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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that see? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Almost. 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 I don't want to speak about it. 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. Words. I don't know. **** it. We're still out of introductions. The the shipments are still coming. We've been told the supply lines are holding out, but they have not been trucked into us yet. So, you know, we will see. At some point, this introduction shortage will end. I will promise you, my fellow Americans, that. But it just hasn't yet. We're still out of intros, but we're not out of Soren Bowie's Soren. We are flush in. Sorry, boys. I would dare say lousy with sorens. Yeah, filthy with sword. This is the most we've ever had in this podcast at least. And tied for the most that I've ever had during that 10 year. Where we work together. Yes. And I'll say completely useless during a disaster. You don't want these. They can't help you now. That's not true. Because one of the things, Soren, you're you're a number of things. You are currently a writer for the TV show American dad. You were formerly my coworker at Cracked. You are a host of the Co host of the podcast quick question with my friend Daniel O'Brien. And you have also helped discover. The lost city in the desert, and I'm not going to give any more detail to my audience than that, but that's not a joke. That's just a thing Sorin did one time, which he has in common with our our host today. Kind of not really Henry Morton Stanley. Yeah. You know, you'll find along the way that there are a lot of things he and I have in common. You have discovered a city and again, no more detail will be given. So off we go into the tail. So I think it's it's hard to adequately convey to people what Africa? Oh, also, this is behind the ********. You probably knew that because this is Part 2 of the episode. Thank you. It's hard to adequately convey to people today, like what African explorers were to Europeans in the mid 1800s and late 1800s. Like the closest thing we have today would be like a cross between a major. YouTube star and a pop musician like you. You have to think about these guys kind of the way people think of Beyoncé and Rihanna today. Like they are that level of worshipped and adored by a lot of people, which is hard to get your head around because they're all like Stanley. So as Stanley stared out towards Africa, you know, at this point in his career, age 27, two of the most famous explorers in the world were Richard Burton and John Speck. They just finished their epic journey from Africa's East Coast to Lake Tanganyika, which is the the longest freshwater lake. On Earth and they had quote UN quote discovered Lake Victoria, the largest body of water in Africa during this trip. It was considered to be like this huge deal. Everybody was very excited. People couldn't shut the **** ** about Lake Victoria and about Burton and Speck and Americans were obsessed with them too. Now one of the most famous explorers of this day was David Livingstone. He was a physician and a Christian evangelist from Scotland. Now Livingston was an abolitionist and his focus was on on ending what is often referred to as the. Arab slave trade in Africa and you hear about the Arab slave trade in Africa today, usually when people are explaining how the Confederacy wasn't all that bad because Arabs were the real villains of the slave trade. Yeah. And it it, yeah. So Livingston, the Arab slave trade was a real thing, but it's probably wrong to call it the Arab slave trade. A decent number of the people who were running the trade were Arabs, but they were N African Arabs and a lot of them weren't Arabs. Like a lot of people are Swahili and stuff like that. These are people from like North Africa. Some of them are Arabs, some of them aren't. It gets reduced to being the Arab slave trades that people can blame Arabs, but it's, you know, it's it's a bunch of people from. One part of Africa enslaving, enslaving people from another part of Africa and selling them somewhere. It's a bad thing, but it's not quite the way it's it's portrayed today. So Livingston was committed to ending this kind of slavery. I didn't hear much about him on the Civil War. I think he probably was anti Confederacy in this, but England itself wasn't necessarily in anyway, we'll move on. He was convinced that the answer he was committed to ending slavery in Africa, he was committed to ending slavery in Africa, and he was convinced that the answer to doing so was what he called legitimate trade. Livingston was a believer in Christianity, commerce, and civilization. Those that was one of his like catchphrases saying that Christianity, commerce and civilization would free black Africans from slavery, that the violent colonial domination of millions of people was the only way to achieve this, was not something that Livingston ever really said, but it was the inevitable result of his beliefs. No, it's cool, yeah. When you're trying to build a utopia, you got to break a few eggs, man. Yeah, and Livingston felt a powerful desire to connect the different villages, towns, and ports of central Africa in order to facilitate easier trade and allow missionaries to move around more easily and Christianize the continent. He wanted to use the many lakes and rivers of central Africa as highways to facilitate this trade. But in order to do that, he had to map them. And that's just what Livingston set out to do. He started mapping out the Congo. River and he had a series of daring adventures on the way. For one example, at one point he was he agreed to help a village by trying to kill a lion that was hunting them. And he hit the lion, but, like, the lion still attacked him and his arm was horribly mauled. So he's like, he's the kind of things this guy gets up to. And he gets very he writes books which are very popular, and he's he becomes, you know, moderately famous. He's not the most popular explorer, but he's up there, and Stan Lee reads one of his books and he's enthralled. Now, the height of Livingston's fame came in the late 1850s. And he succeeded in convincing a series of backers to fund his effort to map the Zambezi River so that he could create a major artery through which he could pump Christianity and capitalism into the heart of Africa. He succeeded in working out a deal with the London Missionary Society, but sort of misled them about the extent to which the government supported his efforts. The result of which of this is that he brought a **** load of missionaries into a place that was extremely dangerous, and a bunch of them, and more importantly, their young children, died horribly. This disaster was not good for Livingston's PR. And by 1866, he was seen as something of a has been. You would say he's like the Jeremy Renner of guys who explore Africa in this. You know, I'm curious when he's like, when his goal is to find out where the, like the, this, find this reverend, explore this river so that he can pump Christianity into that area. Yeah, my phrasing. Yeah, yeah. I'm curious, like how that what that looks like logistically. Like, I can get that you would import and export stuff, but something as nebulous as religion and you're just pumping a bunch of white Christians into that area and being like this, eventually this will take root. Yeah, basically you're sending a lot of them there. From little communities to have businesses and also to to to witness to people. And kind of the assumption I think Livingston makes is that the benefits of white Christian civilization will just be so obvious that eventually this will take root and take over. You know, the way things had been. He wants, he wants what you'd call a soft genocide. He doesn't want to kill any of the people. That's not the kind of guy Livingston is, but he wants to completely change every aspect of their old life and destroy the old culture because his is better. So like. Like a soft genocide. Yeah. Again, the English word. The slow Nazis. Like that's the way to look at them. Yeah. And they have a way higher death toll than the Nazis, because being slow lets you do that. But anyway, so yeah, he it's cool. So in 1866, uh, sort of disgraced Jeremy Renner type David Livingston sets off on another one of his adventures to find the source of the Nile. He went missing, and for years very little was heard from the doctor. By 1868, all of Europe was in an uproar over the fate of David Livingston. Within several English social clubs, gears began churning to raise money for an expedition to rescue the good doctor. Or to find evidence of his demise. But sitting over in the United States, keeping an eye on the news, Henry Morton Stanley was able to see something important in the disappearance of David Livingstone. An opportunity for Henry Morton Stanley? Yes. To Africa now. Henry? Yeah. If he could somehow convince his new employer to send him to Africa and then track down Livingston himself, he would have the biggest scoop in all of journalism. It would be the kind of story that would not just make his career, but make him into a global celebrity. And there was nothing Henry Morton Stanley wanted more. He spent quite a lot of time trying to convince the publisher of the New York Herald to fund his expedition. He succeeded once, but then Livingston turned up briefly again and Stanley putted around the Middle East, you know, doing that sort of journalism instead. It took until 1869 for things to really start to happen with this story. So, like four years after Livingston goes missing and Stanley's version of the story of how he got approval to do this as a lie, but it's also the most coherent version of the tale. So we're going to start here. I'm going to quote Adam Hauschildt right up of it. In 1869 Stanley received an urgent telegram from Bennett, his boss come to Paris on important business. A journalist, Stan Lee wrote with the self importance that had now become part of his public persona is like a gladiator in the arena and he flinching any cowardice and he has lost. The Gladiator meets the sword that has sharpened for his bosom. The roving correspondent meets the command that May send him to his doom. He dashed off to Paris to meet his publisher at the Grand Hotel. There a dramatic conversation about Livingston Climax with Bennett, saying, I mean that you shall go and find him wherever you may hear. That he is, and to get what news you can of him, and perhaps the old man may be in want. Take enough with you to help him if he should require it. But do what you think is best, but find Livingston now. None of this actually happened. Uh, it's a lie that Stanley cooked up because it made a good introduction for the book. He eventually wrote about his expedition and he tore up the pages of his diary from those days. So we will never know what actually went down the whole Livingston journey. No, no, no, just the whole story of how he convinced his boss to send him. The real story seems to basically be that he got approval because it was a big story and then his boss backed out a bunch of times and eventually Stanley kind of conned his way into pulling out money out of the company. Counts. And then disappearing in Africa. And when he reappeared with the story, his boss agreed to pretend that nothing bad had happened. You know, that's kind of the gist of it. I think it's a weird story. There's nothing you want more in a journalist than a really good liar, and that's that's exactly what he was. And I'm sure his plan was to go there and of Africa. He wrote that he felt like an English nobleman in a massive private park. Quote, I felt momentarily proud that I owned such a vast domain, inhabited by such noble beasts, the pride of the African forests. So he is one thing you can say about Stanley. He is the most ******* pedal to the ******* metal colonialist. Like, there is not, not even a second that it takes and be like, yeah, this, this is, this feels like mine. Yeah, and I feel like Africa's mind. He's so obsessed with being a nobleman that he even in Africa. He's like this. This feels like it, right? This is what it's like. This is what it's like. Squint. These look like my Moors that I'm out wandering around on my horse background. It rules. So for a little while, Stanley was in Paradise. He was followed, as always, by much younger men whose job it was to see to his every need and to adore him. His translator, Salim, fit this bill to a tee, as did kalulu, the young slave that he had bought and made into a Butler. So he owns a slave, and as he has to do a lot of he's got to do a lot of groundwork to try to turn this one around. Sorry, I'm very curious about his acrobatics. It is hard to turn a slave owner in the not a racist, but Geo gives it the old college try, yes. He describes, Gill describes Kolulu as quote, the slave boy whom he would free by purchase to be his Butler and valet. Henry would be reminded of the boys at the workhouse who had been his de facto family during his adolescence, not that his affection for them would stop him from beating both Salim and Kolulu for crimes such as stealing food and breaking things. So here's the way that he describes it or he he washes it away as he's like he has an affinity for him because he reminds him of the slaves at the workhouse where he used to. He still beats the **** out of this slave. Don't get me wrong, beats the **** out of this slave. It's also worth noting in Geo kinda brushes over this that Stanley doesn't like Kahlua's original name and he just changes it. Oh nice, he just gives him a new name is a better name for you. I hate this relationship. Yeah, Stanley, Carl from now on who again, Geo repeatedly points out what an anti slavery crusader Stanley is owns the slave whose name that he changes and whom he beats. And this is different from slavery for variety of reasons that neither Jill nor I have the time to get into right now. So we know the name change. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's it's it's somewhere in here. Oh, man, I hope. It's like, I hope he named him like Karen. Just like Kalulu is the name he changes it to and it's what kalulu goes by for the rest of his life or what the kid goes by for the rest of his life. Like, Stanley brings him back to England and stuff. Like, I don't know, it is one of those things, you know, a lot of times people will defend these guys, will pointing out that, like these people who they very clearly abused and owned, like, liked them and spoke pleasantly about them the rest of their days and like, that's really not the point. Yeah, like there's a lot of former terrorist like kidnapping victims and ******* Stockholm or whatever, you know, who will speak fondly of them. It's yeah. Yeah, he wrote a book about kolulu years later called Mike Kalulu Prince, King and Slave, which he called a romance for boys. So that's. That's not great, either. Henry, deal with your sexuality, man. Yeah. Yeah. And he renamed him from Kahului's. Real name was naguru. Mahali. Which means my brother's wealth. Yeah. And yeah, he renamed him Kalulu, which means a young male antelope, and then made him carry his gun. That was kalulu's big gig, so that's cool. Cool and sorry, the Dugu. Yeah, did he turned Dugu mahali? That's he changed his name and turned him into a gun rack? Yeah. Which is not racist. And you know what else is not racist? Soren? Abraham Lincoln. He he was profoundly racist, but he gets a partial pass for destroying the Confederacy. I would say partial. Yeah, OK, let's not racist. That's not racist. A haircut. A haircut. I mean, actually there's a lot of politics around haircuts and how that could go badly, as well as as well. Oranges not racist, incapable of racism by dint of being a fruit. So. This podcast is supported by oranges, the fruit that hates racism. 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. 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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 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. Spreaker.com get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back. Oh my gosh. So. Boy howdy. So Stanley sets off on this expedition to find Doctor Livingston, and at the time Doctor Livingston is an OK is probably strong. He was broken, abandoned in central Africa and was regularly terribly ill. But he was also like just kind of hanging out in a house in a village as the local white guy. And he wasn't in more danger than like any given white dude was in a place where they had no natural immunity to all these different horrible diseases that were flopping around in the flies and stuff, you know? So this isn't like a heart of darkness situation where. Has gone down there and become a God in some remote. No, no, he just kind of lives there. And they're like, yeah, it's that's the white guy we got. We got one, we got one. Tell all the other villages. We got one. Yeah. Starting in 1867, Livingston's own followers had stolen so much for him that he'd been forced to travel with Arab Swahili slave caravans for safety while, like, hating these people and the Arab slave trade. And while he describes all this, our buddy Tim Giel had things that you, the reader, need to know that. Even this kind of slavery wasn't super bad for black people, and I'm going to give you more of Tim right now. Who is Bradley becoming? The real ******* of the story? Livingston could endure his humiliating dependence on many considered evil doers largely because he made a distinction between Arab slavery as an institution, the treatment and possession of domestic slaves, and the cruel process by which Africans were torn from their homes. The slaves journey by land and sea was appallingly cruel, but on arrival in Arabia they were usually treated better than many British factory workers. Oh, OK, great. Thank you. Tim Gill didn't need that defense of slavery. Not necessary to tell the story, actually, yeah, Tim is quickly working his way up to having his own episode. Yeah, this is basically the Tim Geo episode. Stanley has the defense of growing up in a time when almost everyone was some kind of monster. So Stanley, as Stanley got deeper into Africa, problems began to surface. Some of his men expressed displeasure under his leadership, and Stanley generally responded to this by flogging them. When they were 125 miles inland, Stanley flogged his cook for incorrigible dishonesty and waste, which I think was just like wasting food. He fired the cook and told him to leave, but when the cook left, Stanley called him a deserter and sent soldiers out to bring him back. Gill says this shows his steely determination. Throughout this adventure. Stanley would send his soldiers out after disorders and order men beaten. Unchained for not wanting to work. This is again different from slavery, because of course Henry Morton Stanley was an abolitionist, so that's good. So yeah, Livingston had two white guys with him on this journey. When one of the two of them got sick, he abandoned him to die in a village and continued on. Stanley had very little sympathy for people whose illness rendered them unable to work for days, even though he was himself frequently and horrifically ill on these journeys. Tim Giel, unbiased biographer. I want you to know that while he tromped through other people's land, Stanley was a pretty good guest of the Africans. Oh great quote. Though impatient with white colleagues, he showed commendable restraint with Africans, though Agogo, whose territory lay midway between the coast and Lake Tanganyika, were, in Stanley's words, clannish and full of fights, and their young warriors repeatedly rushed up to within a few feet of him and shouted in his face, before moving closer to inspect his clothes. The traveler in Rego territory, wrote Henry, was tempted a score of times. Each day to draw a bead with his rifle, but such an outburst of anger would be bitterly regretted afterwards. Stanley was ill with fever at the time, and on 2 occasions lashed out with a whip, but he paid these people generously for territory lay midway between the coast and Lake Tanganyika, where in Stanley's words, clannish and full of fights, and their young warriors repeatedly rushed up to within a few feet of him and shouted in his face before moving closer to inspect his clothes. The traveler and Regogo territory wrote. Henry was tempted a score of times each day to draw a bead with his rifle, but such an outburst of anger. Would be bitterly regretted afterwards. Stanley was ill with fever at the time and on 2 occasions lashed out with a whip. But he paid these people generously for the right of passage through their territory. The equivalent of $170 would gold, so he whipped them sometimes for asking what was up, but he paid him. Yeah, I also like picturing this man in a pith helmet, like feverishly hallucinating and whipping people throughout the jungle. And Tim Gill being like basically a good guest. What's the problem? He was hospitable. What I would I would criticize him more for this, but I have lost count of the number of people that I have whipped in their own homes for unclear reasons while feverish. So I'm not going to give Stanley too much pain. It happens, you know, we've all whipped a few people we wish we hadn't whipped when we had a fever and wound up in their house somehow. Not going to you don't. You don't throw stones if you live in white houses. Exactly. And every house is a White House. When you bring a whip into every house you winter, bring your own whip. Yeah, always. So Stanley did succeed eventually, in his goal of tracking David Livingston down. He found him in the village of Ujiji in November of 1871. The moment the two met is one of the most famous stories in all of journalism. Stanley and Livingston, the two only white men around for miles, surrounded by black and Arab servants and soldiers, walk up to one another and Stanley dryly asks Dr Livingston, I presume, and the joke here is that Livingston is the only other white guy. They're like the ******* length of multiple states. Of course it's Doctor Livingston. And for his part, Giles thinks this was a lie, like that this recitation of events was a lie and that Stanley's real introduction was like, hi, Doctor Livingston. My name is Stanley. You know, it was a normal thing that a person would say again, Doctor Larry, say my name is John. No, I'm sorry. Yeah. ****. I meant that to be so much better. His actual notes, uh, Stanley's actual notes about their moment of meeting were again destroyed. So and Livingston died a year later before ever returning to Europe. So there was never anyone to question Stanley's recitation of events or never anyone white. And no other white person at the time was going to ask, like a black dude what had really happened. So Yep, so we don't even know the doctor. Livingston, I presume, is just something he might probably made-up afterwards. He made-up because it sounded better. Yeah, and it's really funny because Jill is more concerned. Like the honest documentarian in him means he needs to let people know that Stanley's most famous line was a lie, but he he is so he loves Henry Morton Stanley so much that he spends more time defending him about this. So memorable that it would be recognized by 1,000,000 / a century and 1/4 later places him in a class all his own. Yes, it does. A very specific Class A very not the one you're thinking of. Yeah, not a good one. Hmm. Now. Livingston and Stanley spent four months together, which were probably the happiest four months of Stanley's life, and it does seem that the two men grew very close in Livingston, who was 60. Activity to invent a greeting so memorable that it would be recognized by 1,000,000 / a century and 1/4 later places him in a class all his own. Yes, it does a very specific Class A very not the one you're thinking of. Yeah, not a good one. Now. Livingston and Stanley spent four months together, which were probably the happiest four months of Stanley's life, and it does seem that the two men grew very close in. Livingston, who was 60, acted as a sort of father figure to Stanley. They explored together for a little while, but then Stanley had to go. He had a story to file and Livingston wasn't ready to go back to to England or whatever. Now the story was a massive hit. It was the biggest news item in the world and one fell swoop Stanley became among the most famous people on the planet. He wrote a book to go with his articles how I found Livingstone, and in doing this he sort of invented. An entire genre. One historian notes that he's the progenitor of all the subsequent professional travel writers like Stanley kind of invents the discipline of travel writing, as there's not like the very first person to do it, but he like, he nails it for the first time in a way that's like really echoes throughout history. Adam Hochschild writes his articles, books and speaking tours, bought him greater riches than any other travel writer of his time, and probably the next century as well. In 1874, the Herald paid for him to go on another adventure. This time, Stanley traced the course of a river named the Lua Laba, and in the process he discovered the origin of the Congo River. He started this journey with 228 people, and over the course of 7000 miles, more than half of them died. As the corpses piled up, people attempted to desert. Stanley responded to this by capturing and chaining those people up. Gill notes that Stanley preferred chaining people up because it was nicer than beating them. Our hero. It's so cool. Stanley also continued his marked preference of having adoring white younger men accompany him on his journey. And all three of them had a witness. Yeah, exactly. But unfortunately, all three of them die. And they died. They died just horribly. Like the worst, the worst deaths you can imagine. That's basically all the white guys Stanley ever goes on trips with. Die. The worst deaths human beings can die. Yeah, they're all red. That's great. And then Stanley gets to lie about them. Terrible. Which they're all pieces of **** too. Like, I'm not going to, you know, whatever. So Stanley gets back from his journey in August of 1877 and publishes his book on it in 1878 through the Dark Continent and Henry Morton. Stanley is generally credited as being the man who popularized that term, and he may even have invented it. So he's like, he's the guy who makes dark continent a household name for Africa and that is there's huge consequences to that, like to the like. He contributes to the death of 10s of 1,000,000 as a result of this. True to form, Stanley exaggerated every single number he could in this book, claiming his expedition had 100 more members than it really did, exaggerating the number of natives as been killed in gunfights and all. Every number is a lie, basically, in one key story stuff. This is like, this is lying in the wrong direction to a tee. Yeah, I was responsible for more dead men than I got so many more people killed. In one key story, his own notes record 6 kills during a firefight, but his book claims 35. And again, this is a firefight because he, like, barged into some people's land and started stealing **** and they got angry, so it's like I had no choice but to shoot them. And also true to form, Tim Geo uses the fact that Stanley lied about how many people he killed as a basis for a lot of his argument that Stanley was has been unfairly treated by history and was a good dude. He frames this as Stanley just being very insecure because of his childhood in the workhouse God. What a kindred spirit Jill has found in Stanley. It's so good. If if Jill had been alive during this time, he absolutely would have gotten hired to follow Stanley on a journey and he would have died the most unimaginably painful death Gary gets. He would have been eaten by fire ants. And Geo would have like lied and said that he started one of the many gunfights he had with natives. Yeah, he would have lied and said that the natives natural attraction to Jill it was forced him to to kill all of them. Yeah, it did. This is a guy whose whose career is an adventurer star starts with getting a young boy who adores him raped with knives and then stealing that kid's money. Such a ***** ** ****. So yeah, now his acknowledgement of of yes, it's it's great. So Stanley and his passage in one of Stanley's Diaries, which I have never seen quoted in any book, and this entry, Stanley showed that he had recognized the fundamental moral problem facing all European travelers. We went into the heart of Africa self invited, he wrote. Therein lies our fault. But it was not so grave that our lives, when threatened, should be forfeited. So Stanley. Stanley knows it's ****** ** to just barge into someone's home and then take their **** at gunpoint and kill them when they say he knows I'm invading people's homes and murdering them for food, and that's not good. But he also argues that because I'm starving, it's OK for me to do this, right? What other choice do I have? What other? You could not be in Africa, dude. No, not be reasonable. Grow up. What other choice do I have? Yeah, you could just not do this. Millions of people around the world managed to not do this during the same. That could have been you, buddy. Yes, but none of them are me. Yeah. Henry Morton stands. Henry Morton Stanley. Yeah. Now this reasoning is dubious enough on its own, but Stanley's contribution to death and destruction in Africa went far beyond a few 100 bullets fired or even beyond the three of his own men that he hanged. I'm going to quote now from a write up titled Henry Morton Stanley and his critics from the Oxford University Press. Rich people, he of course. Sorry, you're not gonna go on journeys through the heart of Africa and not hanging some of the people that you can't chain or whip into submission. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, of course. Quote on his death in 1904, Sidney Lowe claimed that the map of Africa is a monument to Stanley. Such an epitaph draws our attention not only to Stanley's contributions to geographical science arising from various African expeditions between 1871 and 1890, but also to his role as an agent of European colonial influence. For Stanley was a tireless advocate of commercial and political intervention in Africa. Indeed, to describe him as the Napoleon of African travellers seems particularly appropriate in view of both the scale of his ambitions and the links he was prepared to go in order to realize them. His career as an explorer Bridges would have sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of African Exploration, 1851 to 1878, and the era of the Scramble for Africa, 1884 to 91. If the 1870s were indeed a critical turning point in the history of European involvement in Africa, than Stanley himself played a significant role in the transition. New forms of imperialism in the closing decades of the 19th century. See, and this is critical, there was colonialism in Africa before Stanley, but what we think of as colonialism in Africa was invented in a lot of ways by Henry Morton Stanley. Most of Africa wasn't quote UN quote owned by European powers when he gets there. And his work helps inspire the political changes that leads to that changing, he sparks was known as the Scramble for Africa, and some of this was deliberate. It was part of a plot by King Leopold to get control of the Congo. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. I want to talk about Stanley. Specific contribution, though, to like the evolution of colonialism because he's critical in the whole world wide thing. So he believed, like Livingston did, that slavery was the ultimate evil and had to be fought by sending Europeans and to facilitate trade. Sometimes that process meant chaining or whipping, or beating or executing Africans who didn't play along with this trade. If so, yeah, we're owning slaves. If so, this was all the regrettable necessity of freeing people now. I love that he always has his excuse every single time is my hands are tied and it's crazy how this never changes. And you have literal reports from the US military in Vietnam that are like we had to burn down the village to save it. Like this is this is always the logic of this sort of thing. But Stanley helps develop this language of of justifying the most violent kind of imperialism. So at one point while sailing through Lake Tanganyika, Stanley writes quote the beach was crowded with infuriates and mockers. These are like local Africans who just kind of like hooting and hollering and yelling at him because they don't want him in their area. We perceive. We were followed by several canoes and some of which we saw Spears shaking at us. I opened on them with the Winchester repeating rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking, so they made fun of me, so I killed four men. It was gundar stand. Yeah. I walked into their home. They laughed at me, and so I murdered four of them. And then there is this laughing. Are you trying to tell me I'm not a hero for that? Don't try to tell Tim Jeal that he will get ******* angry. So Stanley was not the first or the only white man to stumble into Africa with a pile of guns and the desire to own things, but he was one of the most influential in his writings in this. Helped to inspire countless millions of white folks around the world to embrace the conquest of Africa. Quote. His writings represented Central Africa as a primeval place, untouched by history yet full of possibility. They were far from unique in this respect, of course, and the period? Don't try to tell Tim Giel that he will get ******* angry. So Stanley was not the first or the only white man to stumble into Africa with a pile of guns and the desire to own things. But he was one of the most influential in his writings in this. Helped to inspire countless millions of white folks around the world to embrace the conquest of Africa. Quote. His writings represented Central Africa as a primeval place, untouched by history yet full of possibility. They were far from unique in this respect, of course, and the period between the publication of Stanleys through the Dark Continent, 1878, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, 1903. The vision of darkest Africa appears to have gained an ever more powerful hold in the minds of Europeans. As Patrick Brantlinger observes, Africa grew dark as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light, which is a solid turn of phrase, the peculiar power of this myth of the Dark continent. Saying it's fusion of a complex of images of race, science and religion. The iconography of light and darkness thus represented European penetration of Africa is simultaneously a process of domination, enlightenment, and emancipation. Although Stanley did not create this myth, his writings popularized existing stereotypes, combining the symbolism of darkest Africa with an unshakeable faith in the potential for European mastery over the entire continent. His mission, as it was described in 1884, was to strike a white line across the dark continent. Ah, Yikes. Boy howdy. Ohh man now. Tim Gill's greatest biographer of all time. Let's get that out of the way right away. Tim Gill tries to patch over the kind of fundamental racism of what Stanley's doing, but just sort of sharing individual stories about times when he wasn't ****** to individual African people. Yeah, when you're not ****** 100% of the time it means you're a good person. Yeah, he he includes a lot of lions. That's like, you know, Stanley would like me to specific tribe and describe them all as attractive and intelligent and kind. And Jill is like, what a racist. Right, this. Did you know that Hitler had a dog? Yeah. And in doing this, Geo ignores lines from Stanley's journal like this. The blacks give an immense amount of trouble. They are too ungrateful for my fancy. Now Gill highlights that Stanley wrote of being prepared to admit any black man possessing the attributes of true manhood or any good qualities to a brotherhood with myself. But #1 ignores how racist this line is, but also ignores other lines like the savage only respects force, power, boldness and decision. And perhaps most racist of all, this line about Afro Arab people. From non racist Henry Morton Stanley quote for the half caste I have great contempt. They are neither black nor white, neither good nor bad, neither to be admired nor hated. They are all things at all times. If I saw a miserable half starved ***** I was always sure to be told he belonged to 1/2 cast. Cringing and hypocritical, cowardly and debased, treacherous and mean. The syphilitic, blear eyed, palid skinned abortion of an Africanized Arab. Holy **** Henry. Yeah, wow. Yeah, let us Tim Giel is I I'm going to look up one of the times he doesn't use the. Racism. Often in his book, like he defends him from racism, but he really there's seven matches in the entire book, and I want to read one quote from oh, sorry, this is we're not even at a. We're not even at OK, before I get into something, Geo wrote this is one of the book quotes about Jill's book by Jane Ridley of Spectator magazine when she put it on their books of the year list and spectators like a right wing news website. Yeah, yeah. Why is fair and deeply researched. Jill's book sets the record straight on the Great Victorian explorer, exonerating him from allegations of racism, brutality and suppressed homosexuality. So really, not only is like racism and murder are the same as being gay, but also he wasn't any of those. Things. Meanwhile, Tim Geo repeatedly talks about him whipping people. That's wonderful. But he had to. He had no choice. Wrong. He had to, because they weren't. They didn't. They weren't right. They weren't working hard enough. Anyway, here's the line from Tim Gill I wanted to read you today. A vivid and uniquely adventurous life like Stanley's challenges, our ability to be just an objective, both about his story and about the vices and virtues of his contemporaries. Worldviews, worldview. His absence of racism was all the more remarkable for him, having lived in the Deep South. Perfect. His absence of racism, it's complete absence. Well, nothing about the Confederacy washed off at all on this man who fought for the Confederacy and then helped enslave Africa. Not a single thing. He didn't know what he was fighting for everyone. It's fine, yeah. Now, likewise, when Gill is forced to deal with Stanley's dark side, he tends to make very quick, vague references to unfortunate floggings and beatings. He generally neglects to cite for us what Stanley wrote in his own notebook when he was flogging people, and thus excludes lines like when mud and wet sapped the physical energy of the lazily inclined. A dog whip became their backs, restoring them to sound, sometimes to an extravagant activity. Yeah, well, you when they when they start to to wane, you got to whip them back into shape. You gotta whip them back into shape. That's not racist. To whip only black people is fine. Yeah, come on. What have not racist people whip only one specific type of people. They are lucky to be whipped when all of his white counterparts were eaten by fire ants and died in quicksand. I mean, hey, the least we can say for Hitler is he mostly whipped. I think actually only whipped white people. So. Hitler's whip was woker than Stanley's if you needed to, to, to. It's a categorize those too. So Stanley considered Africa to be an unpeopled country, and his dream was very clearly to see it colonized with white folks, just like North America. He didn't want all the black people killed, but he kind of assumed that a lot of them would die out and be marginalized during, you know, the spread of white people all over Africa. He wrote quote. There are plenty of Pilgrim fathers among the Anglo-Saxon race yet, and when America is filled up with their descendants, who shall say that Africa should not be their next resting place? And true to his convictions, Henry Morton Stanley's next great career move would do what he thought was the best thing he could do to open Africa to further white exploitation. He took a gig with King Leopold, the second of Belgium. Now we're not going to get into crazy detail about this because we do in our two parter on Leopold. The short of it is that the King of Belgium sneakily convinced Europe that his country owned central Africa, and then he killed half the people there by working them to death to produce rubber. Stanley was a key part of that, and it's easy to see why work with the King of Belgium on this project would have appealed to him. Outside of financial incentives, Stanley's life outside of exploring was a little bit of a disaster. He'd been engaged to a woman named Katie Gal Roberts before he set off for the Congo, but she left him for an architect while he was there, and he liked discovered that she'd gotten married to someone else when he got back. This isn't like the first time something like this happens to him either. Like he's just got this thing of falling in love with girls, promising himself to them, and then going to Africa for multiple years. And then he comes back and he's like, that woman wasn't loyal. Yeah, I will probably die where I go. That I will be on the verge of death the entire time. Everyone around me will die. Yeah, but wait for me. Don't ****. Hope you are still ******* yeah? So yeah, so his likewise, his fame and his wealth had not translated to very much respect by the actual English high society. Like the actual fancy explorers. Clubs didn't like him very much, and the issue was his unspeakable brutality. In 1876, explorer Richard Burton wrote a letter to the console of Zanzibar complaining that Stanley, quote, shoots ******* as if they were monkeys. And Richard Burton is a guy who killed a ******** of innocent black people. Like, and he's like, this dude is cut, this guy. Like **** man. You got a problem. It's like it's like having my namesake producer, Robert Evans, sit you down to talk about your Coke problem. Yeah, bro. Yeah, yeah, the guy who's already famously terrible. Listen, this is too much. You cannot kill them like their animals. Yeah, I don't know the difference. Yeah. So this became a big topic of controversy within English society, and the specific clash that Burton was ****** about was a firefight with a tribe called the Bambera who stole, or who Henry Morton Stanley claims stole from him. In his periodic dispatches from the Congo, Stanley had bragged about the quote. 14 dead and wounded with ball and buckshot, which, although I should consider to be a very dear payment for the robbery of eight ash ores and a drum, was barely equivalent in fair estimation to the intended massacre of ourselves. So this is what he writes in one of his like public documents. We killed 14 of them because they stole some horse. Yeah, and, like, it wasn't a totally fair exchange because those were nice orders, but, you know, more or less. And we killed them. And yes, that is, it's a it's a steep price to pay. But isn't their death worth less than my death? Yeah. So for Stanley, killing all these people wasn't enough. He took his 280 man force armed with muskets and Spears waving American and British flags, and then slaughtered 42 bambera that he tricked into believing he wanted to talk. The Saturday Review wrote this in London. Quote he has no concern with justice, no right to administer it. He comes with no sanction, no authority, no jurisdiction, nothing but explosive bullets and a copy of the Daily Telegraph who is writing for at the time. So it is important to note that, like, wow, all of the worst parts of colonialism are going on. Kind of like while all the worst crimes of our own era are going on, there's a lot of people in England who are like, oh, it seems really ****** ** what we're doing. Hey guys, this is bad, this is bad. And just as now they don't stop any of it from happening, but. They are there in their ****** so, well, that's comforting. Yeah, yeah, I guess. Ish, yeah. So there was a lot of outrage over Stanley's behavior, but yes, we're all familiar with today. Public outrage never stopped anyone from staying rich and famous. So if you'll recall, King Leopold's grand scheme was to give him self access to the Congo by conning the international community into believing that he was going to open it up to free trade for everybody. And the what happened on paper is that all these tribes in central Africa signed contracts giving up their sovereignty to a new state called the Congo Free State, which was in theory a nation of theirs. And Belgium was going to help them by providing the core of their military and, like, helping them organize and become a real nation to join the community of nations. None of this was really true. None of the people who signed these contracts really knew what they were doing. And it was all just to provide Leopold with a legal justification for other Europeans so that he could rule the Congo. And Stanley is the guy who got him these justifications. He was hired by Leopold for five years to act as basically a secret agent traveling to Africa under an assumed name. And making a series of treaty deals with different tribal chiefs. Now, depending on who you read, Stanley signed somewhere between 300 and 450 of these treaties, and the gist of them all was that these tribes would hand over their sovereignty and ownership of their land and exchange for scraps of cloth and vaguely defined trade benefits. And Geo disagrees with academic consensus here. Most historians, yeah, most historians, will argue that Stanley basically knew what he was doing with Leopold. Geld claims that with some evidence that Stanley didn't intend to get these tribes to sign away their sovereignty. Totally or forever. And that Leopold tricked him and destroyed some of the original treaties and replaced them. That's totally possible because King Leopold was a ***** ** **** and would have had no issue with lying to Stanley, because he was a way smarter liar than Henry Morton Stanley. But also Lee Stanley knew, if not every detail of what he was doing. He knew the broad strokes. You know, that's really what matters. And he contributed massively to the deaths of 10 to 13 million people in the Congo Free State. And of course, the establishment of the Free State, the fact that Belgium had suddenly wound up with basically all of Central Africa, helped to spark what came to be known as the scramble for Africa. When all of Europe's powers startled by the fact that you know that when they all started filling Africa up with colonies and and conquering it and killing people and laying the groundwork for the Rwandan genocide and all sorts of awful, awful stuff. Now the justification used for all of this was the need to destroy the Arab slave trade and replace it with legitimate commerce, with free trade. Right, that's the justification for all of this. It's the same as Stanley's personal justification. We got to stop slavery, and the only way to do that is for us to own these people right now. Under such justifications, Africa wasn't changed by Europe. By 1890, the situation justification for domination had gotten so absurd that Scottish explorer Joseph Thompson dismissed the term legitimate commerce as quote magic. Words which give such an attractive glamour to whatever can creep under their shelter, words which have too often blinded. Gullible public to the most shameful and criminal transaction. Wow. Yeah. Words. Yep. Not wrong. Joseph Thompson is not wrong. Hurt. The products and services that support this podcast? Absolutely yes. None of them have sparked the scramble for Africa. Well, well. 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Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We're back. Ohh, good ads. I particularly liked the ad for conquering Africa and murdering millions of people there. Really a good way to end slavery. They made it. They made the case. It was. I was hesitant at first, I'll be honest. And then hearing their position on it in the 32nd spot, I realized I was wrong. Yeah, I was the wrong. Yeah. Weird that they got Bill Murray to voice it. Yeah. Yeah. Good pitchman. But. I wouldn't have called it. I mean now, certainly a different second act than I anticipated from him. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Now, in 1887, Stanley departed and what will become his final trip from Africa? The Emin Pasha relief expedition. Pasha was an Eastern European blowhard in a pseudo grifter who ennobled himself to the English people by resisting the followers of the Mahdi in southern Sudan. And this is most similar in modern things because we really don't have time to get into this very complicated story. It was kind of like this air is equivalent of ISIS, this guy. Rises up, he like, beats the European army and it's this like real shocking uh, move. And like he's he's raises up his own Islamic Kingdom. It's this like, it's a big deal at the time. They they would they treated him like ISIS. Like, I'm not going to say that he was. He was actually because ISIS sucked ***. I don't know if the Mahdi did or not. I don't know enough. But that's the way they they talk about him, right? So Pasha wound up surrounded and cut off by the forces of the Mahdi, and Stanley was dispatched to relieve him, and the whole operation was a **** show again. All of Stanley's White colleagues died, so he was able to blame sundry failures and massacres committed by his execution on dead men, which is very handy for Stanley because they this expedition massacres so many ******* people. Now, they didn't make it hard for him to look bad. One of his white companions who didn't survive was James Jameson, the heir to the Jameson Whiskey family. He died on Stanley's second trip, but not before buying a young girl from a slave trader and paying cannibals to let him watch them eat her. Now, Jameson was known as Cannibal Whiskey by many for years later, and this might not be true. A lot of people will say it's not a lot of people who have no interest in defending Jameson because there's just a lot of ******* stories, right? I don't know the truth. This is a story people tell about this. This expedition. The trip was a massive **** show and a lot of people died. And at the end of it, Iman Pasha didn't really wind up wanting or needing rescue. So Stanley took him along to Zanzibar anyway, where Pasha attempted to commit suicide. After all this, it seems Henry Morton Stanley had finally had enough of adventuring. He retired to England. He lost his taste for that. Yeah, he did. He yeah. He retired in England. He married a Welsh artist named Dorothy Tennant. And kind of to his credit, he adopts a Welsh abanda ******* child like he. He finds like a poor abandoned kid who's like he was, and he adopts him and loves him. So that's that's good. He has. He's in need of a boy. Yeah, he needed a boy. He got himself another boy. He's always got a boy, and this one finally didn't die immediately. So that's good. That's wonderful. Oh, very nice for Henry. A happy ending for Henry. In 1899, Stanley became a Knight of the Order of Bath. He settled into a dignified retirement, with both US and Britain proudly claiming him as their son. He became a Liberal member of parliament in 1895, and he died in 1904. The stigma that remained around all of his murders stopped him from winning a Westminster Abbey burial, but he did receive a nice memorial. The epitaph reads Boula matari, the breaker of stones. This was a nickname he'd been given by Africans who were like, this guy is such a brutal ***** ** ****. Like, that's the kind of guy. He is like, he's the ******* hard enough to break stones, break whatever. Yeah, yeah, but Stanley actually really liked this nickname, which is why you should never ******* give a ***** ** **** a nickname. That sounds cool, like call him fart master. You know something. Something you can learn? Something he's not going to put on his grave. I'm going to quote from Oxford University Press again. He gloried in the name Bula Matari, the breaker of rocks, portraying the story of African exploration as a quest for mastery of the Earth. Stanley's geography was ever a militant and manly science dedicated to the subjugation of wild nature. Its books and maps were weapons of conquest rather than objects of contemplation. The study of geography, he proclaimed in 1885, ought to lead us to something higher than collecting maps and books of travel and afterwards shelving them as of no further use. Why Traveler are not going to conquer. Wow, he's a bad tourist. So. For most of the last 100 years in change, a consensus has evolved that Stanley was a real big ***** ** ****. And this has been mostly universal, even among his biographers, until Tim Giel came around and published Stanley, Africa's greatest explorer, and saved him since he saved him from the evils of history. Because, as we know, history is written by the victims. Yeah, and I will, I will give, I will give Jill this. This is probably the most impressively researched justification for mass murder that I've ever read. I've never read anyone put as much work into defending a guy who killed and enslaved people for his own benefit. Like he really he ******* puts in the legwork to defend this monster. Normal. Sort of inspiring. I kind of wish. I I kind of hope that when if if there's ever a biography written about me, someone like Jill writes it and they can they can frame. Yeah, they can frame moments like, and Robert had no choice but to vomit on the sushi of that Ukrainian couple out for a nice night at the restaurant. What were his other options? To vanish, to vomit on the people next to them? The puke was going somewhere and he made the only goal he good at the time. The most heroic choice, I would say. Yeah. Uh, Jesus, he really do. Yeah, everybody should have a deal in their life. Yeah, I I want to have. I I kind of want to hear Jill do Hitler. What? That guy. I know. I know he wants to deep down. I kind of want to hear his Hitler. Ohh, man. Ohh, his Andrew Jackson. I wanna. I just. Oh yeah. So, like he's he. I don't think he would actually do Hitler, but he would totally do Jackson. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Geo, we've given, I think, a well deserved drubbing in this episode. What he did didn't happen in a vacuum, and I think I need to close this out by quoting from a very important book called the Imperial History Wars debating the British Empire. And it explains the context that this biography we've been talking **** about came out in. Quote by 2012 a new documentary series about Britain's Imperial past was being aired on British TV, This one BBC production with Newsnight interviewer Jeremy Paxman, who guided his viewers through amazing stories of adventure. It's nothing short of a scandal. Paxman scolded that this history is not taught in schools. The purpose of the series, he explained, was to refute the conventional view that the British Empire was a thoroughly bad thing, the TV person. The TV personality. This is where people are gonna be bummed. The TV personality and naturalist Sir David Attenborough apparently did not get the memo. He complained that Paxman was far too negative about the British Empire. Other figures who felt that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other prominent figures who felt that the public needed to be re educated about the virtues of the British Empire and the achievements of its heroes were the popular historians Andrew Roberts, Lawrence James and Max Hastings. The biographer Tim Gill wrote a book about Henry Morton Stanley that declared her to be Africa's greatest explorer and dismissed charges that he had massacred Africans during his expeditions and that he bore any respect. We all know Jill. Yeah? Stanley became one of the leading proponents of a controversial campaign to erect a statue honoring Stanley at his place of birth, the Welsh town of Denby, as GL saw it the time. Come to dispense with post Imperial guilt. For Jill and those who share his views, this call to arms was fueled in part by resentment as what he dismissed as the moral brownie points politicians and others sought to accrue by well publicized apologies for crimes committed by earlier generations. He was no doubt alluding to Tony Blair's apologies for Britain's role in the African slave trade in the Irish Potato Famine, Gordon Brown's role in the export of child migrants to Australia and other colonies, and David Cameron's apology for the Bloody Sunday massacre and dairy. They call it Londonderry, but yeah, it's. During a visit to India, Cameron also conceded that the British bore some blame for the conflict over Kashmir and expressed regret with the Washington Post called a near apology over the Amritsar massacre of 1919. So maybe has very little to do with Henry Morton Stanley then. Jill is just like trying to defend himself so badly and like, yeah, that's that's all these guys are doing that, right? At the end of the day, they're defending themselves as heirs to the British Empire, which is important to them, you know, when we come from. A culture that was built and attained, you know what would would be called greatness, at least in sort of the amoral sense, just in the objective. Like the British Empire was great in the same way that like a ******* a boxer can be great even if they're a ***** ** ****. It's just a a term of relative, you know, power and influence people who come from those cultures, which is most people at one point or another. If you dig back long enough, you have to decide what do you, how do you, how do you deal with that? You know, do you, do you come up with justifications for all your ancestors did horrible things, or do you like. I think it's often wrongly written as like, the options are either take pride in it or feel ashamed, and it's ****** to want people to feel ashamed for things they didn't do. And it's not that at all. I don't feel any shame, personal shame, for, like, slavery. It's just like, yeah, people. It's a horrible thing that people in the past did. I didn't do it, but I'm not going to pretend it wasn't a nightmarish evil that persists to this day in a lot of its harms on society. And that still has not been made close to, right? It's not a it's this, this attitude that, like, you have two options, which is like, feel horrible as a human being for this or pretend it was fine and you don't. You have the option. Yeah. You don't have to be one of those. In one of those camps. You can. And you're absolutely right. Like, you you can acknowledge that this was something horrible that existed in history and that you still benefit from today, and you think about ways in which you can try and write it. In your own life. But you weren't the one who was actually killing people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I'm there's a well, I don't know, like, my, I I don't know enough of my genealogy to know if the scramble for Africa had any of my relatives in it, but there's a decent chance. And, like, yeah, the scramble for Africa with, like, all, all of colonialism in Africa was as a history of unspeakable historic grade war crimes. And that's ********. And there's a lot that we should be doing to write it, including, like, reparations. Just ******* to. Yeah, nations in Africa. There's a whole lot that needs to be done. And it's a very complicated discussion. And you don't have to, like, beat yourself up about it because you didn't do anything about it to not be like, but that was ****** ** and we should do something about that, right? Like, yeah. Yeah, we should we should do something here, huh? I think what we should probably do is, I mean there that we've done so much damage to the entire continent that we sent a bunch of. Yeah, yeah, maybe if we were just to send a bunch of. You know, civilized people like us, that's a great option. We would draw basically what I would call a white line through the continent. Yeah. We can establish these little, these little communities in there that can let us, like, travel through it and we can facilitate order. And, ah, sorry. And we did it. We invented colonialism again. Oh dear Jesus, OHS. I see how easy it is to fall into that trap of inventing colonialism had. Really? Ooh boy. You know, now that we've had this experience, I think I'm going to write an 18. 100 page book about how King Leopold had no other option to do what he did. Rubber. Everyone needs rubber. Have you seen galoshes? They're amazing. What was he to do? His hands were tied. I mean, not literally like his slaves, but figuratively. I mean, he actually did still have hands, which is much yeah. Uh, it's a nightmare. Oh, sorry. And how does this compare to what you'd expected for the tale of Henry Morton Stanley? He did a lot more terrible things than I anticipated. He sure did. He was a busy man, but I do. I'm very charmed by his lying. It's incredible. I'm charmed by how much how invested he was in making himself seem like a ****** to the point where, like, he he lost track of his lies and then just started venting anytime that he needed a number. It was just like a bigger number, regardless of whether it was a good or bad thing. This is a key story for all grifters. You have to be very whatever thing it is you do that makes you great, you have to be perfectly consistent about it. Stanley's whole thing is he lied about stuff to make a more exciting story so that he would be famous and he never stopped. He was unbearably consistent in his lying, and it's why he was great. It's like how L Ron Hubbard was incredibly consistent in his lying, and so he was able to die worth $700 million being worshipped as a God. It's like how Donald Trump. Has done nothing but lie his entire life and is the president of the United States. They're all the same guy at a certain level, yeah. Even if they didn't, are we allowed to say that? Yes, absolutely. They're all fundamentally at their heart of hearts, the same individual. They share a soul. And that soul sucks so hard. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Good, good. Sorry. You want to plug anything? You wanna plug this new idea to establish a series of trading posts throughout Africa? And I'm look, I think I still need to bounce some ideas around before I really lay it on the world, because, yeah, I'm sensing that they might have a couple of holes. Yeah, well, I know one thing, which is that I'm going to hire a small child to hold my guns. That, that, that that seems like a thing. Worth doing. It goes without saying that you bring somebody with you to witness all of your greatness. Yeah. Good God. Ohh, that's the story of Henry Morton Stanley. You can find the story of us on our website behindthebastards.com. You can buy T-shirts. On public you can continue. Do you want me to do? I feel like you like it now, Sophie. Well, I feel like now you're angry when I do that. Well, because you do it. Not as good. I don't. It's fine. I should just do it. Yeah. Sorry. You wanna give a shot? Yeah. I don't know what we're doing, but I'm going to try it. OK. Just do something. Yeah, you're allowed to get all. We got all kinds of merch out there. Ladies and gentlemen, go to tea public and get our shirts for you guys. Anderson on some of our shirts, and we got behind the ********. On others, we're also got a Patreon that you can donate to. And we've got oh, OK. No Patreon. Take that. Ready? You would have halfway there, though. You were doing great. Much better than Robert, actually. Nailed it. That's all we need to do. So colonize your own. Don't do anything. I don't. I don't know. I don't know. Just stay the **** indoors and watch or go on a run. Yeah, tell the truth. Don't lie about how many people use social distance from. Be honest about the number of people. It's about 7 billion. That's the episode, yeah. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. 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. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know, because after listening to stuff you should know. You will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.