Part One: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism
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Call zone media. Hey everybody, welcome to Behind the Bastards, and I know what you're all saying. Congratulations, Robert, on finally being appointed the new Pope of the Catholic Church, Pontifex Maximus. I was as surprised as anybody. I wake up in the morning, I see a phone notification.

that says, you know, Vatican Conclave appoints new Pope Robert, and then the rest of the title got cut off, but I understood what the rest of it was, obviously. I've been celebrating the last couple of days, have not really checked in online, but am now going to check in with my guests for this day, Sophie Lichterman, well, not my guest, but my co-host and producer, and our guest for today, Blake Wexler. Do either of you have a boon to ask, now that I am the literal mouth of God?

So I got an email saying I was Pontiff Wex, and I don't know if that was a typo or what happened. No, that's a new position I've created specifically for you. Thank you. Yes, you are responsible solely for the spiritual guidance of all Blakes and all Wexlers. Oh, boy. So it's a fairly large responsibility. Yeah. Well, there's not a lot of Catholic Wexlers. I guess. Yeah.

Well, then you got a lot of work ahead of you, don't you, my friend? Yeah, I do. Robert, I have a request. Uh-huh? Can you heal LeBron and make him 30?

I've already done it, Sophie. Oh, thank you so much. Yay. Gaze upon it and know it. Yes. God has already touched him. He has another 40-year career ahead of him. Thank God. I just don't know if I could do it. He's going to be dunking until his 60s. Fantastic. He's going to be praying for death, begging for anything but another season with the Lakers. No. But we won't let him stop. Yeah. We won't let him stop. That's the plot to Space Jam 3, by the way, is LeBron begging to stop playing basketball. Begging to die? Yes.

Yes, that's what God wants, is Pope I know. The other thing I gotta say, unfortunately, as we learned with the last pope, popes are more or less helpless to stop the world from descending into fascism or the slaughter of children overseas. It's a bummer. So...

Really only random bullshit is what I'm empowered to do. And today, the thing that I'm going to do that is not enough but might be a little useful is explain to you the intellectual underpinning of fascism, right? Specifically, there's a guy, a single dude, who's probably the only genius in the history of, like, fascist, like...

legal philosophy and theory who we're going to talk about. And the basics of this story is when the Nazis started coming to power, you had this guy, Hitler, who was really charismatic, who was good at drawing in people. And you had, you know, this movement that was clearly on its way to taking power and

And there was not really much beyond that. There wasn't a consistent set of beliefs because a lot of early Nazis, that's why they had the night-along knives. There were a lot of disagreements between them. And there was this kind of competition for like, who is going to figure out what the political philosophy of fascism is? And the guy we're talking about today is the dude who won that

struggle. And he's gone on to influence, he's kind of the thinker behind the neoconservative movement that dominated during the Bush years. He's the thinker behind, you know, Putin's rise to power in a lot of ways. He's a very influential guy. So Blake, are you excited to hear about him? I'm both dreading it and excited. I can't wait. Before we close out our cold open, you want to plug your pluggables right here at the top?

Oh, my God. I love that. Yeah, that's a fantastic process. Yes. I am. First of all, my name is Blake Wexler at Blake Wexler on all social media. I have a stand up special called Daddy Long Legs, which is available for free on YouTube on August 1st and 1st. I do all my calendar is Colin Firth. He's all over every single month of my calendar. That's why I mispronounced that. But

August 1st, I'm going to be in Philadelphia doing stand-up. And then in late August, I'm going to be in Wilkes-Barre. And then, yeah, there'll be more dates popping up on my social media that aren't in Pennsylvania. So, yeah, you can find me all those places. Excellent. Excellent. All right, everybody. Let's come back after the cold open. This is an iHeart Podcast.

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Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead. And we're back. All right, Blake, are you ready to get into this tale? Are you ready to learn? Are you ready to lock in here, Blake? Lock in, learn about Nazi jurisprudence? I'm a jurisprude, but yeah, no, let's dive in. So was this motherfucker, actually. Yeah. So today we're going to talk about Karl Schumacher.

And Carl Schmitt is the he did a lot of things in terms of like coming up with intellectual underpinnings for what we call fascism today.

The number one thing he did was figure out how to destroy liberal democracy. And this is why I call him a genius. A lot of fascist thinkers were like dipshits and bigots. And maybe they had they had certain kinds of cunning, like Hitler was very smart at certain things. The man knew how to work a crowd. That's an intelligence, the same kind of intelligence Donald Trump has, right? Like intelligence isn't an objective thing that people are good at certain things. Stephen Miller has certain kinds of evil intelligence for scheming in certain ways.

Carl Schmitt was just an actual genius, and he was a genius in an evil way and in a way that was like fucked up, but was very broad. And the thing that he figured out before anyone else was how to kill a liberal democracy as like the far right, as like a member of a reactionary party.

And it's the same playbook. The playbook he wrote out in the 20s is exactly what's happened here, right? So that is the degree of mind this guy has. And so as much of a fucked up weirdo as he is, he is a legitimately, like, smart man, which is unfortunate, right?

It's always so much easier when you can kind of write these guys off as like freaks, but you just can't with Carl, with old Schmitty, as we will not be calling him. It's a little humanizing. It's a little humanizing. Good old Schmitty. Yeah, good old Schmitty.

So Schmitty, Carl Schmitt, was born on July 11th, 1888, which means he comes into the world right as Germany, the state, becomes a legal adult and thus is able to buy scratch-off tickets at the gas station. I'm not sure if Germany ever did that. Maybe we'd have been better off if they'd gotten really into –

Fucking paper casino bullshit, but tragic. Something to put their energy into. Right, right, right. Get them really into the power ball. Right, exactly. So one thing right off the bat that separates him from most future reactionaries is that he never loves Imperial Germany or the Kaiser. He is not, most of these guys at least have some degree of like, ah, back in the good old days of the Second Reich. He is never that guy.

And he's never that guy because he comes from a marginalized population within the Second Reich, which is Catholics, right? Which very much are in a lot of ways, right? We don't really think about Catholics that way now. But even in the US, it was a big deal when JFK got elected president. Like there were people who were like a papist in the White House. He's a Vatican stooge. And it's much worse in Germany in the late 1800s, right? Yeah.

I know. It's hard to imagine like Catholics as like a marginal. But I mean, think about like Ireland, right? Like, you know, under the English thumb, right? There's a lot of oppression of Catholics, even as the Catholic Church is also doing horrible things in Ireland, right? You know, shit's complicated.

So the fact that he does not like the Reich at any point in his childhood is a product of both his family religion, as I said, Catholicism, and of the origin of his family, where they come from geographically, because his family hails from a place called Bossendorf, which is a small village on the Ulfbach River in the Eifel Mountains.

This village is about six kilometers from the Mosel, which is M-O-S-E-L-L-E, which is a major river in Germany. And all his life, Schmidt identified primarily as a Moselanian, right? Now, that probably means nothing to most of you listening. And it probably doesn't mean a whole lot more to the people who happen to

be German, right? Because things are, it means a different thing now, even than it does to like Germans today, right? Coming from this region in the late 1800s, when Germany has not been a thing for long means a very different thing. This whole part of the country, which biographer Reinhard Mering just refers to as the Eifel,

is sort of on like the southeast point of Germany. And it's right next to Lorraine, which today is part of France, but had been taken 18 years earlier from France after the Franco-Prussian War ended and was thus part of Germany at the time that he's born.

So the region he comes into is right next to this traditionally French region. And as a result, Carl and his family don't consider themselves like Germans, certainly not in the way that like Germans will in a couple of decades. They are French Germans, and they feel both French and German, right? And there's a tension between a lot of his family does live in Lorraine, right? And so there's this tension between his family and the

pan-German ideology that suffused the Second Reich, which is very anti-French because they're not anti-French, right? Their relatives are French. They feel kind of French. So you're both part of this Catholic minority and you're also like kind of French. So you're just not fully on board with the whole Kaiser thing. Now, obviously, when I say these are marginalized people, it's not nearly in the same way as like even a Jewish person in this period of time is marginalized. But you don't escape bias either, right?

Um, Karl was born in a town called Plettenberg, where his parents had moved right before having him. This was not far from where he's born, but it was a little bit nearer to the imperial core of Germany. More to the point, it means that Karl grows up in a large town that's developing rapidly because it's industrializing, but he's a distinct religious minority in that town.

As biographer Reinhard Mering writes in Carl Schmitt, A Biography, this means belonging to a confessional minority in an intensely evangelical environment, an environment partly even of Protestant sectarianism.

So everyone around him is like a Lutheran and they don't like Catholics very much. Right. People are kind of dicks to him. Right. That was one of the theses, I believe, is that we don't like Catholics. Fuck these Catholics. Yeah. Fuck the Pope, which I take offense to now, obviously, becoming the Pope. I'm sorry you had to read that. That's not fair to you and your audience.

Yeah, yeah, it's hurtful. It's hurtful. Yeah. So this was particularly difficult for Catholics during Karl's early life because he is born kind of in the shadow of something that occurs at the early stages of the German Empire called the Kulturkampf.

Right. And if you remember, you know, Mein Kampf is my struggle, Kulturkampf, culture struggle. It's not quite culture war, but it basically means that. Right. And what the Kulturkampf is, is in the late 1870s, right after the Reich is born, Otto von Bismarck, who's like the the he's the architect of

Right. He's like the vizier whispering into the ear of the Prussian king and his his plots and schemes lead to the culmination of the Franco-Prussian war and the creation of Germany. And Bismarck is kind of dealing with a problem in the early days of Germany that would later bedevil Hitler, which is that the Catholic Church.

isn't just a church, right? Not in the way that like, you know, the church down the street from you probably is assuming it's not a Catholic church. You go into first Baptist or whatever. That's like a church. It's a discreet organization. And it has, maybe it's, maybe the pastor there is political. Maybe he's not, but the church is just a church.

Catholicism is both a church and a government, right? There's an actual micro state in the Vatican that they govern, but also they had governed, they had been almost like the Christian UN for a long time. They'd had armies for long points of time. And even in this period, nearly all social services in Catholic-dominated regions of Europe are run through and by the church, right? So they are still to a degree in this period,

involved in governing in a way that impacts people's lives. And Bismarck doesn't like this because he's trying to centralize power within a modern state, and the Catholic Church is an alternate and perhaps opposing power center, right, that might wind up opposing the Kaiser.

And that can make things dangerous for the Kaiser and dangerous for the regime. Part of what scares Bismarck is that the Pope is infallible, right? And the Kaiser is just not, you know? Like, even though things are very strict, the Kaiser is kind of close to an absolute monarch. There's not the widespread belief among Germans that the Kaiser can't make mistakes, whereas Catholics are obliged to believe that the Pope is infallible. And Bismarck really doesn't trust this, right? Right.

That's a hard argument to win where it really is just back and forth once where it's like, I believe this. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm infallible. I'm infallible. And yet what Bismarck's saying is both that, like, well, how do you win an argument with a guy who can't be wrong? And also a lot of people just feel like they owe the church because it's providing them food when they're starving and shit. Right. And that's that's a complicated thing.

So in the early part of the German Empire, he kind of goes to he goes on a culture war against the Catholic Church to strip it of its influence. I want to quote from a write up in EBSCO by Donald Sullivan here.

Bismarck sought to assert state control over the church through a series of laws aimed at reducing its influence and authority. These measures included government oversight of Catholic seminaries, restrictions on clergy, and the implementation of civil marriage laws, which removed the church's traditional role in marriage. Despite these efforts, the Kulturkampf faced considerable resistance from the Catholic community, leading to public sympathy among some Protestant Germans.

And something kind of like this is going to happen under the Nazis, right? The Nazis have a little war with the Catholic Church. The Kulturkampf does not achieve its goals. Bismarck kind of underestimates how, you know, one thing you got to say, even if you hate it, the Catholic Church has staying power, right? It's been around for a little bit. It's been around. They can take a punch, you know? And...

Bismarck, you know, Germany's pretty new. And he's thinking, like, I'm going to roll over these fuckers. And he's like, oh, no, no. They've got a lot of money and power. Shit. So by the late 1870s, a lot of the, like, harshest measures he tried to push through had been repealed. Some stuff stays, like, you know, the Catholic Church does lose. They are not in control of marriage or of education, even in Catholic regions, in the way that they had been. So it's not a total failure.

This conflict has largely passed by the time Karl is born. And in fact, the year of his birth is the same year that Kaiser Wilhelm II takes the throne, which spells the beginning of the end for Bismarck. So he is not going to be in power much longer. Catholicism has kind of outlasted him. But the hostility Catholics had to the Reich kind of lingered as a result of this.

And Carl's dad is a Catholic activist, right? He sits in the local parish council, and he's always fighting for the rights of Catholics. So before Carl's born, his dad is kind of fighting Bismarck on this thing. Carl later described his father this way. Throughout his life, he remained faithful to the Catholic cause in a diaspora, which was still very hard at the time. And he really admires his dad for this. He does not like his mom. Spoilers for a fascist, but...

Mom issues. Issues with women in general. Shocking. It always starts with the mom, doesn't it? It's always the mom. For all of these guys, yeah. So this explains why, contrary to a lot of reactionary Germans of his day, Karl's got no nostalgia for the Kaiserreich because he never feels like a full citizen of it. Another of Schmidt's biographers, Gopal Balakrishnan, describes the situation ably in his book, The Enemy.

And that's kind of where Carl is growing up. He's in this town where he's a minority. It's very cosmopolitan, but he goes to a Catholic school. So he is separated from everyone who's not a Catholic, and he lives in this kind of bubble. Um,

He's a good student, very good student, and he's helped along by the fact that his father is a stenographer who teaches him how to write shorthand at an early age. So Carl's always going to be very good at writing very quickly, which is a real boon if you're going to be an intellectual who's trying to take advantage of shifting trends when things are moving very quickly, that you can get shit out quickly.

Because it is either writing or speaking, right? Like you either have to be a great, you know, like speak. Yeah, it's one or the two. One or the two. Those are the only ways to reach people, right? Exactly. There's no like editing together a TikTok video or whatever. No, no, unfortunately. Tragically. Ah, to have seen Hitler's TikTok, if only for a minute. No, we don't need that. We can already see Hitler's TikTok. Yeah.

There's a bunch of them now. There's a lot of them now. Fuck me. So Schmidt's family are working class. They're bordering on poor in most cases. They voted for the Catholic Center Party, which is, you know, a centrist party.

Johann, who's his dad, worked at a railway station. And Carl's relatives are mostly kind of at a similar socioeconomic level. But his dad's got one brother who gets rich by selling land to mining concerns. And so he's kind of like supporting a lot of the family whenever shit's difficult or whenever a kid has like bills that their family can't afford.

And he and a lot of the rest of the family pool resources when they realize how smart Carl is to invest in his education and the education of one of his brothers. He's got two other brothers. One of them is really smart. So Carl and his smart brother get a lot of money put into them. His smart brother goes on to become a medical doctor. Carl becomes a jurist. His other brother is like, I don't know, he doesn't do anything school related, right? Yeah.

Yeah, he's just fine. He doesn't become a howling fascist, I don't think. So, you know, he's got that going for him. So we know glaringly little other than this about Carl's early childhood, which he never discussed at length. He did speak positively about his dad, but he does not speak about his mom well. Merring, who is his best biographer, simply writes, Schmidt would sometimes speak about her in rather negative terms. And boy, boy, did he. We'll get to more of that later.

It's tantalizing to want to pull more from these scant details, but we simply don't have it. He learned to play piano. We know that. He got good marks in school. And then at age 11, he has an experience that was familiar to all of the sons of ambitious families at this period of time anywhere in Europe, which is that he got shipped off to a boarding school, right? Where, you know, time to leave your family behind and learn how to do whatever it is you're going to do. And this is the same in Germany as it is basically everywhere else.

else. So he leaves this town where he's a member of an outnumbered religious minority for a closed world in which everyone around him is Catholic as fuck. And he lives there, you know, a large portion of the time. His mom wants him to become a priest, right? She wants him to get into the clergy. And he's not interested in this at all. And she never forgives him for this, right? It's like your mama wants you to be a doctor or whatever. And you fall into some other career. And she's just always kind of pissed at him.

Now, Carl's grades qualify him for a scholarship, uh,

Eventually, he leaves this Catholic school for a prestigious local secular gymnasium. In Germany, that means high school, which is confusing. You're not talking about going to work out. You're talking about high school, more or less. This is odd. The fact that he gets to leave his Catholic school and go to the secular school is weird because as Balakrishnan writes, bookish Catholic children were usually singled out as potential candidates for the priesthood and would not typically have been exposed to the full course of studies at such a gymnasium.

The fact that he was allowed to continue his study suggests that his family placed more value on a secular education than was typical of their kind. Right. So even though his mom has these goals for him, he's allowed to go to a secular school when it's clear that that's what he wants. And that is kind of interesting. It does show that like they are also modernizing. They're not completely stuck in the old way things had been.

And this – going to this secular school kind of ends him as a believer. Like he stops believing in God here. This has a very humanistic curriculum. And he doesn't fully fall into like German idealism and all of these kind of like totally secular ideas. There's always a little bit of like belief in the divine that he holds to that even influences his ideas on the law. But he stops being a literal believing Catholic.

as a result of this education, right? One of his best friends in this period is another Karl, last name Kluxen, whose father owned a big department store in town. And Kluxen is an artsy kid, and so he kind of inducts Schmidt into the world of what we'd call like theater kids and art kids.

That's who Carl's hanging out with, is like the theater kids and like the musicians, the artists. These kids were going to be like bohemians in the Weimar era doing hella drugs and eventually getting purged by the Nazis. This is his social circle as a teenager, right? That's what turns him into a Nazi. He's like, I can't deal with these people. They're bugging the hell out of me. We got to kill all of them. There actually is. There's a degree to which that's true. Fuck these theater kids. God damn it. Sorry. Yeah.

Relatable. No, it's actually... He does seem to be going down a different path at one point because during his last year in secondary school, he starts reading a guy named Max Stirner. And all the anarchists in the audience are just going, oh, what? Because Stirner is like... He's a very influential anarchist thinker, although...

Calling him that even is like it's a big simplification of what he believed. He's the father of a school of thought called egoism, which I shouldn't even try to explain here because any discussion of this man sparks furious arguments about the 30 or so people who know he existed. That's a bit of an exaggeration. But it's enough for you to know that Stirner is about as fringe and radical a thinker as Germany ever produces, right?

And especially the fact that he's reading Sterner at this period of time means that this is a kid who is drawn to radical ideas and dangerously radical ideas. Like you can get in some shit for reading Sterner in public school at this point in time. Right. So he is very drawn to like forbidden intellectual topics in a lot of ways.

Now, one reason Schmidt is interested in Stirner is that his writings had contributed to what was called the Vormars, which is a period of what scholar Lawrence Steppelvick describes as intellectual fermentation. This is happening in the early 1800s, and Stirner is one of these thinkers whose radical ideas contribute to this boomerang.

boiling over of intellectual like discontent with the system that contributes to a failed revolution in Germany in 1848 and in 1848 there's a shitload all over Europe there's a bunch of failed revolutions Stirner is a big part of what you know that period of time and so that's part of why Schmidt is interested in him he's also interested because Stirner is a Hegelian a

In other words, an intellectual follower of a guy named Friedrich Hegel. Philosophy is not my strong suit, but from Hegel, we get this important concept called the Hegelian dialectic. A dialectic is just a method of philosophical argument that involves two opposing sides having an intellectual clash.

And Hegel's particular style of dialectic broadened the concept of opposing sides from like Plato literally depicting arguments between like famous dudes who embody different attitudes to, and I'm going to quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here.

Now that doesn't seem, and I know this is, this is,

Not what people come here for. That doesn't seem like it's anything that could piss someone off, right? This seems very like, who could be angry about this basic idea, right? So many people get pissed off about this. Up to the present day, reactionaries fucking hate Hegel and Hegelian dialectics.

Because Hegel is like this very scientific and progressive figure whose philosophy advocates for like a continual advancement in understanding, right? So in other words, we are working to better ideas and better understandings of things. And that's not conservatism, right? That's like the opposite of a reactionary idea. And the Nazis are going to consider Hegel like a devil, right? Like he is Satan himself, right? Right?

They're so angry. They don't like, let's hear all sides out. Let's give everybody an equal floor to speak. That's not... You read that last dense paragraph to like one of these Nazis and they're reaching for, I mean, literally, there's like, I think it's a Goering quote where it's like, I'm going to reach for my gun when I hear shit like that. Amazing.

So the Nazis don't like this guy, as George Lusix would explain in a 1943 essay. Hegel's scientific dialectic is unbearable to them because their worldview sees in it almost in the same words as the old Friedrich Schlingel who became a reactionary, a satanic principle, the principle of evil, of the anti-German, of the anti-racial.

So at the time Schmidt is in school, Hegel is controversial for these reasons, like, you know, reactionary – this is a fairly reactionary state, and so they don't like this guy whose thoughts play a significant role in a revolution that had occurred not all that long ago.

But there's other reasons why they're unhappy with this, right? Because after Hegel dies in 1831, his philosophic school splits into two opposing sides. There's young Hegelians and there's old Hegelians. And young Hegelians tend to be young people who were convinced of Hegel's logic, but also convinced that it led inevitably to a rational argument for socialist revolution against both the Prussian monarchy and against evangelical Lutheranism, right?

And that's not going to be super popular with the state, right? That there's like a chunk of this guy's followers who in the period of time that Schmidt is reading all this stuff are like, we have to overthrow the government. This is radical literature, right?

As Lawrence Stepovich writes in an article for the Journal of Modern Judaism, "...the young Hegelian school suddenly came into being in 1835 with a brilliant theological study, The Life of Jesus Christ Critically Examined. It was written by a young and little-known theologian, David Friedrich Strauss, who candidly, into the shocked embarrassment of the old Hegelians, declared that his work was inspired by Hegel's philosophy."

His reduction of the miracles related to the life of Jesus into a collection of mythic tales based upon Old Testament expectations simply destroyed the claim that Hegelianism and Orthodox evangelical doctrine were compatible. As the Prussian monarchy was supportive of and supported by the Orthodox Church, Strauss's work was even more disturbing than might be expected from a biblical study.

And this is relevant to us because like Sterner is like the marijuana that gets him dropping acid, which is reading David Friedrich Strauss. This doesn't sound all that like dangerous or even extreme. But in his time, this is if you get like if you're a kid in high school who gets caught with a copy of the zine, Why Break Windows, which is like an anarchist essay about like why it's not just moral, but like an ecstatic act.

to shatter windows or something like a beginner's guide to targeted property destruction, both of which you can find on Crime Think's website. If you're like caught with those in high school now, you can get in trouble, right? Right. And it's important you look at this book about Jesus that Carl's going to get caught reading this in school.

The authorities of his time see this as the same as they would see those zines today, right? This is that radical, right? That's very much how they view it, even though it doesn't seem that way to us, right? So he is reading like the radical, like anti-state revolutionary theory. That's very much like –

You know how this is looked at at the time. So while Schmidt is being a big nerd, the people he's hanging out with are kind of like the punks and anarchist radicals of their day. Now, they're not most of them are actually more like socialists or social Democrats. But given that they live under the Kaiser, that's a similar level of like, you know, radicalism, you know, and Strauss. You should do that. Yeah. OK, sure. Why not? Here's fucking ads.

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Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they say, what the fuck is that? No, you're going to come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon? Get out of here. But I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. Okay.

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

Well, the vibe is working because everyone loves it. It's good with anything. Watermelon juice. Bloody Mary mix. Coconut. Grapefruit. Diet freaking cola for crying out loud. The deepest friendships have been forged over Casamigos margaritas. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that's a slay. Ah, Casamigos. Anything is a slay. Because anything goes with my Casamigos. That is so true. You can thank me later. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company. White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume. So we're back.

So he gets caught reading Strauss in school. He gets caught reading this book about Jesus in school, and he gets in trouble. He gets, like, detention. He's put in the fucking breakfast club for his, like, radical reading. And, yeah, this is not the only thing he gets punished for when he's in his last year of high school, according to Reinhard Mehring. Quote,

On August 3rd, 1906, Schmidt was punished together with 12 of his peers with one hour of after-school detention for breaking the rules and visiting a public house. Presumably, this was the reason he had to leave the seminary in September. Thus, in the last months before his final examination, he had to commute as a train farer.

So he's kind of a wild kid. He's reading revolutionary literature and breaking the rules to get fucking wasted with his friends, and he gets kicked out of seminary for being too cool, actually. Yeah, he's pretty. This guy's sick. This is the only time that will be the case. Yeah, he's hopping trains. I mean, he probably pays. He's not that cool. So as dull and academic as this guy appears, he is pretty

Pretty radical in this period of time. That said, his grades remain excellent. Our boy graduates and he gets accepted to the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, which is also just called the University of Berlin. And, you know, Yale and like Harvard existed back then. This is the top college. A lot of people would argue the best college in the world of its day, right? This is the most because Germany's education system is the best. Germany is the first country to figure out modern universities.

And almost anyone would agree this is about the best place you could end up as a young intellectual in this period of time. Robert, was this the first time that he was moving into a city as well? Yes. Like, was this the first time he was in, like, a metro? Yes. A really big city, right? As opposed to, like, kind of, you know, these smaller, these large towns and whatnot. Now he's in Berlin, right, which is a different level of city. Right.

And he finds himself drawn to it and kind of repulsed by it, right? Which we'll talk about in a second. But he's a very good student. He initially wants to get his degree in philology, which is the study of the structure and development of language. But he's being supported by his rich uncle who lives nearby and like he'll crash with him during the holidays and is his main source of support. And his rich uncle's like, you know, philology, the fuck is that shit? No, you're getting a law degree. You're going to become a lawyer and make money. Right.

So he's doing this in Berlin, which is, again, a very different environment than one he's raised in. And the different biographers I've read give divergent descriptions, somewhat divergent descriptions of how he felt about it. Balakrishnan describes him as deeply ambivalent to the diversity of the metropolis, noting that in the popular imagination, urban areas in Germany were seen as in some way Jewish as well. And

And this all helped harden his identity as an outsider. Balakrishnan concludes that Karl found city life both fascinating and disturbing. And here's how Karl himself describes his feelings at the time.

I was an obscure young man of modest descent. Neither the ruling strata nor the opposition included me. That meant I, standing entirely in the dark, out of darkness, looked into a brightly lit room. The feeling of sadness which filled me made me more distant and awoke in some other's mistrust and antipathy. The ruling strata experienced anybody who was not thrilled to be involved with them as heterogeneous. It put before him the choice to adapt or withdraw. So I remained outside.

And this is, you know, he's not part of the opposition. He's not part of the ruling class. And so he can see them all better, more accurately than they see themselves, you know, as a result of this position that he has, which is often the case. It's why a lot of our greatest artists are outsiders, you know, in one way or another, right? And Carl is going to have perspective that gives him a degree of vision that other people lack, right?

Yeah, that's how I feel about New York. I've written a very similar thing about New York City. So yeah, we're on the same page. Right. So Mehring's more recent biography paints a picture that conflicts with a few aspects of this. For one thing, Balakrishnan kind of transposes Schmitt's anti-Semitism that comes later into this assumption that maybe he was repelled by the city as a result of it in this period of time. And there's reason to doubt that.

But Mehring paints a picture of a young man who is enthralled by his surroundings. He describes university as a temple of higher intellectuality, and he finds himself almost religiously obsessed with legal study, particularly the Roman origins of Western justice systems.

And he likes his Roman law classes because he's a Latin nerd. So like that's the degree of fucking dweeb this guy is. But very smart. And he maintains a sense of superiority towards his peers, right? He feels because he's smarter than them and because his interests are so much more esoteric that he's like a better person.

That quote I read earlier of how Carl viewed himself came from a memoir he wrote about his college years, where most of the book is him insulting two of his friends who he like shit talks constantly about like being less intelligent than he is. And the purpose of that passage where he's talking about him being an outsider is like, look at how much smarter I was than all these dopes I went to school with.

Like the Michael Jordan Hall of Fame speech, but with the creator of fascism. Right, right, yes. What are these petty, you know, like...

He is so petty. Per Mering, quote, Schmitt claims to have had early on a distance from the myths of the German Reich under Bismarck and from the national liberal atmosphere at Berlin University. He felt his whole life as if he were intellectually superior and a social climber, an outsider, an underdog who does not belong and has not shown enough respect and who, in response, looks down on the bourgeoisie world around him.

So this is part of why he continues to socialize with artists and creative types, right? Is these are other people who are kind of on the outside looking in who he maybe feels a sense of kinship with. He spends his nights out with other people who see themselves that way and feel like we're turning a lens on society and we're thus smarter than everyone else.

Schmidt doesn't quite settle into Berlin yet. He moves to college in Munich the next year, and then he goes to Strasbourg the year after that. And these are all bigger cities than he had lived in before. Mehring suspects he moves around so much for financial reasons. We don't really know. In any case, he falls in love with Strasbourg, and that's where he'll stay for the rest of his education. And it's where he meets his mentor, a guy named Fritz von Kalker, who becomes his doctoral supervisor.

Von Kalker is a criminal law professor with a particular interest in how morality impacts punishment under the law, right? What is moral in terms of a punishment and how is the morality of a society even? How does it relate to how they punish people? This is his Roy Cohn? This is his Roy Cohn kind of, yes. Okay, okay. So far he sounds like not a very chill guy.

He's a very intense intellectual. And Fritz is the most important person in Carl's early life because he really takes this kid under his wing. He supports him getting his doctorate. He finds him work in various positions for the university. And he will continue to go to bat for this guy, which is interesting because later in life, Carl will pretend this dude never existed. He keeps no copies of this guy's work in his library. Yeah, it's a little bit like that, right? Yeah.

And this is, you know, he keeps basically every other letter he gets in his life, but he throws out most of the ones to Van Kalker, which is interesting because Van Kalker literally saves his life at a later point here.

Now, another key person in Carl's young life who he will later jettison as an adult is Fritz Eisler. Fritz is... A lot of Fritzes in this story. It's very confusing. It's Germany. Yeah. I know. It's what we signed up for. We signed up for this. The moment you chose this guy, we're going to have a million Fritzes. There were going to be a shitload of Fritzes. None of them cats. God damn it. It's too late.

There's no turning back. We'll call this guy Eisler, right? And Eisler, he meets because they're both working for von Kalker as like assistants. And Eisler becomes his best friend during the five terms he spends in Strasbourg getting his doctorate. And this is noteworthy because Eisler is Jewish, right? And contrary to how Balakrishnan depicts him as a young man is uneasy with the city because of its ineffable Jewishness.

His best friend in his favorite city is a young Jew from a prominent family. And Eisler is not only Jewish, he is a Hungarian national who, despite being a Hungarian national, identifies as German. And this whole period is trying to get legal status in Germany. He is trying to get German citizenship. And he wants, Eisler's whole goal in life is social acceptance as a citizen of the German Reich.

And this is a difficult battle for even a rich young Jewish man because nearly everybody is incredibly racist, right? So it's interesting that Schmidt isn't in this period, right? At least not towards Eisler, that he's willing to – because Schmidt expresses a degree of like bigotry as well, but never – not towards Eisler in this period, which is interesting. It shows that he's got this degree of ability to kind of look past that, right?

So the two became buds in 1908. They get their doctorates in, like, 1910. Mehring writes that, quote,

And the difference in the theses that these guys pick for their doctorate is interesting to me. Eisler goes for this very standard topic, like he's analyzing a bunch of defamation lawsuits and is like, what are the ones that succeed all have in common, right? Pretty normal lawyer stuff, right? Schmidt picks a much more philosophical and a very Catholic topic. His paper is titled On Guilt and Types of Guilt, which, again, super Catholic, right?

But also – Good God. Eisler is doing this nuts and bolts. Okay, if you're arguing for a defamation case, statistically, what is likelier to work for you? Mering is wondering, what does it mean to be guilty, right? Guilt and types of guilt. Why is my mom a piece of shit? Is my mom a piece of shit? Will she ever stop giving me crap? Yeah. Yeah.

Now, the actual content of his piece is an argument that the law fundamentally hinges on an arbitrary free-floating element. No matter how much the law may claim to be an objective thing, it always relies to some extent on the ability of a judge to determine a sentence. In other words, you can have whole reams of law books and legislature that can give the appearance of a mechanistic system that

functions based on objective measures. But the law is always at its core reliant on the discretion and decisions of individuals, right? And that's a very important realization.

Now, this is in keeping with a major trend in German jurisprudence at the time, which is called the Free Law Movement, which stands in opposition to legal positivism, which is a trend that had swept through in the 1870s with the goal of like, we don't want to talk about natural law, about like the natural rights of man and stuff. We want to talk about like, what are we saying are people's rights? What are we saying is legal and illegal, right? So there's a struggle between people who want this absolute code and

that handles how things should be adjudicated in every situation, versus people who are like, no, the creative power of a judge to interpret justice matters, right? And Schmitt simultaneously recognizes there's this arbitrary core to the legal code. But he also starts to value what he described as higher law, this sort of like maybe even divine natural justice that the law is always moving closer to representing.

And he writes about guilt not as an internal thing, but as a legal category. In other words, he concludes that it doesn't matter if you've done what the state accuses you of. Guilt is a legal status and moral norms are bound by the law, not the other way around. And you can kind of see how a man making conclusions like this might wind up as a fascist, right? Yeah.

Guilt is a category. What you did is immaterial. Guilt's the marijuana of the fascism acid. Right, right. Yes, yes. To continue using the gateway drug metaphor. Right. So when he's not writing wonky legal arguments, he and his friend Eisler attempted to start a satire magazine. And God, this must have been fucking unreadable because they're doing this. Oh, my God.

Just imagine like your most up their own asshole friends in college. They make a satire magazine that's mostly about Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Walter Rathenau, like all these German intellectuals that they have issues with that they're just like making as like teenagers making fun of these like these great intellectuals that are part of like German culture.

And that's it seems to be the whole reason for this magazine seems to be that all these guys are respected contributors to German culture. And Schmidt wants to take them down a peg to prove he's not like everyone else. And I wonder maybe Eisler as a Hungarian and as a Jew maybe feels a similar need. Right. We're like, these guys aren't any better than I am. Like, yeah, let's let's let's fucking puncture them a little bit.

Now, they hoped that this would sell and make them money. Again, they are delusional. This does not... This satire magazine is not going to take off. There's no era in the history of the human race. Absolutely not. No. It's Mad Magazine, but it's all about Nietzsche. Like, okay.

Maybe calm down. Yeah. Maybe just read that yourself. Maybe just read that in your own home. Yeah, that might just be for you and your friend Eisler. Yeah. So because they can't make money off of this, and Schmidt is struggling, he is basically is going to spend like the first almost decade of his adulthood as an intern, unpaid, because that's what being an academic means in this period of time. So you have to be have support from someone to

And Eisler begs his family, like, hey, this friend of mine is brilliant and he's a good guy. He's not a racist. We've got money. Dad, will you give money to this guy? Right. And as a matter of fact, for like most of his 20s up until World War I, the Eislers will be Schmidt's primary source of financial support. This Jewish family really keeps this kid from starving.

You know? Which, given what he's going to do to Jewish people later, is just an extra level of fucked. Um...

In letters to his sister, Carl's sister, who became a teacher in Portugal during this period, Carl showed an obsession and a frustration with his relative poverty, writing that neither of them, neither he or his sister, had been careful enough in choosing their parents and complaining that rich people were conceited. So both like, fuck my mom and dad for not making us rich and also fuck rich people. And fuck rich people. Yeah. Yeah.

One letter he sent her on the subject included this interesting line. This is what makes our time so dreadful that the individual person, what he is and what he can do never matters. Only the role that he can play in society. You know, that's an interesting, interesting issue. Yeah. I think it's not an uncommon thing to feel during this period of time. Right. I'm no one cares about who I am, just like what I can do, how much money I can make. And that's like, it's kind of fucked that society works that way.

And it's that type of humor that made that satire take off. That made his magazine really take off. National Lampoon acquired it for $3 million. Yeah. Now, that's a very, like, wow, easy to identify with sentence. Here's the one that's less easy to identify with. So he warns his sister in the same letter to be careful with men, quote, don't trust these Portuguese happy-go-lucky windbags an inch. Don't even begin anything with them. Yeah.

Same sentence, by the way. Same sentence, same sentence. There was a semicolon. Oh, society judges us on all these bullshit things. Don't ever trust a Portuguese man. While we're at it.

These windbags. These fucking Portuguese windbags. So after a brief period working for his brother as a lawyer's assistant, he continued to squeak by as an academic, lecturing and getting bits of work off the strength of his now published thesis. In his free time, he flirted and seems to have gone after women compulsively. Merring describes this as like his, in his own mind, his original sin is that this guy just can't stop trying to fuck.

Like, he is really horny and has bad judgment and is constantly screwing around. He may have actually been kind of a player at one point. It's a little hard to tell, but, like, his earliest serious fling that we have evidence with is this pair of Jewish sisters, the Bernsteins, who he's, like, in a love triangle with. He's, like...

And it's unclear, given the time, is he just flirting with both of them? Or are they actually like going at it? Right. But he wants to marry one of them, Helene. But he's also kind of stringing the other along. Like he's got a triangle with these two sisters. Yeah, I don't know. This sounds like Portuguese windbag behavior to me. He sounds like a Portuguese windbag, right? He sounds like a Portuguese windbag. Now, he tries to marry Helene.

And again, these sisters are Jewish. So the fact that he wants to marry this woman at one point is really interesting. Again, given what he's going to become. But her family won't let him because he has no money.

And like, this is not just, you know, this is a thing any German father pretty much would have had said at the time. It's like, well, you're an academic. Maybe you'll have a career. But right now you literally don't have income. So no, you can't marry my daughter. You have no way of supporting her. Right. This is not a thing that just would have happened because of like the religion of her father. This was a totally normal thing at the time. And this is something that's driving him crazy that he can't get married. Right. He has nothing coming in.

And he starts to get increasingly angry at society, which we see in his letters to his sister. Quote, every person is vehemently egotistic and it is a miracle they do not murder and poison each other, but inquire about the weather instead.

So he's become very blackpilled at this point in time. He can't get married. He seems locked out at this point from and so close to being where he needs to be. Right. But he just can't cross that border because he was born poor.

It is interesting that he chooses his sister to confide in, too. You know, like, I wonder why that was. He hates his younger sister. His older sister, who's in Portugal, he seems to really trust. And maybe she's the only member of his family that he can trust. It kind of does seem that way. A mother figure. Yeah, maybe a little bit of a, or at least somewhat how he would have liked to have felt about his mother. His chosen mother. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaking of poisoning and murdering each other, don't do that. Listen to ads. Okay.

Right.

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

Well, the vibe is working because everyone loves it. It's good with anything. Watermelon juice. Bloody Mary mix. Coconut. Grapefruit. Diet freaking cola for crying out loud. The deepest friendships have been forged over Casamigos margaritas. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that's a slay. Ah, Casamigos. Anything is a slay. Because anything goes with my Casamigos. That is so true. You can thank me later. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company. White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume.

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We're back. So obviously this is 1912. World War I is right around the horizon, but Carl doesn't know that yet, and he is much more concerned with matters of the heart than the fact that everything is about to get really fucked up for everybody in his world.

He had been banned from the Bernstein house after continuing to pursue Helena after her parents said no. So he is that kind of suitor. Like, he will not give up. And eventually her dad's like, motherfucker, I'm calling the cops if you come back here again. The good news for him is that within weeks of this, he meets a Spanish dancer at a cabaret. She calls herself Kari. And when they strike up a relationship, she tells him her full name is Pauline Carita Maria Isabella von Doretic.

Now, if you know German, von means someone is a noble, right? Like, that's a marker that you are of the nobility. And this woman is claiming to be the daughter of a noble family. And so as soon as he's, like, got the interest of this dancer who's, like, got noble blood, he drops all interest in these sisters he's been pursuing. And he writes to his sister, I now have a delightful friendship with a Spanish dancer. Now...

Kari is not Spanish. She is also not a noble woman. Every aspect of Kari's life was fake. She claimed to be the daughter of a Croatian lord who had died, which had forced her to travel to Munich to live with a cruel aunt, which is basically a Disney fable. She also claimed that she'd been born a week after Karl, when in reality she was five years older than him.

She was the illegitimate daughter of a Viennese woman and a Croatian plumber. And for all of his brains, Karl never catches her in her lie. Like not in or at least at this point. Right. He buys in all of her stories of royal life, everything she says about herself. He is completely fallen for this woman.

And all of his colleagues, because again, he's a doctor at this point, right? All of his colleagues are like, man, this chick is not, she's lying to you for one thing. This is bullshit. There's no Spanish accent here. She doesn't sound Spanish. That's not a Spanish name. Why, like, this family doesn't exist. She has a Croatian accent. His mentors gently warned him against getting with what they called a tingle-tangle girl,

And this is a term at the time, it refers to like the kind of clangy sort of like bits of like jewelry that dancers at burlesques and whatnot would wear. It means that they're calling her a stripper, right? Or they're calling her outright a whore. That's what a tingle tangle means at this period of time, right? Like, man, you have fallen for this stripper and she is lying about her past. That's what his friends are saying, right? That's the equivalent in modern terms, right? Right.

But he doesn't care. He's in love with this woman. He believes her. And he believes her even though they can get married because her dad's dead. There's no one to stop them. He doesn't need to ask permission. But they can't get married because every time they try to go to a judge, the judge is like, oh, okay, well, where's this woman's papers? You know, to show where her citizenship is and that she is who she... And she never has them. And occasionally she'll have papers, but they'll be like, well, these are obviously fake. And Carl doesn't like...

Doesn't think anything's weird about this. She's just bad with papers. She's terrible with papers. Loses them all the time. Yeah. These noble women, they never have their papers with them. They're like...

So he spends the last years before World War I fighting constantly with their local magistrates to get her naturalized so that they can get married. And because he's so crazy in love, he switches in this last year or so before the war from writing about law to writing about love, particularly the morality of love. I'm going to quote from Mehring's book again here.

From October 12th, the diary contains a passionate love letters and an ecstatic philosophy of love that aims to base love on permanence and enforce faithfulness by idealizing love as devotion to an idea. Schmidt wanted to conceive of his love from the perspective of eternity, a perspective in which Kari then had no predecessor and no successor.

Right. He can't he can't let himself a man. And again, this woman is an exotic dancer. She has a relationship history prior to him. He's trying to build this cosmology in which there's never been a before. Right. Because then that he just is not secure enough in that idea. Right.

This happens all the time. Constantly. Constantly. Yeah, it's like a very common thing, I fear. My wife has never seen a man before. She still hasn't to be completely honest. Yes, never, never. Talking about myself. Let's start now.

But it is interesting that he has to intellectualize this, the way he does his attitudes about the law, right? Where he's like building this almost like natural law attitude about how love works in order to like avoid being insecure. It's going to give you an idea of how good he will be at twisting based on his own kind of feelings, his understanding of like the law and these things that are supposed to be objective, but that really are not.

he starts writing that his past pursuit of the Bernstein sisters was a mistake, but obviously it's their mistake, not him. He writes that he had been quote, painfully ambushed by a vain, common, ugly, and arrogant Virago who is now in possession of love letters from me. She has foisted herself on me as an addressee. Thus I spit her out as a whole person. I have no more to do with her. I wash my hands clean. I took excrement for gold without letting slip from my fingers, the pure gold that I now hold in my hands. And he's like,

Because, again, the fact that he had been in love with this woman and had written her letters means that this relationship he's in, even his side of it, isn't as pure as he wants to pretend. And it's her fault, right? She ambushed me. She forced me to write her letters. You tricked me. Yeah. Meanwhile, the honest person that he's currently with, that's not a trick at all.

No, that's not a trick at all. Or just the fact like, yeah, man, shit changes. People feel different ways about people over time. That's fine. Like you could just accept that. Some shit's shit. Some shit's gold. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, right. Anyway, this is where we're going to leave Carl on the eve of World War I, right? This guy who is starting to become the thinker who's going to define a lot of what becomes Naziist jurisprudence. He's also real big issues with women, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So how we feeling, Blake? What's a German for incel? What is that? Except he's kind of getting late. Yeah, that is true. I don't know where we land on this guy, but he isn't, you know. That flew by. It is really interesting to get

Because it's almost like seeing the first piece of shit, like the modern piece of shit that we have now. It is interesting seeing the building blocks of how it came together, you know, especially knowing what he turns into. There are so many clues of, oh, look, he wants to this is how he's breaking down this establishment. And that establishment is trying to date these Jewish sisters.

He broke down that democracy, you know, and it's interesting to see how he wants to do it going forward. But yeah, this is this is fascinating so far. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that is what we're going to be continuing from next time. All right.

So, Blake, you want to plug your pluggables here? I would love to plug some pluggables. So I am going to be in Philadelphia August 1st doing stand up there. I'm going to be in Wilkes-Barre at the end of August. And I also have a comedy special called Blake Wexler Daddy Long Legs. And depending on when this comes out, I'm biking in this thing called the Eagles Autism Challenge. It raises money for autism research, autism awareness. So there's donation links. I know times are tough, but if you could spare anything, that link is in my blog.

bio on at Blake Wexler on all social media. Amazing. All right. Check that out. And yeah, don't become a jurist. No, don't don't do that. Turns out the laws are just what people in power decide they want them to be. And you shouldn't have that much faith in the law, meaning anything objective, because look at just read the news for 10 minutes. You'll see why. Anyway, don't even we're done. Don't even need the full time. Goodbye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that.

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I think a

A lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing that you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody.

There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody. Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit BetterHelp.com today. That's BetterHelp.com.

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This is an iHeart Podcast.