Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Coop People who did Coop Stuff,
Speaker 1: because we've had a coup in which Robert Evans has
Speaker 1: stopped pretending to be a different person than Sophie Lickterman.
Speaker 2: That's right. I'm just the best voice actor there's ever been.
Speaker 1: That's that's right, and that's why you have those immaculate
Speaker 1: accents that you totally do on your show and not mine.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Margaret Kilsroy, and each week we talk
Speaker 1: about cool people who did cool stuff, which has never
Speaker 1: been the name of the podcast. So this week we're
Speaker 1: talking with Lori Penny. Hi, Laurie, how are you?
Speaker 3: I'm all right, how are you?
Speaker 1: I'm doing good on this day that is totally a
Speaker 1: different day than the previous day that we recorded.
Speaker 4: It's also a different day. It's also a different day
Speaker 4: from me than it is for you. That's true. It's
Speaker 4: just going with here in London.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we wanted to record in two different days, so yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and of course our producer is Sophie Lichterman. Sophie, how
Speaker 1: are you doing? Sophie. Laurie knows that I'm famously accent blind,
Speaker 1: but even I can tell a perfect Boston accent.
Speaker 2: Classic Boston Sophie because she loves the Celtics so much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. Ian is our audio engineer. Hi Ian, You'll
Speaker 1: have to say hi to Ian too him. Our theme
Speaker 1: music was written for Spyon Woman. So this week won't
Speaker 1: make any sense, Well, today won't make any sense unless
Speaker 1: you go back and listen to part one. Where you
Speaker 1: should go back to listen to part one talk about
Speaker 1: Josephine Baker and where she comes from, which is mostly
Speaker 1: a series of not nice things that happened, followed by
Speaker 1: her doing really amazing shit and making it friends as a.
Speaker 3: Web of fascinating and brilliant lies. Love. I love the
Speaker 3: idea of it.
Speaker 4: Has this just amazing, amazing liar that's her talent in
Speaker 4: so so many ways.
Speaker 3: And then she just becomes a spy, which I don't
Speaker 3: actually know much about, but I feel I'm about to.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, and it's it's perfect. Everyone keeps thinking that
Speaker 1: she wouldn't be a good spy because she's like an
Speaker 1: actress person in the world. Right, there are some downsides,
Speaker 1: but it works really well. So there's this intelligence agency
Speaker 1: in France, or there used to be, and it's called
Speaker 1: the Dooziem Bureau Bureau, god fucking whatever. It's called the Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks you, there we go, thank you, thank you. A
Speaker 1: low yeah, as compared to the law, you can probably
Speaker 1: actually pronounce all of this stuff. They're spies, and they
Speaker 1: spy on stuff. They counter spy on other people's spies
Speaker 1: of the French ci A. Essentially they or the French
Speaker 1: M one six, m I six what's y'all's over and.
Speaker 3: M I six or M I five that's what we
Speaker 3: could The M one is is a road?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Wait why five? And why is the most crowded
Speaker 2: road I've ever seen?
Speaker 3: Yes, I've never known why it's five and six?
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, are they different?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: One is one is Home affairs, one is one is
Speaker 4: the FBI. One is the CIA exactly.
Speaker 2: A g r U F s B sort of sort
Speaker 2: of dell, yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, So the the those the m BR cut whatever,
Speaker 1: they predate the CIA by a long fucking time, like,
Speaker 1: you know, fifty.
Speaker 2: Years at least.
Speaker 5: All.
Speaker 1: Yeah, However, it's also woefully underfunded.
Speaker 2: Not the CIA. They can have no fund fine CIA.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And normally I would say I don't care for
Speaker 1: countries for an intelligence. This is underfunded. There's this problem
Speaker 1: with the Nazis, you know, and it will have impacts, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: So one of the ways that they start financing their shit,
Speaker 1: or rather they start setting aside this slush fund where
Speaker 1: they're basically like intercepting spies, German spies in France and
Speaker 1: then continuing to pretend to be those spies in order
Speaker 1: to keep getting payments from Germany. Because Germany's spy agency
Speaker 1: is really well funded.
Speaker 3: They're running faked spies in order to feel from the Nazis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, basically, yeah, right. They're also relying primarily on volunteer
Speaker 1: spies because they're broke as fuck. These volunteer spies are
Speaker 1: called honorable correspondence and they are a sort of irregular
Speaker 1: and they're probably not super trustworthy to be honest, although
Speaker 1: actually they are rated as very trustworthy by the like
Speaker 1: each of of French spies at this time has like
Speaker 1: a rating of the information is like rated on a
Speaker 1: like seed a scale.
Speaker 3: Are you meant to be trustworthy if you're a spy?
Speaker 3: I know, maybe I've misunderstood spying here, right. I may
Speaker 3: not know much about about about lying, but I feel
Speaker 3: like spies untrustworthy.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's fair.
Speaker 1: I honestly, sometimes spine seems like the most impossible thing
Speaker 1: in the world because you're like, well, who's lying who's not?
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess that's the whole thing, is trying
Speaker 1: to figure out who's lying, he's not. There's a whole
Speaker 1: things about it.
Speaker 2: But I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's much easier to just be like, I'm a partisan,
Speaker 1: I shoot Nazis and then these people to do like
Speaker 1: really complicated shit. You know, yes, communication, yeah, exactly, So
Speaker 1: non violent communication with bullets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's something different.
Speaker 1: Oh, violent communication? Sorry, violent communication, all right. So they
Speaker 1: recruit her the u z M Hero and it's a gamble.
Speaker 1: They're like a lot of people like the guy who
Speaker 1: wants to recruit her is like, I want to recruit
Speaker 1: Jephine Baker And people are like, she's literally the most
Speaker 1: photographed woman in the world. How can she be a spy?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: But this is how it worked, and it worked because
Speaker 1: of that. So this guy shows up at her house,
Speaker 1: her big her chateau, and it's like, hey, do you
Speaker 1: want to go be a spy for France? And she's
Speaker 1: apparently she's like hanging out in boots in the garden,
Speaker 1: like picking up snails in order to feed them to
Speaker 1: her ducks. Oh yeah, it's like very like you know,
Speaker 1: she has like two lives. You know, she's Josephine Baker
Speaker 1: on stage and then she's like the lady who picks
Speaker 1: up snails to go feed to the ducks, or.
Speaker 3: Of secret dorkiness. Yeah, she just pulled her goat and
Speaker 3: her pig and head cheet during her ducks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and her dog and her three different types of
Speaker 1: monkeys and her mice, but we'll get to those.
Speaker 4: She's so glad she got so many animals. At the
Speaker 4: beginning of this story, she's like running away from home
Speaker 4: because they weren't. It's like the same kind.
Speaker 3: Of person right the way through. I love it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So they show up and this guy shows up and
Speaker 1: he's like, yeah, you want to go spy for France,
Speaker 1: And she's like, well, I fucking hate Nazis and I
Speaker 1: fucking love Paris, so let's go. Or more specifically, she
Speaker 1: says things like the way she's quoted in all of
Speaker 1: the various honorifics from France, as she says, dispose of
Speaker 1: me as you will. You know, she's willing to die
Speaker 1: to fuck up Nazis. She also makes it very clear
Speaker 1: up front that she has no problem killing Nazis herself
Speaker 1: with her bare hands as necessary.
Speaker 4: This was this something that they suggested she should deal
Speaker 4: Was she just like as an optional extra in case.
Speaker 1: Has I think she just was like, I just want
Speaker 1: to make it clear, like does this mean I get
Speaker 1: to kill.
Speaker 3: Some Yeah, it's like you can have a weapon.
Speaker 2: It's like whatever, I don't care.
Speaker 3: There's nothing wrong with you I can't fix with my hands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and her handler is a guy named Jacques Abtay.
Speaker 1: They start fucking, I think pretty much immediately because those spies,
Speaker 1: which makes the whole like dispose of me as you will,
Speaker 1: like kind of a kind of you say, yeah, both
Speaker 1: of them are married. Both of their marriages on the rocks.
Speaker 1: Sugar Lion has been cheating on Josephine. Josephine also had
Speaker 1: recently had a miscarriage that broke her heart and put
Speaker 1: some distance between her and Lion. And then Abtay, his
Speaker 1: like wife I think was an Actually I don't think
Speaker 1: his marriage was on the rocks.
Speaker 2: I think he was just being shitty.
Speaker 3: Because his wife. His wife was not Josephine Baker.
Speaker 1: That was the problem with this, yeah, exactly. And his
Speaker 1: wife was like I think in England at this point
Speaker 1: because the aforementioned the fall of France's imminent. One thing
Speaker 1: I didn't realize is how everyone in France knew the
Speaker 1: fall of France was eminent except the French government. The
Speaker 1: French government was like, we have the line. I can't
Speaker 1: remember the name of the line.
Speaker 2: You imagine the line. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1: They're like, we're going to hold this and it's totally
Speaker 1: gonna work, and like all of France is like getting
Speaker 1: ready for like, well, we're about to become German. Maybe
Speaker 1: we should get out of here, and yeah, including not lions,
Speaker 1: TH's lions whatever. Abdey's wife I believe is in England
Speaker 1: at this stright. So they give her her first assignment.
Speaker 1: They want to know if Mussolini is going to join Hitler,
Speaker 1: if he's going to join the Axis forces. It's hard
Speaker 1: to imagine in retrospect that anything else could have happened,
Speaker 1: but it was actually an unknown at the time, and
Speaker 1: considering Franco didn't write, there was not actually an assumption
Speaker 1: that all of the Fascist countries would fight on the
Speaker 1: same side. So she goes over to the Italian embassy.
Speaker 1: They like her there, they trust her. After all, she
Speaker 1: backed Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, right, yeah, And she gets
Speaker 1: information out of a guy I think by nagging him.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, just like can do that ship. That's what
Speaker 1: you gotta do, That's what you gotta do. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: could do that ship. Your biceps a looking kind of
Speaker 1: weak from you even like lift with your tries.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I bet you, I bet, I bet You're not
Speaker 4: going to join any any Nazi alliance.
Speaker 3: You know that, But you couldn't. You just wouldn't be
Speaker 3: that kind of person. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So she talks them into joinings. I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, and this guy like basically like whispers to
Speaker 1: her like, oh no, we're totally going to join Hitler,
Speaker 1: and so she goes and it's like, oh yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. I am and nobody there's no reason I
Speaker 1: would tell anyone that. And apparently at this point she's like, yeah, like.
Speaker 2: Me a bit you can say to me, honey, And she.
Speaker 1: Like is literally writing the notes on her like arm,
Speaker 1: like she's in school, you know. Yeah, because when people
Speaker 1: are like what the fuck you do it, she's like
Speaker 1: not not the people she's spying on, but like later,
Speaker 1: and that's for sure when people are like how do
Speaker 1: you get away with that? She's like, I'm Josephine Baker, Like,
Speaker 1: no one's gonna second guess me.
Speaker 2: So it works, she's yeah.
Speaker 1: And so she's the one who breaks the news to
Speaker 1: the Allies that Mussolini is going to join the Axis
Speaker 1: Powers and this is really fucking bad news, but it's
Speaker 1: also really important news for the Allies to have. And
Speaker 1: next up, they're like, all right, what about Japan. What's
Speaker 1: Japan going to do? Because Japan at the time is like,
Speaker 1: what joining Axis? We would we would never do that.
Speaker 1: It's like not our thing. This is shortly after Stalin
Speaker 1: had made a deal with Hitler because we cannot go
Speaker 1: an episode without bringing up the Malota ribbon. Trump packed
Speaker 1: It's in that contract with cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of my favorite pacts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, top five past easy, easy. And the Allies are
Speaker 1: basically like, all right, well, Germany, Italy and Russia are
Speaker 1: all on one side. We're kind of in trouble here, right,
Speaker 1: If Japan joins, we're kind of just entirely fucked right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they never do that.
Speaker 1: No, they would never do what Yeah, which kind of
Speaker 1: like I mean, looking at it, I'm like, if Germany
Speaker 1: hadn't betrayed Russia by invading it with the Nazis have
Speaker 1: won the war.
Speaker 2: Americans. Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean it's one of
Speaker 2: those things. Also, if they had just like stopped, like
Speaker 2: not instituted the Battle of Britain, not invaded Russia, focused
Speaker 2: on Northern Africa, Yeah, it's potentially like at least a
Speaker 2: situation where they can hold on to European dominance and
Speaker 2: probably a big chunk of the Mediterranean too. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it was all because you know, the people
Speaker 4: who one were strong and brilliant and clever are not
Speaker 4: at all because Nazis made mistakes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, you know, it's complicated, but Nazis made a
Speaker 2: lot of mistakes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're in a pretty good position after the fall
Speaker 2: of France. It would have been really hard to dislodge
Speaker 2: them if they hadn't have done a bunch of really
Speaker 2: stupid shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's like parts in this that are like, as I'm
Speaker 1: reading about it all I'm like, oh, this.
Speaker 2: This was closer than I thought.
Speaker 1: I mean this obviously you look at some of it
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh god, this is close, right, I
Speaker 1: don't know whatever. There's just moments where it's.
Speaker 6: Like like there's you know, there had been prior to
Speaker 6: the Nazi invasion.
Speaker 2: Like one of the reasons why Stalin has a series
Speaker 2: of panic attacks is that, like the Germans, even before
Speaker 2: the Nazis took over in the Weimar years, had a
Speaker 2: pretty long history post war of collaborating and training with
Speaker 2: the Red Army that's who. Like, as the German military
Speaker 2: was re arming after World War One because they're a
Speaker 2: paria nation, because the Soviets are a pariah nation, they're
Speaker 2: doing like combined arms training together for a so interesting
Speaker 2: of the nineteen thirties. Okay, Yeah, it's like they had.
Speaker 2: It's much like the kind of collaborations between the two
Speaker 2: countries actually go back both further than the Nazis coming
Speaker 2: to power and significantly further than the Molotov Ribbon trop back.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So, so she's
Speaker 1: trying to find out, Josephine's trying to find out Japan's
Speaker 1: going to join the war and fuck everything up. I mean,
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, Japan was on the axis side of World
Speaker 1: War Two for anyone who's not familiar with that part
Speaker 1: of it. So Josephine, she's tight with the Japanese ambassador's
Speaker 1: wife in a almost like like she calls her her sister.
Speaker 1: This is when when she went back to the US
Speaker 1: and she was getting kicked out of all these hotels.
Speaker 1: Oh she was that was the friend is the Japanese
Speaker 1: ambassador's wife. So she's in with the Japanese embassy, but
Speaker 1: she would have to leverage and betray that trust in
Speaker 1: order to find out what Japan is going to do
Speaker 1: in the war. Man, So she does, yeah, right, choice, that's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I don't feel like it is.
Speaker 3: I feel like Howard choice, but it's a very obvious one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, I mean, yeah, if there's a good situation
Speaker 2: to betray your friend, it's when they side with the Nazis. Two.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly, exactly, a little bit of a no brainer.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like USSR is over here being like, oh, thank god
Speaker 1: Finland joined the Access Power So the winner war makes
Speaker 1: us look like who we were on the right side.
Speaker 1: So she leverages her connections with the Japanese ambassador to
Speaker 1: find out that yes, Japan is going to join the
Speaker 1: Access Powers. So she passes that along too, and the
Speaker 1: war itself is kicking off. At this point. Germany in
Speaker 1: the USSR did their joint invasion of Poland in September
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine, and it seems like most of France
Speaker 1: is like, I think we're just going to kind of lose,
Speaker 1: which is in fact what ends up happening. But for
Speaker 1: a little while, for eight months, you have this quote
Speaker 1: unquote phony war, and it's eight months of not much
Speaker 1: happening on the Western Front. The Western Powers have declared war,
Speaker 1: but they aren't really doing much besides economic actions. The war,
Speaker 1: of course, wasn't phony on the Eastern Front, although in
Speaker 1: some ways the Eastern Front didn't exist yet.
Speaker 6: Because one of my favorite factors, so the phony war
Speaker 6: is one thing it's called.
Speaker 2: The other nickname they had for it was the sits Creek.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, And actually this whole time, Josephine has complaining
Speaker 1: about the sits Kreek basically because her whole thing is
Speaker 1: she's like trying to she doesn't succeed, obviously, she's trying
Speaker 1: to get France in England to just fucking invade Germany, just.
Speaker 2: Like let's go, let's do it.
Speaker 3: How is she one per trying to do.
Speaker 1: This if the others doesn't have any.
Speaker 3: Impact, because I'm us making that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I don't think she's like pulling strings.
Speaker 1: I think she's just making it clear that her opinion
Speaker 1: is whereat war, let's destroy them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like she has a fairly like simple she does incredibly
Speaker 1: complicated strategy all the time. But it's just like she's
Speaker 1: just like, well, let's just fucking do the thing. It's
Speaker 1: like often seems to be her her strategy in a
Speaker 1: very effective way. And the war, of course, isn't phony
Speaker 1: on the Eastern Front. There's refugees pouring out of everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's also not phony to French civilians who are pouring
Speaker 1: away from the border with Germany. Josephine was not willing
Speaker 1: to just to just do behind the scenes shit. She's like, well,
Speaker 1: I can fly a plane. I like giving people stuff.
Speaker 1: So on Christmas nineteen thirty nine, she signs up with
Speaker 1: the Red Cross and flies aid to the refugees, goes
Speaker 1: on a bunch of different missions. Yeah, what flying across
Speaker 1: enemy lines to refugees and Europe, I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: She starts performing for the troops as well, which is
Speaker 1: most of what people know about her wartime activity because
Speaker 1: a lot of the other stuff was undercover for a
Speaker 1: very long time, right, She starts singing his anthem that
Speaker 1: she'd actually written a while earlier. Je vu a moire.
Speaker 1: I have two loves, and her two loves are Paris
Speaker 1: and her country, and I think this means the USA,
Speaker 1: although it's kind of funny because she hates the USA.
Speaker 1: I sort of write my first read was I have
Speaker 1: two loves Paris and my country. And I kind of
Speaker 1: like it because I like the fact that Paris doesn't
Speaker 1: consider itself part of France. It's like always amused me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's kind of like London and the reci of
Speaker 4: the Ukay, it's a different place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense. That's kind of like the rest
Speaker 1: of the UK and England. They would like to be
Speaker 1: different places.
Speaker 2: It's like Texas and the rest of the United States.
Speaker 1: Yeah, would prefer to be different places. But if you
Speaker 1: would prefer to be different and stand out from the crowd,
Speaker 1: you can do so by having the same stuff as
Speaker 1: other people who stand out from the crowd, by purchasing
Speaker 1: stuff from our fine advertisers.
Speaker 2: What how'd I do? Is that gonna work? We're gonna
Speaker 2: We're gonna make stuff book. That's fine, that's fine. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Big Stuff is investing.
Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent, here's some maths, and we're back. So she
Speaker 1: started writing songs for the British troops who were stationed
Speaker 1: in sad bunkers on the Western Front. She started writing
Speaker 1: a bunch of songs in English about like I didn't
Speaker 1: write down the titles of it, but they're like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I missed London and everything's sad.
Speaker 2: I don't actually remember.
Speaker 1: But she writes a bunch of songs for the British
Speaker 1: people who are like sitting around in the sitskrig.
Speaker 2: I really like this name.
Speaker 1: I'm going to use that all the time now, all
Speaker 1: of the times in my life. When I talk about
Speaker 1: the Phony War, I.
Speaker 4: Bet there was like in at least in every one
Speaker 4: of those bunkers, there was one person who kept doing that.
Speaker 3: You just wouldn't let it go. And have you heard this?
Speaker 3: So that's actually where they started to real wool.
Speaker 1: No, they just sent that guy into no man's land
Speaker 1: as a scout and then he came back successful. He's
Speaker 1: actually the real hero. We're going to pivot to hit no.
Speaker 2: So she starts working.
Speaker 1: So she's flying missions, she's she's writing songs, she's done
Speaker 1: all the spine. She starts working at soup kitchens for
Speaker 1: the Red Cross, and her presence cheers everyone up. And
Speaker 1: she's doing two things here, well, okays, as mutual aid,
Speaker 1: she's doing two things. She was directly materially helping people, right,
Speaker 1: she was also cheering people up her presence. I mean
Speaker 1: she's like, I don't know who's a famous.
Speaker 3: Person she's turning up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the famous Beyonce. Beyonce is like, right, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: do we know that she's not?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: So I think her mutual aid were was entirely sincere,
Speaker 1: but it was also a great cover for spying because
Speaker 1: Germany's spy oparass has been pouring spies into France, and
Speaker 1: it has been for like a decade now, right, like
Speaker 1: building up towards this shit. But it's just it's just
Speaker 1: ramping up more and more and more, and they're going
Speaker 1: from like a couple dozen arrests of spies per week
Speaker 1: to like hundreds of arrests of spies per week, and
Speaker 1: there's just more that keep pouring in. And so she
Speaker 1: is hanging out at the like she's just fucking trying
Speaker 1: to figure who's the spy constantly. Meanwhile, she divorces her
Speaker 1: husbands number three yeah, yeah, so the foreny war doesn't last.
Speaker 1: O mean, I'm trying to remember why she divorced him. Ah,
Speaker 1: he's cheating on her, right, and this is before she's
Speaker 1: cheating on him. Actually his affair was when they started
Speaker 1: falling out. And then also she miscarries, and which unfortunately
Speaker 1: she does multiple times during her life.
Speaker 2: She's very sad about it.
Speaker 1: So the phony war didn't last, and for the West
Speaker 1: it soon went from phony war to Germany took over
Speaker 1: the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. Germany just kind of
Speaker 1: fucked them up with new tactics and new weapons.
Speaker 2: And methamphetamine. You know, don't don't don't don't you know?
Speaker 2: This is this is this is amphetamine erasure, Margaret.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Well, considering our main sponsor is methamphetamines, that's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the only productivity method.
Speaker 2: Crystal meth. Do you know how many fibers are in
Speaker 2: your coat?
Speaker 3: I do not.
Speaker 2: Crystal meth count the tile room.
Speaker 1: So the methods and no, I'm not gonna phrase it
Speaker 1: that way. So the Germans invade France and the French government.
Speaker 6: For copper wire.
Speaker 2: Just just spun out.
Speaker 6: Dudes being like look man, France has a shipload of copper.
Speaker 2: Grab this ship, we take it back home. We can
Speaker 2: be fucking lit up for weeks.
Speaker 1: See, that would rule if that's what they had done.
Speaker 1: If it was like the Scrounger's army and they just
Speaker 1: like poured in and ripped out all the wire and
Speaker 1: then went home, just.
Speaker 6: Taking suda fed from France's many pharmacies exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: That's what the is for, man, we need pseudo exactly.
Speaker 1: But the French government said, I regret that I have
Speaker 1: but one Suita fed to leave in my wake, so
Speaker 1: that the enemy is distracted. Yeah, and they flee. The
Speaker 1: American ambassador apparently William Bullet. This was like basically a
Speaker 1: side note in this book I was reading. But it's
Speaker 1: fucking weird. He took over Bullets, William Bullet took over Paris.
Speaker 3: He's not friends Amy Soon, No.
Speaker 5: I know it.
Speaker 1: It's funny because this is not a normal American name, but.
Speaker 2: William Bullet's not.
Speaker 6: That's like, that's like the if you're, like, I don't know,
Speaker 6: like a Japanese film producer making a racist stereotype movie about.
Speaker 2: America, that's what you call one. Yeah, call him William Bullet.
Speaker 6: Yeah, William Bullet, Johnny Gunn, ted aar fifteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the American characters also come on.
Speaker 4: That guy's like, everybody clearly refers to that guy as
Speaker 4: Bill Bullet.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, Oh you're right, you're right.
Speaker 3: But William Bullet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he insists, he's like, I will it's William Bullet.
Speaker 2: And he didn't want me to call him William Bullet.
Speaker 2: I would, I would Bill you. I'm gonna call you
Speaker 2: Bill Bullet, Like I'm not calling you. That's much less fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Billy two Guns, he takes over governing the city.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: He apparently finds a phone, like one functioning phone, and
Speaker 1: he like calls Berlin and he's like, hey, we're like
Speaker 1: not resisting. Could you please not murder everyone when you
Speaker 1: show up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, call that an open city.
Speaker 1: Yeah that specifically, Yeah, they refer to it as an
Speaker 1: open city. And so Josephine could have fled. She was
Speaker 1: a superstar, and she was arguably still a US citizen
Speaker 1: since her marriage and citizenship in France were sort of
Speaker 1: contested because of the whole marriage issue. She did not flee.
Speaker 1: She absolutely could have been like one of the people
Speaker 1: on like the last planes out right, and instead she
Speaker 1: keeps doing her thing in the city. She's performing. She
Speaker 1: walks like ten miles uphill each way from her chateau
Speaker 1: to the Red Cross Center to keep feeding people. She
Speaker 1: keeps performing, and then after performing goes and volunteers more. Oh,
Speaker 1: this is where the meth comes in. How could one
Speaker 1: possibly anyway? Yeah, she just basically works tirelessly.
Speaker 2: France.
Speaker 1: It's sort of abandoned. No one really had made enough plan.
Speaker 1: This is according to this book I read. I have
Speaker 1: a feeling when I start doing more stuff on partisans,
Speaker 1: people will be like, hell, hell no, here were all
Speaker 1: our plans and stashes of guns. But at least from
Speaker 1: an organizational like governmental level, people hadn't really made enough
Speaker 1: plans to fight back, hadn't really made enough plans about
Speaker 1: like what would happen if France fell? And the intelligence
Speaker 1: agency with a French name I'm bad at pronouncing, was
Speaker 1: definitely caught in disarray. They they didn't set up a
Speaker 1: rearguard to keep up the fight, They didn't evacuate or
Speaker 1: burn their files in a timely manner. They managed to
Speaker 1: get some of them out all at the last minute.
Speaker 1: A whole ton of files actually literally using signal just
Speaker 1: keep that auto delete on. Yeah, I know that happens
Speaker 1: when you take enough mess. Well, they didn't have it
Speaker 1: yet to capture off of the Germans. Yeah, so they
Speaker 1: they they store tons of files in a dairy among
Speaker 1: cheeses in central France, but other tons of files they
Speaker 1: just like put on the last train out of France
Speaker 1: and so the Nazis are like, yo, stop, this trainer
Speaker 1: will shoot you, and they're like okay, and so then
Speaker 1: they come on and they just take all the files
Speaker 1: and then the government Nazis get all the fucking files
Speaker 1: from the fucking French FBI and in a cheese warehouse. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the ones that got out.
Speaker 3: There's just so bits of this do sound like it's being.
Speaker 2: Written to make fun of friends.
Speaker 3: Yeah, trunk person who knows very very little about the
Speaker 3: European history apartments. Why will the French do files in
Speaker 3: a or just like this is what happens at the
Speaker 3: end of the riker's room when everyone's very very tired
Speaker 3: and just wants to go home. I don't know, cheese warehouse,
Speaker 3: like cowboy guy sends the files to the cheese weak
Speaker 3: house like see you all.
Speaker 1: Tomorrow, which is Basically what's happening is everyone's very tired
Speaker 1: and wants to go home, but instead the Germans are invading. Also,
Speaker 1: one thing that the and forgot to do was do
Speaker 1: something with all of the German spies they had arrested.
Speaker 1: So they're just all in prison and then the Nazis
Speaker 1: come in and say, oh, hello, Franz, welcome to not prison.
Speaker 1: By the way, who were all the people who arrested?
Speaker 1: You tell us who all the spies are, right, So
Speaker 1: a lot of French spies get executed right off because
Speaker 1: the Nazis capture all their files and shit, yep, yep, yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't capture anythingbout Josephine at this point, and so
Speaker 1: Josephine she vows to never perform in France for the Nazis.
Speaker 4: And unlike that she must have been in so much
Speaker 4: danger though absolutely even if they hadn't found out about
Speaker 4: about her spine.
Speaker 1: They personally hate her. Gebels has like specifically been like
Speaker 1: Josephine Baker's I don't like her. She's mean or whatever
Speaker 1: she called me. She looked at me funny once another supermarket.
Speaker 1: But she does have one advantage fantastic amounts of money
Speaker 1: and she happens to be already renting a or possibly owning.
Speaker 1: I don't know how it refers to as renting. But
Speaker 1: she has a fucking medieval castle in southern France. Yeah
Speaker 1: it's cool, but it is hard to hide. Not a
Speaker 1: safe ass, right, And so what she does is she
Speaker 1: doesn't hide. She hides the fact that she's a spy.
Speaker 1: So she takes off to her medieval chateau in southern France.
Speaker 1: And it takes Germany a while to take all of France.
Speaker 2: You know, you have like there's a decent amount of
Speaker 2: France there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not a it's not a Rhode Island.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And prepper queen that she is, she fills her car
Speaker 1: with champagne poddles full of gasoline that she's been hoarding,
Speaker 1: oh boy, so that she can make the trip if
Speaker 1: the gas stations are gone.
Speaker 2: Hey bonus.
Speaker 6: If you run into trouble on the road, you've already
Speaker 6: got molotovs. Yeah, what's that campaign? Yeah, you are ready
Speaker 6: for a variety of situations.
Speaker 1: What's the big place? The quote from the Good Place.
Speaker 1: If you ever have a problem, throw a molotov at it,
Speaker 1: And now you have a different problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, absolutely, Yeah, so she had the same problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So she gets out and it's possible. I think she's
Speaker 1: like helping bring a bunch of a bunch of folks
Speaker 1: she knows. I think mostly Jews out with her at
Speaker 1: this time. I've read one thing that's like, and she
Speaker 1: got a whole bunch of Jewish folks down to her chateau,
Speaker 1: and another one that was like she put her solid
Speaker 1: gold or like her gold piano in one of the
Speaker 1: trucks or whatever. I've read a bunch of different takes
Speaker 1: on how she gets I don't know. There's one version
Speaker 1: where it's one car full of champagne molotovs, and another
Speaker 1: one where it's like three trucks full of pianos. I
Speaker 1: don't know the answer. German troops bomb the road as
Speaker 1: people flee because they suck their Nazis.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: She makes it to her fucking castle, and she's friends
Speaker 1: with the locals because she's just friends with everyone. Everyone
Speaker 1: likes her. She's genuinely charming and cares about people, and
Speaker 1: so she winds up in this resistance fighting cell that
Speaker 1: was pulled together as a unit from like the local
Speaker 1: people of the town and like the groundskeepers and shit
Speaker 1: at her fucking castle. The local blacksmith ran a clandestine
Speaker 1: radio tower out of her castle to keep contact between
Speaker 1: the resistance in England.
Speaker 3: Her that's just a brilliant sentence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. Her farm hand on the grounds who was
Speaker 1: a pole who'd fled the Blitzkreek. He dies running messages.
Speaker 1: The man who ran the local train station. He has
Speaker 1: a wooden leg from fighting in World War One, and
Speaker 1: the Germans like show up and are like asking him questions.
Speaker 1: I think about Josephine Baker and he's basically like, you
Speaker 1: see this wooden leg.
Speaker 2: Fuck you.
Speaker 1: They shoot him, but the heels doesn't tell them anything.
Speaker 1: And she gathers up a crew, including a ton of
Speaker 1: Jewish folks that she's rescued that she maybe drove down,
Speaker 1: and she fills her castle with guns, which is a
Speaker 1: good thing. This is I just wish, this is amazing.
Speaker 1: And she plants a tobacco plant.
Speaker 3: Were you about to say you wish you had been there?
Speaker 1: Maybe it would have gone badly, but I would have
Speaker 1: been in a castle full of guns.
Speaker 2: So it's like.
Speaker 1: We all die sometime, you know. She planted a tobacco
Speaker 1: plant by the entrance to the castle in memory of
Speaker 1: her enslaved fairly recent ancestors who had been forced to
Speaker 1: grow it. She helps a whole bunch of Jewish folks
Speaker 1: hide out. I think like more people are showing up.
Speaker 1: France officially surrenders agree to become a Nazi puppet state,
Speaker 1: the Vichy on June twenty fifth, nineteen forty. They pay
Speaker 1: forty million ranks to the Nazis every fucking day. Resistance
Speaker 1: is an instant death penalty. And the Jamais they didn't
Speaker 1: sell out and become Nazis, fortunately they did the resistance
Speaker 1: thing instead. Technically, legally they were beholden to the Vichi.
Speaker 1: They just didn't do it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so now they're the only good FEDS, which
Speaker 1: are illegal FEDS fighting against Nazis. And this is remember
Speaker 1: how they were like stealing money from the Germans by
Speaker 1: running fake spies all at the beginning of this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is when they bust that out because their official
Speaker 1: resources have dried up. But they've set aside this rainy
Speaker 1: day fund and they make friends with one other important
Speaker 1: anti Nazi force that is often overlooked in history books,
Speaker 1: the Mafia. Yeah, so they're fairly good at finding German spies.
Speaker 1: This is the main thing that they do, right, is
Speaker 1: that they counterspy and find spies. So then they turn
Speaker 1: But now you're not going to arrest spies. You're not
Speaker 1: the government anymore. And also didn't really work well when
Speaker 1: you just arrested Nazi spies. So these two anti Nazi
Speaker 1: crime enforcers whose names were Big Louis and Little Pierre.
Speaker 2: There they were. Oh man, you love to see it.
Speaker 2: Never change, crime, guys, never change change. This is this
Speaker 2: is my family, Like, this is the side that I'm
Speaker 2: that I'm proud of. Look on one side of my family,
Speaker 2: I don't know, there were white people in America for
Speaker 2: a while, probably not a great story. The other side
Speaker 2: of my family mobbed up as hell, and nothing, nothing
Speaker 2: problematic ever came from the mafia. Well, of course, and big.
Speaker 3: Medium someone in between.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Big Louis and Little Pierre might have been cut,
Speaker 2: no way to know.
Speaker 1: Just Goldielucks. The one in the middle is just named Goldilocks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Big Louis apparently specifically, he has these quotes about how
Speaker 1: he was like, look, I've done some bad stuff in
Speaker 1: my life, but I want.
Speaker 2: To make my grandma proud. There we go oh yeah,
Speaker 2: and so he just murders Nazi spies. M you love
Speaker 2: to see it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Her handler boyfriend shows up at her castle unannounced,
Speaker 1: right because everything is completely in disarray. There is no
Speaker 1: like am I five or six or seven or eight
Speaker 1: is referring to themselves as like blind at this point,
Speaker 1: they've lost their eyes in France. And so her handler
Speaker 1: boyfriend shows up on announce. He's a new name and
Speaker 1: a new identity card. His name is Jack Sanders and
Speaker 1: he's an American.
Speaker 2: That is also a pretty American name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally be like, why did you write your middle
Speaker 1: name as American?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 2: Nothing? Jack a man.
Speaker 3: And it doesn't it sounds like a brand of crackers.
Speaker 1: That's truly multiple ways.
Speaker 2: Yes, I do like the idea of like a British
Speaker 2: spy pretending to be an American and then like in
Speaker 2: the tense moment of the movie giving himself up and
Speaker 2: he refers to French fries as chips.
Speaker 3: Every one of the Chuck Montana, You're doing such an amazing.
Speaker 2: Which state did you say you were from, mister Montana?
Speaker 3: One of the end one.
Speaker 2: South was southern Wisconsin.
Speaker 5: Mm hmmm, says the name of this town and then
Speaker 5: he like slides across a piece of paper that just
Speaker 5: had has Luton written on it. Right, Lester, but love
Speaker 5: Yeah again literally any town in the UK, yeah, would break.
Speaker 3: Which Australians called luga baruga I've heard, which is amazing adurable.
Speaker 2: I really hope it's too durable.
Speaker 3: Loga baruga. I am.
Speaker 1: One time was hanging out with Laurie in London and
Speaker 1: I couldn't stop laughing. I was sleep deprived from the
Speaker 1: flight and I was on the subway, and the subway
Speaker 1: in London is just full of fake names that are
Speaker 1: all designed to make Americans laugh while they're sleep deprived.
Speaker 2: Nonsense.
Speaker 4: Cockfosters, yeah, yeah, But the thing is the thing is
Speaker 4: that the train line goes to cock Fosters, So every
Speaker 4: single stop says this is a Piccadilly Line train to Cockfosters,
Speaker 4: and all of the not English people in the train.
Speaker 3: Completely lose thisshes. It's very delight It makes going to
Speaker 3: pick someone up at the airport on the train completely
Speaker 3: worth it. Yeah, everyone has a great time.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And also, nobody I know has ever been to Cockfosters.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's real.
Speaker 1: No, I why would it be real that doesn't make
Speaker 1: any sense.
Speaker 2: It's just it's sexycinnati. I don't believe it happens. I
Speaker 2: don't believe anyone's really there. Well, is this just in
Speaker 2: that fake state? I it's probably a tack scheme of
Speaker 2: some sort.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, so Jack Sanders has shown up. The
Speaker 1: US is still neutral, So being the US is like
Speaker 1: actually a thing that one would do as a spy.
Speaker 1: Whereas very soon, well not very soon from France's point
Speaker 1: of viewer, but they wish we came in a lot sooner.
Speaker 1: The Nazis are after I know, I know the ocean, Yeah,
Speaker 1: swinging a baseball bat. So the Nazis were after him
Speaker 1: because of all the files that got turned over to
Speaker 1: the Nazis, you know. And eventually more spies show up
Speaker 1: at her castle, and her castle becomes I think the
Speaker 1: center of resistance on a spycraft level. At the time,
Speaker 1: it's like kind of the center of where the French
Speaker 1: intelligence like rebuild. As far as they can tell, there's
Speaker 1: like other places they're doing it, including in the heart
Speaker 1: of it all, like VICI.
Speaker 4: So the French resistance is rebuilding in a Josephine Baker's
Speaker 4: castle full of refugees and guys and guns and a cheetah,
Speaker 4: a goat in a pig. Yeah, in my head, Kenn,
Speaker 4: they made it. It's but please don't tell me otherwise.
Speaker 4: I just don't want to know.
Speaker 1: There's positive news about all the animals, and I think
Speaker 1: it's I don't know whether it's I have a feeling
Speaker 1: when I start studying the French resistance more, I'm going
Speaker 1: to start running into the more like partisans on the
Speaker 1: ground stuff and it's going to be a little bit
Speaker 1: more distracted from this. But from a like intelligence point
Speaker 1: apparatus point of view, yeah, as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1: And a blacksmith running a radio tower is how they
Speaker 1: communicate with England.
Speaker 3: Thank you for saying it again. It pleased me so
Speaker 3: much for.
Speaker 2: The first time.
Speaker 1: So French nazis aka v G guys, or maybe it's
Speaker 1: actually a regular Nazi. At this point, some dude shows
Speaker 1: up at the castle and he's like, I want to
Speaker 1: see Jason Josephine Baker. I hear there's guns in here,
Speaker 1: and so all the resistance people will like go fuck down,
Speaker 1: funk off down to the dungeons because it's a castle,
Speaker 1: and go hide.
Speaker 2: Like a scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I guess literally, yeah, like yeah, so these
Speaker 1: like leather daddies were in all blacks show up and
Speaker 1: are like hail Hitler and present her with a search
Speaker 1: for it, and she talks to the main guy and
Speaker 1: she yells at him for invading France. Good, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, this helps prove that she has nothing to hide,
Speaker 1: she's not afraid of him.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he pokes around for a little bit and is
Speaker 1: like you have been worn, I can't do an accent,
Speaker 1: and you know, fucks off soon after I think the
Speaker 1: next day. Okay, So there's this Jesuit priest resistance guy
Speaker 1: and his name is father Victor Dillard, and he's up
Speaker 1: in Vechi and he sends them maps of where all
Speaker 1: the German Air Force stuff is, like where they're staging
Speaker 1: for all the the blitz and all of that, where
Speaker 1: they're bombing the shit out of England. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: has decrypted where all of the defenses are for all
Speaker 1: of the shit that's bombing England. It also includes a
Speaker 1: list of all the German spies in England. Plans for
Speaker 1: a possible Nazi invasion of Ireland based on arming the
Speaker 1: IRA and teaching them how to blow stuff up in
Speaker 1: exchange for helping invade England. Yep, because the IRA was
Speaker 1: on the wrong side of this one.
Speaker 2: Well that's it, you know again just kind of like
Speaker 2: with what we were talking about the Soviets. That's also
Speaker 2: goes back further than the Nazis. During World War One,
Speaker 2: right before the Easter Rising, there was a German ship
Speaker 2: full of guns that got captured by the British, like
Speaker 2: right before it was able to liver said guns to
Speaker 2: the IRA for an uprisings of the Imperial Germans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because like actually cover that in one of our
Speaker 1: episodes about oh god, what's his name, the gay Irish Knight,
Speaker 1: Roger Casement. Yeah, he was the one who arranged for
Speaker 1: that shipment of guns. Yeah yeah, which is so funny
Speaker 1: because I'm like, Roger Casement, good, you know, but i mean.
Speaker 6: Like Imperial Germany, Imperial England, like they're all kind of
Speaker 6: morally not wildly different from one another.
Speaker 3: He's not morally a approachable people who did absolutely great
Speaker 3: stuff all the time and it wasn't comp.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is the information that
Speaker 1: Father Victor Dillard has gotten. He doesn't re enter the story,
Speaker 1: so he dies in Dick how a couple of years now.
Speaker 2: Dock Cow.
Speaker 1: He dies in dock How in nineteen forty five, which
Speaker 1: is a.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's.
Speaker 1: So they get this information right. But they get it
Speaker 1: it's like a really sketchy way, this like super spycraft
Speaker 1: way where this well not this very spycraftway. This guy
Speaker 1: shows up and he's like, I got to see Josephine
Speaker 1: Baker and people are like, this is the same day
Speaker 1: after the Nazis came here.
Speaker 2: This is a trap.
Speaker 1: Finally, Josephine Baker's like what's up and he's like, I've
Speaker 1: got like news for you from father Victor Dillard. I've
Speaker 1: got all this stuff. Let me give you these papers.
Speaker 1: And she's like, no, I've never heard of the resistance.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what you're talking about. And they
Speaker 1: send him away because they don't trust him. And what
Speaker 1: they do is the local chief of police is like
Speaker 1: kind of on their side, what is on their side?
Speaker 1: So they call him and they're like, arrest this guy.
Speaker 1: And they go and they arrest him and they like
Speaker 1: interrogate him basically, and then they decide like, all right,
Speaker 1: this guy's for real. And he had actually before he
Speaker 1: left the castle, he had hidden the papers in the
Speaker 1: castle and then left, so they almost turn away like
Speaker 1: the most important fucking information, right. But yeah, so they
Speaker 1: have all this crazy information and they're like, we have
Speaker 1: to get this to the Allies. This is before they
Speaker 1: had the tower set up and all that shit. And
Speaker 1: so the crew decides that while the rest will stay
Speaker 1: and fight, she and her boyfriend Handler needed to get
Speaker 1: to Lisbon in Portugal to get these documents to Britain.
Speaker 1: I would say, to get them to the Allies. But
Speaker 1: Britain's alone.
Speaker 2: I think at this.
Speaker 3: Point this is a massive, massive empire.
Speaker 2: That's true. Okay, fair enough, Look, I mean the story.
Speaker 4: Sorry, it's just like I feel their correct the record
Speaker 4: here that we always talk about it as like a
Speaker 4: plucky little island stands alone, and so we did have
Speaker 4: a giant empire, and actually quite a lot of people
Speaker 4: were recruited to fight alongside this. It probably didn't make
Speaker 4: much of the difference to ordinary London is being you know,
Speaker 4: hammered by the Blitz. Because again, when people talk about
Speaker 4: in the particular, Americans, even like you know, Americans with
Speaker 4: very decent policies politics will talk about England and talk
Speaker 4: about the British when they mean the British ruling classes,
Speaker 4: and that's never been the total experience of the English
Speaker 4: level and the British and like that it's always been
Speaker 4: for them. Yeah, it's them, but like colonialism always starts
Speaker 4: at home and they only like one of the reasons
Speaker 4: that we ever had to had to have an empire
Speaker 4: a tool was that they exploited our working class just
Speaker 4: about as much as they could to find where to
Speaker 4: ship the excess population so they could become white people.
Speaker 2: No, I mean that that makes sense.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the reasons white Americans with
Speaker 1: good politics to it is because they want an out
Speaker 1: where they're like, I know, we suck, but there's like
Speaker 1: one place is worse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right right, it's just it's bad.
Speaker 4: But we don't know this bit of our history as
Speaker 4: the collective British we like we talked about before, we're
Speaker 4: not thought it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's this just giant howling in the.
Speaker 4: Public historical record, which is of course why people have
Speaker 4: been so upset over the last ten years when people
Speaker 4: started talking about the empire, just talking about it, Yeah,
Speaker 4: because it is incredible how much is not generally known
Speaker 4: even the recent history of Ireland. And look if we
Speaker 4: knew more about the recent history of Ireland. And look,
Speaker 4: you have people trying to negotiate in terms of the
Speaker 4: like the Northern Ireland Border Protocol who have no idea
Speaker 4: about the last few years of Irish history.
Speaker 3: It's absolutely nuts. Rant over for now.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, it's I think that is really important.
Speaker 1: I think it is really important that when we talk
Speaker 1: about I mean even when we talk about like the Germans, right,
Speaker 1: you're like, well, Germany was the site of resistance against Nazis,
Speaker 1: and Millie, I don't know. I don't have the numbers
Speaker 1: off to my head. A fuck ton of German people
Speaker 1: died at the hands of the Nazis, right, and including
Speaker 1: all different types of people.
Speaker 2: But if you want to not die, yes, the products
Speaker 2: and services, much like buried with thousands of rams heads,
Speaker 2: if you were an Egyptian pharaoh, purchasing these products and
Speaker 2: services will make you immortal. You will never die if
Speaker 2: you buy these products. And that's a guarantee I feel
Speaker 2: comfortable making because there's actually no way for you to
Speaker 2: assue me over it. To buy this philactory.
Speaker 1: And we're back, so we're talking about how they have
Speaker 1: to get these documents to Lisbon and so that they
Speaker 1: can get to Britain. She is the only person of
Speaker 1: their crew who can legitimately claim a reason to travel, right.
Speaker 1: Everyone else is like, like, you're not supposed to leave France.
Speaker 1: Anyone over forty is not supposed to leave France because
Speaker 1: you could be leaving under forty. Sorry, it's not supposed
Speaker 1: to leave because you could be going and join an
Speaker 1: army or whatever. But like, really, they don't want anyone leaving.
Speaker 1: But if you're fucking Josephine Baker, you gotta perform. And
Speaker 1: so she was like, Oh, we're going to go on
Speaker 1: the South American tour.
Speaker 3: We just have to go to.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so they get on a train down to Spain
Speaker 1: and she brings along her her assistant. They say, playing
Speaker 1: down to Sam train.
Speaker 3: Yeah, handlet slush boyfriend.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is actually going to make this next part
Speaker 1: extra gross because some of the information was encoded in
Speaker 1: secret and secret inc invisible ink, which at the time
Speaker 1: was primarily semen.
Speaker 2: Wow, I thought it was piss.
Speaker 1: I don't know the book I was reading was said Semen.
Speaker 1: And then the spies were all like embarrassed because they
Speaker 1: kept getting accused of being chronic masturbators because they would
Speaker 1: like just have to go make.
Speaker 2: Some because like semen shows up on a black live
Speaker 2: so they're literally just writing and come, I think, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's fucking dope.
Speaker 6: I know extreme.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: This is the most frantic one king you can imagine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just sit back and think of England because you
Speaker 1: need to.
Speaker 6: We got some great intel this week. The bad news
Speaker 6: is man, I am shooting ghost loads.
Speaker 3: It is dust like.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So she writes on her sheet music and her probably
Speaker 1: her boyfriend's come of that song Adua Moir and my
Speaker 1: two loves just think spying and come, and she writes
Speaker 1: us all down. But they also have the actual documents
Speaker 1: because its not enough to just have the encoded stuff.
Speaker 1: They need like the photos and shit. So they put
Speaker 1: secret compartments in some of the suitcases. And what they
Speaker 1: do is they bring a fucked on of suitcases, just
Speaker 1: a mountain of stuff because she's fucking Josephine Baker. Yeah right,
Speaker 1: and if she's found, she's one hundred percent fucked, right,
Speaker 1: because it's not just invisible and seamen stuff. It is
Speaker 1: like here's some photos of the ink where or they're
Speaker 1: fucking of the air force bases, right and like how
Speaker 1: they're defended and shit, no one looks at her luggage.
Speaker 1: They all just stare at her. They ask her for autographs,
Speaker 1: and shit, she makes it to Lisbon. They from a
Speaker 1: get on a plane in somewhere in Spain, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure where, and fly to Lisbon. Lisbon is the espionage
Speaker 1: capital of the world. Just then, because all of it's
Speaker 1: like neutral but close to everything, you know, And they
Speaker 1: pass on documents to some guy who's named Major Bacon,
Speaker 1: who also has a funny name. And this trip is
Speaker 1: what re forges. You know, this is okay when I'm
Speaker 1: making the claim that like Josephine Baker saves the world
Speaker 1: or whatever, right, and there's like plenty of people who
Speaker 1: you can say, in World War II, save the world.
Speaker 3: Bill Bullet and Major Bacon.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, now, actually Bill, Bill Bullet, all he did
Speaker 1: was like tell he he just told Berlin that it's
Speaker 1: no open city. Please don't kill us, right enough? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but Major Bacon, who's British. I believe this, This is
Speaker 1: what reforges the connection between French and British intelligence agencies.
Speaker 1: And also is like here's the information about the fucking
Speaker 1: blitz and that feels like real major shit. You know
Speaker 1: that feels like world event changing shit and yep, so
Speaker 1: Josephine Baker saves the world. And then all the while
Speaker 1: she's giving radio interviews in Lisbon about like celebrity bullshit,
Speaker 1: where she's like, oh, I'm here to sing, you know,
Speaker 1: which is cool, Like I mean, her singing isn't bullshit,
Speaker 1: it's like really fucking good, right, And they're like, all right,
Speaker 1: you've reforged these connections. We have arranged safe passage for
Speaker 1: you and your boyfriend Handler to go to London and
Speaker 1: you can sit out the rest of the war. Well
Speaker 1: unless London falls, yeah.
Speaker 3: Right Ley, which is currently being massively bombed.
Speaker 2: It's true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Josephine Baker she's like, no, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to run from a fight.
Speaker 2: Fuck that.
Speaker 1: She goes back to France, she goes back to her castle,
Speaker 1: she goes shows back up and they're like, look, we
Speaker 1: know that you promised to not ever perform in Nazi France.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. We're broke and it'd be really
Speaker 1: sick if you got paid a whole bunch of money
Speaker 1: because you're like a superstar, and also your celebrity access
Speaker 1: to information is more important than your unvarnished reputation. So
Speaker 1: this is another thing that she burns. She burns her
Speaker 1: own credibility. Yeah, and so she starts performing. She has
Speaker 1: done like almost every role of a rebel besides like
Speaker 1: literally the murdering Nazis with their bare hands part. She's
Speaker 1: done mutual aid volunteering, she has done spy shit, She's
Speaker 1: smuggled documents, she's fundraises, she's provided sanctuary, she helps people escape.
Speaker 1: She like, fucking does it all propaganda. We'll talk more
Speaker 1: about that. She also so, now, okay, what's her next trick.
Speaker 1: She smuggles folks out of the country. In particular, she
Speaker 1: smuggles to two people out of the country. One is
Speaker 1: her old gay male lover, Fred Ray, who is her
Speaker 1: co star and a lot of stuff back in the day,
Speaker 1: and he's openly gay, and the Nazis were like, fuck
Speaker 1: this guy, We're going to fucking kill him, right, And
Speaker 1: he also had fought in a French foreign legion against
Speaker 1: the Nazis, which is like, so now they double don't
Speaker 1: like him. And another is a German Jewish film producer,
Speaker 1: Rodolphe Solompson, who had already fled Germany with his family
Speaker 1: and so Fred and Rodolph and his family. They're going
Speaker 1: to go flee and they're going to go to Morocco
Speaker 1: ostensibly to perform again this but it's more than that.
Speaker 1: North Africa is the next theater opening in the war,
Speaker 1: and she needs to be where she's useful. Also, the
Speaker 1: Nazis were onto her kind of They were like, right,
Speaker 1: I think they weren't onto her as a spy yet.
Speaker 1: That's going to common about a year or so. But
Speaker 1: they're like gonna fuck this lady Tip and so they
Speaker 1: blacklist her and so she needs to get the fuck
Speaker 1: out before they arrest her.
Speaker 2: She can't.
Speaker 1: She cancels the last bit of her shows in Marseille
Speaker 1: and she gets on a steamer along with a great Dane,
Speaker 1: three monkeys and two mice.
Speaker 3: Oh hell yeah, it's fantastic.
Speaker 1: Everyone is like what are you doing? Leave the animals
Speaker 1: and she's like, no, what are you doing?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it kind of works in that, like hurt,
Speaker 1: she's not gonna fly under the radar, so she flies
Speaker 1: over the radar, you know, yeah, or breaks through the
Speaker 1: radar or whatever. And my metaphor doesn't work right. But
Speaker 1: she gets to Africa and she's immediately arrested by Vichy
Speaker 1: police for breach of contract because she owed more shows
Speaker 1: to the fucking people in Marseille. It takes her like
Speaker 1: a week to sort that one out, because it's not
Speaker 1: a we're going to murder you crime.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: She's rescued her, her friends and herself. She then immediately
Speaker 1: sets to work using her connections to get passports for
Speaker 1: Jews fleeing Europe. Then she gets sick as fuck paranatitis,
Speaker 1: which is basically stomach is bad to squeamish folks like me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: She spends eighteen months in the hospital in the middle
Speaker 1: of all this shit. At one point, she's so close
Speaker 1: to death that the poet Langston Hughes and Chicago writes
Speaker 1: her obituary and published it by accident because everyone thought
Speaker 1: she was dead. He'd written that she was quote as
Speaker 1: much a victim of Hitler as the soldiers who fall
Speaker 1: today in Africa fighting his armies. The Arians drove Josephine
Speaker 1: away from her beloved Paris. Josephine had to write a
Speaker 1: attraction to her own obituary saying, quote, there has been
Speaker 1: a slight error. I am much too busy to die.
Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, this was like that whole like five six
Speaker 2: year period was like the Golden Age for one liners,
Speaker 2: some really truly incredible lines. Yeah, oh god, my favorite to.
Speaker 3: Fight your own death, isn't it? Like do you want
Speaker 3: to be a spy or not? We're moving on now.
Speaker 1: No, sorry, So her hospital room becomes a resistance center
Speaker 1: for spies because they can meet there, because they're under
Speaker 1: the pretense of visiting Josephine Baker, because like lots of
Speaker 1: people are coming and visiting. So while she's sick, she
Speaker 1: gathers information about AXIS North African access defenses, about the tides,
Speaker 1: and helps pave the way for Operation Torch when the
Speaker 1: Allies fuck up AXIS forces in North Africa in the
Speaker 1: US gets involved a little bit more directly in the war,
Speaker 1: I believe. So eighteen months she gets out and she
Speaker 1: goes on to start passaging messages back and forth as
Speaker 1: she travels across North Africa, performing to raise money and performing.
Speaker 2: For the troops.
Speaker 1: And the main way that she's carrying information is invisible
Speaker 1: inc on her sheet music. And then the other thing
Speaker 1: is notes pinned inside her underwear because she's like, I'm
Speaker 1: Josephin Baker. No one's going to strip search me.
Speaker 2: And she's right.
Speaker 1: The entire war goes by, and when Strip searches her
Speaker 1: and she's like, you know who else sucks besides Germany?
Speaker 1: The fucking US army. It's segregated, so she refuses to
Speaker 1: play for a segregated army and only will play when
Speaker 1: the black and white soldiers sit together. This is amazing
Speaker 1: also that local folks like North African folks are allowed
Speaker 1: to attend her performances. At one point, cool she's singing
Speaker 1: and performing for the troops and the base they're at
Speaker 1: is bombed and there's a bombing raid on the base.
Speaker 1: She doesn't stop singing because they're like, oh, they got
Speaker 1: to get you out of here, and she's like, well,
Speaker 1: the soldiers can't leave.
Speaker 2: So I'm not fucking leaving. Also based and the.
Speaker 1: Other thing, she is doing all of this out of
Speaker 1: her own pocket because there's no money for troop entertainment,
Speaker 1: so she just burns ten million francs of her own
Speaker 1: money to travel the world being a spy performing for troops.
Speaker 1: So she works as a diplomat. She is talking with
Speaker 1: people across Northern Africa about why they should support the Allies. Specifically,
Speaker 1: she helps connect the free forces of France with Egyptian stuff.
Speaker 1: I don't really know enough about the course of the
Speaker 1: war to say how influential this is. I just like,
Speaker 1: straight up, I don't know. By nineteen forty two, it
Speaker 1: is clear that the Nazis are onto her. She keeps going.
Speaker 1: She's less of a spy at this point, and she
Speaker 1: is just and just gets quotes because it's still fucking amazing,
Speaker 1: an entertainer and a fundraiser for the war effort. The
Speaker 1: leader of Free France gives her a fancy bejeweled medal
Speaker 1: at some point. There's like all of the people keep
Speaker 1: listening off her medals and all of the articles, but
Speaker 1: I never care about that, and so I don't pay attention,
Speaker 1: so I didn't write them down. Gives her a fancy
Speaker 1: bejeweled medal for her service in nineteen forty three, so
Speaker 1: the next time she's in Beirut she auctions it off
Speaker 1: to raise money for the resistance. Great and in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty four she joins the Free French Air Force properly
Speaker 1: and becomes a second lieutenant. This is an all women unit,
Speaker 1: and I think it's mostly for propaganda purposes, and I'm
Speaker 1: not entirely certain. I wasn't able to like find more
Speaker 1: information about that. I mean, she can fucking fly, right.
Speaker 1: She's a pilot. She's flown missions with the Red Cross
Speaker 1: for refugees, and she's flying along as the Allies march
Speaker 1: into access territory and start liberating camps. She's like flying
Speaker 1: along and she starts performing for refugees and for Holocaust
Speaker 1: survivors as they like are freed from concentration camps. And
Speaker 1: it's kind of I don't know, I just I think
Speaker 1: it's fucking cool. So when Paris was retaken, she goes
Speaker 1: and she just sells all of her jewelry and shit
Speaker 1: and raises money and gives it directly to poor folks.
Speaker 1: It's no longer now that like Paris is retaken, and
Speaker 1: now that the war is fucking winding down, she's not like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to give all my money to like the
Speaker 1: military effort or whatever. She's just like or the French government.
Speaker 1: She just like directly gives it to poor people.
Speaker 3: You're already thinking about putting things back together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And she burns her entire fortune during the
Speaker 1: course of the war. She like actually puts it all
Speaker 1: on the line in her life and even her fucking
Speaker 1: reputation by playing her fucking Nazis to raise money and
Speaker 1: get info.
Speaker 3: It's so brave, Yeah, someone as the bravest bit of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because like if she had died before that and
Speaker 1: no one knew that she was like a super cool spy,
Speaker 1: it would have been like, oh, she was cool, and
Speaker 1: then like I don't know, and then.
Speaker 3: She steaded performing for the Nazis and sold out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, and for.
Speaker 4: Somebody who has like like right at the beginning, we
Speaker 4: were talking about different ways of telling your story, and
Speaker 4: she clearly wanted to own it and to make up
Speaker 4: things about herself again and again and be in charge
Speaker 4: of it. So to risk that the story people would
Speaker 4: have about her was really really awful. It's just the
Speaker 4: bravest thing a person that that can do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, you're right, because I mean she clearly isn't
Speaker 1: afraid of death, Like you don't become a pilot or
Speaker 1: a spy because you're afraid of dying, you know why.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's true too, right, Yeah, And I'm guessing I
Speaker 1: don't know how long cheetahs live, but I stop hearing
Speaker 1: about Hiquida before she takes all of her animals over.
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm presuming Shakida lived a natural life span and.
Speaker 4: Like and had a long, happy life somewhere else, because
Speaker 4: cheetas never die.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I meant to say. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So after the war, she goes back to performing, but
Speaker 1: she has a newfound seriousness. She rebuilds a lot of
Speaker 1: her famousness. She kind of like when I say struggles financially,
Speaker 1: I like, I don't know how much bother she was
Speaker 1: by it or not, you know, but she's like, doesn't
Speaker 1: reach the same level of like, fuck off money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think that that might be not as much
Speaker 1: important to her at this point anymore, you.
Speaker 3: Know, just dispertely leaves money. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty one, she returns to the US, not
Speaker 1: to live there, but to to use her fame to
Speaker 1: force places to desegregate. This nightclub in Miami was like segregated,
Speaker 1: and they were like, hey, we want you to come
Speaker 1: play here, and she's like, I'm a fucking plan for
Speaker 1: a segregated club.
Speaker 2: Fuck you.
Speaker 1: They're like, we'll give you ten thousand dollars, which I
Speaker 1: don't have the I forgot to do the money calculator.
Speaker 2: But it's like about forty million dollars in modern money. Yeah, yeah, roughly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And no matter how much money they offer her,
Speaker 1: she's not going to play for segregated audience. So they desegregate,
Speaker 1: and then she goes on a US tour that went
Speaker 1: way the fuck better than last time she tried, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty five years earlier or fifteen years earlier. And when
Speaker 1: she fought to desegregate the Stork Club, which is an
Speaker 1: old bougie asshole club in New York City, some assholes
Speaker 1: and some asshole and the press called her a communist.
Speaker 1: So the US kicked her out of the country because
Speaker 1: even though they were getting slightly better about racism, they
Speaker 1: were really anti communist.
Speaker 2: It was a it was a two steps forward several
Speaker 2: other steps back, so.
Speaker 3: You can deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was banned for twelve years nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 1: They lifted it in nineteen sixty six. She goes to
Speaker 1: Cuba and plays in Havana for actual communists. I have
Speaker 1: like no belief that she became a communist or something,
Speaker 1: but I think she was about what she was about.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And she worked for the NAACP in the US.
Speaker 1: She spoke she was the only official woman speaker at
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty three March on Washington alongside Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King Junior, and she used the fact that she was
Speaker 1: the only woman who was like given a place to
Speaker 1: speak to invite other black women up to speak, and
Speaker 1: specifically Rosa Parks and Daisy Baits came up and gave
Speaker 1: small speeches basically like as part of her speech, because she.
Speaker 3: Was like, this is so completely crazy. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 3: they dunce.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I know.
Speaker 1: And if you read all these articles about her.
Speaker 2: Always did the most base thing she could. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And when she spoke in nineteen sixty three, she wore
Speaker 1: her free French uniform.
Speaker 7: Oh god, just unerringly based. Yeah, like a base seeking missile. Okay,
Speaker 7: there's gonna be one little I'll get to it. This
Speaker 7: next part, isn't it. When when Martin Luther King Junior, dies,
Speaker 7: his widow asked Baker if she would take his place
Speaker 7: as leader of the movement, and for the first time,
Speaker 7: she let her own safety influence her decision. She said
Speaker 7: her children were too young to lose their mother, and
Speaker 7: her first duty was to them. Because now let's talk
Speaker 7: about her children, who kind of don't Okay. So she
Speaker 7: adopted twelve kids from around the world, called them the
Speaker 7: Rainbow Tribe, in an effort to show that quote, children
Speaker 7: of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers. So
Speaker 7: she raised them all different religions, including not necessarily the
Speaker 7: religions that they would have been otherwise born into. Okay,
Speaker 7: And there's a lot of criticism from a optees today
Speaker 7: about the way that adoption agencies work, especially around international
Speaker 7: adoptions and things like that. She also arranged tours of
Speaker 7: her chateau so that tourists could come see how happy
Speaker 7: her Rainbow Tribe was, and the kids would sing and
Speaker 7: dance for the tourists.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: And then here's one part that I found one source
Speaker 1: and that confuses me. When one of her kids, who
Speaker 1: is Argentinian, was fifteen and like came out as gay,
Speaker 1: she kicked him out of the house and sent him
Speaker 1: back to Argentina. And it's really that's a bumb I
Speaker 1: don't it. I believe so, But it's like, and it's
Speaker 1: interesting because she's bisexual. She saved this gay man's life
Speaker 1: on purpose, who she was also her Yeah, she also
Speaker 1: converted to Catholicism later in her life. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if those are related.
Speaker 2: Maybe she just got listed, yeah, debased.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I as far as I can, all her
Speaker 1: kids who've now also mostly lived full, complete lives and died,
Speaker 1: I think her kids tend not to be her biggest
Speaker 1: fan about the way that she raised them.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, you can't, you can't get it all right, yeah,
Speaker 2: And it's.
Speaker 1: Like and you can see where it's coming from and
Speaker 1: all the like singing and dancing. Shit, that's like what
Speaker 1: she fucking did and what she loved.
Speaker 3: You know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So her last marriage, I know, I know, we're it's
Speaker 2: not done.
Speaker 3: Oh it were.
Speaker 1: This is the this is the winding down. Her last
Speaker 1: marriage was to an artist named Robert Brandy was about
Speaker 1: thirty years younger than her. It's referred to as a
Speaker 1: platonic marriage and it was never legally sanctioned. It was
Speaker 1: in an empty church in Mexico. They kept it away
Speaker 1: from the press because they didn't want to deal with
Speaker 1: all the bullshit. In nineteen seventy five, she performed in
Speaker 1: Carnegie Hall and there was a standing ovation before she
Speaker 1: came on stage, and she cried because the night and
Speaker 1: day difference from her treatment. The last time she tried
Speaker 1: to play Carnegie Hall, like you know, thirty fifty whatever
Speaker 1: years earlier. That's a few days later, at sixty eight
Speaker 1: years old, she slipped into a coma and died of
Speaker 1: brain bad stuff. About twenty thousand people showed up for
Speaker 1: her funeral procession in Paris. She was the first American
Speaker 1: woman buried in France, with full military honors and a
Speaker 1: twenty one gun salute.
Speaker 2: Damn.
Speaker 1: A few years ago she was reburied in the Pantheon,
Speaker 1: France's Tomb of Heroes, and she's the first American of
Speaker 1: any gender race to be buried there, as well as
Speaker 1: the first pilot and as well as the first black woman.
Speaker 2: God damn. Yeah, she just fucking did everything.
Speaker 3: He really did, like you feel like, and he just
Speaker 3: started getting up earlier in the morning.
Speaker 6: No, I will say she was probably exhausting to be around. Yeah,
Speaker 6: oh sure, yeah, smuggling shit via the air and spying
Speaker 6: on the look you know some of us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you do you have a.
Speaker 3: But do you ever just dick around? Do you have
Speaker 3: to just think, no, I'm just not going to do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, hang out with my monkey and dick around games
Speaker 4: with my cheetah and like go to my pig and
Speaker 4: that's it.
Speaker 1: No, And the worst part is this somehow she's still
Speaker 1: hand collected the snails to feed her ducks.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a full day for me. Yeah, I'm on
Speaker 2: snail dude, that's like eight hours here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, they're not that fast. Famously, Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: Actually snail's pace specifically referring to the pace at which
Speaker 1: one can find them and put them in the bu
Speaker 1: I don't know if you knew the etymology of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a true fact, true facts with Margaret. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's just beIN Baker, who saves the world.
Speaker 3: Amazing story talking about moments that saved the world. And
Speaker 3: it's funny.
Speaker 4: I wrote something a couple of years ago about alternate
Speaker 4: histories and how all these stories ab alternate histories. But
Speaker 4: other seventy years, these histories of alternate histories, often when
Speaker 4: you go to the alternate future, or it goes to
Speaker 4: one moment that's changed, and it always ends up in
Speaker 4: if this had not happened, then the Nazers would have
Speaker 4: won the war or some other fascist future, and it's
Speaker 4: always I don't know, it's this anxiety that if that
Speaker 4: were always I mean I think, particularly a few years ago,
Speaker 4: but this ongoing anxiety that we're just one of butterfly
Speaker 4: wing flaps, one little butterfly wings flap away from a
Speaker 4: fascist future. And I think, like all these amazing individual stories,
Speaker 4: it doesn't make them most amazing and it doesn't make
Speaker 4: it more scary the fact that all of them had
Speaker 4: to happen.
Speaker 6: A lot of people had to save the world, right,
Speaker 6: but effort, that's I mean, I think if we're if
Speaker 6: we're really drilling down into it, it's like, you know,
Speaker 6: the I think the likelihood was always less that the
Speaker 6: Nazis will take over the world and more that like
Speaker 6: the Nazis would not be forced out of power in
Speaker 6: Europe absolutely to all acoustic completion and all sorts of
Speaker 6: like a lot of really terrifying things that don't involve
Speaker 6: you know, the Third Reich invading Delaware.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: No, that's such a good point, And that's part of
Speaker 1: how like a lot of the if the Nazis won
Speaker 1: is all about them taking over the US because it's
Speaker 1: being written from an American audience.
Speaker 2: Whoever, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: I did that. Yeah, when you're saying the world I
Speaker 3: didn't really seem in America.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, no, sorry that And when I say America,
Speaker 1: I mean the United States of America, not the entire
Speaker 1: two continents that that name. Yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: forgot that. You know, you you British people don't realize
Speaker 1: that the world is entirely America.
Speaker 3: Germans coming to Yeah, it was so great talking to
Speaker 3: you guys. Honestly this is.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: On that note, do you have anything that if people
Speaker 1: enjoyed you here, how can people listen to more of
Speaker 1: what you do, or watch your TV shows or read
Speaker 1: your book?
Speaker 3: Well you can.
Speaker 4: I've written quite a few books. My latest is called
Speaker 4: Sexual Revolution, and it's available from all good and a
Speaker 4: number of bad bookstores. I work on various TV shows,
Speaker 4: including You Might Have Seen a Haunting and Blind Manner
Speaker 4: or Carnival Row or a few other things I'm not
Speaker 4: allowed to talk about yet. And but also you can
Speaker 4: you can find my writing online on the blue Bird
Speaker 4: site at Penny Penny Red and on sub Second lots
Speaker 4: of other places. Honestly, if you just google me, see
Speaker 4: what comes up first, it will be whatever people are
Speaker 4: most interested in. So I don't know, it's lazy for
Speaker 4: me to trust the algorithm, but I'm not as tired
Speaker 4: as Josephine Baker because it's it's one place in the
Speaker 4: morning here.
Speaker 2: Well, you're stayed up late because of the blitz that
Speaker 2: still is going on.
Speaker 3: Well no, that's just general my estate. It's not going
Speaker 3: on still. But that's how time works, you see.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: But if you come and visit just to check, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I probably should.
Speaker 2: Sophie, do you have anything you want to plug for
Speaker 2: Cool Zone Medium? Yeah? I am Sophie lester Man. You
Speaker 2: can find me on the internet at www dot ivice
Speaker 2: dot com. That's my personal website. Yeah, and I love
Speaker 2: I love the Celtics, which I call the Celtics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's important. That's how we know that you're a spy.
Speaker 1: If you want to find me on the internet, I'm
Speaker 1: at Magpie Killjoy on Twitter.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 1: The thing I want to plug is that all of
Speaker 1: June twenty twenty three, if anyone you're listening to this,
Speaker 1: I will be kickstarting a game called p Number City,
Speaker 1: to tabletop role playing game where you can drive around
Speaker 1: on motorcycles that are likely to explode and fight against
Speaker 1: the god King and do all kinds of actually fairly
Speaker 1: like Roaring twenties kind of stuff, but with more magic
Speaker 1: so you can.
Speaker 3: Back this sounds brilliant. Can we play it?
Speaker 1: Yes, you can, but only you. Everyone else is to
Speaker 1: back it first.
Speaker 3: Fantastic.
Speaker 2: I'll go cry alone in my room. I'm sorry, but
Speaker 2: it's just the way it is. No, No, it's okay.
Speaker 2: Don't give me any special treatment. Yeah, after all the
Speaker 2: things I've done. Yeah, and we'll see you all next week.
Speaker 2: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 4: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.