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My name is Alex Fumero and I host the new podcast more than a movie, American Me, a film directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. I'll be diving into the behind the scenes controversy, including an alleged backlash from the Mexican mafia. Several people who worked on the movie have been murdered. I don't want to speak about why would people be murdered for being in a movie. Listen to more than a movie, American me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Tojo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Lauren Ober, and in addition to being a charming podcast host, I am also a newly diagnosed autistic person. My new show, the loudest girl in the world, is all about my weird, winding path to diagnosis. My decision at age 42 to finally get evaluated for autism. Listen to the loudest girl in the world on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody. I am Robert Evans and this is behind the ******** the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Today with me is my former boss at Cracked and current boss at Stuff Media, Jack O'Brien. Jack O'Brien and today Jack attack, we are talking about the children of dictators, which I know you. You just had another kid. I did. Yeah. And you're, you're kind of like the podcast equivalent of a dictator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there might be some tips here. OK. I didn't realize that's how we were coming at this, but feel like you can empathize with the the fathers of the Father figures. Just you can give me some. You know, I'm not. I don't have kids, so I may not know if something's actually a good parenting tactic, right? Yeah, well, my children are two and two weeks old, so I I have yet to be able to **** them up totally given one of them control of either a soccer team or a military unit. Not yet. OK, OK, Well, third birthday going to be a lot of that in this podcast, all right? I've spent most of the last week. Reading about the various children of dictators, there's a number of sources for this podcast which I'll I'll go through as we read them, but I do want to up front plug a book called Children of Monsters by Jay Nordlinger. It's a great book. I'll be referencing it regularly here. There are a lot of players in this podcast, so I kind of figured my best bet would be to start with the dictator, who I think was probably the best parent out of all of them. Fidel Castro. I'm not saying Fidel was a good parent. He was terrible by every normal measure of being a dad. But none of his kids grew up to be mass ****** mass torturing monsters, and that counts as a win on this list. So Castro's oldest son was fidelito. Castro divorced Fidelito's mom, Merta early and fled to Mexico to wage his revolution from afar. The Delitos Moms family was well connected in Cuban politics, so obviously Castro hated them and he hated that his kid lived with them because they were, you know, bougie as ****. When Fidelito was six, Castro asked nicely if he could have his kid for a two week visit. Merida said yes and sent him over and Castro kidnapped him. But not only did he kidnap him, he didn't even kidnap him to raise him himself, he kidnapped him and put him with a foster family that he thought would do a better job than the kids actual. That is some dictatorship, just like you should be over here. These are better parents for you than your mom, and certainly better than me. That's great. So Murda had to get the Mexican government to help her, Redknapp her son three months later. But in 1959, when Fidelito was nine, Castro took power. His mother sent him over from New York to visit his dad again because she thought he should know his dad, even though he had already kidnapped him once, which is maybe a questionable call from a mom. But, I mean, so far, this is exactly the story of my 2 year old. So keep going. So yeah, Fidelito went over to Cuba to see his dad, who was, you know, the new dictator of Cuba. They post together on top of tanks. And basically, Castro treated him as a prop. Fun dictator stuff. Yeah, fun dictator stuff. And a few months after those tank photos were taken, there was a horrible car accident Fidelito got into. He was badly injured. He went into surgery to have his spleen removed. On the same night, Fidel Castro was set to address a bunch of reporters. On TV, the children of Monsters Book quotes a biography of Castro called Guerrilla Prince, which is both a solid name for a rap album and which I'll also quote because you know, it's great. So this is the night Castro is talking to a bunch of press people while his son is getting surgery, and he's clearly set all this up. So all these journalists are talking to him. But instead of asking him normal questions, they're all asking him, like, why aren't you leaving to go see your son? Why aren't you leaving to go see your son? And. Finally, one of them says Commandante Castro, who is it who rules in Cuba? And Castro shouts back the people. And then the journalist says, well then the people want you to go see your son. And so at this, Castro turns around and and drives off to see his kid. So, like, his son gets in an accident and he's like, how can I spin this for good PR, right? Umm. So Fidelito became a celebrity in Cuba, and he seems to have hated it. Castro eventually pulled him out of the line limelight and sent him to study nuclear physics in the Soviet Union like you do. He became the head of Cuba's Atomic Energy Commission in 1980. He was not good at the job he was on. He round up, getting removed from the position 12 years later in 92. We don't know why exactly, but it probably had something to do with the joint Cuban Russian nuclear reactor. There's a great article about this reactor. And Gizmodo, on the title of the article, kind of tells you the story. The abandoned communist reactor that would have killed us all. So this reactor that Castro's son was presiding over, they basically found that upon its operation, it would have been at least 15 times likelier than the US plant to have had a catastrophic meltdown. Based on the weather patterns, they knew it would only take 24 hours for radioactive materials to reach Florida if it did melt down. And since Cuba is not very big, fidelito's plan was to dump all of their nuclear waste into the ocean. So he was he was not a great Atomic Energy Commissioner. His dad fired him. He was sent to the Cuban Academy of Sciences. And that's not really much else to say about Fidelito. He's kind of boring, which is basically the best case scenario for a kid on this list. Fidel, we don't know how many kids Fidel had. We aren't even sure if he was married for most of his time in power or how many wives he had. But we do know that he had another boy, Antonio, who became an orthopedic surgeon. Antonio worked as a physician to the Cuban basketball team and seems to be better. His job than his older brother was at building nuclear power plants and bringing him up because in 2008, something hilarious happened to him. Louise Dominiguez, pro Democracy activist, baseball fan, and Cuban American, pretended to be a 27 year old Colombian sports journalist named Claudia to seduce Antonio. So the Internet's not allowed in Cuba, but if you're a Castro family member, you get a smartphone, you get Internet access, you get all of that stuff you're not supposed to. But you know, they they have it anyway. So Louise pretends to be this woman. Claudia and strikes up a romantic relationship with Castro's son via text messages and Google Chat and like. So he's catfish. Yeah, he's he catfishes Castro son. Yeah, fishing. The king fish, the big fish. There's messages like guess where I am and I will Make Love to you without stopping is 1 message. Antonio sent this fake woman while he was on a diplomatic visit to Russia. I mean, that's just kind of basic love making is that you don't stop in the middle of it, Make Love to you and I won't just randomly stop. I have a desire to kiss you. I want to kiss you, love you and Make Love to you. So that's sweet. But Louis was also to able to get Antonio to share his phone number, his address in Havana and revealed that he had no bodyguards. And give him updates on secret trips he was taking to other countries in Central and South America. That's the sort of thing that a secret admirer would ask you. Yeah, exactly. And my favorite thing about this is that, like, by doing this, Louise is not just throwing shade on the on Fidel Castro, but he's also, like, kind of sticking it to the CIA who spent, like, tried to kill Castro like, 500 times, was always trying to figure out stuff and couldn't. And then this guy is like, I'll just pretend to be a girl, pretend I want to **** his son. Turns out that was the key. All along, yeah. So that's a fun story. So yeah, Antonio is clearly kind of dumb, but he's he doesn't seem to be a bad person. So again, Castro's kids pretty much the best case scenario here. The worst case scenario. For that, we're going to have to roll over to our old buddy Saddam Hussein. Of all the dictator fathers I've read about, I'm pretty sure he was the worst. Hussein was born in 1964 day and Kousei in 1966. Kousei's not a whole lot to say about. I mean, he wasn't a great guy, but it's Uday who who's the real king **** of garbage mountain. Ooda was originally meant to be the heir to Saddam's power. He was tall, handsome and athletic. But he was also so crazy that Saddam couldn't stand him and eventually disinherited him. So. In the 90s, Uday was made the head of the national soccer team. Football team, whatever term you want to use the head of the team? Yeah, yeah. He was like the head coach. OK, that's like a dictator kid trope. We'll run into a couple other kids who like, OK, you get to run the soccer team because your dad's. I mean, yeah, that's awesome. The the boss, right. And so as coach of this team, he was known to show up at halftime and promised to cut off players legs and feed them to hungry dogs if they didn't improve. Which is that's good motivation. Yeah. Yeah, it's a solid strategy, yeah. I'm gonna quote here from a Wonderful Guardian article titled Uday Career of Rape, Torture and Murder. Quote as football overseer Seer Uday kept a private torture scorecard with written instructions on how many times each player should be beaten on the soles of his feet after a particularly poor showing. Well, you got to stay organized. I mean, that's the, that's the first thing. Can't forget any any beating worthy mistakes. No, no, that's like the first. I'm pretty sure what Joe Namath said, that he was always hitting people in the foot. Yeah. So in addition to being probably not a very good coach, Uday was famous. They're ****** basically anyone and everyone who caught his eye. There were some occasions where he'd show up at weddings and just take the bride. Really? Yeah, that would happen. Like, there's a lot of those stories. So he's he's he's he's garbage. He became obsessed with torture. It said that he had a private torture chamber on the Tigris. I found a quote during my research from a friend of the Hussein family who said the day Uday discovered the Internet was a black day for Iraqis. Which. Yeah. What did he do with the Internet? Well, he found out about things like iron maidens, not the band. The the sarcophagus filled with spikes. We found one of those in one of his palaces. The Americans did when when Iraq was, you know, conquered or whatever. And when they found it, it was dull, like Jesus Christ, like it wasn't. He didn't just buy it to put it in the corner because he was like ****. I think it started sharp. Yeah, you got it. You got to keep that thing sharp, man. I think he was doing a lot of maintaining with the Iron Maiden, although maybe more painful if it's not sharp. Yeah. I mean, I assume Uday knew what he was doing when it came to using an Iron Maiden on people. He was probably the world's leading expert on that, actually. So, you know, I've only used one like once or twice, so I shouldn't shut my big nails. There is one mark in Utah's favor, which is that he was the leader of the Saddam fedayeen, which was a violent paramilitary force dedicated to his dad. And the mark and his favor is that he equipped his private army with Darth Vader helmets. Yes, I've got a picture of them. And that's that's that's that's that's pretty fly now. Did he know they were Darth Vader helmets? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he he knew what he was doing. It was a conscious decision to echo Darth Vader and the helmets of his private army, which is. If you're gonna have a private army, not a bad call. So he was just like, I'm a bad guy. Like from age one was just like, I'm going to be evil he didn't have. It's not like one of those awful people who tries to pretend to be good. He's like, fully committed, you know, would be cool an army of Darth Vader if they were mine. So Saddam does not seem to have reigned in his oldest son for decades or disciplined him much at all. But over time, U day's behavior grew too abhorrent for even history's worst day to let that horse run, you know? Well. So Uday was a drunk, had a little bit of a drinking problem, and in 1988, he got drunk at a party and bludgeoned his father's bodyguard to death in front of a bunch of random partiers, which is kind of a party foul. That's where I draw the line, personally beating your dad's bodyguard to death. Yeah, that's an important line, yeah. This was not unheard of behavior for Ude. He was famous for getting ********* and doing things like firing his machine gun above the heads of musicians and dancers at parties. Sometimes he did not shoot above their heads. She said he would just get drunk and shoot people at parties. That was his thing. He was like Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas. If he was never kidding, if every single time he he was just going to murder them. Yeah yeah he's he's there's no kidding with Uday, Hussein said. Sense of humor. Notoriously bad sense of humor. Well, and all of this came to a head during a drunken brawl with his uncle Watban. See Watban and why? Which, who is a Saddam's brother-in-law, got into an argument over quote. The most sought after prostitute at a party. They went to Uday to ask him to basically King Solomon the whole matter and like determine who gets the prostitute. Yeah, this was not a good idea. Uday had shown up at the party after 3:00 AM, drunk as **** with a crazy pump action rifle that looked like it came from the movie. Rambo is the only description I've I've. I can't. I have no idea what kind of gun it was. It sounds ridiculous. So he was he was already hammered, probably blacked out. And when they asked him this for some reason he became. Events that Watban had been making fun of his speech impediment. So Uday just starts shooting. He fires randomly into the crowd, first killing three people and wounding God knows how many. Then he turned the gun on his uncle and shot him in both legs and then also accidentally gunned down six female dancers. So like nine people have died total in this rampage and Saddam's brother has had his kneecaps blown off. So this ****** *** Saddam Hussein and he decided he was actually going to discipline his son. So the story. Serviced it's a real **** *** that guy, you know? You get to draw the line somewhere. Yeah, so the story of how I'm quoting from Will Barton Warpers the prisoner in his palace quote. As punishment, he torched Uday's prize collection of rolls, Royces, Bentleys, BMW's, Porsches and Ferraris, which had been stored under guard in a garage in the Republican Palace. Laughing wildly, the former dictator recalled how he gleefully watched the inferno, smoking one of his famous cohibas as the flames engulfed. Sonny's treasured possessions, Saddam's almost manical laughter was contagious. Rogerson, who's the guy? The American he's telling the story to, was unable to resist joining in, succumbing to belly laughs of his own. The mental image of the dictator dousing hundreds of his son's luxury cars with gasoline and setting them ablaze reminded him of a Jerry Springer episode on steroids. So just everybody in this story, including the guy, he's telling the story to us, just ******* crazy. Just completely out of their mind. I mean, that's pretty funny. You murdered nine people at a party. I'm going to light 100 cars on fire. Yeah, that'll show him. And Uday was on the straight and narrow from that point forward, right? The end. No, he actually got shot in an assassination attempt and paralyzed from, like, the waist down. So he did calm down after that, but I don't think it was because of the cars. So one of the weird things here is that, like, while Saddam doesn't seem to have done much at all to his sons one way or the other, he was actually kind of a sweet dad to his. Daughters, especially his eldest daughter, Raghad. She told a story to an interviewer who at like saw this cheap piece of jewelry on her when she was like in exile in Jordan and was like, that doesn't look like the kind of thing you'd have. And she told him a sweet story about when, you know, before Saddam was dictator, they've been walking in a market and she'd fallen down and scraped her knee and broken down into tears. Power crazed general like. Power craze vice president. Yeah. Scrappy, young, power crazed vice president. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So he like, he he bought her some fancy like costume jewelry when she scraped her knee and she kept it her whole life. So Dom was like a a sweet. And this is like another dictator trope is their sons always are often turned out to be like mass ****** murderers and their daughters are like, he was a sweet dad. He bought me jewelry. This is why it's so good that our main enemy, North Korea has just a line of succession. With just nothing but dictators and sons of dictators all the way down. Yeah. Yeah. And and most of them seem to be cut from the old Uday cloth. Yeah. So again, that's a trend, dictators being really close to their first daughter. And that kind of brings us to Stalin because Stalin adored his young daughters Svetlana. And we're going to get into Joseph Stalin as a doting father after this break. But first we're going to break for something Stalin would have hated, adds capitalism. Songs of of products. So we go by not skipping these ads. You're fighting Stalin? In a sense, yes. Stick it to Stalin. Be a good American and several of the dictators on this list by listening to these ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying. Or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. 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Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart. And we are back. Last we talked about Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein and their parenting tactics, and right now we are talking about Svetlana Stalin, the daughter to Joseph Stalin. She was born in 1926 after Stalin was already in power and he was kind of a doting father at first. Svetlana thinks it's because he reminded her of his mother. Svetlana's mother, Nadezhda, was a committed Bolshevik. She was not big on child rearing. She never hugged her daughter, she never said a kind word to her daughter, and she constantly gave Stalin. Credit for coddling their daughter. So in this relationship Stalin was the cool parent. Which song was the laid back dude? He's the chill dad. Wow. Yeah. Collins wife did not **** around, huh? No, she did not. Yeah, she wound up killing herself because ** *** wasn't angry at how he wasn't communist enough for her, basically. Really? It seems like why we don't. I mean, we're not. Tell you what a ******* argument, ladies. But anyway, so Stalin and his daughter had a cute little relationship. He would have her issue orders to him in writing, and then he would respond. I obey. He would sign notes as like the poor peasant Joseph Stalin, the secretary to, you know, my daughter. So that was cute. That is adorable. Yeah, they had a cute little thing. It didn't last. You know, Stalin was always busy, and a lot of what he was busy doing was disappearing people so regularly her classmates would just not show up at school because their parents had been exiled. Executed many had her. Classmates killed for like not being nice to his daughter. I suspect some of that might have happened too. There's just a lot of her schoolmates weren't there one day, and that kept on happening from time to time. Other classmates would give her notes to pass on to her father, begging him to free their parents. Stalin hated this and told his daughter to not act as a post office box, right? So that's a fun thing to put on your daughter's shoulder, right? Her relatives started to disappear too. After Stalin's wife committed suicide, Stalin got rid of basically the moms whole side of the family, so all of Svetlana's, aunts and uncles. She didn't understand why this was happening and thought that it was just like a a terrible mistake until she went to Stalin about it and he said no, they knew too much, they babbled, and it played into the hands of our enemies so he knows how to talk to his daughter. Yeah, he's a good father. He's a good dad. He's a good dad. That's how you explain disappearing. Yeah, someone's relatives. So in 1943, at the height of World War Two, Svetlana fell in love with a young boy named Kappler. They had a brief romance, and then Stalin found out. He became convinced Kappler was a British spy. He also wasn't wild about the fact that Kapler was Jewish, Svetlana said. You know, but I love him, Dad. I'm going to quote from Svetlana's autobiography Here, Love, screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word I can scarcely convey. And for the first time in his life, he slapped me. Across the face, twice. Take a look at yourself. Who'd want you, you fool? He's got women all around him. But that's Stalin. He's he. There's a immediate drop off as she, like, gets to be a teenager and how sweet stall it is. Yeah, and just the second she shows any interest in another man. Yeah, that's. She so she's also a first daughter. Yeah. Yeah. So that's just interesting. We were just talking on the other podcast that I host, the Daily Zeitgeist today about our President and his strange relationship to his first daughter, Ivanka. Just how it doesn't seem like totally normal. Like they seem to have a very special bond. But yeah, so yeah, so he has sort of the same sort of relationship to his daughter. Stalin does that, like Scarface. As to his sister, it's like, yeah, man, he's really protective of her. Yeah, it's sweet up until another human being enters the picture and then it's like, Oh no, this is bad. That's interesting that dictators can like not because they they're clearly their love for their daughter is just a function of their narcissism, right? Yeah. But it's weird that it doesn't translate to their sons, probably because they see their sons as just like a diminished. ******** version of them. Yeah, it's me. But, you know, you never had to struggle. You didn't grow up robbing banks for a living. Right? Right, right. Yeah. Whereas his daughter is just this, you know, perfect little thing that loved him. And then she becomes a person and he's very angry about, right? Yeah. So, you know, Stalin dies, spoiler alert, and after his death, Svetlana flees the Soviet Union. She becomes an American citizen and 67, but then comes back to the USSR in 84. But then she goes back to the US and then France and then finally England in 1992. Uh, just on her. My dad was Stalin tour? Well, yeah. She wrote two very popular books and one of them was a best seller, and they were apparently good books, like well reviewed. So you you might call her the best case scenario for like, the kid of a monster from our perspective, yeah, she wound up being relatively successful person and, you know, spoke out against her dad the rest of her life. Like, whatever happened to the guy Capilar that she fell in love with? He went off to a gulag. Oh, got it, got it, got it. Yep. Like, specifically as ordered by Stalin or just because he was one of 1,000,000 and millions of people who got swept up. I mean, he was one of 1,000,000 and millions of people who got swept up. But Stalin, you know, like, I don't think it was unrelated to the fact that he was making eyes at Stalin's daughter. And gulags were a nice places, right? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty chill. Let's not examine that any further, right. They seem nice. It's a nice name. It sounds like a good soup. Yeah. Yeah. Gulag. Oh yeah. I love the gulag. That's eggplant, right? Yeah, my favorite fact about Gulags is the Russian word for Russia. Russian still has a word for this. It's called it basically means man cow. And it's a word that was created in the gulags for when you fatten somebody up who you're in the gulags with in order to and then you plan an escape with them so that you can eat them as you're crossing the tundra. That's nice. That's yeah. Russian hats has a single word for that. Is that why you would cater all those no fat heavy lunches? Where about it? Yeah, OK. All right, back to Castro's. Oh yeah. So this kind of, this kind of brings to mind Castro's daughter Alina, who had a very similar story to Svetlana. So she never really lived with her dad. Her mom was kind of one of Castro's side flings, but she grew up knowing, knowing she was Castro's daughter. Everyone else knew she was Castro's daughter and likes Fat Lana. People would beg her to have her dad free their families from, you know, horrible, you know, slave camps and stuff. Yeah, Castro wasn't as much of * **** ***** it as Stalin. I don't think he did anything when she asked him, but he wasn't like, makes it kind of hard to be like, guys. I'm not just defined by my father when they're like, but he's killing my family. He's my father, right? So they didn't have a super close relationship, but Fidel did show up at her first wedding, and as he left, he told her don't let me know when you get your divorce. And her response was don't worry, I don't have your phone number. Like Svetlana. She fled her home country, she wound up in the United States, she wrote a book about her ****** dad, and she started a radio show in Miami called Simply Alina, where she would talk **** about Castro every day. Not Castro was my dad. It was just simply Alina. I think Castro was my dad was similar to her. Books title, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's interesting. You've got like 2 older daughters of of dictators who follow basically the same path, right? Rejecting their father who clearly was into them for a weird reason. There's still hope for you, Ivanka. Yeah, you can write up. You could have simply Ivanka. Yeah, you could just get a fair. Interesting. I'm really interested to see like what? As everybody who was associated with. Well, well, we don't need to talk about politics. Let's keep going with these crazy *************. Yeah, let's talk about Stalin's sons. Oh, so first, props to Stalin. He spoiled his kids a lot less than most dictators. This is particularly true of his sons facility and Yakov. So Stalin seems to have been kind of a true believer in some ways. Uh, to the stuff. He was. He was. He was, you know, throwing out there. Uh. He didn't want his kids to get special treatment just because their dad was Stalin. When Vasily was 17, he joined a flight school. His grades were terrible. His dad's employees helped him get into the school without, you know, Stalin's knowledge because they thought it might Curry favor. They would probably disappeared for that because Stalin did not like that. He described his son as spoiled in average, when you're helping somebody get into flight school and they're not good enough to get into flight. People are you really doing them a favor or you just be sending them off to a fiery death? Yeah, or maybe other people. So basically tried to use his famous name to get privileges at flight school. Stalin found out and ordered that his kid not get any special treatment. I think he still did get some special treatment, but I think Stalin was ****** about it. The silly was a rampaging drunk. In spite of that, he did manage to graduate flight school. He had a habit of drunkenly commandeering planes and then flying them while continuing to drink. You would expect that story to end worse than it did, but apparently he never like accidentally 911 anything. I like that nine elevens past tense as 9 to 11, first of all. But also, yeah, so he was like Denzel Washington's character in flight. You needed a couple pops to like, get him to the world's greatest pilot, and then he's like flying planes upside down. Is he a commercial pilot or what? No military military. So he is the commander. He is a Colonel in charge of an Air Force Regiment during World War Two. For a little while, Stalin actually fired him very quickly and said this. Colonel Stalin is being removed from his post as regimental commander for drunkenness and debauchery and because he is ruining and perverting the regiment. So so I mean, when he's drunkenly commandeering these planes, that's only a thing that is possible if you're Stalin's kid because everyone else, they just ******* shoot you between the eyes. Yeah, Stalin did protect his kids from being shot in the eyes. If there's one thing you could say about that guy, yes, millions of lives lost, but actually basically got to drunkenly. Commandeer that plane, I should say. He stopped 2/3 of his kids from being shot in the oh boy. So Vasily lived to the ripe old age of 41 when he died of rampant alcoholism. He lasted longer than his brother Yakov. As far as I can tell, Yakov was actually pretty solid dude. I haven't read about any specific crimes he committed. He did try to kill himself after a failed romance. When he failed, Stalin's only comment was he can't even shoot straight. Is the name Yaakov in Russian spelled **** ***? I mean, I wrote it as YAK, like it's written in Cyrillic. Well, it's neither, because can you spell it either. OK, OK, so they use different letters. Proceed. Yeah. Yakov wound up on the eastern Front during the Nazi invasion. He was captured by the Nazis. They offered to ransom him back to Stalin in exchange for the captured German field Marshall Paulus. But Stalin said it's not worth it to trade a general for a Lieutenant. Stalin also had Yakov's family locked up after he was captured because he'd issued a decree saying that the families of captured soldiers had to be punished. And he did not exempt his son's own family from that. So his son's own family was imprisoned, but that's like his wife or like some just wife and kids, some side piece. No, it's his wife. I think he's got a wife and kids. So Yakoff's family was also his family. Yeah. Yeah. Saddam, Saddam's grandkids and daughter-in-law he throws in prison. Because their dad gets captured by the Nazis, OK, Yakoff, yeah, wife and kids, and Yakov gets killed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. When he refuses an order from a guard to go, you know, do something he just, like, wasn't going to take it anymore. The fact that he died this way is actually the only thing he ever did that Stalin approved of. So that's stalling the dad in a nutshell. So it was he shot by a German officer, and he shot by a German while an s s guard. Right? Basically the guys like, it's time to go inside. And yeah, I was like, no, **** it, I'm just ready to die when you keep playing. Yeah, OK and yeah. So that's how you get stalins approval. If you are his son, get shot by a Nazi. Way to go, Yakov Stalin. Yeah. And I feel like now is the right time to move on to another Communist dictator. Nikolai chuchu. He was the dictator of Romania from 1965 to 1989 as an authoritarian ruler. We ordered troops to fire on protesters, operated a vast and repressive secret police, and generally ran his country into the ground. He's the whole standard bingo for a European dictator, 60s, Seventies, 80s, and he's kind of middle of the pack as far as dictator dads go. So his wife was named Alina, and they had two sons and one daughter. His first son, Valentine, was initially meant to be the heir apparent, but Valentine didn't want to follow in his dad's footsteps. He declined the privilege of being the heir and instead became a nuclear physicist, which he still does. Today. Such a disappointment. So yeah, what a bummer. Yeah, kid just becomes a nuclear physicist and not a power hungry dictator. Valentine only abused his position a little bit. He acquired a giant art collection and he had a side job helping to run the nation's best soccer team. But he was apparently pretty nice. Nobody had any complaints with him on the soccer team. Yeah, you know, the silly Stalin also had a soccer team or a hockey team or whatever. All these dictator kids get a sports team if they want them. Apparently it's a lot of fun because it's what our richest people do right this second. They become like billionaires. They buy a sports teams. Zoya Chechu was the middle daughter. Apparently Nikolai and Alina did something, right? Because she also got a PhD. Hers was in mathematics. Yeah, this. Check out the big brain on the chef Schoos. Well, this is actually a problem, because Nikolai's wife, Alina. To the dictator, rest you could say was kind of a giant ***** ** **** too, and her hobby was pretending to be a chemist. She loved to get honors from foreign universities for her pioneering work in chemistry. She had done no work in chemistry, but that was just her thing. It got her off to pretend she was a chemist, and she hated that her daughter was an actual scientist with actual accomplishments. Of course she would. So when her daughter gets a PhD in mathematics, Alina kicks Zoya out of the presidential palace and makes her live in an apartment. As revenge, Zoya starts a new mathematics department at the institute she worked at and winds up in charge of it. She also starts smoking because her mom hates cigarettes. Umm, so this is like like a mix of normal teenage rebellion and the kind of thing you can only do as a dictator's kid? Like, I'm gonna smoke cigarettes and start a new mathematics institute. Screw you, mom. Start dictators, kid. Yeah, yeah, she's brilliant. She starts drinking heavily and having lots of sex with random people like you do. Alina didn't care about the sex so much, but she did order the secret police to watch her daughter and report on the boys she dated, which I assume did not always end well for the boys. Joya became a bit of a dissident. She made some friends with normal Romanians who were suffering under her parents rule, and so she stopped using her family name and spoke out about terrible living conditions. But that really seems to have been more of a way to get back at her mom than out of a real commitment to justice. When her parents were forced from power, Alina was arrested too. The troops that searched her house found it filled with jewels and art and cash. As they took her away, she asked the police if they had any room in the truck for her poodles. Since many Romanians were starving at this point, this did not play well. But you know, Zoya and Valentine were both functional people who, like, got legitimate jobs and, you know, high level degrees. They're success stories. The same cannot be said of Nikolai and Alena's youngest child, Niku. Since Valentine had chosen the life of the mind, Niku was seen as the Cheska's best bet for establishing a Communist dynasty. I'm going to quote children of monsters again here. From his mid teens, Niku was an out of control drunk and a ******. He raped at will. And his will was ferocious and an opposable he had complete license. He was the kind who could run red lights and kill people. The process with total impunity. So that's. I told Nikki, yeah. When the United Nations named 1985 International Youth Year, Nikki was picked to be the spokesperson of that whole thing. Person of the International youth. Yeah, yeah, you got a medal. What's more youthful than running red lights and indiscriminate rape? He's a fun guy, you know, back in Romania now with a metal nick who drank, raped and regularly got into car accidents. His best friend was Uday Hussein. The pair would regularly meet up in Monaco. Like weird. Ooh, sound in their name and yeah, they just seem like a perfect match. I bet they had fun in Monaco and Switzerland. They seemed like. Seemed like a good crew to party with. Yeah. It must be weird to get drunk with Uday when he can't machine gun people, right? Just I I wonder, yeah, what does he do then? Yeah, just like goes around and pushes people into traffic or something. Helps people off of balconies. At one point, Nikku got married. His mom had to force this on him because, you know, he was happier ****** people indiscriminately, right? But at his mom's urging, he eventually married a girl named Pollyanna. After the wedding, he told her, now go live with my mother. She should **** you because she chose you. Wow, that's some solid. That was actually in my wedding vows as well. That's a beautiful, beautiful sentiment. Yeah, the couple divorced not long after that. Yeah, it's a heartbreak whenever that happens. So during the revolution that kicked their parents out of power, Nick, who ordered troops to massacre civilians in one Transylvanian town. His brother and sister didn't do much at all. They received 8 month sentences. Niku was given 20 years in prison. He was released after only three because his heavy drinking had killed his liver. He died at age 45, which means he lived, you know, a good four years longer than Vasily Stalin. I could probably fill two or three full podcasts with anecdotes of other dictator kids. I assume we'll do a follow up at some point. You know, there's there's the story of Gaddafi son Mutassim, who hired Beyoncé and ushered to play at private parties. He would throw and spend $2,000,000 a month of the government's money on his own fun, but we're going to also sounds like some sort of over the counter cough medicine. We're gonna actually move on to another dictators kid in a little bit, Nikolai Lukashenko, the small child with a golden gun. But first we've got some advertisements to come back to. Which advertisements? Advertisements that would really **** *** Nikolai Cheska, because he was, you know, Communist. So let's keep angering these dead dictators. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes there are answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing. This research with you for the first time ever in a book format you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world, and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker or wherever you find your favorite. Yes. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world, and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with speaker from iheart. Hey, we are back and I'm going to talk about Benito Mussolini, the lean man, and he actually seems to have been a decent parent and that his kids all grew up idolizing him even after his death. But he was a ****** parent and that his kids all became horrible fascists and his family are still fascists today. He sent his son Vittorio to Hollywood in 1937, and Vittorio formed a company with Hal Roach, creator of The Little Rascals. Their collaboration was short lived Dorable. You can find a video online of Mussolini's son meeting all of the Little Rascals. For real? Yeah. Does he have like a stiff sort of fascist demeanor about, you know, what I think he would have been? No, but he would have been a great member of the cast he's got. He's got rascals. Charisma. Yeah, yeah. I I really, I don't see why they didn't bring him back for the reboot in the 90s of the Little Rascals. That would have been what that was missing. But yeah, if you want to look that up online, you can see Mussolini's son and the little Rascals being adorable together. Mussolini's daughter, Etta, loved Hitler and the Nazis. In 1933, she joined Hitler and gerbils and Gerbils's family at Lake Bonsey, which is where the Holocaust was planned, not during that meeting, but in that same location a couple of years later. When the Holocaust Holocaust jokes aren't that funny, but the idea of Hitler planning it with a like 10 year old is really weird. I think she was a late teens like 19 underneath this point, no? Yeah. She called Hitler her uncle, though, and was, quote, always struck by his extraordinary kindness and affection toward me, as well as his patience. Hunky Hitler. Unkie Hitler, yeah. In 1940, she said she was ashamed and disgusted that Italy hadn't yet entered World War Two on the side of the Nazis. She said that she didn't force her dad to enter World War Two, but she also said, quote given My Germanophile sympathies, I was, without being aware of it, the link between the fewer and my father. I found it normal that two dictators should be allies. And this is all the more so since as soon as he took power in 1933, I had begun to consider Hitler a veritable hero in the 30s. I'm just trying to like, get a sense of when. When Mussolini and Hitler were like first on the scene, is there a modern day corollary for like, how the world viewed them? Would Putin be like the closest thing we have or Putin? Putin might be the closest thing we have towards how Mussolini was viewed at the time. A lot of people thought he was a monster, but he was very popular. Like one of the things that's hard when you think about the 30s is that fascism was a legitimate political ideology at that point, right? People thought it was dope. Yeah. People thought like, Oh no, this might be a reasonable way to run a country. So Mussolini was like he was the senior partner. Between him and Hitler for a while, right? Like in the 30s, he was like the big man and Hitler was trying to impress him and obviously Mussolini went to **** and this whole country went to ****. Hitler thrived, yeah. No, as far as I know. Now, I haven't read past 36, but I think it went pretty good. Guys got something on the ball. I feel like we got a lot. No, probably shouldn't make those jokes about Hitler, but yeah. ETA had a husband named Siano who wound up turning against Mussolini and being part of a plot to sort of overthrow him and pull Italy out of the war. Mussolini had him executed. He was forced to sit in a chair with other Co conspirators, tied to the chair and then shot in the head. His Mussolini's grandchild, Fabrizio Oceano, wrote a book in the 1990s titled when Grandpa had Dad shot wow. It's taking all I have to not say any of these names. And like a like insulting Italian caricature. There we go. You feel better get a little bit of that pressure out? Yeah. Mussolini's family is still very active in the Italian far right, which you'd think after their dad and his mistress being, like, murdered in public and the country getting bombed like, they would have been like, oh, maybe that was a mistake. But his granddaughter, Alessandra, is a member of the Italian Senate since, I think, 2011, and also a member of the European Parliament in 2006 when Libya asked for reparations for Italy's colonization and brutal war against it. Elisandra said, quote, if it hadn't been for my grandfather, they would still be writing camels and wearing turbans on their heads. They should be paying us compensation. So being complete **** does not always skip a generation. The Mussolini family just kind of seems to be garbage. Or maybe it did skip a generation and he had that generation shot in the head and then this is the ****** generation again. So maybe the next generation will shoot the prior generation. I mean, the the jury's pretty much in on fascism. You would think so. But then everything that's happened in the last two years, yeah. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about Gadhafi. Moammar ka freakin dafi. So you're a cute man. Then he has a weird record as a parent. Like most dictators, he gave one of his sons a sport team. Saadi Gadhafi was the head of Libya's National Football Federation, but he was also the captain of his home team and the national team. So he played too, and he was not good. But he benefited and his team benefited from the fact that referees weren't allowed to rule against him. And also broadcasters weren't allowed to mention the names of any other players in games he played in, so they would call out Saudi by name. But the other though, if you were playing in a game and he was anywhere on the field, no one else's name could be mentioned. So they'd be like, and the guy who sadly passed 2-3 passes ago passes to, they called their numbers out. OK. Some reason my brain was still in black and white from the Mussolini stories. When did he have that stadium demolished? Was that like, geez, modern day? I think that was in the early 2000s. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I'm not 100% on that. Yeah, boy, yeah, it was pretty recent. Like, it wasn't back in black and white days for sure. Yeah, Mutassim, you know, had Beyoncé play for him and stuff. He once counted that his lifestyle cost the Libyan government 2,000,000 a month just for him. That. Yeah, that was something he admitted freely to a friend. Yeah, so you can imagine how expensive the whole family was. Mutassim attempted a coup probably once in the 1990s. We don't know for sure, but he tried to overthrow his dad. We think his dad exiled him for a little while and then welcomed him back as the national security advisor. OK, so little. Yeah, you got to you got to forgive your kids, got to let them get that stuff out of their system. You know that the military cue overthrowing. Exactly. Your kids are going to crash a car or something. You know, they're gonna smoke a little weed. You can't be too hard on them, you know? You kick them out to Europe for a while and then you make them your national security adviser. No, I see they'll never get there because I already know my kids are plotting my overthrow, and I just have it. In the back of my mind, that's at all times. Yeah, that's smart. You gotta, you gotta. It's like that old parenting saying you always, you know, for every kid you need a dozen secret police. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of our conversations begin with, you think you're stronger than me. Yeah, that's that's that's good. That's setting yourself up for success. Gaddafi son. Hannibal was a sailor and so wound up in control of Libya's horrible Gaddafi. Gaddafi, well, Hannibal's a big name in that part of the world, you know? He's still a hero. ******* baller. Bad guy. Name anytime. Your name. Hannibal, that's frightening. One of the things that's a general rule with dictator kids is that if you have like an interest like sailing, you'll wind up in charge of that for the whole country. So it's he was like, oh, you like being on ships? Well, you're in charge of all the ports in our port nation. You own the ocean. Now, the upside of it is Hannibal was well educated and took his education seriously. At one point he was tutored by a European professor from Copenhagen. The book children of dictators quotes writer John Byrne as saying he was. This tutor who visited him was met by chauffeured cars, put up in a five star hotel and someone for private sessions to Hannibal's home, where gazelles and antelopes strolled around a garden. Pretty sweet gig if you're a tutor. I can see. Like, I think that's more forgivable than, like, Beyoncé because she doesn't need the money. But a college professor, you're going to take what you can get. Yeah, I guess. Like, be creative with who you make rich. Yeah, yeah, at least yeah, college professor I feel better about than Beyoncé getting more money. Play for a dictator or just one of the other destinies child yeah, yeah, that would have been creative. Yeah, we we've got a whole podcast on Children of Destiny coming up after this one. I I feel stupid. Hannibal regularly found himself in conflict with the police. Not Libyan police, obviously because they would never get him in trouble or anything, but with European police. In 2001, he assaulted officers at the Hilton in Rome at 3:00 AM. I'm going to quote from children of dictators here quote the officers had been guarding Hannibal's own room. He struck them with bottles and emptied a fire extinguisher on them for good measure. He then pleaded diplomatic immunity, as he would habitually do. In 2004, Hannibal led French police on a high speed. Race through the center of Paris. He was drunk and his black Porsche doing 90 miles an hour down the Chanza lease. He ran red lights. At one point he went the wrong way. When the police finally stopped him, six of his body on children of Destiny coming up after this one. I I feel stupid. Hannibal regularly found himself in conflict with the police. Not Libyan police, obviously because they would never get him in trouble or anything, but with European police. In 2001, he assaulted officers at the Hilton in Rome at 3:00 AM. I'm going to quote from children of dictators here quote the officers had been guarding Hannibal's own room. He struck them with bottles and emptied a fire extinguisher on them for good measure. He then pleaded diplomatic immunity, as he would habitually do. In 2004, Hannibal led French police on a high speed chase. To the center of Paris, he was drunk in his black Porsche, doing 90 miles an hour, and on the channelize he ran red lights. At one point, he went the wrong way. When the police finally stalked him, six of his bodyguards arrived in other cars and attacked the police. End Quote attacked them like physically. So this is like that, that affluenza case, but just on a global scale? Yeah, it's affluenza when you actually are immune to prosecution because you have diplomatic credentials, so you really can just. Plea diplomatic immunity. They're like guilty. Plea diplomatic immunity. And like diplomatic immunity, we control one of the biggest ports in the world. So what are you going to do? Like you, you you know our trade is a not insignificant part of your GDP. It's amazing that nobody just. Kills one of these guys just like, it's just like, well, come on, you guys aren't going to care, right? I mean, some of them did get killed, right? Yeah, but just toss him. Wound up getting killed, right? With alongside his dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, Hannibal, you know, was a nightmare person. He beat his wife and his servants, but also his wife poured boiling water on her servants. So nobody's the good, nobody's good in this story. Yeah, maybe the servants are OK. Yeah, the servants are probably decent people who are just trying not to get boiled. After Gaddafi was deposed information came out that Hannibal had ordered the building of a private cruise liner called the Phoenicia. It would have been big enough for 3500 passengers. Hannibal had specified that he wanted it to include a 120 ton Shark Tank that could hold 2 sand tiger sharks, 2 white sharks, and two black TIFF tip reef sharks. White sharks are great white sharks. Just white, just white, just white, just white. Not the great ones. He wasn't going to, he wasn't going to splurge the companies countries money right? You know you don't want to go crazy. Gaddafi did have one good kid. His name was Saif al Islam, which literally means sort of Islam. Saif refused to post in government and would regularly give interviews to the national press where he was critical of the Libyan government and his father. He, like, was kind of very popular in the world media because he was calling out the Libyan regime. He would call for democratic elections, but when the Civil War happened, he returned home to fight on behalf of his father. Real godfather two situation. Yeah, I guess. Godfather one. Yeah, godfather one. Like, he was a good enough guy that he recognized **** was ****** ** and he was willing to call it out. But like, when the chips were down, he defended his monster dad, right? And in fact, he was like the last Gaddafi standing in Libya as, as children of dictators puts it, after everyone else was, you know, murdered or had fled the country to avoid getting murdered. Murdered in the street publicly. Yeah. And he was left over. Did he ever get murdered? As far as I know, I think he's still alive. I think he might be in custody right now. Two days after his dad was killed, he he said that he was willing to fight to the end. But I think he's in custody right now. It makes you wonder, knowing what we know about all these other children of dictators, it makes you wonder if this guy was the best human like ever because he managed to just be an all right person. Yeah, it's rare, right? Like you've got some of the Castro's who were not terrible people. Right. Yeah, that's true as far as we know. But, like, Castro didn't give them. I don't know. You know, he gave them. Like, it's it's feel like he was kind of absentee or like, a disinterested dad maybe. Like, yeah, yeah, and that's they were just ****** ** by or, like, poorly parented into not being terrible, I guess. Yeah. Like the best thing you can hope for is enough neglect and also that your dad doesn't give you too much responsibility. And if that happens? And you won't, like, wind up in the worst case scenario you could wind up in. Yeah, would. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. No, he was a safe was captured trying to flee Libya. He was in jail for five or six years. He was released in June of 2017 and a militia that had arrested him chose not to transfer him to the International Criminal Court. And it looks like he's going to. Yeah. He says he's running for president. The UN backed Libyan government says he's running for president. He says he's going to, but the UN backed government in Libya right now. Because that's not going to happen. The ICC has a warrant out for his arrest. So I guess we'll see what happens if he needs somebody to run his campaign. I mean, I think we just gave them the strategy. Just be like, did you see how ****** my siblings were? Like, come on, I feel like Bannon could make it. I mean that makes you wonder though, if like the whole speaking out against his father thing was all it was an act from the beginning. Like it was like, I mean he is the great, like the long con. Or they call like a the. **** the second coming of Satan is that Satan? 2 electric Satan, 2 electric boogaloo, yeah. I forgot. Yeah, I feel like the great deceiver or whatever. I feel like that's what's happening here. It's just like, if I make myself seem like a good guy to the international press, then they won't have a big issue when I wind up taking over from my dad. And his dad was like, well, he's the only kid I have who's not a complete **** ** right. So he'll definitely take over. And it's fine that he's going to critique me a little bit. Antichrist, that's what. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm about to talk about my boy, Nikolai Lukashenko. So Nikolai is the son of Alexander Lukashenko, who is known as the last dictator in Europe. He's the president of Belarus. I should probably add that people called him the last dictator in Europe before Putin was as clearly a dictator as right now. But yeah, we'll stray away from politics here. Coming back, baby. Yeah. So Nikolai Lukashenko started being groomed to rule Belarus when he was six years old, which is, I guess, the age when you start that training, I assume. Some of this involved a thorough education and military training and all that stuff. But a lot of the time, his dad just seems to use him as a prop to embarrass world leaders. By the age of seven, he'd posed Nikolai with the Pope, Hugo Chavez, and the President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, the President of Russia, gave him an actual golden handgun. He apparently still wears it, because when he met Chavez again in 2012, he reached his hands up to high five. Him and his suit coat slid back to reveal a giant, stupid golden handgun. And I got to drop you some pictures here, so these are all going to be up on the website. Of the pictures that behind the ******** SCOM. Here's Nikolai Lukashenko receiving his giant golden handgun. And there it is in his little suit, just always clearly packing heat. He's still a child. He's he's 13 now. Wow. And he still has a golden handgun that he carries everywhere. There's the picture of him with Chavez. And this is a working handgun? Yeah, it's a functional, gold plated handgun. Jesus Christ, he's like my man. Yeah. What else do you give a kid? What do you give the kid who has everything? A golden gun? I like that he's slapping Hugo Chavez A5 instead of like, shaking his hand or cowering in fear. He's a hip, you know? Dictator in training, right? And apparently gets to carry a gun everywhere. Which golden gun? I mean, what? 12 year old wouldn't do that if they had the chance? Nothing says mad with power. Like golden handguns? Yeah, he's job offering pretty hard in all those pictures. Yeah, you don't find a whole lot about Nicholas personality because you know Belarus is a pretty closed country. But I'm sure he's going to turn out just great. He's been chosen to represent Belarus at the United Nations General Assembly. He's taking pictures with the Obamas and basically every other world leader who winds up near him. As of right now. He's aged 13, and yeah. We don't know much about him, but I'm optimistic that he will not be a drunken mass ******. Don't mind if if I've learned anything today, it's that I want that guy to marry my daughter if I if I ever have one. So, yeah, he seems like he's going to be well balanced. Yeah, he seems like that seems like that's going to go. So what? Why does his dad bring him everywhere? Because he thinks it's, like, funny to make heads of state pose with him, or it's it's kind of impossible to tell. If I feel like some of it's that because Belarus has been condemned by a bunch of different countries, including us, through, you know, nightmarish human rights violations, jailing political opponents. So I think it kind of tickles him to make someone like Barack Obama pose with him and his little kid who's the dictator. Waiting, but I think some of its training, like he wants to establish like a Kim style dynasty got it in Belarus. And so he's sort of positioning his kid. And so there's there's like 2 messages in making a 6 year old. Your apparent one of them is, you know, obviously getting people ready for this guy to be in charge, but the other is like, well, he's 6. So I'm going to be around for a long time, like you're not going to be free of Alexander Lukashenko anytime soon. And my kids packing a golden gun if anybody has a problem with it, of course. So yeah, I want to end this podcast by talking about Hitler's son. Now, I didn't know Hitler had a son. He almost certainly did not. Ohh, but there is one man who spent most of his life believing he was Hitler's son, even though he never met the man. So his story is worth telling. This guy, Jean Marie Loret, was born right at the end of World War One. He grew up without a dad, just knowing that his father was a random German soldier because the Germans had occupied his village for most of you know that war. He lived a pretty normal life. During World War Two, he fought against the Nazis as a member of the French Resistance. But then in 1950, when his mom was on her deathbed, she told him that when she was 16, she'd had an affair with Hitler. Jean Marie had been conceived during a quote Tipsy night with the future furor in June of 1917. This is a quote from Jean Murray quoting his mother saying I was cutting hay with the other women when we saw a German soldier on the other side of the street. He had a sketch pad and seemed to be drawing so checks out. So far. All the women found this soldier interesting and wanted to know what he was drawing. They picked me to try to approach him. They wound up starting a relationship and Jean Marie was born the next year. Is cutting hair euphemism for something or they are just legitimately cutting hay? They was. I mean, this is some like peasant **** right there. Adorably peasant, yeah, yeah. So yeah. According to Jean Marie's mom, she and Hitler would often go on walks while she was pregnant. The walks usually ended badly. Quote in fact, your father, inspired by nature, launched into speeches which I did not really understand. He did not speak French, but ranted in German, talking to an imaginary. Audience so. Sounds like Hitler. Yeah. I mean, sounds like the one thing you would know about Hitler if you so when was this? This was during World War Two, during World War One, during World War One. World War One is when this kids conceived because he fights the Nazis as a young man because he's just like a French kid. So most reputable historians say Phillip probably wasn't Hitler's kid. A blood test didn't rule it out though, because they have the same blood group. And his mom had a Hitler painting. And there's another painting of Hitler's that looks like it's a painting of her that's a regional Hitler and original Hitler. So maybe there's. Yeah, it's not impossible. And so did we have this guy's bloodline snuffed out or where what we do, what's going on? We're getting to that. OK. So, you know, Jean Marie grew up believing he was Hitler or, you know, from the age 30, believed he was Hitler's kid. And he claimed that at first he was horribly depressed and he would just work all day every day in order to not be overwhelmed with sadness, he says, for 20 years. Couldn't even go to the movies because any time spent not productively it would just like grip him and and and consume him. He didn't tell anyone for almost 30 years until in 1979 he walked into a lawyer's office and said quote I am the son of Hitler, tell me what I should do. Which great day to be that lawyer. Why did he think that was a legal matter? Well, he never makes much of a point of it in the interviews of him I read. But there's always talk about like, well, he might be entitled to the royalties from Mein Kampf, right? Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. He did wind up writing a book about his experience as maybe Hitler's kid. And as the years went on and the scientific battle to prove his claims was waged, Jean Marie sort of leaned into being Hitler. He changed his look to match the furor, and he definitely looks hitleri. All you need is a mustache. So this is him posing next to a picture of that'll do it keeps in his house. That will do it. He's got the stash, and that's all you need? Yeah. He he grew the mustache and he kept Hitler pictures around on his walls so that when journalists came over, they could catch a picture of him looking just like Hitler. And he does. Also important that you not be smiling in your picture. No, you can't look like Hitler while smiling. No, you don't see a lot of smiling Hitler pictures. Yeah. So. Yeah. He seems to have gone from ashamed and horrified of his lineage to weirdly proud. Yeah, very clearly. Here's a quote from him. Hitler is my family. It's not my fault that I ended up as his grandson or that all those things happened during the war. Those things. I think being the Holocaust. What he did has all those things, those things, all that stuff, all those that that what not. Yeah. What he did has nothing to do with me. Which, you know, that's fair. He will always be family for me. That's weird. Yeah. I don't think evil passes on. Of course, qualities from your parents pass on to you, but you build your own life and you make it what it is. Up until the end of his days, Jean Marie Loray continued to insist that he was proud of being Hitler's son. So that's weird. He is wearing a smart little sweater tie number there. So kind of gives you an idea of what Hitler retired might have. That's exactly right. So this is not the end of the story because Jean Marie had a son, Philippe, who worked as a plumber for the French Air Force. Really? That's apparently a job. Air Force. Hitler would have wanted it, just like just like Hitler would have loved. Please, I want you to deal with French soldiers. ****. So in recent years Felipe has opened up about his belief that he is the grandson of Adolf Hitler. From him we get quotes such as my father said Hitler was a good lover and was gentle to my grandmother, but apparently he was a jealous person and did not like other men giving her the eye. As far as I know, he never had any sexual perversions. I don't want to make him out to be more of a monster than he is. Which is. Weird of all of the things. Rather than just being like, yeah, I think I'm Hitler's grandson, but doesn't mean I'm a bad guy. You're like, I think I'm Hitler's grandson and my grandpa was good at sex, right? What a strange. Yeah, so Weird Hill to die on. Yeah. It's not like Hitler is known for not being good at sex or being good at sex. Like, either way, it's a very strange. I hear he was a gentle lover. Alright, see you guys later. That's a weird thing. You just drop on a journalist, right? My favorite thing about this story is the way Jean Marie apparently informed his kids. Including Philippe, that they might be Hitler kin. So one evening they're all seated around the dining room table when, quote, suddenly my father said, kids, I've got something to tell you. Your grandfather is Adolf Hitler. Well, really built up to that. He had a lifetime to write that speech and was just like, oh **** forgot. Yeah. Hitler's your granddad, yeah. Sleep also expressed a weird sort of pride in his possible ancestry. And he, too, keeps pictures of Hitler on his wall, seemingly so photographers can take photographs that show off the clear resemblance is the same picture this is dad took? Yeah, I mean, his mustache is a little less hitleri. His mustache is just a mustache. He does have two framed photographs on his wall, both of Hitler. One of them is a drawing. But this is very strange. Like, they they look like, you know, they are in frames where you would have family pictures. Yeah, yeah, just Hitler right on his back wall and like, like, his dad seems to be making some effort to look Hitler. And with that casual laid back Hitler Vibe, he has his like one hand on his wrist, like just kind of doing a hey, just chilling at Hitler the 3rd's dining room. I can see the resemblance. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not impossible that they're actually Hitler's kids. It's just weird to me, the impact that just thinking you've got this guy as your relative has on you. Yeah. And it's also interesting to me that, like, so many of those other kids, the ones who weren't garbage, like, as soon as they were old enough to realize what their dad was doing, like, fled the country and got away. But these guys, once they think, like, Oh my dad, Granddad might have been Hitler, they just go whole hog into looking like him. Like, hey, Hitler wasn't that bad. He was. Good lover, at the very least, yeah. Say what you will about all that stuff that happened during the war. Hitler could **** and he was my grandpa. The end. I think that's the name of his book. Hitler could ******* use my grandpa, man. But what a romantic that Hitler was. Yeah. Yeah, well, this has been a whirlwind. Yeah. I've learned a lot about what to do as a parent from these stories. Yeah. Any lessons you want to take back home with you? Just. Yeah. Earn their belongings while laughing maniacally is kind of one of the first things that put their belongings while laughing maniacally is kind of one of the first things solid parenting that puts them in their place. They really kind of found his place after that. It sounds like Jesus man, what a nightmare. Yeah. Oh, boy. That's a fun tale. Yeah. Yeah. I feel, I still feel like having gone over all of this, like, my initial conclusion was right, that that Fidel was probably the least garbage of all these parents, but they were all pretty, pretty terrible, right? Yeah. Like, not a lot of good cases here. Yeah. So yeah. Being a strong leader, that maybe that's a lesson for all of us parents to learn. Like the tendencies that lead to dictatorship don't lead to good parenting. Yeah. Authoritarianism isn't a good thing to to bring out an apparently not. Yeah. Yeah. Although, you know, maybe the Obama kids will wind up, you know, carrying out a brutal. Purge campaign against the Trump family and and murder their political enemies. So we're not gonna talk about whether how we would feel about that. But yeah, I bet the Obama girls are going to end up just fine. Yeah, I suspect they'll wind up better than we already know. The Trump kids have held out. I'm really curious about Barron. Barron could be very interesting. Ivanka, I mean, come on, she's she's an All Star. She's a star. You guys, how long do you think it isn't before Putin gives Baron? Golden gun. It's coming, man. All right, well, Jack, you got anything to plug? I hear you have a podcast these days. I do have a podcast these days. Almost definitely on the day you're listening to this. Unless it's weekend. We just released an episode. It's called the daily zeitgeist. We talk about whatever is happening right now on a daily basis. Host it with my co-host Miles Gray and we have 1/3 comedian on and it's a lot of fun. You can find it wherever fine podcasts are given away for free. You should try and get Hitler's grandson to come on. Yeah, that would that would actually be awesome. Yeah, I'm sure he'd have a fun pronunciation of the word zeitgeist. Oh yeah, and you can follow me at Jack under score O'Brien on Twitter. Well, this has been behind the ******** and I am and have been Robert Evans. If we haven't in this episode, gotten to a dictator that you particularly wanted to hear about in their parenting strategies, that's OK. There's a lot of dictators who had kids. They were all terrible. We didn't even get into Papa Doc and Baby Doc. So this is going to be a reoccurring feature throughout the podcast. We'll be checking back in with other dictator. Parents and their kids talking about how that's going and you know, so. So if you've got a dictator parent you want to hear about, maybe drop us an e-mail. What is our? I would tell them. Ohh, so if you've got a so if you've got a dictator kid or a dictator parent you want to hear about, maybe you tweeted at us and we'll make sure that one gets into the next episode we do on this topic. Until then, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram and social media at at Bastarde pod. You can find us on theinternet.com at behindthebastards.com. And you can find us next Tuesday with another episode of behind the ********. Until then, I'm Robert Evans. My name is Alex Fumero and I host the new podcast more than a movie, American Me, a film directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. I'll be diving into the behind the scenes controversy, including an alleged backlash from the Mexican mafia. Several people who worked on the movie have been murdered. I don't want to speak about why would people be murdered for being in a movie? Listen to more than a movie American me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator capital Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your husband blood. And his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. 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