very safe, nurturing place where he's
like the center of the world to a cold boarding
school run by priests who show no warmth or emotion
or compassion to any of their charges. Yeah. He describes
the sunny and letters home as a prison. His only

(21:44):
escape was a daily walk around the grounds. His letters
home to his parents became almost fervidly loving and cloying,
agonizing over bright memories of his childhood and obsessing over
the pain of his absence. Lucy Hughes Hallett, Gabrielle's biographer,
suspects that this environment caused him to grow a shell
that was at least partly responsible for the fact that
he grew up into the sociopathists sociopath to ever path

(22:05):
Socie's um. That is yea great uh, it's a great line, um.
And I guess it must have been jarring to go
to a place that you weren't like revered constantly. Yeah,
and I guess it. It kind of destroys my thesis
that that making children survive alone in the woods for months,
would would stop them from becoming monsters. Well, your theory

(22:26):
is is that you would do that at a young age,
before they had a chance to think that they were
Messiah's But you're right, cheering. My theory is bulletproof. My
theory of chan theory is not. It's bulletproof. I will
say it's fascinating, and I will say to use a condom. Um.
But continue now. At a certain point, Gabrielle seems to

(22:48):
have replaced the affection he once expressed for his parents
with a love of Italy. At age thirteen, after two
years and this iss Ognany, he wrote that he had
two missions in life quote to teach the people to
love their country and to hate the enemies of Italy
to the death. Um. Now, I'm obviously not a child
development expert, but this does not seem like healthy behavior
to me. Um is a general rule. I think children

(23:08):
shouldn't focus on hating the enemies of their country to
the death. I feel like that's led people in bad directions. Um. Yeah,
gener yes, that's that's how you make the Nazis. Um.
Gabrielle's devotion to his nation was not, however, selfless. He
seems to have been obsessed with Italy, primarily as a

(23:28):
vessel to express his own greatness. One of his school
reports from the time notes he is entirely dedicated to
making a great name for himself. He signed one of
his earliest photographs, a picture that he sent home to
his parents with to glory. So yeah, right now, yeah,

(23:48):
any other child probably would have been ribbed mercilessly for
this kind of arrogance, but it must be said, Gabrielle
backed up his words with deeds. He learned to play
the violin and the flute, and to sing expertly. On holidays,
he would translate ancient Greek literature into Italian. He wrote ceaselessly,
and when study time ended every evening, he would collect
the excess lamp oil from the other boys so he
could stay up all night writing. He was always at

(24:10):
the very top of his class, and at one point
he wrote home to his mother that he was angry
he'd been allowed to skip a test because quote, I
am certain I would have taken the first place. At
age sixteen, he could speak and write fluently in Italian, Greek, Latin, English, French,
and Spanish. So he's not good so my theory about
nature nurture. Okay, there's definitely an element of him being intelligent,

(24:33):
very smart. He's a smart kid. But my, but it
is a very interesting idea. Just I don't know, like
you can be smart and not a fucking lunatic. Yes, um,
and he definitely don't know. We'll tell you where this goes.
But before we talk more about Gabrielle de Nunzio, we're
going to talk about some motherfucking products and a goddamn

(24:57):
service or three. It's gonna be great. Okay, are you
ready for this ship Sharne, I'm so fucking ready. Italian
Robert that I've just learned. Okay, then I'm going to
shut up Pizza. That's it's Robert. It's okay. It's okay
to be racist towards Italians. It was a Mario reference.

(25:20):
Gen Mario is so racist. Yes, it'd be incredibly so.
But it's fine. I'm shattered. My little self of playing
Mario growing up is really sad. Listeners, you can see
it eyes for seconds. Jesus Christ, let's go to ads.

(25:48):
We're back, all right. I will say that I would
play Yoshi a lot of the times, and Mario Karton,
not Mario. Yo, she was my guy. Have you gotten
all the anti Italian bigotry out of your system now, Shrine,
I didn't mean it, Robert, Roberto, Sorry, I'm thinking I do.

(26:10):
Like you should have known I was Italian by like
the frequency with which I gesture with my hands. Um,
you're allowed to say that, but I'm not. Am I No.
I think everyone is allowed to recognize that about Italian people. Well,
they say that about East from people too, that we're
very we're an expressive bunch. Well and like it does
like it like actually Italy is not super far from

(26:32):
the Middle East, Like it's just literally across like a
stream from cousins the world. Yes, yeah, yeah, that's there's
a reason why we were Every era I related to
my big fact Greek wedding. We're all the same. We're
all the whole region the Mediterranean is all the same.
We all show both our love and hatred with food.
Um very true, very true. Um. So the monthly turn sixteen,

(26:57):
Gabrielle's very first poem was published. It was an ode
to King Umberto um Now. Gabrielle's father, Francesco Polo, had
it printed and handed out to towns, folks who showed
up to take part in the king's birthday celebrations. And normally,
when someone's dad helps them publish their work, it's a
sheer sign that that work is no good. But this
was not the case with Gabrielle. Less than a year later,
his father helped him publish his first book of poetry,

(27:19):
called Primo Vera. Now, right out of the gate, it
was clear that Gabrielle de Nunzio was an incredible poet.
He sent copies of his book out to several of
the greatest Italian poets of the day, and most of
them wrote him back, um with like very positive things
to say about his work, And he's again, He's again.
He's seventeen at this point. Um. Yeah. A number of
them even invited him into their homes and gave him

(27:40):
in vice and counsel. Critics raved about his work. The
priests at his boarding school considered banning the book because
it had powerfully erotic subject matter, contained lines like with
trembling agitation, I laid you on the water lilies and
kissed you with convulsed lips, crying you are mine like
a viper, you writhed and groaned Um, so like the
priests like this is way too much fucking to allow

(28:02):
in our religious school field. His his his cause that
must have been like, yeah, this is what I wanted.
They didn't ban the book. Um, they wanted to, but
they decided that his use of Italian was so perfect
and his verse form was so exquisite that they couldn't
ban the book. It was just too well written. So like, yeah,
they decided to allow because like but like, funk, the

(28:23):
dude can write, Like that's how good the poem? Crazy
that is? Yeah, yeah, I mean especially for the time,
it's must have been a very revolutionary thing to even
write about. Well, you know, they are Italians, so yeah,
like this this this is like you're you're going like

(28:44):
there's always been more of this kind of like acceptance
of sort of like this the yeah, yeah, it is
a very Italian thing. Um, and I can't I'm not
gonna have a lot of quotes from his poems in here,
just because like a big part of them is that
he was such a good writer the Italian language. So
like the translations, you lose a lot, I think, Um,

(29:05):
but it's universally recognized that this guy is one of
the greatest poets in Italian history. And some people will say,
including he would say that he was the best Italian
writer since Dante. I thought that you said, including him,
he was. He was, he was sure of that. Most
modern like academics will say, no, he was one of
a number of people. But he's at a very high level,

(29:25):
like he's had a big impact on the language. I
just hate that he is so. I mean, it's fine
to be confident and know you're worth but to say
that you're the best writer since Dante, that's like such
a I don't know, that's wild. But so he was
never a victor or, he never suffered from um syndrome
of nepotism, like he even though he had such obvious

(29:47):
nepotism in his life, like like like advances and and privileges,
no one ever, no one ever saw that as any
kind of issue. I think his work is just so
good that like people are like, well fuck, Like, I mean, yeah,
he definitely comes from money. His dad is able to
help him. But like his work does seem to stand
on its own. Interesting, I don't I don't think that,

(30:10):
like like most academics who write about him now like
agree that he was a monster and a piece of ship,
but pretty much everyone agrees he was really good at
writing poems. Imagine if Hitler was good at painting. Yeah,
it's it's weird. You get this mix of dictators like
Saddam and Hitler who are like, I want to be
artists but suck at it. And then you get guys

(30:30):
like Stalin, Like Stalin was a poet in his youth
and was a really well regarded Georgian poet. Um, Like
he gave it up after a while, but he was
like considered to be very good and still is. Um,
I'm obsessed poetry. Poetry is so powerful, and I write poetry.
I think there's a there's a such a power in
using the written word, and it can garner so much

(30:52):
attention and in respect, especially back then because that wasn't
like the Internet. But uh but yeah, I it's it's
it's it's a fascinating thing too in this case. So
you have to separate the art from the artist. And
we we we go through right now with filmmaking, like
someone makes a great film when you find out they're
a pedophile. So it's like it's this balance of like

(31:16):
someone can make something so profound and so incredible, but
also be a complete waste of space or like a
piece of ship. So there's it's still going on now
and I think it's just fascinating to see it back
then as well. With poetry, I don't know, Yeah, And
it's to understand you have to understand what poetry was
back then too, because like now, there are people like

(31:37):
people like poems. Most everybody has at least a couple
of poems that they've enjoyed, but it's not like it's
not like a huge thing at the center of life
for us back then, Like to be honest, at least,
the feeling I get is that like poets at this
period is particularly in Europe, kind of occupy the space
culturally that like an Instagram or a YouTube star like
occupies now, Like they have these legions of utterly devoted fans,

(32:01):
like a pop star like they are like like the
closest you can like the best poets of the day,
guys like Byron, like the closest modern uh, like like
comparison to be someone like Beyonce like that, that's the
level of devotion that their fans have to know. It
was like that in the Middle East too. There's this
poet kind of from similar roots, like he came from privilege,

(32:22):
he was rich. His name is uh Um, He's Akabuni.
He's an amazing poet in the Middle East. He's Syrian
from Damascus, and he was regarded as like a celebrity.
He was. His book was like banned from so many
places because it was very erotic, very sexual and um
it was like everyone would read it as like a
like a like a political pamphlet that came out like

(32:43):
every it was like this like thing that everyone was
looking forward to, like it was this It's poetry was
like the mouthpiece of that generation for a long time,
and he would use it in a political way and
to talk about like I don't know, I think poetry
now is not what it was back then, and because
time is so different, but you know it's it's I
believe it's they were celebrating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so

(33:05):
like when when I talk about poets in this episode,
think about like a very high level pop star. You're
thinking about like the way people treat these guys. So
he's he starts reaching out to the most famous poets
in Italy with his work and they love it. Um
and one of them who is particularly taken as a
fellow named Nincione who's one of the biggest poets in
Italy at the time. UM And Nincioni takes him under

(33:27):
his wing and starts like tutoring him, and he introduces
him to a book by a guy named Thomas Carlyle.
The book is on heroes, and it's basically the thesis
statement of the great man theory of history that like
single exceptional individuals are the ones who move history, not
economic forces are like the actions of like mass groups
of people. Um. Like exceptional individuals are what make history.

(33:48):
And Gabrielle is absolutely taken with this theory um and
is of course convinced that he is supposed to be
one of those great men um and from a very
early age he was not. It was not just enough.
He's not just one of these people who like wants
to make a living with poetry or like just has
to express something. The thought of being anything but like
the very best poet writing in Italy is like hateful

(34:11):
to him. So early in their relationship he sends Ncioni
a book of his poetry with a letter asking if
his work is just charming or pleasing um, because if
that's the case, he was going to give up writing immediately. UM.
He said that little artists and little poets were abhorrent
to him, UM, and asks can I cover myself in glory? Um?
So like again, he can't stand the thought of just

(34:33):
being a good poet, Like that's not enough for this guy.
He's got to be the best. UM. By age eight teen,
Gabrielle had published three books of poetry. One was dedicated
to his recently deceased grandmother. The other was a second
edition of his first book, Primo Vera, with forty three
new poems and revisions to his old work. His father
paid the publishing costs for all these books, but the

(34:54):
Nunzio took responsibility for picking the font, the paper, the printer,
and in setting up distribution deals with bookstores. Both Donunzio
has had a hand in promoting the work, and the
differing ways they went about it say a lot about
their personalities. Francisco Polo like a normal person, through a
big banquet party in the middle of town to drum
up interest in the book. Gabrielle, being a narcissistic maniac,
sent an anonymous letter to the editor of a poetry

(35:16):
magazine in Florence, lamenting that Gabrielle de Nunzio, the young
poet already noted in the Republic of Letters in his words,
had died after falling off of a horse. So he
sends a letter to like a big poetry poetry critic
and claims that, like, hey, this guy gabriel who wrote
this book, he's dead now. Um yeah, well he does

(35:37):
this because guys like Shelley and Byron, poets who died
very young after publishing you know, a gainful of books,
were like the biggest poets in Europe at the time.
They had these huge cults of fans because they died young. Um.
And so he knows that like if like if it's
just the story of like a young poet who's pretty
good and he's publishing a new book of poetry, like,
he'll sell some copies, people will talk about it, but

(35:59):
it's not going to be a huge deal. But if
he's a great poet who dies tragically young, that's a
huge deal. Um. And it gets treated that way by
the editor. Like a bunch of magazines start writing articles
about this this dead young poet. They like call him
things like the last born of the muses like he's
suddenly like the fact that he's believed to have died
young elevates his work instantly in Italy and he develops

(36:22):
this huge culti fan base. And eventually Gabrielle corrects the
error and basically plays it off as if, oh, this
must have been someone must have just gotten their wires crossed,
and like, since you incorrect information and you know it's
the eighteen eighties, Like honestly, I respect this. This is
level uh influencer, Like like I don't know that that's

(36:44):
one way to get a following. Back in the day
there was no Instagram. You couldn't you know what I mean?
Like you fake your death? Yeah, he fakes his death.
He and then and it it turns what would have
been kind of a modestly successful book of poems into
a national news story. So as he turns eighteen, Brial
de Nunzio is already famous um and already like very
well regarded, and of course he was already fucking um

(37:07):
As a young teen, his teachers had noticed that on
walks through town, Gabrielle constantly stared at young women. At
age fourteen, he spent a few days in Florence with
a family friend and wound up taking that guy's seventeen
year old daughter to the Museum of Archaeology and making
out with her in public. Shortly thereafter, on a school
trip to another town, he pawned his grandfather's gold watch
to pay for a hooker so he could lose his virginity.

(37:29):
Yeah he is, he is. He just dives right into fucking.
You cannot stop this guy from fucking, which gets exactly
as rape as as that sentence should make it. See
yeah yeah uh. The summer after he was finally allowed
to go back to Pescara at age eighteen, he or
at age sixteen, sorry, he flirted constantly with every woman
in town. He found himself particularly enamored with a young

(37:52):
peasant girl. She, unfortunately was not enamored with him, so
he hunted her down, chased her into a vineyard, shoved
her to the ground, and raped her. Gabrielle was quite
proud of this and wrote about it openly. He had
a lifelong obsession with raping poor women, particularly servant girls. Um,
and it's actually hard to tell how often he did
it because the act was such a fetish for him
that he also fantasized about it regularly, as I am

(38:18):
because when you read when you read that poetry verse
like before the break was when she was like writhing
and whatever, I was like in my brain, in my brain,
I was like, that sounds rapy, and this makes so
much sense in the worst way. I am disgusted that
I agree with some of the points that you made earlier.

(38:39):
He's a very rapey guy, is a big part of
his personality. Oh god, we're talking about the guy who
invented fascism. But that's the thing. You can be a
ladies man and not be rapy like that's absolutely a
rapy ladies man is the the worst kind of ladies
man in the Oh god, there's a lot of class

(39:01):
issues wrapped up in this because he doesn't at least
I don't. I'm not aware of him. I don't think
he raped upper class women, wealthy women, famous women, and
he had would have. He had hundreds of affairs with
the most famous women of the era and was considered
to be a very a very great like romancer. His
particular fetish was in raping poor women like that is

(39:21):
just appalling, I mean, not really disgusting, um horrible Yeah,
it's horrible because he's regarded as this womanizer, a seducer,
and also this rape fantasy of poor people is just
regards as a fetish because he has all these other qualities.
Well in the well. But the thing is, though, it's

(39:43):
a little more complicated than that, not that it's morally complicated.
It's horrible, but at the time, number one, most men
who he would have talked about that he wouldn't have
hid the fact that he was forcing himself on these
poor women, and they wouldn't have really thought it was bad,
Like that's kind of like it's a it's a rape
eat time and place Italy in this period, and like

(40:03):
not just Italy obviously, like everywhere in the world. No, no,
I mean you rape and pillows. That was like how
you were taught to show yourself as a man. It's fine,
we're not all the way past that now, obviously. Um
So it was worse back then, and he would not
have this was not like a dark secret of his
is the point, Like, this is the thing that he
was like, Yeah, I'm a ladies man. I romance these women.

(40:25):
I forced myself on these women. That's just what a
ladies man do. Like, that's that's the attitude with which
for all the classes, even if they don't want you
to kind of especially if they don't want me to. Yeah.
At ag eight teen, Gabrielle met Giselda, the daughter of
a schoolmaster in Florence. When he first met her, she
was sobbing because she'd just seen the corpse of a

(40:46):
little girl who'd frozen to death. This really turned Gabrielle on.
They started dating and fucking. In his early letters to her,
he would write about how much the sight of her
tears turned him on. I want to make those tears
fall again, um Lucy Hughes Howett writes quote. He luxuriated
in the idea of her unhappiness. He even told her
how much he would like to see her corpse. He
loved it that she was deathly pale, like the blessed Damosel,

(41:08):
the dead girl of Rosetti's famous poem in painting, but
he would have preferred her even paler. He told her
that he would go around all the florists in the city,
fill the carriage with assordid flowers to come and bury
her beneath them. Yes, to bury you. I want to
make you die. He wrote to Tito Zuccone, not as
one might expect, promising to cherish and protect Tito's daughter,
but announcing I and Elda cannot live long. Both he

(41:30):
and Giselda were, so far as we know, in perfectly
good health. Yet De Nunzio wrote, our cold bodies will
fall to the earth to feed the flowers, and we
will be swept away unconscious Adams and the irresistible currents
of the universal force. M hmm, I want you even pale,
or I want you did some red flags? Huh, Well, okay,

(41:52):
Unfortunately I I dated someone that told me he thought
I was attractive when I was when I cried. And
I think, like, it's such a weird thing to say
to someone, like to be like I think girls are
hot when they cry, or like I'm turned on by
girls crying. Um, there's elements of something like, I mean,
I guess there is a beauty to tears. I'm sucked up.

(42:15):
I don't know. I think like it's complicated, like you're
not a bad person, if like, obviously you're not a
bad person. I have been coating my therapist. I don't
want to use the therapist, but I he's also in necrophiliac.
Then like he's also into like dead business. You know,
I don't know. I wouldn't say that because I don't
think that's I think it's more that the art. If

(42:37):
he's very much into classical and medieval art and that
sort of art. There's like this death obsession because death
was such a part of the Middle Ages, and there's
a lot of paintings and poems and works of about
like focused around dead women. Um, like fucking Dante is
obsessed with his dead chick um that he only met twice.
Like it's it's a thing. And so it's like, now

(42:58):
if somebody's like fantasy, yeah, I would sa yeah, that
that's probably what that dudes into. But at the time
was probably just resizing this idea of of of I
don't know, losing your life, romantic death. Yeah, Like there's
just it's there's so much culturally wrapped up in it
that like you really honestly can't compare it to anything
today because like we don't have those same sort of

(43:19):
they're not nearly as powerful as they were then. Um,
now you know what, won't fantasize about your dead body.
That's a bad way to lead into adsum an ad
break will never get raped by an AD break. Oh god,
you know what, won't molest peasant girls in a field? Jesus,

(43:41):
I hope the ad that comes up is like, I
don't know, fucking what do you get sponsored by? Like,
don add gabriel to Nucio. Oh boy, okay, let's just
go to products. We're back. I mean the first break

(44:05):
started with me being bigoted, racist against Mario or like
realizing that Mario is tainted forever, and the next one
lead it up to me just I'm sad. Yeah, that's
that's the do Nunzio effect. Okay, co continue, I'm sorry.

(44:26):
Over the two years that they were together, Gabrielle wrote
Giselda five letters. They actually spent very little time in
each other's company. Shortly after hooking up, he graduated and
wound up traveling all around Italy, launching his career as
a writer. He continued to write her dizzyingly passionate love letters,
but ignored all of her pleading requests to visit her
in Florence. Sometimes he would even pass by the city

(44:46):
on journeys to other places without diverting himself to visit
this woman. He claimed to love. The fact that he
wasn't all that into seeing her didn't stop him from
giving her orders on what to wear only black. But
by eighty three he was tired of the relationship, and
gradually his letters to her dwindled off into nothing. Gabrielle
was never able to actually break off things with anyone.
He just sort of ghosted them after spending months and

(45:07):
even years writing tens of thousands of passionate odes to
their bodies. This would prove to be a lifelong habit
for the poet and writer. By his own count, Gabrielle
betted around a thousand women in his lifetime, and this
is probably not far from accurate. He developed a reputation
for being not just a great seducer of women, but
for abandoning them and breaking their heart. His lovers would
repeatedly attempt suicide, and a number of them probably succeeded.

(45:28):
One of the reasons I really love Lucy Hughes Hallett's
biography of Gabrielle Um is that she she's a woman,
and she brings a woman's perspective to the way this
this guy dealt with his relationships, and I'm very interested
in the way she writes about him, because she's very
detailed and thorough um and clearly as an appreciator of
his work, but is also utterly unsparing and sort of

(45:49):
analyzing this him as a human being. She writes at
one point quote the more unhappy a woman was, the
more interesting to him she became. The more he tantalized
Elda with promised visits, which were repeated he deferred, the
more adorable her image seemed to him. You must be sad,
immensely sad, my poor angel, he wrote, you will be
thinking of me with desperate desire. The idea of her

(46:09):
disappointment denied his savage kisses was one he liked to
dwell on seeing her so seldom. She was really in
no position to report on how pale and one elder
really was, But he addressed her in a rapture of
sadistic pity as my palladophilia, my poor betrayed virgin. So
he's like into ignoring and mystery, emotional manipulator like, and

(46:29):
he's a fundamentally abusive person. He's a very abusive like
emotionally abusive person. Uh and ghosting someone and like there's
a there's a term called love bombing where you're like
showering someone with all this affection and everything. Then you're
just like gone. And it's a huge form of emotional
manipulation because you make them addicted to you because every time,

(46:50):
and it's like scientifically proven that whenever this person reaches
out again, your cortisol goes up, and your cortisol is
like your stress hormone, and it's like literally the same
way an addict reacts to an addiction. So he's literally
making all these women addicted to him, and it's conniving
and disgustingly brilliant because that's what a really good emotional

(47:11):
abuser does. Um. But it's one of the things that's
really hard about thinking, like I most of at this
point in my life, just because of the way my
career and my travel has gone, like most of my
relationships have have wound up being long distance for some
particular point, and that's like a really that's one of
the things that's like really tough about them is there
is this like addictive sort of like nature to the

(47:34):
relationship where you're apart and then like you're together and
you get this like massive oxytocin release and then like
like it's hard not to. I don't know, Like it's
one of those things that I always wonder about, like
because it's it's it's just it's difficult to do that
and not like funk it up and not hurt the

(47:54):
other or or get hurt yourself, like both of those
things happen. Like I guess they're hard, yeah, because when
when the relationship is established as this, like I don't know,
like it's it's it's hard to describe it as anything
but an addiction because there's like this huge overwhelming release
of happiness and everything when you're together and then you're not,
and then especially if there's someone that's constantly pulling the

(48:16):
rug from under you're pulling away constantly, that only feeds
the addiction for the other person. So in this case
in particular, I think, I mean, like the my relationship
that I've kind of like the closest thing I've had
to a relationship was long distance, so I can kind
of relate to what you're experiencing as far as like
when you're a part, it's like you're just waiting to
be with them again, and you're waiting for that like

(48:37):
basically a hit. And then as soon as you get it,
you're good. Even if they're just like replying to a
message or whatever, it's like you're constantly needing that um
like streamline of like like I don't know um. But
then in his case, he's it's one side addiction. He's
completely fine. I don't think he remains anything he writes.

(48:57):
He he is not at all emotionally in age, which
is part of what makes it abusive. Right, if you've
got two people and you're both dealing with that thing
and you're emotionally into each other, that's not abusive. But
if you number one. He also doesn't. In no way
does this need to be a long distance relationship. He's
very well off and successful from an early age and
absolutely could at least visit her regularly. Like there's times

(49:21):
where he's like an hour away and he just doesn't
get like like like he's it's honestly, he probably gets
turned on with having this kind of power. He knows
he has power over these women, and he knows that
he has emotional abuse has made them addicted to him
and his presence even to be not there, and that
probably turns him on more than any type of sex,

(49:43):
in my opinion, like he's absolutely sitting there jacking off
as he writes about how sad he thinks, Like that's
that's what he's into here, and that's why he's a sociopath,
because you're just yeah wow. In n when Gabrielle was
very famous and renowned, not just in Italy but all
across Europe, Giselda wrote him and asked for permission to
sell the letters that he'd sent her. She needed the

(50:05):
money to give to her son so he could get married.
Gabrielle refused her this and instead asked her to hand
over the letters to his lawyer. So like he just
doesn't doesn't give a ship, Like he just stops writing
this woman like and it completely cuts her off without
even like talking to her about just one day, we're
just done, like and he doesn't even tell her we're done.
She just stops getting letters and never hears from him again. So,

(50:29):
like most great men in history, Gabrielle treated the women
and indeed the men in his life like trash. But
this did nothing to halt the meteoric growth of his career.
He went to Rome, where he studied literature, published more poems,
and started writing books. In eighteen eighty two, he wrote
The Innocent, a book about a dandy and fun hungry
man named Tulio her Mill who cheats constantly on his
saintly wife until she cheats on him and finally gets pregnant.

(50:51):
In eighteen eighty nine he published Il Piacere considered the
manifesto of Italian Decatentismo, which is more or less what
it sounds like and I'm gonna read you two paragraphs
from Wikipedia's summary of this book. Girard, an aristocrat, is
in mourning over the death of his mistress Leonara. He
listens to tape recordings of them having sex and records

(51:12):
his recollections of the day he met Leonora for the
first time at the Carnival of Venice many years ago,
on a day he felt sexually adventurous. In a flashback,
we see him meet her on the street, introducing himself
as Giacomo Casanova. After chasing her through the city, he
finds her waiting for him behind a column in a passageway,
where he lifts her dress and has sex with her.
Later that day, in an Opium dem after having a smoke,
they are initiated by Hanani. In The Cosmic Secrets, of

(51:34):
pleasure and join in the threesome with her. Back in
the present, Girard and Fiarrella dress Leonora's naked body for
her funeral. When Ursula and Edmund, Leonora's children from another man,
arrived for the funeral, Girard, who has not seen either
of them for ten years, at first mistakes Ursula for Leonara.
Girard is now legal guardian to both until they come
of age and a sudden fit, Edmund cries out that
his mother was only a whore and suffers an epileptic attack.

(51:56):
He has calmed down by his sister breastfeeding him like
their mother did. Later is Fiarrella, who repeatedly breastfeeds him
and with whom he has his first sex. That's just
two paragraphs. It goes on like that. That's the kind
of books this guy writes like they're the smuttiest smut
to ever. I mean, I'm about over the phrase fun
hungry that you use maybe five minutes ago. He is

(52:16):
very fun hungry, writing fundamentally fun hungry. Is Gabrielle de Nunzio.
That is that is twisted. Yeah, but they're wildly successful,
I mean because because it's it's what's the words, they're
the horniest books ever in. Everyone's horny. Yeah, everyone's fun
hungry when you want it, when you when we're honest,

(52:37):
everyone's fun. Everybody's fun hungry, and Gabrielle is just leaning
into it. Like you guys want horny books, I'll write
the horniest fucking books anyone's ever written. People are sucking
each other's sucking each other. Yeah, it's just like the
most depraved, decadent ship he can think of. But for

(52:58):
but for his for his legion of Allower is there
probably like this is like from his real experience, Like
he probably did all this stuff because he's like this
amazing womanizer. I mean he made He probably did a
lot of this stuff to be like, yeah he was.
He didn't have a lot of boundaries. I'm gonna show you.
I'm gonna show you his picture at the end of
this episode. We'll talk about that. Um. He was not

(53:20):
considered good looking though um. Most of Gabrielle's protagonists were aristocrats,
though he himself was not. It's notable that his only
marriage was to Maria de Galisi, a duchess, and probably
because marrying her technically made him an aristocrat. To he
had three children with her, and Christ knows how many
with other random lovers. He never took care of any
of these kids. And I'm gonna quote from the New

(53:41):
York Times wildly generous. He bestowed upon them custom made
gifts by buccal Letti and famous guys with flamboyant nicknames
that bring him, that bring him mind, a pantheon of
Olympic goddesses bess Alisa, Nike, Barbarrella and of course core
At the outrageous Marchesa Kasati. Um. Yeah. I don't know
who any of these people are, but he he's like
he's always got these loving nicknames that are like really

(54:04):
like like like out of this world flamboyant, and he
gives he spends thousands of of of dollars essentially on
fancy gifts for whoever he's fucking before he abandons them
love bombing. Yeah. The Nunzio was wildly successful and made
fortunes from his writing, but he spent those fortunes even
faster than he could accumulate them. I found a rite

(54:25):
up on his life on the Rake of Fashion and
Style focused magazine, um that makes it clear just how
he managed this quote. He could shop until he didn't
drop endless trips to the tailor, thousands of books, and
he once even acquired twenty two dogs and eight horses
all in one purchase. When he stayed in hotels, he
always traveled with his own sheets. I am, as he
once explained with characteristic self assuredness, a better decorator and

(54:46):
a pholsterer than I am a poet or novelist. Indeed,
at the turn of the century, when his marriage into aristocracy,
along with his journalism and plays, afforded him considerable wealth,
he habitually lived in rented furnished houses that, at great
expense he immediately refurbished extravagant fashion or is he put
it in a style gorgeous enough to be worthy of
a Renaissance lord, which involved filling his properties with mock

(55:07):
sixteenth century furniture of his own design. He's that guy.
I mean, I think that's really funny that he's like,
I'm an even better upholsterer or and decorator, that I
am a poet, Like you think I'm good at this, Well, God,
I'm not good. I'm not bad at anything. Basically, Yes,
the other people in Gabrielle's life were more distractions to

(55:28):
him than real human beings. At one point, when he
already had eight horses, he spent the money given to
him specifically to feed his kids on buying a new horse.
By eight three, he was thirty years old and living
in Naples to avoid his creditors because he was just
in huge debt all the time. He'd long since abandoned
his wife and all three children, as well as Elvira Fraternali,
a woman he lived with and loved for eight years.

(55:49):
He broke up with her to move in with a
Sicilian princess. He was actually charged with adultery for this
and almost went to jail for fucking this princess writing fucking.
If anyone should go to jail for fucking, it's him. Yeah, yes,
if anyone should, I'm not normally as long as there's consent,
well actually there, I mean he should have got to.
If anyone should go to jail for any kind of fucking,

(56:09):
it's him. Yeah, it's him. When writing novels and poetry
wasn't enough to cover his debts, de Nunzio wrote for
tabloids and gossip rags. He used his media connections to
do things like tip off gossip journalists about when and
where he would publicly be breaking up with one of
his lovers. He started telling fanciful lies that he'd been
born aboard a boat, that he had a glass eye,
that he had to bottom ribs removed so he could

(56:29):
suck his own dick. Yes, Gabrielle de Nunzio is the
origin of that? Is he really? Yeah? Yeah, that's where
that's that's the first time I think we come across it. Yeah,
he is a ship ahead. But he did start so
many things, maybe the first poster he started, Oh my god,
he's wow. I mean yeah, I mean all he's definitely

(56:55):
of the belief of, like, any press is good press.
So yes, damn, that's just and his life kind of
proves that that's true. There's actually I found a couple
of articles comparing him to Donald Trump, and while he's
a much more talented person than Trump, um, and did
succeed on his own merits um there, that's not completely ludicrous,

(57:16):
as we'll get to, like, there's some there's actually some
comparisons between the two men. Now, Gabrielle's maxim was one
must make one's life as one makes a work of art,
as the Rake notes he was quote a die hard
disciple of Baldassari Castiglione, the author of a sixteenth century book,
The Book of the Courtier, in which the writer posited
what he referred to as the universal rule in all
human affairs spressa, a facade of nonchalance that concealed the

(57:40):
artistry required to pull off challenges with a plum, regarded
even at the time as both romantic and deceptive, and
almost equal measure. Do Nunzio clearly lived out Castiglione's doctrine,
which was described disparagingly by Henry James as beauty at
any price, beauty appealing alike to the sense and the mind.
So you would not, however, mistake Gabrielle de Nunzio for beautiful.

(58:00):
By age thirty, he was completely bald. He was he was.
He was, to his credit, very physically fit and muscular,
but his teeth were disgusting, his breath was horrible, and
his voice was high pitched and considered weird by all
who heard it. Leand de Poui, famous Parisian Cortison met
him once on a visit to Florence. Here's how she
described him. There before me was a frightful gnome with

(58:21):
red rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth,
bad breath, the manners of a mountebank, and the reputation,
nevertheless for being a ladies man. He just described like
a goblet looking gred though. This is guy, This is
the guy that no one can't bone except for the
women he sexually. I don't know you got I am livid.

(58:47):
Why I'm so much more angrier than I would be
if he was good looking? But I am I'm so angry. Yeah,
well it's it's it's because in my brain I rationalized, like,
if you're a ladies man and you're good looking, you
can get away with it, Like you can get away
with so much ship behavior if you're a good looking person,

(59:08):
man or woman or anything. If you're a good looking
to get away with ship, it's like scientifically proven, you
have an easier life. Whatever. But if you like after
your your a piece of ship, and you like, are
repulsive by this description, like Jesus, it's it's remarkable. Um,
and I don't really understand. And then a breath smelled,

(59:28):
why would you ever be uh? Like? I mean to
be honest, Sherine A big part of it just you
have to understand, like he's he's a great poet, Like
that's probably a lot of why is he's like you
can be like we almost can't. Like maybe in this context,
it's like you can be like a really talented musician, right,
but yeah, maybe, like you know, Ross, it's like you

(59:51):
hear stories about like some famous rock stars who just
didn't shower, and we're like these nasty like drug addicts,
but like everybody because like their music was really good
and that there's just like something about that that can
overcome an odious other aspects of your personality. You know,
I will say, I will say talent and ambition or
maybe ambition, in my opinion, is probably the most attractive quality,

(01:00:14):
but I just can't get over all the other things
that description, I mean, repulsive description of a human being
like that is I would say, sorry, I know, I'm
just mad, go ahead. I mean, I would say, you
have to remember. One thing that kind of helps me
is like look at pictures of like John Lennon with

(01:00:35):
his shirt off, and remember that there was a time
when everyone in the everyone in the world basically wanted
to funk John Lennon um and like just take a
look at that guy shirtless, Like hard to get your
head around it, but like it's because of the artistic
not just how his music on its own, but also
the cultural like like platform he stood on. So we

(01:00:57):
we revere these artists. There are as these really artistic
beautiful souls. Not maybe not beautiful in the in Gabrielle's
definitely not beautiful. He's revered. Yeah, are you gonna show
me a photo? Oh yeah, and a little bit so
I'm so excited. Despite his looks, Gabrielle managed to sleep

(01:01:21):
with many of the most beautiful women in Europe, and
the vast majority of the sex was consensual. His habitual
rape seemed to be mostly of poorer women. His housekeeper
was required to have sex with him three times a day,
whether she wanted to or not. Gabrielle kept his homes
bizarrely warm at tropical temperatures, so he could wear only
a light, thin kimono style robe with the special hole
in the fabric for his dick. He had customed shoes

(01:01:42):
shaped like penises. You almost missed the penis. Shoes are
shaped like penises. This gets more absurd by the sucking second.
Are you shipping me. You know, maybe I haven't emphasized enough.
He's Italian. Does that explain the penis shoes? I'm sorry,
do you have? Of course, when you when you're Italian

(01:02:07):
age eighteen, you get your penis shoes. That's just a
part of being Italian. I the word Italy means an
ancient Etruscan land of penissues. Well, yeah, he does a
little bit now. Gabrielle was, above all else, a genius
at brand management. He knew how to make Gabrielle de
Nunzio into a star and to keep himself in the headlines.

(01:02:29):
It was crucial to him that people believe him capable
of literally anything, and so, in pursuit of that end,
he ran for the Italian Parliament in eighteen ninety seven
as an independent. He called himself the candidate for Beauty
and ran on a platform of pushing the politics of poetry.
A big fan of Nietzsche, he declared that he was
beyond right and left, as I am beyond good and evil.

(01:02:50):
In a way, Gabrielle was kind of a prototype for
Donald Trump, as well as Adolf Hitler, the first man
to take his literary fame and pop culture cash a
and turn it into political power. But when it came
to actually staying in power, do Nunzio decided he really
hated politics. He served one term and never held any
kind of legitimate public office. Again. So he's like the
first guy to take like he's just a famous guy

(01:03:11):
for being famous mostly yeah, like his I mean, he's
a great poet, but like he's he's also really just
famous for being a celebrity. And he turns that into
political power, and that's really hasn't been done, you know,
in the way that he did it. Um, that is fascinating.
Also side note that I I'm still thinking about the kimono.
I'm sorry, um, because if the temperatures are so high

(01:03:34):
and that it keeps in this tropical level, I just
I watched Curb Your Curb, Curb Your Enthusiasm. I watched
that for the first time recently. All I'm all caught up.
But there's this one episode with like, uh Leon his roommate,
fucking yoga teacher, a high yoga teacher. Apparently uh warmer

(01:03:55):
temperatures accorinth this episode good for orgasms, so maybe he
was onto something. Maybe. Yeah, then again, I'm sorry, I
U but and I will say like this was not
like he was not like a one sided sort of
lover um like he was. He was real into Connor
lingus and wrote about it. I mean it pages sometimes
he said he consensual, it's most of it. Most of

(01:04:17):
the people that have wanted to have sex with him,
So um, it's yeah. But yeah, I mean, like, would
you say that his use of like his brand of
narcissistic politics, like using his platform to become a politician,
Like was that not what like Reagan did? Or like
or Reagan? Sorry, I say, yeah, I just pronounced. I

(01:04:38):
say how I think it's it's pronounced. He was my
second language, leave me alone. Yeah, like Reagan, Like since
de Nunzio, a lot of people have done that. Um,
but he's kind of he first thing, the first Yeah,
who's just really mostly famous for his fame and then
takes turns that into a political career. And this is
not the end of his political career, just his end
as an elected political a leader. So keep that in mind. Yeah,

(01:05:03):
I even stepped foot into the fascism. Fascism Jesus were
there's so much about this guy. His debts were so
outrageous by nineteen ten that do Nunzio was forced to
flee Italy for Paris, where he made a film, collaborated
with some of the greatest artists of the day, and
became friends with Proust. American whiskey heiress Natalie Barney wrote
about this time quote, he was the rage. A woman

(01:05:24):
who had not slept with him made herself ridiculed. He
even managed to bed Romayne Brooks, a famous lesbian artist,
who wound up painting his portrait. So like, again, you
really can't. It's hard to understand, like the level of
fame to where like and a famous lesbian would be like, yeah,
I gotta suck him, Like, I just gotta see what's
going on there. It's crazy, it's wild. Yes, actually you'll

(01:05:50):
see it. Um, you'll get a cent for the size. Yeah,
it's in like a banana hammock in the picture I'm
going to show you. And it's not smart. I will
I'll say at um. As the years in Paris ticked along,
Gabrielle found himself less and less enthralled with high society
and more obsessed with the war clouds on the horizon.
The actual start of World War One came as a

(01:06:11):
surprise to most but for years prior to the war,
every observant person in Europe had been aware that some
sort of violent conflict was very nearly like coming. Artists
who recognized this wound up in one of two camps.
Many dreaded it and worked to do all they could
to pull Europe back from the Precipice. Gabrielle, however, wound
up in another camp. He saw it as his duty,
as a lover of beauty, to push Europe into calamity.

(01:06:32):
This seems insane to us now, and it is fucking crazy,
But the Nunzio was not alone in this. I'm gonna
read again from Lucy Hughes Hollett's biography quote and the
political rhetoric and poetry of the period. Civilian existence is gray, dim,
morally compromised, and physically grubby. The battlefield, by contrast, is bright,
a glitter with weapons and flashing with joy. Above all,

(01:06:52):
it is clean. When Britain declared war, Rupert Brooke proclaimed
his gladness to leave the sick hearts that honor could
not move and half men and their dirty songs and dreary.
Like de Nunzio, Brooks saw the war as a saving
freshness into which he could plunge as swimmers into cleanness
leaping in Germany, Thomas Man welcomed the conflict as a
purging and a liberation. Let the storm come, cried the

(01:07:14):
Hungarian does. So, I'm not even gonna try to pronounce
this guy's last name and sweep out our salons. So like,
there's this idea that like society is decadent. There's all
these like young, like lazy, like like children of privilege
sitting around drinking coffee and talking about politics. We need
a war to kill a bunch of them and make
the others into better people, clean out these crowded cities.

(01:07:36):
That's like a sizeable chunk of particularly, Like the intelligencia
in this period is into this idea. Yeah, yeah, they
kind of are. Um. Gabrielle de Nunzio had become a
fervent nationalist by this point, an adherent of a school
of Italian thought that believed the new nation new to
reabsorb or conquer a number of states that we're currently

(01:07:57):
its neighbors. But historically they believed Italian this included much
of what became Yugoslavia. But Gabrielle didn't just see the
coming war as a chance for italyad again lost territory.
He saw it as a beautiful aesthetic endeavor in its
own right. He believed that quote a great conflict of
the races would purge society of its weak elements as
soon as the guns started pounding. In nineteen fourteen, while

(01:08:19):
Gabrielle was still living in France, he had a friend
drive him as close to the front lines as he
could possibly get. They wound up in a place called Rhems,
where German artillery had just destroyed an ancient and famous cathedral,
taking a valet and several suitcases full of clothing with him.
Of course, Gabrielle wound up in the middle of the
front line, watching artillery land just a few hundred meters
ahead of him, and seeing the corpses of men and

(01:08:39):
animals rotting in the mud. He immediately grabbed souvenirs and
started taking fastidious notes. He used these notes to write
an article about the German vandalism of the Rhems Cathedral.
He hadn't actually watched the cathedral's destruction, but he had
no problem lying in describing how with his own eyes
he'd watched them burn it. Gabrielle de Nunzio despised Germans,
considering them a barbaric and disgusting pace. The goal of

(01:09:00):
his article was to try and push his nation into
joining with France and Great Britain in the war. Now,
Italy had entered World War One as an ally of Germany,
but no one in the country was particularly interested in
actually entering the war on Germany's side. In fact, most
of the country wanted to stay out of the war entirely.
Given how World War One went, this was not a
bad call. But Gabrielle wanted Italy to go to war

(01:09:21):
more than he'd ever wanted anything in his entire life,
and he set at once to the task of dragging
his country with him. As soon as he got back
from Italy in mid nineteen fifteen, he began giving speeches,
and I'm going to quote from an article in The
New Republic about this quote. Italy was no longer a
pension de familia of museum, but a living nation, he
declared in one interventionalist, demagoguic speech to General Acclaim, the

(01:09:44):
prospect of mass deaths thrilled him. Benedito Kross was repelled
by his seeming to enjoy war, even to enjoy slaughter,
as he was. How it puts it, the politics of
beauty was revealing itself as a politics of blood. Among
his ardent supporters where Marinetti's futurists, who had recognized early
on that for all his fondness for classical art and
medieval knickknacks do, Nunzio was a fellow modern, a poet

(01:10:04):
who rhapsodized over warships and steel works, and who set
a higher value on energy than he did on virtue.
Genoa is where he first started haranguing the masses towards apocalypse,
and his first four days there he spoke seven times.
The Italian government itself was torn over the question of war.
The Queen Mother desired it dearly, but most of the
elected leaders were firmly against the idea. They hated that
Denunzio was ranting about the need to destroy Germany while

(01:10:26):
they carried on secret negotiations to try to plot the
national course. Standing on balconies and shouting to increasingly large crowds,
he urged his countrymen to pull out of the Triple
Alliance and join the Entent with France, Britain and Russia.
He was not content just to attack Germany and make
the case for war. Gabrielle de Nunzio made a habit
of viciously attacking any politician who spoke out against his whims.

(01:10:47):
He called them cowards and appeasers, the enemies within. He said,
the old order reeks and must be utterly destroyed. Sweep
away all the filth into the sewer with all that
is vile. He called the current political order infected, diseased, corrupt, defiled,
and he said the only solution was cauterization. The corruption
must be burned out. Gabrielle called repeatedly for a holocaust

(01:11:07):
to cleanse the body politic. Holocaust was in fact one
of his most frequently used words, and in a positive sense.
Foreign reporters who watched him were almost as enraptured as
the crowds. Jean Carere, a French reporter, wrote, never have
I seen an orator advanced before the public with such composure.
Standing on his improvised tribune, he was magnificently alone of
a marble pallor with two eyes aflame. And when Gabrielle

(01:11:30):
spoke to crowds, they didn't just listen, they acted in
May nineteen fifteen, he made it to Rome and gave
what would become one of his most infamous tirades. And
I'm gonna quote from Lucy Hughes Hallett again. He attacked
the advocates of peace in vitriolic terms. The very air
of Rome's stank with their treachery. Those who still hung
back from war were traitors, assassins of the Patria Italy's executioners.

(01:11:51):
Geo Liddi, one of these politicians he hated, was strangling
the nation with a Prussian rope. Do Nunzio was openly
advocating violent attacks on the people's elected represent innatives. He
called upon the Roman mob to take the law into
their own hands. He urged his listeners to attack the
appeasers who licked the boots on sweaty Prussian feet. He
called for stonings and arson. His rhetoric was becoming ever
more frenzied. I tell you there is treason here in Rome.

(01:12:14):
We were being sold like a herd of diseased cattle.
He urged the people to hunt down anti war deputies
form squads. Squadrow was one of the many words the
fascists would pick up from him. Lie in wait, seize them,
capture them. An observer reports that the applause when he
paused was like a storm. When he resumed to denounce
Geolyddi and ever more vituperative terms, that diabolical old blubber

(01:12:34):
lipped hangman, the storm was transformed into a cyclone. Do
Nunzio was high on his own eloquence. On the frenzy
of the crowds, he flattered and inflamed, and on the
prospect of blood. Fifty two years old, he extolled the
ruthless purity of youth. A poet whose life's work had
been the threading together of obscure and beautiful words, he
inveighed against verbiage and called for action, swift, cruel if
need be, and unambiguous. It is not the time for speaking,

(01:12:55):
but for doing. He ended by leading the crowd in
an anthem beating time with his little hand at white hands,
while the people below bellowed out the reframe. Let us
join the cohord. We are ready to die. Italy has
called damn. Yeah, fame is terrifying. You're seeing some of
the fascists of creep in here. Yeah, I mean, fame

(01:13:16):
is terrifying. And he obviously used this like visceral um
quality of his writing into his speeches. Obviously like he is,
he's a good words smith, Like that's that's been already proven.
But like it's so terrifying when someone is already so
I don't know, praise and lauded for being this amazing thinker.

(01:13:38):
He's obviously going to have a huge legion of people
follow him when in anything he does, even if it's
to tell people to pick up a weapon and and
be violent. And the fact that Hall compsly were that
he used so much, like that's so telling of like
the kind of mentality he had, even if he did
despise Germany, Like he definitely had similarities to Hitler in

(01:13:58):
that regard of like rounding people together and being an
amazing speech person like a speech giver. Um. So disturbing
because I think that's that's a huge reason why fame
an influence really freaks me out, is because you have
all these people follow you blindly, just like with Trump.
Trump has the same thing. The people I hate the

(01:14:19):
people in the rallies that I see, I hate the
people behind Trump that are clapping every dumb bullshit thing
he says I hate that more than I hate Trump, honestly,
because they're just sheep. I don't know, you know, I
actually know. I don't want to say sheep. Sorry, that's
I think people. People are intelligent, but they're also desperate

(01:14:44):
to belong. And if someone is just like rolling people
together for a cause that he thinks is like, well,
better humanity, I don't know. I think what you're getting
at and I think the reality both of White and
Nunzio was successful in White Trump is is that everyone
has this very deep understanding in our society as they

(01:15:05):
did then that like something's wrong. Um, things shouldn't be
as fucked up at hard as they are, Like this
shouldn't be as messed up as it is. Someone is responsible.
And if you are able to tell people who is
responsible and convince them of who it is, um, and
then invade upon that group or that person with the
kind of rage that everyone has in their heart, um,

(01:15:28):
whether or not it's directed, everyone has that anger in
our society because we all know ship's sucked up. If
you can convince people that you found the people who
have sucked up the ship and then express the hatred
that is in their hearts, you can give them to
do anything, and that's all that matters. They don't care
about laws, they don't care about precedent, they don't care
about history, they don't even care about their own health.

(01:15:49):
To a certain extent, if you are able to convince
them of the group that's responsible for their pain and
express the hatred that's in their heart towards that group,
and that's what do Nunzio is good at. That's what
Hitler is good at, That's what Trump's good at. You
described what I was trying to articulate in a much
better way, because that's what's terrifying, is that what you said,
you can get them to do anything, because that's completely

(01:16:11):
what's what happens, and it works. It works on all
of us. Yeah, it works. I mean, I mean to
be honest, like, I a lot of the success of
this podcast UM, which has been very successful and UM
has has done a lot for my career and has
built up a fan base that's very is very like
loyal UM and active is because what we focus on

(01:16:31):
is talking about like these are the assholes responsible for
why ship is so fucked up? UM, Like the most
powerful thing in the world is is harnessing the anger
that exists in all of us because of the damage
nature of our society and directing it. It's not an
inherently harmful But Bernie Sanders is appeal. There's a lot
in his ability to say this is why ship's fucked up,

(01:16:52):
this is who you should be angry at. We need
to fix now. He doesn't, i would say, in a
non toxic way, in a productive way. It doesn't have
to be a horrible thing. Because the anger is real,
and the anger that Trump's fans feel, the rage, they're
not directing it in the right direction, but that rage
is utterly earned in most cases. No, I completely agree.
I think directing the anger is such a powerful tool

(01:17:13):
to and being able to to harness that is a
terrifying quality when you used it in the wrong way,
which is what Hillar did, which is what Denunzio is
doing or did, and what I'm going to do in
my new cult. So stay tuned, um very excited. We're
going to buy a compound. It's gonna be like that

(01:17:33):
machete is as far as the eye can see. It's
gonna be glorious. Now. On multiple occasions, crowds rioted after
de nunzio speeches. Several times they attempted to break into
the Prime Minister's home in order to murder him. The
violence only encouraged De Nunzio further, and he repeatedly urged
good citizens to take vengeance on lying politicians. If blood flows,

(01:17:54):
such blood will be as blessed as that in the trenches,
he said, drawing a direct line between political murder and
the national war f it. Shortly after that speech, some
of his supporters stole a fire truck and used its
ladder to try to break into the home of one
of his political opponents. Lucy Hughes Howett writes, he was
fast developing a brilliantly manipulative oratorical technique. He allowed his
public no break in his contrivances. Of their hysteria. He

(01:18:15):
played on them with rhetorical tricks borrowed from religious liturgy
or from classical drama. Hear me, he cried, Listen to me,
understand me. The crowd was urged to join him, howling
out responses to insistent Aviva's These were not speeches to
be rationally appraised, but acts of collective self hypnosis. Do
Nunzio's work as a dramatist had frequently been grandiose and
conception spectacular in their staging, and appalling for the violence

(01:18:38):
of their sentiments, but never before he had produced anything
like the shows he put on that radiant may the
sheer rage he worked these crowds and two eventually made
any outcome but war basically impossible. Most of Donunzio's enemies
fled the city, the prime minister stepped down. Historian Mark
Thompson calls what de Nunzio achieved a coupa tall and
all but name. The leader of the Socialist Party, Filippo

(01:18:59):
Turati roofly and accurately exclaimed, let the bourgeoisie have its war.
There will be no winners. Everyone will lose well. On
May eleven, days after Gabriel de Nunzio entered Rome, Italy
declared war on Austria Hungary. There is, of course, significant
debate over whether or not Italy would have entered the
war on this side without de Nunzio. Historians will note

(01:19:20):
that the Pact of London, which set out Italy's new alliance,
had been on a negotiation for a while by the
time he arrived in Italy, but most historians agree he
had at least a very significant impact in pushing his
country into World War One. By the end of that war,
more than four hundred and sixty thousand Italians would be dead,
more than nine hundred and fifty five thousand would be wounded.
The Old Order of Europe died, and Gabrielle de Nunzio

(01:19:42):
helped to kill that too. His career, though, was just
getting started. And now, Sharine, Sophie, would you scroll to
the bottom of the script? Oh, but you have to
he she has to see the Dunzio. This is the best.
I'm so sorry. I just can't believe. I just I

(01:20:03):
don't know. I let's let's look a band aid, let's
rub it off. Come on, okay, bro, here here he
is and she just grabbed. What the fuck are you
shitting me? Okay, first of all, but then a hammock hilarious. Um,

(01:20:26):
he does look like he is packing heat. But he
is packing heat. Yeah, but he's he's pretty stacked, he's
pretty yoked. He's just skinny. What do you mean, he's
not yoked, just tiny. He's got well, you gotta admit,
you gotta you gotta remember to like people didn't know
to build muscle then the way they do now. Like
he's pretty. I mean, yeah, he doesn't have to it
on and I'll give him that, But he's also like

(01:20:49):
if anyone that's listening to this in the beginning was
imagining this like attractive, womanizing, seducing, whatever, this is not
the guy. But he didn't know. I mean, like a
champion for short guys, unfortunately for for all. But yeah,
you already have Napoleon. What ward do you want? I
don't know, Um, Jesus, he's that's a hilarious photo. By

(01:21:13):
the way, this photo, he's completely naked other than this
banana thong and his arms are at his hips posed
for this photo. His mustache is curled up. Didn't know
he had a mustache, by the way. Um, yeah, bald
with a curled up mustache. You got to see the picture.
He looks like if Adam's Silver, the NBA commissioner and

(01:21:35):
Colonel Sanders had a baby and that baby was a creep. Yeah,
I would say, if you have creep, if you look
up creep, that's what I imagine. If you watch the
TV show Community, he looks like Pierce's father. Um, Like
he's that exact building size. He's just this like weird

(01:21:55):
little bald. He's a little he's smile. Yeah, convinced his
country to the dumbest he humanized personified whatever he does
look a lot like Schmiegel. Yeah anyway, yea, how you
feeling after? Um, I've learned a lot. I think we

(01:22:20):
had a good like bonding time you and I. To
be honest, I feel like we just veriprize each other
a bit in parts of this episode, which I feel
kind of like nice about. I think we're good friends now.
Um effect, oh god, don't give him credit, give him more.
I would like credit for the friendship. Thank you, Sophie.

(01:22:41):
I will give you the credit. I mean, this episode
has convinced me, among other things, to buy a banana hammock.
That seems like a good decision. This episode has convinced me,
among other things, that you should not have children. But sorry,
I'm kidding if you would be a great dad all seriousness,
Just don't give that seems like that seems like a

(01:23:02):
long reach to make Sharene I've learned a lot. I
can't wait to learn more. And uh and um really yeah,
just the turn of this guy's life. What an eventful,
awful way to leave the world. He's not lazy. You
gotta say that for the man. He accomplished a lot,
a very productive like back in the day. I mean

(01:23:25):
we have that saying now, like you have as many
hours in the days Beyonce does. Back in the day,
you have as many hours in the day as as
as done as you has. You know what I mean?
What have you? What country have you demolished today? Um? Yeah?
What what world order have you destroyed? Exactly? What generation
have you sent into machine gun nests? Robert? Do you
think we can get a Banana Hammick sponsorship? That's just

(01:23:47):
my only Oh I hope I want a Banana Hammick
sponsorship And I would love it if we could get
if we could like get a ward to sponsors too,
like that would be really good. Like I feel like
there's a lot of really good wars going on right now,
and one of them should sponsor this podcast. I mean,
Lord knows they have the money, so exactly. Yeah, great, yeah, well, Sharine,

(01:24:09):
you want to plug your plug doables? Oh yeah, I'm
Sharene and I am a co host of a podcast
called Ethnically Ambiguous. It's on the I Heart Radio Network.
It's ethnically should look it up. It's everywhere you find
your podcast. I'm Shiro Hero s h E r O
H E r O on Instagram and Shiro Hero six
six six on Twitter, and uh yeah, that's about it.

(01:24:30):
I have a poetry book if you guys want to
like the poetry talks on Amazon. There on my next one.
Read Sharine's poetry for her ego turn her into a
monstrous sociopath who needs the world into a tremendous calamity. Honestly,
I'm just waiting to sell out, so please let's make

(01:24:52):
this are just begging. I would love to sell out,
so make it happen. And I'm Robert Evans. You can
find me on Twitter. I right, okay. I can find
this podcast on the Internet and behind the bastards dot
com where you can find sources in this picture of
the Nunzio and his banana hammock um. You can find
us on Twitter and Instagram and at Bastards pod. Uh
and you can find me fully embracing the lessons of

(01:25:14):
Gabrielle de Nunzio when I create my cult and plunge
the world into a new dark age. So like look
forward to that. It's gonna be a real good time
free machetes for all. Um. Yeah, that's the episode. Have
a good one y'all.

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