Episode 389 - The Istanbul Snowball Fight

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Nate, and with me today are Joe and Tom.

Speaker 1 We're intrepid English merchants seeking to turn a profit in the febrile, cashed up conditions of Istanbul in the year 1600.

Speaker 1 Not one of us speaks Turkish, and we don't speak Greek, and the only Italian we know is Due Monsteri Bianchi per favore, but it doesn't matter all that much.

Speaker 1 We've made a killing selling the wares of northern Europe here in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 There's no shortage of demand for large blocks of metal, elaborately painted harpsichords, one pair of linen pants that you wear for 30 years, assortments of blunderbuses with flared ends that keep getting wider somehow, dueling pistols you have to light with a candle, and so much more.

Speaker 1 As representatives of the one non-Catholic European Christian country with diplomatic relations here in the center of the Ottoman government, we're seen as trustworthy, or at least not in league with the French as much.

Speaker 1 We're friends with the Ottomans. Some of us are really friendly with the Ottomans.

Speaker 1 We've even been instructed on how to deploy the smoke bomb that immediately turns you Turkish if you get into serious trouble behind closed doors. Things are going great.

Speaker 1 Flush with success, we decide to meet up on one particularly snowy day.

Speaker 1 We sit down in a cafe to drink cups of of hot coffee prepared in the style of any number of countries in the region, which we've determined is always the same style, and it's always an observation that all the residents of this region appreciate hearing from us.

Speaker 1 No, I'm serious. They love it.

Speaker 1 English Tom laments that the wind is never as wet or depressing in Istanbul as the way it felt back home. English Nate wishes there was less daylight here in December.

Speaker 1 It's just not natural for the sun to be up after 4 p.m. English Joe is seated with his eyes on the door, alarmed by something instinctive and ancestral that he can't quite put his finger on.

Speaker 1 I'm in danger, he thinks. We recognize English Joe's premonitions, as they're often quite alarmingly accurate portents.
But then it passes, and we all share a laugh. You know what?

Speaker 1 I think I've come to a conclusion, English Joe says. No one with the last name Kasabian will ever feel nervous in Istanbul ever again.

Speaker 1 I just can't get over the idea of walking a dude down with the BG's blowing your boss and shouting, you bitch, you ain't staying alive. Oh, there's more, don't worry.

Speaker 1 And then, as if Faye were responding to this statement with an immediate riposte, we're suddenly interrupted by a gang of French sailors who burst into the cafe, armed with an ever-more threatening array of oblong objects.

Speaker 1 We're dragged from the establishment and beaten mercilessly.

Speaker 1 They cut our coin purses, relieve us of our frilly, lacy undershirts, run us our shoes that are curved in a way you can only describe as sexual, and leave us lying in the snow, gently massaging our heads and saying, ow.

Speaker 1 It's a terrible day, and we're miserable, which is admittedly what we'd been hoping for in the first place. Still, a question remains.
Why did a bunch of French guys attack us just for being English?

Speaker 1 When did that come in? And you can imagine our confusion when we learned that all of this mayhem and violence stemmed from an unimaginably over-exaggerated case of hurt feelings.

Speaker 1 That is, hurt feelings about a single guy getting hit with a snowball as the trigger pull for a lot of other conflicts that had been slowly building tension in previous years.

Speaker 1 And now it's everyone's problem. Gentlemen, how are you doing?

Speaker 1 I love to get run up by the oblong object. I thought you'd like that turn of phrase.
I normally don't like alliteration very much, but I was like, oblong object is just funny.

Speaker 1 There's something about that. It's like they don't have baseball bats for you to put spikes through yet, so you got to figure out something else.

Speaker 1 The er form of the spiked bat is just a weird shape. Getting got by the Yeti battalion.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like, you know, weird pieces of driftwood and like construction debris and like the inner goon inside you.

Speaker 1 Different definition of the word goon there. It's just like, I can beat someone's ass with this.
I can run someone their fucking coin purse for this. This will be amazing.

Speaker 1 Getting hit with a snowball and just all my coins fall out of me like sonic radio. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Well, I love the idea that it's like, you know, like three-quarters perspective view, like Istanbul in the year 1600, one of those games you get ads for on Instagram where it's like level one Ottoman mafia boss, and you're naked.

Speaker 1 Level 99 Ottoman mafia boss, like you've got a turban the size of the entire fucking screen. I stumble outside and my curved shoes are hung up on the telegraph wire.

Speaker 1 You reach level 100 and you're just like dressed like a UK drill wrapper, Air Max 95s, and a bally on. Yeah, exactly.
You're running somebody for their shoes.

Speaker 1 You're like, you're lucky we haven't invented power lines yet. Motherfucker.
Did you just invent the Ottoman Roadman?

Speaker 1 Konichi Wagwan, my slimes. Is that why you cut your beard into that Ottoman-esque mustache? No, it was part of a Halloween costume that I was like, shit, I don't really know what I can do.

Speaker 1 I haven't bought anything. And then I had to go to a costume shop on Halloween in

Speaker 1 Kensington. And it was a collection of people that only exist in Kensington, aka parents in like Arsen Wenger long puffer coats with kids that are named like Abdul and Charity, but they're white.

Speaker 1 Also, the kids where like they go to the private schools where the private school uniform is like eight different fucking layers of like coats and undercoats and fucking all the weird scarves and shit.

Speaker 1 I remember seeing ads for those like the tailor shops when I took a cab that went through Kensington. I was just like, that's not normal.

Speaker 1 Like, you shouldn't go to school dressed like the blue boy from that Dutch master's painting, or whatever the fuck, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Actually, I think it was an English painter, but you know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 Dressed like that guy who jumped off the Eiffel Tower, that thing that he knitted that was supposed to act as a parachute.

Speaker 1 We have an upper-class Red Bull wingsuit. That's what you wear to school.

Speaker 1 It was so funny because I was like in there, and obviously, the type of people who go and buy a costume on Halloween for that night are not really that prepared.

Speaker 1 And there was just a group of like 19-year-old guys who like were obviously going to some college nearby. And they were just like pissing themselves laughing at a Jimmy Saville costume.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, oh, wait till you get older and you go on a stag do. Someone's going to be dressed up as a giant inflatable penis.
Someone's going to be Jimmy Savile.

Speaker 1 Someone's going to be Freddie Mercury. I guess it's just like the Jimmy Saville thing is so sordid and macabre that I just can't imagine dressing up as him.

Speaker 1 It's like, like if America had like a long story, like, you know, guys night out frat party tradition of dressing up as Subway Jared.

Speaker 1 I think if you go trick-or-treating somewhere in Pennsylvania, someone's dressed up as like Joe Paterno. Yeah, but that's, but Joe Paterno is different than Jerry Sandusky.
Like, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 True, man. They would go trick-or-treating together.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I think the best analog of like the cultural tone of going for Halloween dresses Jimmy Savile in 2025 is like pulling up to a party dresses like Dennis Rader or something. That exists.

Speaker 1 I'll put money on it if we look through Instagram. We could find like a Halloween Dennis Rader hanging out with a Halloween fucking, I don't know, the the Dahmer, you know,

Speaker 1 or Ed Gein since they made Charlie Hunnam play sexy Ed Gein, which, by the way, completely off topic.

Speaker 1 And since I'm the co-host, one of the co-hosts today, which also means I'm canonically bisexual now.

Speaker 1 We did it! We did it! We did it. Thank God.
You know what? Anti-heterosexual DEI wins the day. But I started watching that horrible Ed Gein show at Netflix.

Speaker 1 And I have to say, on top of it being horrible, it has to be the most confused TV show I've ever watched in my life. Like, it is strange.

Speaker 1 And Charlie Hunnam has continued his streak of never playing a role where he's allowed to talk normally.

Speaker 1 He can never have a normal accent, and his accent can never be authentic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, like, a good couple's costume that will elicit a kind of like, what are you dressed up as?

Speaker 1 Is just go as Paul Pelosi in his underpants, and then your partner have a hammer. I mean, that's just like a standard Republican Halloween trick-or-treating costume now.
It is so horrifying.

Speaker 1 This is an audio medium, but my reaction there was just like,

Speaker 1 you know, you know what? Why don't we move on to this episode? How about that? You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 We can talk about other dudes getting their ass beat with hammers and hammer-shaped blocks of wood and Minecraft weapons and shit like that. Just getting hit with a snowball and making the Roblox.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Getting hit with a snowball, but it's a cube.

Speaker 1 So what connects a snowball fight in the year 1600? Religious, political extremism, anti-English action with a K, and football hooliganism? It's a good question.

Speaker 1 Today's story is an unusual one, and it's one that takes us back and forth across the span of four centuries from 1600 to the present day.

Speaker 1 So we may need to strap in a little as we get to grips with the subject matter.

Speaker 1 And also, before I begin, I want to give a shout out to my friend Joel, who researched and wrote 98% of this script, drawing on the extreme depth and breadth of his knowledge of English geezers' encounters with Ottomans.

Speaker 1 We made an actual historian listen to this show, and he somehow didn't hire Leon the professional to end our lives. So

Speaker 1 we found the only second cool historian after Patrick Wyman. I'm not including myself in the cool historian category.

Speaker 1 It's like to talk about the dark ages. Yeah, what if the cool historian wasn't cool and wasn't historian, e.g., me?

Speaker 1 As with our Burberry pirates, we are again looking at the lively and bizarre world of Elizabethan English merchants in the Ottoman Empire. Since we last checked in, things have changed quite a bit.

Speaker 1 We saw in our last episode on this topic that William Harborn survived his encounter with some truly idiotic part-time pirates and went on to set up a successful embassy, which eventually helped defeat the Spanish Armada.

Speaker 1 We heard a little bit, glancingly, about Edward Barton, the highly successful second ambassador of the English crown to the Ottomans. By 1600, Barton's successor, Henry Lello, is in charge.

Speaker 1 And, well, we could definitely use some little bit of backstory on how Lello ended up in this role. Lello was born in rural Shropshire, six or seven miles from the modern-day England-Wales border.

Speaker 1 His family were evidently well-to-do, as they owned property in both their home village of Clunton and the nearby settlement of Clun. Oh, brother, just you wait.
All right.

Speaker 1 The home village of Clunton and the nearby settlement of Clun, both helpfully located on the river Clun.

Speaker 1 Lello was afforded the education of a young gentleman and was said by his chaplain in Istanbul, a certain William Biddulf, to have been educated at Oxford and the Inns of Court.

Speaker 1 Now, there's a footnote here, just understand this. Talking about the River Clun.
The river's source is, quote, a marshy area near the public house, unquote, in a village called Anchor.

Speaker 1 Tributaries of the Klun include the River Kemp and, I am not making this up, the River Unk.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Sailing on the River Unk.

Speaker 1 Oh, God. The river of Unks just flows through eternity.
Bloody hell, we didn't know there were so many Unkhs in the area. I'm Klun Maxing through Unkh Town.

Speaker 1 Pull up at anchor where I can meet the confluence of the Klun and the Ankh.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 No record of Lello matriculating at Oxford remains, and it seems unlikely that he actually got a degree.

Speaker 1 In those days, Oxford was more like what we'd consider to be a really fancy boarding high school, and only those destined for the church tended to hang around long enough to receive degrees because the only mandatory subject was theology, which remained the case well into the 19th century.

Speaker 1 The Inns of Court are the professional associations for barristers in England and Wales, that is to say, senior court lawyers.

Speaker 1 There are four inns: Gray's Inn, Lincoln's Inn, Middle Temple, and Intertemple. They date back to the 1300s when some of their premises belonged to the Knights Templar.

Speaker 1 This means that Lello was on track to receive a legal education before he ended up in Istimble. He wasn't a merchant himself before he set out.

Speaker 1 In fact, his education appears to have left him pretty uptight and forthright in his views about how things ought to be.

Speaker 1 Bidolf makes this clear in crediting Lelo for his steadfast religion, calling him one who, first of all, reformed his family and afterwards so ordered himself in his whole carriage that he credited our country and who lived an unspotted life.

Speaker 1 Lello actually ended up in Istanbul because his father was a Levant company merchant, or at least an investor in that company, and responded to Barton's call for some sufficient man to be his secretary by putting his son forward.

Speaker 1 Lello was no hardened and experienced merchant who knew how to cross cultural boundaries, negotiate across linguistic and cultural differences, and look out for himself ahead of boring sovereign interests.

Speaker 1 He was a nerd and a nepo baby. He's just like me for real.

Speaker 1 I love that he traveled to the Ottoman Empire to be like, guys, I have an idea. I am the first British man to come here to get a hair transplant and gigantic veneers.
This will make us a killing.

Speaker 1 I mean, he just needs to smoke crack and get a few prostitutes, and then he's just Hunter Biden.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 early, early, early 17th century Hunter Biden, late 16th century Hunter Biden. I mean, sure it exists.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like whatever kind of, I don't even know know if Laudenum was a thing yet, but you know, the precursors to Laudenum, I'm sure opium existed. They had hash.

Speaker 1 Come on, you know what I mean? They could, they, they, they managed to figure out how to make shatter, and then like it was lost to the ages.

Speaker 1 Like, dudes in Colorado had to reinvent it in the 2010s because the Ottoman secret had like fucking, you know, just it had been just, it was like the Tower of Babel.

Speaker 1 You got so high, fucking, no one could remember it. Are you saying shatter is like Greek fire?

Speaker 1 We don't have the technology anymore.

Speaker 1 There's just weird conspiratorial calls in England for people to release this guy's ledgers, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's got like Leonardo da Vinci style, like weird machines, like sideways helicopters with big wooden gears

Speaker 1 spelled in like Middle English spelling, something called the dab rig, like D-A-B-B-E-R-I-G-G-E.

Speaker 1 He's created a new pipe that lets you hit two rocks at once.

Speaker 1 It's like those epoxy fucking squirt tubes, you know what I mean, where you got to put them both together.

Speaker 1 This motherfucker, if he was alive today, he would just open any Midwestern gas station with all with all like the weird tube socks,

Speaker 1 the glass tube with the rose in it. Or my personal favorite from when I was recently back in Michigan, an energy shot just called Tweaker.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I love the guy who does some work overseas, like in Dubai, and comes back and runs a gas station.

Speaker 1 He's got like Dubai imports of like Confederate flag key rings, but they've got SpongeBob in Arabic for some reason on them.

Speaker 1 Also, if this guy was around now, he would just end up after his sojourn in Istanbul, end up back in East London playing nights that I go to that are described as habe funk I'm man

Speaker 1 I'm manifesting confederate flag shaped

Speaker 1 Dubai chocolate bars

Speaker 1 Dubai veneers Dubai chocolate Dubai SpongeBob in Arabic Confederate flag key rings for some reason confederate flag laboo boo Dubai chocolate it's gonna happen all right Lelo's stern and rigid morals and his determination that his devoutly Protestant English way was always the only right way might not have mattered all that much if it were not for the fact that Barton suddenly died of the flux with an E, in January 1598, aged only 37 or 38, and very much still married to his job.

Speaker 1 The flux or bloody flux, by the way, is what Elizabethans called dysentery.

Speaker 1 So poor Edward Barton, after completely reinventing what an English ambassador could be in the space of less than a decade, died shitting his guts out. It happens to the best of us.

Speaker 1 I mean, like I said, whom among us hasn't thought this might be my end? Yeah, if you're not.

Speaker 1 I am shitting so bad. I'm just going to die here.

Speaker 1 This is where the road ends for me. He traveled to the Ottoman Empire, touched Harisa Spice precisely one time, and immediately shed himself and died.

Speaker 1 To be fair, I did feel that way last night because I had a big plate of beans for dinner and I was like, two hours later, I was like, I'm going to die on this toilet. Just a big plate of beans.

Speaker 1 Why are you always eating meals that like the extras in the background of like Black 47 are eating?

Speaker 1 You're eating like a prohibition era like sharecropper?

Speaker 1 No, listen. Do you know what? It's two days before payday.
I was like, I'm going to use what's in the freezer. So I had, I found a whole bag of Linda McCartney sausages.

Speaker 1 I had four potatoes in my press. I made potato wedges and I had a tin of beans.
So I had Linda McCartney sausages, beans that I added spices to, and then homemade potato wedges. And I felt it.

Speaker 1 Don't tell anybody that Tom lives lives like this.

Speaker 1 Just having fucking Tom invice you over to dinner and he's like, slaughtered that horse last Tuesday. I think she's starting to turn.

Speaker 1 I'm creating a Barico horse. Just hanging from the ceiling.
Hey, that's sacrilegious. All right.
That's the body of our Lord and Savior. He's just horse dos.

Speaker 1 So this, by default and precedent, left Lelo in interim charge as the sitting secretary. Maybe if he'd had more time to learn from Barton, he might have approached things a little differently.

Speaker 1 Maybe Barton would have gotten sick of him and sent him home.

Speaker 1 Either way, Lello managed to spend the couple of years he was in interim charge before being made the permanent ambassador, repeatedly putting his foot in it.

Speaker 1 There were a couple of future ambassadors floating around at this point who were both accomplished merchants and gregarious people persons, which was both a help to Lello in that the Ottomans and the Venetian and French ambassadors actually tended to like them and wanted to work with them.

Speaker 1 This was also a hindrance to Lello in that it was a further stick to beat him with that his assistants seemed more competent than him.

Speaker 1 Paul Pindar, the one that Lello actually liked, would be the ambassador from 1611 to 1620.

Speaker 1 He was experienced in trading in Venice, and naturally the Venetians saw him as the real brains of the English operation. Thomas Glover was the other secretary and right-hand man.

Speaker 1 He was a Turkish speaker who had been in Istanbul from a long age, looking up to Barton's example of how to behave, including all the partying and back scratching. He was favored by Ottoman contacts.

Speaker 1 Lello, of course, was not a fan of this kind of sociability.

Speaker 1 He was replaced as ambassador in favor of Glover in 1607 and took it really badly, to the point of refusing to leave for several months despite being physically removed from the embassy household and conspiring with the French to try to bring down English negotiations and make Glover look bad.

Speaker 1 In a furious letter-writing campaign over the following five years, Lella would come to accluse Glover of, amongst other licentious behavior, taking a poor local boy as his concubine, and even more scandalously than deciding to lie with said boy, dressing him in fine apparel.

Speaker 1 And no, it doesn't escape my notice that this effectively mirrors a pivotal scene in the first disc of Final Fantasy VII,

Speaker 1 which is to suggest that even in the stories we tell ourselves across eras and cultures, there is a reflection of a baseline common experience, and also that Midgar is canonically Turkish.

Speaker 1 I fucking knew it. Walmart, uh, like the Walmart was actually part of like the Istanbul Grand Bazaar.

Speaker 1 What's so funny though is thinking about this with Lelo getting fired later on. It's just like, and then he becomes like a guy who can't stop calling into leading Britain's conversation.

Speaker 1 Like just there's something just innate in a certain kind of English guy. Something goes wrong.
He's like, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to anyone ever.

Speaker 1 Like you got your job because a guy basically like

Speaker 1 a guy shit himself past having one HP to the point where he literally like he had no lives left. It was game over.
He hadn't saved. Like, and then you got his job.

Speaker 1 And then apparently you fuck it up so bad that everyone hates you and you're like i'm gonna i'm gonna write a petition change.uk

Speaker 1 1607.

Speaker 1 petition allow me to dress as many boys as i want in fine apparel well actually i think what it is is that lello was accusing the guy who replaced him of dressing cloud strife up in order to to to win the affection of a local gangster before threatening to cut his balls off um so lello was like this dude not only are all these rumors of me sucking my job and being weird lies but that dude is totally gay.

Speaker 1 And he's wasting money getting nice clothes for fucking, for local comely youths, all right? They need to be wearing barrels. They need to be wearing rags.
Then it's okay. You dress them up, though.

Speaker 1 That's just indecent. They're going to start acting above their station.
Wait, I have a cloud strifeo glue. Is that a thing?

Speaker 1 I do enjoy that there is now an established time honor tradition of being a sugar baby.

Speaker 1 I mean, I feel like it's just one of those things where at a certain point, you know, like you look at the opportunities you've got and it's like you've won the affections of English ambassadors, the Ottomans, and you know, he might give you like a nice fit to wear, you know, he might let you get a dope chain, or you basically go back to, I don't know, like

Speaker 1 whatever the sort of dog shit job was in that era of hammering big rocks with a hammer to make little rocks. Like, that's just your job.
It's like, go to like the rock size reduction factory.

Speaker 1 That's just what you do all day. Going to Turkish Selfridges so you can get a Goyard bag from your ambassador boyfriend.

Speaker 1 The Ottoman sugar baby TikTok would be a very interesting vibe, wouldn't it? I mean, listen, no, Nate, that still exists.

Speaker 1 But it would have been illuminated manuscripts and there would have been no women, so there would be a different vibe. Okay, come on.

Speaker 1 My family could not be reached for comment, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 All of this just comes full circle with Instagram comments that say, Habibi come to Dubai.

Speaker 1 I mean, my God, dude. Yeah, so basically, like,

Speaker 1 we're talking about Henry Lellow.

Speaker 1 What we know is Henry Lello, obviously, was the ambassador when this incident we're going to talk about today happened, but that the man was famous for not being good at his job.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, it was Lello who secured the ambassadorial appointment in 1599.

Speaker 1 This might have been with yet more help from daddy, though the decision-making process between the Levant Company and the Crown is opaque in the absence of sources.

Speaker 1 We do know that Lello wrote fawningly to Robert Cecil, Elizabeth's Lord Chancellor, sending him a carpet as a gift.

Speaker 1 Funnily enough, a painting of the Somerset House of Conference 1604 shows the room decorated with large carpets in the Ottoman style.

Speaker 1 Turkey carpets, as they were called, were a highly sought-after and expensive luxury good.

Speaker 1 Lello's associate and contemporary, John Sanderson, recorded that he gave one carpet worth £1,100 to his sister as a wedding gift, a price amounting to something like £1,500 in 21st century money.

Speaker 1 Between his family connections, the carpet, and the power of the secretarial incumbency, Lello was confirmed as the ambassador and gifts and letters were sent out to the Ottoman Sultan to receive him.

Speaker 1 It is very funny sometimes where it's like, there were a lot of circumstances at play. We understand that this is contextual, but also it's like, but also, he did buy a fly-ass carpet.

Speaker 1 So you're saying he rode a carpet into power. I mean, you could perhaps say that, but instead, it's sort of like, you know,

Speaker 1 there's a refraction of the sugar baby tendency in everyone here.

Speaker 1 It's like, you know, if you want the job, even if even in the sort of courts of manners and whatnot, you buy somebody a nice gift, you get them a really cool carpet, like, damn, this carpet's so nice.

Speaker 1 I'm going to put it on the wall because I can't, I don't want to walk on it. Also, I'm Russian.
Maybe Russians are like, I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's something there.

Speaker 1 God, I wish that it meant that they're only Russian. I've been to more than one household that has a carpet on the wall.

Speaker 1 I mean, isn't it kind of like an entirety of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, to some extent, Eastern Europe Europe kind of thing? It can be.

Speaker 1 I mean, Armenians are still solidly nice rug on the floor people, but you'll also see rug on the wall from time to time. Because Afghans, obviously, Afghans don't, because they make rugs.

Speaker 1 And so it's just like, they, you know,

Speaker 1 I've never seen Afghan homes that had. carpets on the on the wall.

Speaker 1 We need to have the deciding vote of someone needs to phone up a Tajik and ask them.

Speaker 1 We need to form the greater council of former Soviet people of like Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltics, and be like, carpet, carpet, floor or wall.

Speaker 1 And we vote, and then we all promptly start stabbing each other to death over who put beef and leaves first.

Speaker 1 This is post-Soviet Vatican II. Right.

Speaker 1 And then it's like, yeah, we have like a sort of oral history compendium of all their interview responses, and it gets like subpoenaed by the European Court of Justice for being the most racist document ever prepared.

Speaker 1 Flip it, thumbing through the pages. Like, well, they got into a 30-minute long conversation, and somebody knifed the Georgian delegate over who invented bread.

Speaker 1 Issuing the Eastern Orthodox version of a fatwa, but it's only about whether a carpet goes on the wall or the floor. I mean, it was very funny, too, because it wasn't like you were lacking in content.

Speaker 1 It was like across two episodes, but when you were doing the history of Georgia, Joe, I was laughing in the editing and review.

Speaker 1 They're like, how do we pad out this content if we feel like the script doesn't have enough? It's like, get the Georgians and Armenians arguing about who invented wine.

Speaker 1 That's like the next 45 minutes. As I've said in the show, I do that in real life whenever I'm at a place when there's like Georgians and Armenians.
I'm like, so I really like Georgian wine.

Speaker 1 And the Armenians like the hackles raise. And I'm like, I just like wheel my chair slightly back, like, and I'm entertained for the next hour, two hours, perhaps.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they just start arguing it's just like a cartoon where, like, you know, it's just the cloud of speech bubbles and like mysterious glyphs and signals.

Speaker 1 You can read Armenian. I can't.
I certainly can't read Georgian.

Speaker 1 It's like trying to fucking read the symbols on the stargate.

Speaker 1 It's like, what if Charlie Brown was talking about the Voynish manuscript?

Speaker 1 Oh my god. Just a Georgian opens up their coat and it's a symbiote like

Speaker 1 fuck's sake.

Speaker 1 They're actually a Russian operative. It's like, I believe we solved this problem.
Okay, the Georgians are the Cardassians and the Armenians are the Ferengi, all right?

Speaker 1 As an aside, and while I'm noting that he's not the main topic of today's episodes, and a lot of guys are mentioned, Lelo's associate John Sanderson is an interesting character whose life story contains quite a bit of the dynamics at play for English merchants in Istanbul at the time.

Speaker 1 Namely, while working in the Levant company, he found himself constantly losing his temper with his apprentice, who was also a kind of wealthy Nepo baby fail son.

Speaker 1 He also had an insane temper, was constantly getting into brawls. And at one point, he tried to fight a group of Polish Catholics while he was making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Speaker 1 Like I said, nothing has been more English guy than these dudes. Like, that's the thing is, so this can be, because we're talking about Lelo and the snowball fight in 1600.

Speaker 1 It's a lot of backstory, and there's quite a few guys where I would love to digress even further, but I had to keep these details in because I'm just like, wait, what?

Speaker 1 How many Poles does it take to beat up a single Englishman? Like, one of the anecdotes is him pulling a gun on a priest in Jerusalem. Like, it's just so, there's just so much.

Speaker 1 And now we know where Tony Blair got his political rhetoric in like 2001. He was studying the esoteric texts of we need to be racist against the Polish.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 The Polish disrespected me in Jerusalem because I'm a Protestant. So, you know what? Like, we're going to, we're going to expand the EU so we can bring them here and be really rude to them.

Speaker 1 So, in terms of the business of being ambassador, Lello was busy haplessly winding up the French alongside dealing with Barton's debts to various Ottoman magnates.

Speaker 1 When he could find the time, he would also write to Cecil complaining that he hadn't officially been recognized as the ambassador yet.

Speaker 1 The two big issues with the French came down to diplomatic precedence, i.e., which of them was considered the more important ambassador from the more important nation with a more powerful monarch, and which country had the right to represent and collect consulage fees from the Dutch and Flemish merchants.

Speaker 1 In fairness to Lello, the French ambassador, François-Savary de Breve, was almost certainly taking advantage of his inexperience and shaky standing to push back hard on all these issues.

Speaker 1 Breves had previously been frenemies with Edward Barton since the two had plotted together together to depose Breve's cousin from the previous French ambassadorship.

Speaker 1 Lello, being the strict Protestant he was, managed to make things much more fraught by demanding a church for Protestant worship in Para, the embassy district where most of the local inhabitants were Greek.

Speaker 1 Not only did this upset the French even more, but it also alarmed the Venetians, who were not at all cool with the idea of Greeks being encouraged along to a new Protestant church when they'd been trying to encourage them along the Catholic one.

Speaker 1 They even went so far as to describe Lello's plans as chimerical, which that feels like that's 17th century sneakness because like to me, I was like,

Speaker 1 I was expecting something a little bit, you know what, that's like the hardest bar you can drop in in 1599.

Speaker 1 So I guess this man is like, but also the idea of like, this is basically the religious equivalent of like showing up to a place as a guest, sort of like trying to like smooth things over and then immediately demanding that they serve a full English.

Speaker 1 The Venetians showing up, showing their anger by throwing the most gilded lion statue through your window.

Speaker 1 It's like, hey, listen, the Venetians have long been trading in this region, and they've got like this incredibly Baroque, you know, regimented, developed system of manners and decorum.

Speaker 1 And you show up and you're like, Uno, Biro, con shippies, por favour.

Speaker 1 Like, I mean, in fairness, that's kind of us ordering monster energy drinks and the fucked up sandwiches at the kiosk, but I do kind of see Google Italian.

Speaker 1 Getting jumped on by six dudes in those little funny hats.

Speaker 1 And you don't want to piss the Greeks off, you know, because they're going to throw their version of a Molotov cocktail, which is just the flaming cheese plate.

Speaker 1 No, it's the olive oil cocktail.

Speaker 1 I feel like, having just spent some time in a Greek-speaking country, to me, it's sort of like, no, like every single chemical that's used to make this incendiary device that will 100% kill you is derived from pomegranate somehow.

Speaker 1 It's like dried pomegranates, hulled pomegranates, pomegranate seeds, pomegranate syrup, pomegranate rope, where you've dried pomegranate like rind to weave it together like twine.

Speaker 1 And then it's like, and then you throw it, and it's basically like a nine-banger flashbang. Like, it's, I don't get it, man.

Speaker 1 They, they, they, they, they have, they have, they're like, you know, we don't waste any part of the deer. Like, they don't waste any part of the fucking pomegranate.

Speaker 1 The most artisanal way to be set on fire.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's got antioxidants.

Speaker 1 Things managed to get even weirder when Lelo's gifts arrived. The primary gift was a self-playing organ and clock built by a certain Lancastrian called Thomas Dallum.

Speaker 1 Dallum was still young at the time, 24 going by his baptismal record, but he would become a master organ builder with Norwich, Worcester, Wells, Wakefield, Durham, and Bristol Cathedrals all on his CV, alongside such bastions of power and prestige as Windsor Castle, Hollyrod Palace, Eton College, King's College, Cambridge, St.

Speaker 1 John's College, Oxford.

Speaker 1 By all the final accounts, his gift for Amendment III was an absolute work of genius, but unfortunately on arrival after shipping, it came in pieces, several of which had been damaged.

Speaker 1 Lello was in a flap about how much of a terrible gift it was going to be, not worth £2, and his friend and business associate William Aldrich bet Dallum the astronomical sum of £15 that it was not fixable.

Speaker 1 Once Lello had set up a shed big enough to house the repairs, he soon changed his tune.

Speaker 1 The present, I mean the instrument, although at first here thought to be of small esteem, yet now brings set up in my house the opinion of such as I have seen it, though the Sultan will highly esteem the same.

Speaker 1 This is written in Middle English, and I'm trying my best. It is the most, it is the full-on, like,

Speaker 1 thou hast placed epoxy on thine ass and balls,

Speaker 1 like using the ampersand randomly capitalizing. It's that kind of English.
Like, I'm struggling because I want it to be coherent when I read from the script.

Speaker 1 And also, like, I'm just ha ha ha, yes, ha ha, pervert looking through the window because I love, I fucking love when English is written this way.

Speaker 1 It's just, it's just my thing sorry also a self-playing organ is just i'm like this man basically invented a synthesizer this man created fucking

Speaker 1 you like like gunpowder steampunk synthesizer i have gifted the sultan one month free to spotify

Speaker 1 just loads of viziers walking in a juno six into the planet yeah i was gonna say exactly i was just just like it's like yeah it it only it only took one half as many repairs repairs to get a Yama CS-80 working again.

Speaker 1 It's incredible. Mehmed III did, in fact, love Dahlum's organ, wanting to see everything it could do and practically sitting on Dahlum's lap to watch him play it.

Speaker 1 Not bad for the son of an itinerant blacksmith from Lancashire. In fact, Palace's staff were desperate to keep him, as if he, Dalum, were part of the gift.

Speaker 1 He had to invent an imaginary wife and children back home to make his polite excuses to leave.

Speaker 1 He even claimed that Palace's servant allowed him to peek through a fence at the Sultan's harem and employ to try to convince him to stay, which is in truth not particularly likely.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, someone had to take on the duty of delivering the gifts that Elizabeth had sent to Mehmet's mother, Sophia Sultan, also in the harem.

Speaker 1 She wasn't supposed to meet men from the outside world, but somehow she took a particular shine to Lello's associate, Paul Pinder, demanding that he should come and meet her so that she could pass on her thanks and some return gifts for Elizabeth.

Speaker 1 Perhaps fortunately for Pinder, Sophia's thirsting was unsuccessful and the meeting did not take place. All this meant that the focus was very much drawn away from Lello on his big day.

Speaker 1 Apparently he was made to wait a long time before his audience with the Sultan could begin, and when it did, he was so nervous that his English colleagues described him as standing, quote, like a modest midwife and beginning a trembling speech in English, sounding like the squeaking of a goose divided into semi-quavers.

Speaker 1 Unquote. I love when I get when I get really nervous, I just start honking at people like a goose.

Speaker 1 I mean, the thing about it is, though, is that we already have a precedent deep within the show's lore for what this voice would sound like. Hello, Your Majesty!

Speaker 1 Your Majesty, the Salts, and I'm here on behalf of the Crown of England. I have a wonderful song prepared for you to play on this new piano.
It's called Golden Brown.

Speaker 1 Some people think it's in 4-4, but it's actually in 7-4.

Speaker 1 My Lancastrian Twank has invented a synthesizer. He's going to play you a song we've called I Feel Love.
Hold on!

Speaker 1 Perhaps it was his frayed nerves that led to the episode being topped off by Lelo accidentally dropping a bomb in his audience with the acting Grand Vizier Halil Pasha.

Speaker 1 According to Halil's later tittle-tattle-tip to Brev, Lelo had told him the French king had turned from the good religion and was now an idolater, and that this being the case, no reliance could be placed upon the amity of france but only upon his mistress who was most constant and sincere which is interesting to me because it's like okay the french king had turned from the good good religion but this would imply what

Speaker 1 you can't be like oh he's secretly muslim because you're in a muslim court you can't be like oh he's secretly protestant because it's like you were protestant you're like the protestants there it's because people don't recognize the charlemagne caliphate

Speaker 1 so it's just sort of like yeah the king of france actually thinks that this dude dug up some golden plates asterisks and obelisks their entire overarching arc was them actually going on Hajj.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Charlemagne joined the Moorish Science Temple.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Druids said the Shahada. Now they're so powerful.
Asterix and Obelix is just like in the lost panel from the comics just at the Kaaba.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden you can't show Asterix and Obelix's faces anymore because it would be idolatry.

Speaker 1 Spitting this level of brimstone and exposing Christian theological spats in front of an Ottoman Grand Vizier was generally seen as not fucking cool, and de Breve refused his invitation to Lello's celebratory feast as well as going taddling to the Venetians.

Speaker 1 Pindar went over to try to smooth things over with Girolamo Capello, the Venetian ambassador, and to make sure that he at least brought his entourage to the party, confirming the Venetian suspicions that Pindar was most acute and who really governs the ambassador, a man more practical than speculative.

Speaker 1 Capello made sure to note that he would remind de Breve that, ironically, the English and the French crowns were currently on very friendly terms.

Speaker 1 This was all in October of 1599, and things limped along into January 1600, with the French throwing in more complaints of English piracy in the Mediterranean just to spice matters up further.

Speaker 1 Things were still frosty at best between the English and French embassies, and it was snowing outside.

Speaker 1 Various members of the English embassy household had gone out to throw snowballs with their Greek staff and neighbors. At some point, the French ambassador's master of house came passing by.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately for everyone involved, someone hit him with a snowball.

Speaker 1 The sources do not recall whether he took the blow directly in the kisser or the snow deflected off his cloak, but either way, this was taken as a grievous and calculated insult to the honor of the French embassy and nation.

Speaker 1 The master of house stormed back to the French embassy, and from there, in the already febrile atmosphere between the two embassies, all hell broke loose.

Speaker 1 Sort of like in Dark Souls, you can actually hit the turtle with a sword enough times to kill it, but you shouldn't do it.

Speaker 1 You shouldn't throw the snowball at the French ambassador. He hates that.
Pull up with the Lelo, let that shit bellow.

Speaker 1 Hit you with a snowball, that shit piss yellow.

Speaker 1 Shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 God damn it.

Speaker 1 French ambassador flies, like a situation.

Speaker 1 He's like, I got enough ice on me already, motherfucker. You know what?

Speaker 1 Step off. You motherfucker got snow on my cloak.
Yeah, you can't be mad at someone if they throw a snowball at you and you're wearing a cloak. That is effectively a Kevlar vest for a snowball.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's just you switch that cloak like fucking like Alucard and cut the snowball in half and be like, my jewelry's so loud, homie, I can't even hear you.

Speaker 1 He swirls around real fast like he's uh with his cloak, like he's tuxedo mask and just just vanishes.

Speaker 1 I mean, yeah, exactly. Like, that's the thing is that so many people were probably dumbasses and like awkward and not graceful in cloaks.

Speaker 1 And in our mind, we have this image that if you wear a cloak, you've got to be a badass. It's like, what if the cloak was actually like the fedora of the 17th century? Oh, look at that fucking loser.

Speaker 1 Red flag wearing a cloak at his standpoint. Oh, cool.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Look at him out here cloak maxing. Yeah.
Get a new meme, dickhead. Get a new illuminated manuscript meme.
Get a new self-playing organ. Smelling like your local Magic the Gathering champion.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Yeah, but

Speaker 1 I've already depicted you as the cloaked loser and myself as the uncloaked Chad.

Speaker 1 I've already drawn you. You actually don't have a face, but it's not because of Islav.
It's because, like, showing your face would actually be an affirm to God because you're so fucked up looking.

Speaker 1 Have you ever been so ugly? It's a sin.

Speaker 1 A friend of mine one time, oh my god, he was getting death threats for this. He had a tweet go viral because he just said,

Speaker 1 My five-year-old son asked me, Baba, why does Ian Miles Chong look like that? There's something wrong with him. And I said, no, son, it's just the wrath of the law.

Speaker 1 There is not really any other way to describe what took place other than the French rounded up some big lads, got tooled up, and went on a rampage.

Speaker 1 Maybe they got offended because the people throwing them were secretly whispering the Shahada into the snowballs.

Speaker 1 The snowball that turns you Muslim. I mean, that's not that far off from the rock concert that turns you Muslim in 6-6.
So, you know what? Let me just say it. New DLC, all right?

Speaker 1 Ottoman Empire DLC. The French breaking into their arms room into a crate labeled oblong objects.
Like, it's time.

Speaker 1 I mean, I will say this when you play Age of Empires 4, when you play as the Byzantines, it's so fucking, everything about them is so fucking weird, like, mysterious, looking that you're like, okay, guys, you might just go the whole hog and be like, they were the kingdom of zeal from Chrono Sugar on the floating island from 3,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 Like, you can't demystify the Byzantines to be, okay, everything about it is like weird cryptograms and words that read like fucking high fantasy. Like, it's just, yeah, I'm just saying.

Speaker 1 Our frog nights will blot out the sun.

Speaker 1 What is Ursula Le Guin?

Speaker 1 Some French sailors had recently docked in Istanbul, and someone was sent down from the embassy to let them know that the English needed sorting out.

Speaker 1 They took their, quote, daggers, staves, and swords, unquote, and set themselves up all around Paris back streets to wait in ambush for any passing English person they could get their hands on.

Speaker 1 It turned into quite the ass whipping for many an entirely innocent English merchant, including us. Lello tried to get the word out for people to avoid the area.

Speaker 1 I, being advised, sent presently to command them that they should not meddle with the French, but rather come some other way because I knew they had not weapons.

Speaker 1 But before the advice, three were sent as far as the place where the French had waited for them, who issued out and hurt them all one after another, being six and eight upon a man.

Speaker 1 Ever as they came by two and three, Englishmen in a company, the French wounded them to the number of six, and that most cowardly cutting and slashing of their legs and arms after they were down was seven or eight wounds, whereby very dangerous, whereby I think two will be maimed forever.

Speaker 1 It is in a pretty staggering escalation from a snowball fight. The French embassy egged a group of angry and possibly drunk sailors onto a brutal attack on any Englishman that moved.

Speaker 1 Capello's own account of the event is quite blunt. Quote: Yesterday evening, as a result of snowballing, a violent quarrel.
Wait, stop.

Speaker 1 Yesterday evening, as a result of snowballing, it's just something about that turn of phrase just like, no, no, no, no, stop dead in your fucking tracks, dude.

Speaker 1 It should be going wild in those Ottoman clubs.

Speaker 1 As a result of snowballing,

Speaker 1 it's happened again. A violent quarrel arose between the households of the French and English ambassadors.
Several were badly wounded on either side.

Speaker 1 Had night not fallen, worse would have happened, for the ambassadors themselves began to take parts.

Speaker 1 There are differences between them, and also no good understanding on account of past events relating to the question of jurisdiction and other issues, as I, Capello, have on various occasions informed your serenity.

Speaker 1 Each attributed to the other the origin and beginning of the quarrel. The moment we heard of the occurrence, we instantly endeavored to calm their passions.

Speaker 1 Both of them readily listened to our representations, and this morning I, Capello, visited both and succeeded in soothing their ruffled tempers.

Speaker 1 Accordingly, this evening, the illustrious Signor Francesco Gradinigo, son of the ambassador, went to renew in his father's name the representations I had already made.

Speaker 1 He fulfilled his mission with great prudence and deserves the highest praise, for the ambassadors agreed to send each of them three gentlemen of their suite to my house, who, in their master's names, solemnly declared that they had no part in this affair, and were extremely annoyed at what had happened.

Speaker 1 Further, that they left us to examine and discover the prime mover in this quarrel, and each of them promised that when the truth was revealed, they would severely punish the author, whoever he might be.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, the ambassadors were reconciled in the presence of the illustrious Signor Francesco, promising moreover to forget the injuries received and to maintain between themselves that same good friendship with existed between their respective sovereigns.

Speaker 1 This reconciliation has given satisfaction to everyone and to us as well in view of the evil consequences which might have followed. Pause for a minute there because what's wild to me is two things.

Speaker 1 Number one, like, you'd like to think that people who were specifically there, like, hey, this is a bit of a delicate balance. We all want influence here.
Like, we're representing our nation.

Speaker 1 So, like, might be a little more circumspect versus like, that motherfucker got frozen water on me. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And like, now I have to stick a, now I have to, like, literally stab multiple countrymen. So I, Capello, invited three men over to my house for the most vigorous snowballing.

Speaker 1 Also, that was the second point I was going to make is that it's really interesting to me because I've heard of this before.

Speaker 1 This is, you know, basically translated from a historical archive document of the report given by the Venetian ambassador of the kind of like strange, circuitous, roundabout, like indirect way of communicating in the way that they address like if you read that, Matt, like that's a that's such a strange way of writing.

Speaker 1 And and it's obviously it's historical but like it's you know been translated from circa 1600 italian it's it's odd i presume it was italian i i actually quite honestly don't know like one of the things talking with joel that's made that has blown my mind so often is to be like oh yeah as the venetians they were all speaking greek or something like that it'll you'll often find this kind of thing you know not always but it does take place but to me it's like that that's what a what an art in saying fucking nothing you know what i mean like and it's just interesting to me it's like wait so you guys basically caused a diplomatic incident and and basically nearly killed if not you know permanently wounded people because you're like, bitch, what?

Speaker 1 You want to throw a snowball at me? Cloak max? You see how fly I am? You see how dope? Like, it's basically if the little German kids giving the interview, a bitch V.

Speaker 1 Filoch ex-Freundehas du had like really pissed someone off and he killed them.

Speaker 1 I love the idea of a professional diplomat having to sit down this other collection of diplomats to come to an informal peace treaty because multiple people are maimed for life because of a dude threw a snowball at a man's cloak.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 100%, right? It's like, once again, it's like, I am now slightly damper than I was going to be. It's like, we need to do a fucking pogrom immediately.

Speaker 1 We have anti-English action due to this one very small spot on my third outer layer being wet. Exactly.
You know what?

Speaker 1 I have these linen trousers my mom made for me 30 years ago, and any additional dampness beyond the norm might make them fray forever.

Speaker 1 I might have to reach the stage in life where you were officially middle-aged and you graduate to wearing a barrel. It's just, you know, don't.
if you're wearing a barrel, a snowball can't hurt you.

Speaker 1 That is true. Unless the snowball gets down the barrel, it can land directly on your dick and balls.
And that's just really fucking cold for a while. That's truly snowballing.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's what he brought the guys over for.

Speaker 1 The all three, six of you, three from each house, getting your barrels, prepared to have your chunk frozen by these, like excuse, like it's like the like the fucking cocktail bar, like solid sphere of ice, whiskey ice.

Speaker 1 They put it dropped that down the barrel. You don't like it very much, do you? Yeah, but Nate, what you're proposing is dropping the cube into into the barrel.

Speaker 1 Supposes that then there is a bottom on the barrel with two leg holes cut out and the cube wouldn't fall straight down. That is true.

Speaker 1 Maybe there's like some kind of cloth object to stop air from going up into the barrel. This is a winter barrel we're talking about.

Speaker 1 But it does at least imply, depending on how the person is dropping it, that the large block of ice does like a ski jump luge all the way down your dick and balls.

Speaker 1 And it's probably going to be uncomfortable, you know? It's sort of like being like licked up and down by an ice esper.

Speaker 1 I mean, all all this talk of barrels just makes me think about like how, like, Donkey Kong was a real sartorial renegade. That's why he was throwing the barrels and just wearing a tie.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Donkey Kong would have fucked all of these people up.

Speaker 1 You know, you know, before we started recording, I made the comment about like, you know, watching movies that have been censored because of like Qatar Airways or randomly air linguists or whatever, where like the Elton John biopic, they basically took out every reference to him actually being gay.

Speaker 1 So you think that he would just be like, you know, that he was just mad at guys a lot in his life and there's no explanation why.

Speaker 1 And you just come out of here talking about Donkey Kong as like a fucking, like, like transcenter sartorial excellence. Like, I'm sorry, man.

Speaker 1 You cannot make fun of me for saying I'm familiar with Elton John's life story and then say that shit. You cannot.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, when you play Donkey Kong on air lingus or guitarways, the barrels are censored.

Speaker 1 Which kind of that implies that Donkey Kong is just hanging dong everywhere.

Speaker 1 That even rhymes a little. Lelo took the matter straight to Capello as a neutral arbiter.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, De Brev had already gone crying to Halil Pasha, playing the victim, claiming that his embassy had been attacked and Frenchmen had been killed.

Speaker 1 Given that none of the Venetian records mention this taking place at all, it seems likely that Lello's account was the more truthful, and De Breve came up with the most dramatic lie possible in order to justify the sailors' behavior.

Speaker 1 Halil believed De Breve, though, refusing to process any ordinary bureaucratic business on behalf of English merchants and openly referring to Lello as a lunatic.

Speaker 1 Lello was then forced to call in some Ottoman favors of his own from his one remaining big-hitting government ally, the Italian-born renegade Cholazadeh Sinan Pasha.

Speaker 1 He managed to have a quiet word with his colleague Khalil about the unseemliness of taking sides and squabbles between Christian embassies, and the matter was dropped on the Ottoman side.

Speaker 1 This allowed the Venetians to do their mediation with Lelo's cooperation.

Speaker 1 A big part of it for them was managing the embarrassment of what Lelo called, quote, an occasion to make the Turks laugh at Christians, unquote.

Speaker 1 One of the really remarkable things about after such a dramatic and violent flare-up of tensions, all parties kind of just forgot about it. It wasn't mentioned again at all.

Speaker 1 There's no precedent for this. This never happens again in history.
Imagine how the guy who got stabbed over a snowball feels about that, like walking with a limp or whatever for the rest of his life.

Speaker 1 They just say, like, permanently wounded or maimed. So maybe you get like a hand hacked off with a sword or something.
Like, no, we're friends now.

Speaker 1 You know, in like samurai movies where it's kind of like perfectly like slightly unsheathing the sword and then like in the blink, like he's just like struck and this dude's barrel is just cut in half.

Speaker 1 Once again, it's like, I love the idea of the sort of diplomatic backhands to be like, you know, my liege, it's kind of unseemly for you to put two Christians in a barrel and shake it and make them fight like they're bees.

Speaker 1 Well, that's why, like, if, um, you know, just like a bee, if you get a Christian really cold, they go to sleep and you can tie a rope around them and they'll unthaw and then you just get a guy on a rope.

Speaker 1 Have you ever heard about that with bees? Am I the only person that heard about that? I've heard about that. I mean, I guess I thought it was going to be something more fucked up.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, you tie a rope around them and they explode or something. I don't know.
No,

Speaker 1 you can go bee flying. I remember my brother tried to do this one time.
He caught a bee, put it in the fridge. Like, this is a really fucked up thing to do, of course.

Speaker 1 But, you know, when you're eight, things really don't

Speaker 1 register like that. He tied a string around it, put on the counter for thaw out, and then forgot about it.

Speaker 1 So then there was just a really pissed-off bee with a string around it flying around our house and stinging it.

Speaker 1 I mean, I was going to say, too, that like growing up the way that we grew up, it's like, yeah, it's fucked up.

Speaker 1 But then it's like, you know, on an average day growing up in the Midwest, like your neighbor's dog or your neighbor's child just get hit by a car and die.

Speaker 1 And so like being slightly mean to a bee doesn't really register as like, you know, sort of ethical dilemma.

Speaker 1 Also, just as a side note, since we have been Ottoman maxing for the past couple of weeks, I just find it so fascinating how you'll have like Turkish nationalists online postings like, oh, we need to return to the glory of the Ottoman Empire when like half the dudes with the title of Pasha were the real name was like Hans Gruber.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, I mean, yeah, there's so much of this that, like, the guy, I have to pull up my notes really fast, but Joel actually told me that the guy that Lelo actually reached out to, Cholazzade Sinan Pasha, was an Italian who converted to Islam, who became basically who you know became an Ottoman, effectively.

Speaker 1 Tale is old as time. It was like the siege of Karst where every Ottoman officer was like Hungarian.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, and it's interesting too, because, yeah, he's yeah, he said that his original Italian name was,

Speaker 1 I think it's uh Chikala is how you'd pronounce it, but like, yeah, he just became Turkish.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, this is, this is, I think, on one hand, it makes sense in that, like, when you think about the proselytization of Islam islam and also the way the ottoman empire worked is kind of like co-opting and integrating to some extent different communities that had taken over like there wasn't your experience may vary on that one well yeah but you know what i mean though like what they were talking what we're talking about with you know making bulgaria ottoman making the balkans ottoman making any of the like the middle east ottoman is that like there was a degree to which you had a social advantage by obviously this is different in places where islam was already the dominant religion but you had a social advantage by converting and if you were of a different religion converting you then you know were able like like that it wasn't considered like a, you know, like a last-ditch thing from what I can tell.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm not as well-versed as you are, Joe, but to me, it's like people, if they wanted to rise within the system of power that existed, you had to adopt an Ottoman name.

Speaker 1 You had to become Muslim, you know? Yeah, and this is before the onset of like the concepts of like Turkish nationalism or anything like that. Like, it's not coming for a couple hundred years.

Speaker 1 And this is, this is closer to the peak, I think, and also the fact that like, you know, the really serious decline and kind of like internal degradation that took place in the Ottoman Empire, like later on, like closer to the advent of 19th to 20th century nationalism.

Speaker 1 And this is why in order to become the biggest podcaster in Turkey, I'm going to convert to Islam and change my name to Mutamad Pasha. I once made a joke because

Speaker 1 when my partner was really, really sick that like all of my Muslim friends came through, helped me out big time.

Speaker 1 Like when I was watching my daughter solo and I was like, everyone kept joking, like, yeah, clearly, you know what, this is just leading you to the light of Islam.

Speaker 1 And I was like, well, no, I'm not really interested in being religious. But if there was a way to convert to being Kurdish, I think I would at this point.

Speaker 1 So you know what's funny though, because you mentioned Turkish nationalists nowadays, and there's actually like a link here that when we kind of bring it forward, because there's a very similar kind of echo that in events in Istanbul, like relatively recently, and we're going to get to this in a second.

Speaker 1 So we'll continue. In isolation, this is a pretty funny and interesting story in and of itself.

Speaker 1 You have Lelo, who is kind of a stuffy Nepo baby, probably not cut out for the really quite bizarre world he's been thrust into.

Speaker 1 And there's almost a sitcom level of chaos happening around him between a cast of larger than life characters.

Speaker 1 He ends up making things worse by being the straight man and trying to behave in a way that he thinks is just normal. He's like the Frank Grimes of the early Anglo-Ottoman relations.

Speaker 1 And many of his colleagues rip him mercilessly for it, calling him fog or foggy behind his back, saying that he stands like a midwife and stutters like a soprano goose.

Speaker 1 But even with how entertaining this is all by itself, it's also worth asking the genuine historical question of why that snowball fight descended into such brutal violence.

Speaker 1 Despite all the backstory of rivalry and tactlessness, it's still more than a little bit crazy that a Frenchman got hit by a snowball, so some sailors went on an anti-English violent rampage.

Speaker 1 The key to this might actually lie almost 415 years later in Istanbul of 2015, where there's another case of an innocent misdirected snowball descending into senselessly violent reprisals.

Speaker 1 In the liberal and cosmopolitan district of Karakui, before 10 years of increasing gentrification, there was a neighborhood called Rasimpasha that still had a kind of rough around-the-edges happening feel to it.

Speaker 1 It was a kind of place where new pop-up bars and cafes provided for local hipsters and Erasmus students, but there were still family-run corner shops, Kurdish Pideeth sales, Jordanian falafel houses, and students and hipsters lived alongside young families.

Speaker 1 It proudly still had a synagogue and a couple of Armenian churches, even if they were now almost entirely unfrequented.

Speaker 1 Nowadays, the churches in the synagogue and the bars and cafes are still there, but all the small minority-run businesses, bad gaming cars halls that cater to old men, and neighborhood-oriented shops have been replaced by identicate bougie coffee shops.

Speaker 1 Before the coffee shops terraformed the place, one of the premises they now occupy was a large abandoned space.

Speaker 1 It was taken over between 2014 and 2015 by a group called Yaldiermene Solidarity, which basically turned this empty commercial unit into a meeting place slash studio slash squat for a colorful range of local radicals, artists, dreamers, and activists.

Speaker 1 One such activist was New Kuklu, an experienced journalist by trade.

Speaker 1 On 17 February 2015, he intended a peaceful, jovial demonstration over the AKP's latest bout of anti-democracy and anti-protest laws organized by Yalda Yermina Solidarity and Forza Yaldi Yermina.

Speaker 1 They left the protest in a good mood, and the group of friends began to walk back towards the Solidarity building in high spirits as snow fell.

Speaker 1 As they neared their destination, they began throwing snowballs at each other in the street.

Speaker 1 One then hit the window of a spice shop run by a man named Sir Khan Azizolu, a religious and social conservative who had harassed members of the group, particularly women before.

Speaker 1 His measured response was to come out bellowing and making threats, swearing and threatening the women present in particular.

Speaker 1 He soon went and fetched his baseball bat and launched himself at a dumbfounded group who tried to wrestle the weapon away from him and calm him down.

Speaker 1 As the group prepared to leave, he then went into the shop and grabbed a bread knife, attacking the friends yet again. After two people dodged his slashes, a third was cornered.

Speaker 1 Ngu Kuklu rushed to his friend's rescue, managing to strike Azizolu from behind, but slipping in the snow in the process. Azizolu then stabbed Ng in the heart, murdering him over a stray snowball.

Speaker 1 The murderer was of course convicted, despite his initial gloating at the scene that he would get away with it and later claims of self-defense.

Speaker 1 The details that came out of the investigation and trial were grimly unpredictable. He was a conservative who was constantly watching the Turkish equivalent of shock jocks on TV.

Speaker 1 He was mentally unstable.

Speaker 1 He had had run-ins with the group before, feeling like his area was being taken over by these radicals who threatened the traditional way of life in a country where opposition was increasingly being framed by the government as an assault on the nation.

Speaker 1 As regards our understanding of history, there's a useful byproduct of modern social sciences' analyses of events like these.

Speaker 1 A significant amount of psychological and anthropological research has gone into trying to understand the motivating factors of people like Ozzy Zolu, who leaped to suddenly committing acts of political violence after

Speaker 1 seemingly innocuous triggers.

Speaker 1 While much of it has looked at how political and religious radicalism affects people's sense of identity, there's another arena where this phenomenon has been researched extensively too, football hooliganism.

Speaker 1 Two of the key concepts that have come out of this research are identity fusion and devoted actors.

Speaker 1 In a nutshell, identity fusion is when someone feels so strongly aligned to a cause or a team that the collective they identify with becomes an extension of their personal identity.

Speaker 1 This means that when they perceive a threat to the group, they act as as if it's a personal threat to them too.

Speaker 1 We can easily imagine here guys with soccer tattoos on their bald heads who would feel an overwhelming sense of rage just watching their team lose on TV.

Speaker 1 Likewise, we can think about people so strongly aligned with political or religious causes that the cause becomes an extension of their personality, and opponents begin to seem like personal enemies to them.

Speaker 1 We can easily apply this to the band of brothers kind of extended personalized loyalty that develops between youths and the military or say sailors reliant on each other for survival of their ship in the 16th century Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 The other concept, devoted actors, basically applies to those people experiencing identity fusion who are such true believers, so motivated by the group identity, and particularly any perceived threat towards it, that they're willing to take extreme actions at mortal personal risk in order to defend it.

Speaker 1 Defend being, well, their concept, not necessarily objective.

Speaker 1 They're the kinds of people who go beyond just being angry and hateful or saying hurtful words on the internet and are so fused and devoted to their extended group identity that they are effectively willing to kill for it.

Speaker 1 Again, it's easy to imagine hardcore sports fans battering the fuck out of each other or political and religious extremists going on murderous rampages or blowing themselves up.

Speaker 1 Where this again can also be applied is the case of military or pseudo-military groups, such as as our rowdy French sailors losing discipline and committing acts of mass violence against civilians or other innocent parties just because they are associated with hate figures who carry a perceived threat to the group.

Speaker 1 History is not psychology or anthropology. It's not a social science.
And it certainly isn't an experimental science.

Speaker 1 But thinking about what these scientists have to say in the case of startlingly comparable contemporary events to the snowball episode helps make sense of the characters this historical tale might have been feeling.

Speaker 1 and the kinds of leaps their minds and emotions will have been making in order to drive them what seems like a completely disproportionate act of violence in revenge for a harmless snowball.

Speaker 1 When you throw together Lello's tacticness and misguided interference in matters of religion and the real threat of English and other piracy that these sailors would face on a day-to-day basis while out at sea, you can see why they might hold a hostile view of the English.

Speaker 1 Add in an equally furious French ambassador keen to highlight Lello's grievous insults about their king in person and the king's proxy.

Speaker 1 You can begin to see how they would construct the English in Istanbul being an insult and threat to their sense of Frenchness.

Speaker 1 Throw in the massive religious upheaval of the time that had been ongoing in England and France, with them ending up on opposite sides of the Reformation divide after lots of bloody struggle in both countries, plus the Band of Brothers group mentality of men reliant on each other's loyalty for their survival in a dangerous theater, it becomes very easy to see how some of the group could end up in a place of wanting to put their safety on the line in order to get back at those English bastards.

Speaker 1 And from there, a mob mentality could take hold.

Speaker 1 So, the Frenchmen who went on a mass armed revenge mission for a single snowball weren't football hooligans or necessarily religious or political extremists, but the lesson we can learn from looking at why those people behave in the ways they do can certainly help us to understand why these sailors went hell for leather in attacking the English Levant Company merchants in January 1600.

Speaker 1 One blunder and I let up balls.

Speaker 1 Much like singing Frank Sinatra's My Way in karaoke in the Philippines, you can never throw a snowball in Istanbul.

Speaker 1 If you do it, you better do it for you. Hey, you know, it's like we were talking about all of the hardest fuck lines from Apocalypse Now.
Never throw a snowball. Absolutely goddamn right.

Speaker 1 Unless you're going all the way.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 like I said,

Speaker 1 this was really interesting to me because

Speaker 1 it kind of stepped out a little bit of the way that we have covered history in the past and obviously I'm very grateful to Joel for his help on this and what I thought about that was interesting here is that like we talk so often on this show about these kinds of outpourings of violence whether it's like you know sort of organized regimental military units the predis the precursors to those or like social upheaval in which these events take place to me I guess I thought on one hand I like to make jokes and joke about you know the barrels and

Speaker 1 the ice looch down your dick and balls of the perfectly formed sphere but there's a thought process that goes into it here that I do find interesting which is like why on earth would would this matter?

Speaker 1 Is it just like the violence was just kind of more commonplace to the point where like someone says, hey, grab shit. We're going to go beat some ass.

Speaker 1 Because that's not that far off from what I grew up with. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me when you have, you know, a military, pseudo-military unit, like a group of, I mean, these could have been, you know, French Royal Navy sailors.

Speaker 1 They could have been. X, Y company sailors, whatever.
I mean, they are a military slash pseudo-military unit.

Speaker 1 And I'm willing to bet as someone who has not necessarily beaten up a motherfucker for throwing.

Speaker 1 Actually, I have beaten up a motherfucker for thrown a snowball, but it's because they froze at first, but that's a different subject altogether.

Speaker 1 But, you know, it's one of those situations that by the time you get dudes with like shivs in the street, none of them have any idea why or what started the event.

Speaker 1 You know, like it's like a game of telephone that eventually leads to violence. Like, it isn't like, hey, fucking Chuck from Unk River threw a snowball at a guy.

Speaker 1 It's, you know, they assaulted a Frenchman or, you know, they outraged a Frenchman's honor or whatever, or maybe they even hit someone.

Speaker 1 And by the time, by the time it gets to guy getting stabbed in the street, the story has spiraled so wildly out of control that they, you know, in their mind, they are defending something worth defending.

Speaker 1 I'm willing to bet if they knew dude got a snowball thrown at them, they wouldn't have given a fuck.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm going to experience this in real time tomorrow night because I'm going to the Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv match. I mean,

Speaker 1 that's a perfect example of like how that can happen.

Speaker 1 Where like, you know, a couple months ago, this episode's coming out in November, but a couple months ago here in the Netherlands in Amsterdam, we had a massive, you know,

Speaker 1 it's correct to call it a riot. It didn't start that way, though, when McAvie Tel Aviv fans came to Amsterdam for a game against AX.
AX famously has quite a rowdy hooligan group.

Speaker 1 So do other football clubs in Amsterdam. And the McAvee Tel Aviv group came to, and mind you, these are ultras, you know, they are hooligans.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Famously, one of the most racist club in a very racist country came to Amsterdam and started saying all sorts of fucking outrageous shit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And people are like, well, you know, they got their ass kicked by football hooligans, which is partially true, but that's not exactly what happened.

Speaker 1 They managed to piss off the entire fucking city to the point that the various parts of Amsterdam society started fighting them.

Speaker 1 It had nothing to do with football.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, it gets spun up into this idea it was a hate crime targeted at Israelis or, you know, obviously the Israeli government wants to say Jews when that is not the case.

Speaker 1 It was just a bunch of dickheads getting their teeth kicked in.

Speaker 1 Right, because the story was like a bunch of drunk dickheads looking for a fight, going around and harassing anyone who wasn't white, anyone with a Palestinian flag, any woman in hijab.

Speaker 1 And then it's like, oh, oh, it's, it's like Christalnach too. Oh, God.
Oh, it's like, it's like every one of these soccer hooligans with like, I love doing racism on their chest.

Speaker 1 It's basically Ann Frank. It's like, man, shut the fuck up.
Yeah, so it gets lost in the middle of like, oh, it was hooligans fighting each other, which like is not necessarily what happened.

Speaker 1 It's part of what happened. But you don't get, you know, like, you don't get fucking press ganged into being a hooligan by just existing in the way of a bunch of racist dudes coming down the road.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, you know, like if I get my, if I get run over by a car, it's not a head-on collision in traffic. You know what I mean? Like, it's a car hitting me, the person.

Speaker 1 I don't get, like, anamorphed into a car.

Speaker 1 Similarly. I think that might be more of a Transformer situation.
No, in this car, the car is a mammal. It's anthropomorphic.
It's got blood.

Speaker 1 It feels pain. It hurts.
So you're saying football hooliganism exists in the Cars universe.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 9-11 took place in the Cars universe, which kind of implies that that must have been really strange for the first World Trade Center attack because it was a truck bomb.

Speaker 1 So like that truck was alive also.

Speaker 1 No, but no, but if 9-11 happened in the cars universe there is also a supplementary film in that universe called planes so that means the plane itself was a jihadist that's why they didn't need to learn how to land because the plane was flying itself what if what if there were two dale earnhardts in parallel and that was 9-11 in the cars universe

Speaker 1 muhammad auta spray painting a big number three on the side of a plane

Speaker 1 muhammad auta spray painting the side turn right instead of left no dale earnhart like dying in the cars universe is like how people reacted when Michael Jackson died.

Speaker 1 That makes a really, really fucked up impression when you think about what Princess Diana dying was like in the Cars universe.

Speaker 1 Oh, Nate, I have to say, I would like to extend a big thank you to Nate.

Speaker 1 And I don't want to call him a research assistant because that's unfair to a man that has a PhD in history, but our researcher friend for writing this episode and the last one that you led because I took some time off for some unfortunate leave due to a death in my family.

Speaker 1 And I really liked being able to come back and talk about quite possibly the weirdest shit ever.

Speaker 1 I mean, what I'd like to say is that I obviously am very grateful for the attention and discipline with which Joel approaches this subject.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how he, as a person born and raised in England, is going to react when he hears this episode. And we hypothesize Princess Diana's death in the Sweeney in the Cars universe.

Speaker 1 However, I felt like that I actually came away from this edified because like, well, I mean, thankfully,

Speaker 1 someone did the research, research, much like you, when you do an episode, and I'm like, well, I learned something from what you researched, but this is a completely different approach that I really liked.

Speaker 1 Does that mean, sorry, Nate, that the journalists that were chasing Diana were like the Google Street View cars? Well, no, they were like evil motorcycles. They were like,

Speaker 1 I mean, in a way, it starts to become like,

Speaker 1 I don't know if this is going to have any resonance with you because it's such an old reference American, but it's sort of like, I mean, like, what if, you know, you got like the black magic version of the blade, the brave little toaster, and those cars were chasing Diana.

Speaker 1 So they're sort of like ringwraith anthropomorphic anthropomorphic cars. And Princess Diana's like, but that also implies that she's like piggybacking on another car who's drunk.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know how it would work. Was she like on a tow truck, like a drunk tow truck, trying to whip ass through Paris in a tunnel? Who can say? I don't know.
I really don't either.

Speaker 1 Being ran down by the French press version of Nas Ghoul.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. I need to get the exclusive for my magazine, Le Pidifile Recis.

Speaker 1 Hey, they've changed their name. Now they're known as Le Ressiste.
Okay.

Speaker 1 They have aged with the times. So So all I can say with that, and if you don't have any other reactions, is what we've talked about so far is the end.

Speaker 1 And. So we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion, parentheses, cars, for if you'd like to ask us the questions from the Legion, you can ask us.

Speaker 1 First, you have to support the show on Patreon. That's mandatory for all people.
Universal basic Patreon.

Speaker 1 I'm Joe Carsabia.

Speaker 1 And you will have access to our Discord and obviously the Patreon.

Speaker 1 And you you can ask us a question on our Discord, which we have a dedicated channel to, or on our Patreon and messages, which admittedly, Discord is better.

Speaker 1 Patreon as a messaging platform is terrible. But today's question is, none of you live in the country where you were born.
What is a tell that you're not from there? Mine is pretty easy.

Speaker 1 Other than the obvious of like, I don't have blonde hair.

Speaker 1 Is people who live in Europe have a tendency, if they wear like an American, anything to do with American sports, it's like a Yankees hat or an L.A.

Speaker 1 Dodgers hat because those are the two American cities that exist in the European mind. I obviously only wear Detroit stuff and nobody's wearing that shit unless you're from there.

Speaker 1 It's a pretty big tell that I'm wearing like the Detroit Tigers hat or Red Wings hat or whatever. It's like, oh, no, you have to be from there.

Speaker 1 Joe starting the first ever branch of the Den Hawk Poiruse. And their symbol is going to be the Detroit hat.

Speaker 1 I guess for me, it's like I've definitely adopted perhaps, if not like specifically Swiss French way of dressing, then sort of like the general pan-Europe ghost HM because it's cheap way of dressing.

Speaker 1 I think for me, it's obviously like, well, I think when I go to the grocery store, I feel as though I still shop like an American and like just lose my place and stand in the aisle and block the fuck out of everybody.

Speaker 1 And it's always crowded. And it's like, I live above a big grocery store, but like any time of day, it's going to be crowded.

Speaker 1 I have to remind myself to like, you know, sort of find a find a non-trafficked area to stand in. If I need to just like, you know, zone out and think about what I want to cook for for dinner.

Speaker 1 I also think that there are some things, this is really funny.

Speaker 1 I still react really by surprise living in a society where like there isn't really as much like hardcore, we suspect everyone of shoplifting and we're going to kill you.

Speaker 1 Like there are times when I realize like I'm really confused and I think I'm doing something wrong. Like I had to buy this stamp for my business.
It's a stupid thing for tax.

Speaker 1 They love stamps with your name on it here for business documents. And I bought one from this and I said, can I just pay with a QR code bill? And they're like, sure, fine.
They shipped me the stamp.

Speaker 1 It was like 125 francs. They shipped me the stamp and didn't send me the bill for like two weeks.
Now, in the American meeting is like, okay, run me like about a thousand of those.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? But like, obviously, I'm not going to steal shit.

Speaker 1 But what I'm saying is, to me, it's like, wait, they shipped something that's worth the equivalent of like $150 to me without me paying. And they're like, yeah, just pay the bill by the due date.

Speaker 1 We'll send it in the mail sometime. That's like, I'm like, what the fuck? Something bad.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, fuck with me too. Yeah, it would definitely fuck with you.

Speaker 1 I mean, another one I'll leave you is there's things here like in order to encourage people once they started doing like a citywide or cantonal wide composting program where you can do like compost collection and they get like the green bags and they have like a special like a different kind of trash for compost collection they were like oh we'll give you free composting bags you can pick them up pick them up at like either city hall or your local police station now joe you're american i'm american do you think at any time on this planet i'm gonna walk into a police station like oh can i have some free trash bags please oh never hell no that's definitely a sting operation yeah and it's it's completely legit like they're just it's just how they do stuff here and so for me i'm like wait what ask he's not separating his dry recycling get out of the floor Exactly.

Speaker 1 Exactly. It's like, you can't.

Speaker 1 You can't get the bag to tear off. And then you're trying to pull it.
And they start, you're like, stop resisting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man. Hell no.
So you understand, like, yeah, that little things like that, I think it's not necessarily like a huge giveaway.

Speaker 1 I mean, I speak, some people have told me that they think my French accent is pretty good. Some people are like, no, you're definitely a foreigner.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 But I don't, I'm not uncomfortable in the language. So that's not always a dead, like, it's not a dead giveaway that I am American, for example, when I speak French.

Speaker 1 But little things like that, I'm like, wait, what the fuck? No, no, no, I just won't do that. It'd be like, it would be like, I don't know, it's like if, if there was just some kind of

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 instead of shaking somebody's hand, if you had to like, I don't know, like play footsie with them, and that was the new like poly test, it would just be weird.

Speaker 1 I actually have a, I have another one in regards to that, which is, I refuse to send tickies to people.

Speaker 1 I was gonna say, yeah.

Speaker 1 For people who are unaware, like even amongst friends in the Netherlands, it is very, very common.

Speaker 1 Like, you guys go for coffee or whatever, and then like you leave and you'll get like a tickie, which is is a like you owe them three, five years, whatever. It's for like negligible amounts of money.

Speaker 1 It's just something that's pretty normal. Um, obviously, super close friends don't do that, at least not from my experience.

Speaker 1 But, like, you know, I go out with my friends, I'll buy a beer, you know, I go to like my Warhammer club, I'll buy the guy that I'm playing a game beer or whatever.

Speaker 1 And they're like, oh, you know, send me a tickie. I'm just like, no, I'm not going to do that.
It was

Speaker 1 five Euro.

Speaker 1 Did I send you the Dutch Hell TikTok that was like, oh, a guy going to Dutch Hell and is like, yeah, I'm going to buy you a beer, but I'm not going to send you a chicky.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to expect you to pay for it. I'm just going to hold it over you forever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's really weird for me.

Speaker 1 I do not do it.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's like the Midwesterner slash American slash Armenian in me. I will never expect people to pay me back.

Speaker 1 No, I always like, yeah, I was always that way before the even when I had a really hard time spending any money on myself. And I would have like, oh, yeah, it's okay.

Speaker 1 I've had this, you know, the same pair of boxers for nine years, and they're basically like, you know, the linen pants that are hanging on by a thread.

Speaker 1 But we go out for drinks, I'm buying rounds for everybody. Like, no way am I letting you fucking pay me back in money.
You want to pay me back in stuff later, get me later, great. But I would never.

Speaker 1 So, to me, yeah, that that is that is a very it's not quite as common here, but like the idea of like, hey, you know, because you can pay with QR codes and like it's easy to do that here.

Speaker 1 People do it all the time for like splitting checks. And I'm just like, it's, it's fine.
Like, I'll just get dinner, man. It's cool.

Speaker 1 Even if it is like a fucking mortgage payment in this country, but I'm interested in

Speaker 1 you, England and Ireland, very different, but also there are some similarities in a ways that maybe america and the netherlands aren't you know what i'm saying so there's loads of like i think there is loads of similarities between the two uh the like a handful of like big ones that i notice all the time is one british people go on about loving cues but none of them know how to queue but also like they've since coveted have now started doing this thing of like when they're in the pub they'll queue up like single file rather than spreading along the bar and i'm like what are we doing just like walk and stand and like lean on the bar and just like look at the shit on the wall and smile.

Speaker 1 And they'll get to you when they get to you. It just

Speaker 1 the judgment of the barman of who was there first. Yeah, but it's like you see it like in so many different things.

Speaker 1 It's like they love going on about queuing, but they don't know how to queue in a way that's not anger. That's not aggro.
For our American fans, that means standing in line. Standing in line.

Speaker 1 Yeah, or standing online if you're if you're from New York. I mean, that's always weirded me out because it was such a thing about their kind of like self-mythology.

Speaker 1 And then living there, I'm like, these motherfuckers can't queue for shit. I've noticed that as well.
Like, I've never been cut in line more than outside the Caucasus, where lines are more of a vibe.

Speaker 1 I've never been cut in line at people like do weird shit in line than in London. Yeah, I mean, like, I remember because in Korea, it can be pretty aggressive.

Speaker 1 And when I was studying Korean, a bunch of the students with me were Chinese learning Korean. And they're like, oh, it's so orderly here.
People like, you know, wait and wait in lines.

Speaker 1 And I was like, what is China like the Castlevania level where the furniture's on the ceiling and everything's going really fast? Like, what the fuck?

Speaker 1 But the thing is that, like, Brits brits are just like pay pigs for their own culture like they are just god dude they are just dominated by these like weird perceptions like another one and people will probably understand is that like all like i don't care really if people wear poppies i think it's stupid but like i've had so many conversations with like people i'm friends with who will like wear it and like I'll just say it's like, oh, like, why do you wear it?

Speaker 1 And it's like, oh, you know, they have this like strange cultural attachment to it.

Speaker 1 Not in the kind of like poppy watch people, but like just average people who like wear and it's coming up to remembrance day soon which i'm going to i'm going to the cenota to take photos but it's like i find it so strange and there's like so many i think

Speaker 1 with your exact the two of your examples is like it's much more concrete in the way people behave it's just more so that like i think living in britain you're taking constant chip damage to your psyche and it's like it just makes people insane like they like they are obsessed with these things that they say they're they do but don't do in practicality.

Speaker 1 It's like you are all weird. So do you stick out? Because obviously you're not going to throw on a poppy and walk around and

Speaker 1 I'm going to wear a black poppy because I'm clear. They all die.

Speaker 1 I'm actually pro-Kaiser.

Speaker 1 Like I saw a video the other day of this like guy who's like, couldn't be older than like 21 going on about how, oh, you know, all these like different variations of the poppy.

Speaker 1 So like, oh, you know, the poppy to specifically remember like the black service members or the Indian and Pakistanis who served in World War I.

Speaker 1 And he's like, oh, this is disrespectful to the memory of World War I. You should just wear the regular poppy.
I'm just like, you were insane. And like the

Speaker 1 reform guy who was like, oh, we wouldn't have depression in young people anymore if they just went out and had that wartime spirit and worked.

Speaker 1 You know, the best cure for mental health is a good day's work. I was like, none of you people served in an actual war.
You are insane.

Speaker 1 I mean, remember that line when we were doing the show with and Jeremy Vine was on about the collar being like, Do you think anyone was going on about mental health at the Somme? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I know what cured me of my PTSD was sitting in a trench line being shelled for like 13 hours.

Speaker 1 I mean, what I would say is for me is, I think there is actually a comparable thing, just to close it out when you talk about that, Tom, because I had noticed this.

Speaker 1 There's an equivalent thing with Americans where people were Americans who you would otherwise think to be pretty rational and even-handed, and oftentimes, like, you know, relatively politically progressive, but maybe not like on the

Speaker 1 far extreme of being left-wing and like anti-imperialist, but like, not like someone who's, you know, you would consider like a, like a, like a jingoist.

Speaker 1 If you talk about the Pledge of Allegiance or like the sanctity of the American flag, it's the exact same as Brits with the poppy and with the monarchy.

Speaker 1 The people that you would think are otherwise sane and reasonable will take on the most fucking bananas opinions. And you're like, wait, what? You actually believe that?

Speaker 1 You actually believe that God's son lives in the Godhouse and he's the head of the aristocracy and he's in charge of that.

Speaker 1 I have the funniest interaction between the two of it was was last year, and I think it was in about December or so.

Speaker 1 And I was in, you know, one of those shops that does like the really fancy hot chocolates or whatever.

Speaker 1 And I was like, went in there, and there was like an American family in front of me. So I was like, two parents, two kids.

Speaker 1 And the guy ordered four hot chocolates and it was like extortionately expensive. And he asked the person behind the counter in London, do you do a veterans discount? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 And the woman

Speaker 1 visibly had to stop herself from laughing at him. Yes.
Oh, my God. I love that so much.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 asking for a veteran's discount on your naturalization fee to become a British citizen. Like,

Speaker 1 I'm going to go down to IOD

Speaker 1 when I finally get my new residency card and I have to pay like, whatever, 20 euros and ask for a veteran's discount and immediately get deported. Yeah.
Like,

Speaker 1 I was standing there and I was like, so shocked i like got my hot chocolate and like went outside and it like processed and i saw them walking down the street it was like he was a big dude like very typical like american tourist he was wearing like a

Speaker 1 kind of like a light hiking jacket with like a heather gray hoodie underneath it boot cut jeans and like the most horrible like on running running shoes ever and it was like this is so also he's wearing a snapback of course but it's like hey whoa whoa whoa snapbacks are fine if you haven't gotten a haircut in a while and you're fitted so fit anymore.

Speaker 1 But it was like the psychic damage this poor woman behind the counter took of this American asking, Do you do a veterans discount? That's legitimately one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

Speaker 1 That's the funniest thing I've heard in a very long time. I've just been staring.
You guys maybe have noticed this on your screens. I've just been dissociating this whole time after you said that.

Speaker 1 I love it. I love it.
I love it. It's a shame that this story came to me at the end of the episode.
I hope people are listening.

Speaker 1 It genuinely is like once I, it was like a Proustian reverie. It was like, I can actually picture it in my mind because it was so hot in there as well.

Speaker 1 And it was like people are really crammed together and there was like two queues and like fuck veterans. So funny.
I fucking love it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, actually, this coffee shop in London is a subsidiary of Lowe's hardware store.

Speaker 1 But you have to stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance, though, like a Smission BBQ. I'm pretty sure he got like a fucking like triple espresso mocha as well.
It's like, this is mad.

Speaker 1 like that message. Can't go back to the hotel toilet to start podcasting.

Speaker 1 Can't get hot chocolate because that's gay. No, I'm going to get the triple shop mocha and get my veterans discount.

Speaker 1 This is my new favorite guy we've talked about. I don't even know.
Like, that's just, I mean, I love him.

Speaker 1 Shouts out, Tom, to like taking like last part of questions from the Legion to like fully flip the script on us and just like send us down this, like you said, Proustian reverie.

Speaker 1 It's just sort of like, I don't even know what to do with this information i love him i love him so much mid-december uh no early to mid-december and it was like oh it was in around covent garden so it was probably the family were going to like the fucking harry potter thing or whatever and it was like balls hot if like you know in the movies of like the middle east from the 2000s the wind or the air is just waving yeah it's yellow filter they've got like like a warbling world music woman voice singer going on like scary

Speaker 1 arabs

Speaker 1 Everyone is holding like their north face buffer because it's so hot in this shop and they're going so slow because it's like this artisan hot chocolate or whatever.

Speaker 1 And just hearing this guy, I'm trying to remember what he sounded like.

Speaker 1 It definitely kind of like Midwest because he didn't sound like he was from like the northeast like asking for a oh, this is so good. I love him.
I love him. He's perfect.
He's a perfect being.

Speaker 1 Actually, I'm pretty sure I sent a text to someone about it. I probably texted Shocks about this.
I'm going to try and find the text before we can make it to fucking episode art.

Speaker 1 Fans will be confused.

Speaker 1 Well, fellas, I believe that is a podcast.

Speaker 1 Nate, again, thank you so much for taking the lead while I took leave for, I believe, the second time in this podcast history.

Speaker 1 It was a lot of fun. I hope people enjoyed it.
But you guys host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts.

Speaker 1 I am the co-host and producer of What a Hell Away to Dad, a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military and also about parenting.

Speaker 1 Trash Future, a podcast about making fun of the tech industry, and Kill James Bond, a feminist film podcast. None of them offer a veteran's discount, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 Neither does this show.

Speaker 1 It sure doesn't. Despite the emails.
No, no, sure. It sure doesn't.
You know what? Take that shit to Red Robin and see if they can give you a meal. You know what I mean? Like, it's not my problem.

Speaker 1 Yeah, take your veteran, your DD214. That plus a Metro card will get you on the subway.

Speaker 1 Tom.

Speaker 1 Beneath Skin, a show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and Bloodwork, a show about the economy of violence. You can follow my photography at scamgolden.

Speaker 1 That's G-O-L-D-I-N. And yeah, buy my books from beneath the skin shop.com.
I got some new ones coming out before Christmas. This is the only show that I host.
Thank you for listening to it.

Speaker 1 Support us on Patreon. It is no longer voluntary.

Speaker 1 If just $5 a month gets you everything,

Speaker 1 almost eight years of bonus content.

Speaker 1 Side series like the the history of Armenia and lines up by robots as well as even more history stuff discord access every episode early and one snowball that will cause your friend to stab your homie over if you're a veteran you get the opposite of a discount we'll actually charge you more

Speaker 1 uh and until next time oh i got one for you buddy until next time akira slide the horse whip that cloak fast as fuck cut the snowball in half no one will get mad at you everyone will think you were cool we promise And we will talk to you next week.

Speaker 1 Bye. Bye.