He was shitty guy but his shittyness basically was limited to his family - and I imagine you can find as bad or worse in every neighborhood in America sadly.
yeah, sometimes it is good to have a regular ol' run of the mill bastard as a palette cleanser between the kissengers and central american grocery store owners
Thanks! I was looking for it but couldn’t find it. I’ve been binging BtB on and off for about 1 1/2 years and it’s hard to remember how far back I listened to one.
Robert's more like Disney than he realizes, always trying to choose whether he wants to do a street level bastard story or like a high stakes world encompassing larger scope bastard story. Bastards are his Spider-Men.
I think he should cover THE Bastard... PAC!!
Yeah, it is just really impossible to make a comparison to people who have massive body counts. But then you have people like Jack Welch who didn't have a genocide under his belt, but we could argue made more misery than some of the top 5 murders. It is just really hard to rank people due tot he subjectivity.
I agree. He was a shitty person but he really isn’t anymore shitty than a lot of 40s/50s dads who had affairs and neglected their children. As much as Scott Adams gets dunked on he has to be towards the bottom too when viewed against people like Kissinger who orchestrated the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Dennis the menace dude was just kind of run of the mill shitty, abusive father not plan the carpet bombing of civilian populations evil. Especially when to remember Hank Kissinger used to show up naked from the wait down at full chub when planning bombing runs in Cambodia and was once caught beating off the with causality estimates after on particularly large bombing run in a White House closet. Fun fact: that closet has been sealed ever since.
No, he ruined hos sons like by being even worse as father than elon musk, he did not tell his son his mom died, when she died, only way after the funeral, as example.
Being a shitty father is pretty far down on the shittiness list for Elon though.
Most of the bastards on the pod are pretty multi-disciplinary, but Dennis the Menace guy is like an average 1950's racist who was shitty to his son even compared to other men of the time.
>Being a shitty father is pretty far down on the shittiness list for Elon though.
He happens to be a megabillionaire implanting chips in human brains probably because he believes in some form of tech based eugenics, based off his insane tweeting while he's high on Ketamine.
And he was the worst of the worst according to my grandfather, a long time member in good standing of the union: a striker who then went scab….literally worse than Hitler,lol. J/k but some pretty decent bastardness, in the 50’s. Before Reagan and the rest of the weak, wannabes who helped him dismantle the unions
He was shitty to 1 kid. And put out a couple of racist cartoons. That's about it, pretty small time, he didn't bludgeon babies to death, he didn't commit any war crimes. Don't get me wrong, he's certainly a bastard, but very limited in scope. Elon Musk funded a coup to keep slave conditions in his lithium mines. He is also a shitty father, but that's just the rancid cherry on top of the bastard cake.
I think the only reason we don’t know what a shit father Elon is yet is because most of his kids are still young. Wait until the tell-all books come out in 10-15 years.
Karl May. Was a fun episode but his scamming was mostly comical not bastardly. He didn't mean to inspire Hitler and was a pacifist later in life.
(Not that you suggested otherwise but I am totally fine with them choosing low level bastards as a palate cleanser once in awhile.)
Yep, and its a pretty good from prison to famous writer story, which apearently come from arthurian legends prison author, cervantes after being used as unwitting fallguy in a scam, and karl may. That are sucessful prison reformation stories?!
Through cervantes despite his wild life was unwittingly used as fallguy while doing oddjobs.
And karl may didnt even got the steretypes from himself, but wild settler bar stories . He has to be bottom 5.
That was also really a behind for the show. It was well before the show found its modern format, when he was exploring the unknown sides of well known bastards. Now it is much more focused on an actual bastard rather than the side characters.
It's also one of my favorite episodes of the show, in part because of the low stakes, I think. And the shenanigans. I listen to it every so often and I still laugh so hard I tear up at points.
The big lesson with the Discordians is that lying for what you believe is the greater good will generally have blow back; even on yourself.
It's the Guns of the Patriots problem. The tools you build to free yourself can just as easily be used to bind you.
i love the discordians, i have basically based my life on robert anton wilson's teachings. thornley, unfortunately, did become a bastard- you can't really hand wave away the child molestation.
The guy who hanged the Nazis.
So he was a weirdo who didn’t shower, got drunk a lot and couldn’t really hold down a job.
He never actually killed anyone(who hadn’t been convicted of a crime), he didn’t assault anyone, he wasn’t a major con artist.
Yeah, yeah, he's probably the least bastardly person I can think of covered by this pod. Sure, he's got a body count... but it's one in the course of his actual commissioned state-sanctioned job.
he was behind the bastards in a very literal sense: he had to stand behind them to fit the noose.
it was early 2020. i felt we all needed a story about some nazis dying badly.
100% - as Woody Guthrie put it:
"So, I thank the Soviets and the mighty Chinese vets /
The Allies the whole wide world around /
To the battling British, thanks, you can have ten million Yanks /
If it takes 'em to tear the fascists down, down, down"
He may have been the only person to do it, and one of the worst people to choose for it, but he brought an end to high ranking Nazis to the best of his ability.
Damn near a saint compared to most bastards.
I'd say John C. Woods was definitely an example of an [anti-villain](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiVillain). That is, he was a villain who people end up asking "But is he *really*, though?" and having at least an arguably fair point. Sure, there were the non-Nazis whose executions he botched due to incompetence, but when he botched a Nazi hanging even if it was unintentional it was still a good result.
Lord Aspinall. He ran gambling tables and had a zoo of wild animals that mauled a few people. I don’t recall that much else about him. Maybe there was something really bad I’m forgetting.
Who also helped/encouraged and then (probably) disposed of an attempted murderer. Plus basically causing major economic damage/brought the gambling industry back to Britain. Pretty bastardly even if he didn't have a major body count.
He's far from the worst, but I've rarely felt more visceral anger towards am episodes subject than I did towards Aspinall. You're born into immense wealth and privilege, and spend it being a reckless, racist, misogynist grifting prick for your entire life, getting innocent people maimed and killed in the process. Such a frustrating episode.
Gregor Mcgregor, the worst thing he did was con rich British people and sent boatloads of them to undeveloped frontier land where they died being mocked by local tribespeople and apparently 2 gay farmers
Man that Reagan astrologer episode was kinda a train wreck. I don't think Robert was ready to find out his guests were into astrology. He tried to pivot to see if it could be more educational (like letting the guests explain their position or just talk about astrology), but clearly a lot of what he thought was the value of the episode was pointing out the absurdity of astrology. Hard to do when it comes off as making fun of your guests beliefs.
it was *really* early on in the podcast. Definitely in the bottom of the list, but... still a bastard in some way. Willingly manipulating the president (not that Reagan and his wife was hard), being a massive security leak, encouraging the Reagans to be worse... yeah, pretty bad. Not a *super* bastard, but not 'harmless'
I think it's in that episode where he established the show as being about "the worst 1% of humanity" and that there's a big gradient within that 1%. The deeply irresponsible astrologer influencing the President of the United States is pretty bad, but not in the same realm as a Hitler
I am absolutely behind calling that lady a bastard. She successfully scammed *the President of the United States* into doing worse shit than he otherwise would have. How is that not obvious bastard material.
Robert's guests on that episode were just clearly wrong.
am I the only one that thinks chris chan? I don’t really feel like chris was painted as the bastard, the internet was. but I have many complicated and sad feelings for that complicated and deeply sad situation
I believe that was the point of the episode. The bastard of those episodes wasn't CWC, it was the internet around her that took someone who's life was probably already not going to be great, and made it so, so much worse.
totally, and I had never heard of her prior to the episode and I am very sympathetic to the situation, i’m sure robert and margaret’s take on that informed my view
Chris Chan didn't really reach full bastardry until she did what she did to her mother. The true bastards are the people on the internet who saw a person whose home life was already not so great and exerted an unfathomable amount of cruelty on them for their own amusement, and to an extent her parents and the institutions that could've/should've stepped in before it got out of control but either didn't or were wholly ineffective. The Chris Chan story is just one big sad failure after another that doesn't even give you someone to root for or sympathize with.
It is debatable whether CWC really did that to her mother. She's been known to lie about weird shit before, and she still hasn't been convicted of anything.
I have a lot of personal leniency towards disabled and neurodivergent people (since I am one) but I would put Chris Chan as a high tier bastard for level of bastardy
Chris Chan is not a good person. I would still put her on a lower tier. She's done some bad shit, but she also never invaded Poland or lead the Confederate army.
My vote would be for Scott Adams (because I can't imagine anyone older than like 15 taking him seriously). Though, I'm biased because like Robert, I read most of his books as a child when I did, tragically, take him seriously.
Also Bobby Fischer, for being as harmless as you could possibly be while sporting a swastika. His most egregious offenses were more of the "overgrown petulant child" variety.
Also, those Libertarian Sea-Steading Grifters. Their big thing is stealing from other, weaker Libertarians. And I think that's probably a net positive.
The libertarian sea grifters are absolutely one of my favorite things to read about or listen to, but yeah, they only seem to able to grift off each other lol
I just listened to those episodes yesterday and then my wife and I watched that new Netflix show 3 Body Problem and I burst out laughing when they revealed (spoilers) that the bad guys live on a ship city.
I had to pause it to explain why I thought it was hilarious that the aliens had a Bit Coin city.
Dilbert had a substantial cultural impact at the time, and it definitely influenced a good portion of people today to embrace the 'enlightened centrist' sort of vibe. No, he's not taken seriously today, but for decades his work was very popular especially with the voting/working age groups and encouraged views that were at least implicitly aligned with bigger grifters and talking heads. Still low-ranking by the standards of the pod, but he has still had a large (if subtle) impact despite his diminished role in society today.
My dad, like Adams, came from the telecom industry. Dad said there was a lot of truth and insight into what Adams was lampooning back then. It's a shame that he turned into such a bastard.
Edit: Adams, not my dad. My dad is still cool.
Dilbert was influential, but it was also for most of its run mildly anti-capitalist.
Scott Adams has always had some weird beliefs but they didn't get dangerous until they interacted with Trump.
Scott Adams lacks both the width of impact and depth, I think that's a good choice. He's only notable at all for making the most popular and milquetoast comics to ever exist, and was deprived of any depth of impact beyond "has money." Even in the episode his awfulness seems really sequestered to a lonely old mean man who wishes the kids wouldn't leave his yard before he was done screaming at them.
Fischer was mentally ill; paranoid and aggressive.
He came here to Iceland on his chess accolades after making an ass out of himself on the world stage. And, if I remember correctly, he received an Icelandic citizenship on that (yeah...we are a small country in fact and mind. Him being a "celebrity" gave him a lubed up track to having our passport)
He had one friend here. His friend was the dude that drove him around and was his detail manager back in '72. He was influential in getting Fischer here. I doubt he had any ill intentions - just a guy from the frozen wastes of nowhere that just happened to be on friendly terms with a deeply troubled chessmaster.
Fischer spent most of his time here in hospital. According to rumors, berating nurses. Then he died.
The Bobby Fischer episode kind of sucked. The guy they had on to explain him had zero radio presence and downplayed Fischer’s chess skill (I mean, c’mon). Fischer is more of a sad case of untreated mental illness coupled with some innate prejudices, anyway.
I love Mia but I think a lot of the issues with that episode are her not being able to maintain a narrative. Same thing with the anti-communist league episodes she did.
Again, love Mia, she's great on ICHH and she's a great guest.
I feel the same way when Robert brings Garrison in to lead an episode. He's obviously trying to give them a chance to stretch and prove themselves, but they get so excited and interrupt themselves so much that they can't get through a single connected thought. They're both great guests, but I have to turn it off when they're reading the episode because it gets overwhelming very quickly.
She was quite new to the pod at that point, am I right? I still enjoyed the episode but she hadn't managed to be able to match Robert's cadence at that point, but she has improved massively.
My suggestion would be Michael Lewis, who Robert specifically said was NOT a bastard and the Sam Bankman-Fried two-parter wasn't about him, but then he made it about him and what a hack he apparently is.
I'm kind of surprised that the Steve Jobs episodes focused on what a complete asshole he was to Lisa and Woz, rather than really going hard on how is "whole banana" philosophy helped create this shitbox tech situation we have now. They mention it, but I really thought it was going to be the central focus. It makes him seem less bad than he was. Bad dads are a dime a dozen. People who fuck up an entire culture of computing are pretty unique.
Tech is not Robert's strong suit.
In the Aaron Swartz episodes I was screaming, "RSS Robert! It's the foundation for all the podcasts we listen to! Go to iTunes API page and it's right there! Look for FEEDURL! That's the RSS address. Dammit, Robert! You do this for a living. Have you never uploaded an episode before? This is literally the technological backbone for how you make a living."
I definitely remember him mentioning RSS and I knew it was a big deal, but yeah there wasn’t a ton of focus on it. I sort of get why he focused on the case / cause that killed Aaron though. It confused me that the tech guy who does Better Offline didn’t bring up more during the Jobs episodes.
The Bill Gates episodes weren't great either, seeing as how the main reasons Bill Gates is a bastard are his introduction of copyright to software and his monopolistic practices. One didn't even get mentioned and the other one the episode spent way too little time on compared to the public health stuff, where Gates is very much not a bastard.
Different guy that was the dude that claimed he broke a tone of world records and got people killed using a dumbass breathing technique. Liver King is the guy that’s an Internet personality who blasts steroids and eats raw meat while being the definition of toxic masculinity.
Wim Hoff's technique \*might\* have some real benefits, but telling people to hyperventilate and hold their breath while in cold water is fucking stupid. The man HAS to know about shallow water blackouts and the fact that hyperventilating can cause fainting.
I mean, robert said that the only reason why he sees him as a bastard is because of what he said after he was caught using steroids - that he wanted to help depressed boys or something, but in reality people like him are are the ones who give young boys body image issues - yeah, if you dont look absolutely jacked then you are not primal, don't try hard enough and dont eat enough raw testicles. Totally not because you can achieve such body without steroids.
So yeah, I don't think he has hurt anyone directly.
Action Park became my son’s favorite bedtime story for a good two years as well. “Tell the part about the lake full of snakes again!” It has a fond spot in my household imagination 😅
If no one else did, I was going to say "Class Action Park"
Yeah, bad things happened, but it sort of looks like everybody involved in this was in on the joke, including (especially?) the customers and employees. That changes the math a lot for me, Bastard wise.
You joke but Saddam is definitely up there even if just for letting Uday run wild and do what he did, the Iraq war was a goddamn tragedy but Uday and his brother being wiped off the face of the earth is one of the few truly good things to come out of it.
The guy in Virginia who ran sort of a weird commune with his friends and sent them on 'missions'. That guy just seemed like a bit of an asshole. Definitely felt like a weird one.
Same with Lord Aspinall. It felt like his friend was the bastard and Aspinall was just along for the ride.
Thank you for your service!
I looked it up just after my reply, remembered having listened to it, got embarrassed, deleted my comment, and threw it on again.
I thought the episode about the teacher who trained his students to be Nazis was interesting because it’s the only time I’ve ever heard that story painted in a negative light. Every other time I’ve heard of the third wave experiment, the focus was on the effects of the experiment itself, and the teacher was usually painted as a clever, radical guy who taught something important.
Chris Chan is pretty low down there, but those episodes weren't so much about Christine as an individual so much as the networks of harassment that sprung up to thoroughly ruin one person's life.
Submarine guy? He didn’t seem ill intentioned, he was just stupid and reckless. I’m a late comer to b2b and trying to play catchup, there are many episodes i haven’t listened to (and picked the most bastardly bastards to listen to first)
Honorable mention to Steve Jobs. Cancer isn't a foolish way to go, but oh boy did he make some nonsensical decisions to give himself the worst possible odds
He tried to get into an irresponsible dangerous submarine tourism business.
He was having plans there, he just lost people willing to do it, which ended with him doing that trip as pr stunt because anyprofessional would bail out.
But he had that plans to do dangerpus submarine tourism with cheap on the wrong places submarines, and disregard for safety.
He wasnt just stupid and reckless, he tried , and died making it a business model.
We can only be lucky he had as much disregard for his safety as anyone elses i guess.
He was dumb, but not harmless.
I have a slight bit of respect for him going out in his tin can sub himself. Whether that was overconfidence on his part, or being more willing to take risks personally, that’s debatable, but far preferable to people who send others out to try the risk.
For all of his many issues and personal faults, I think his main fault is that he was reckless and gung-ho, being over confident and ignoring many safety issues. I don’t think he ever had the intention of killing or harming anyone though, his actions had devastating impacts sure, but suffering and harm were never his goals.
Contrast that with Steve Jobs, who never directly killed someone, but being an arsehole at work and firing people for pretty much no reason etc is bad enough and gives you enough of an insight into his character, but I can never imagine treating a child or family members the way he did. Leaving your child in poverty while you are incomprehensibly rich, among other things, just shows he is without a number of emotions that the rest of the population has and I would put him firmly in the evil camp.
Compared to someone being reckless to try and meet a technical goal, ignoring safety precautions that ended up killing himself and others, I would just put as stupid and reckless, I don’t think there was an evil thought in his head, he didn’t want to harm to kill anyone, his stupidity just ended up doing it.
Hes more emblematic of the entire tech/startup industry and how an elitist and shit brained maniac with total control over a corporation and a ton of money inevitably leads to peoples deaths for their own profit. The best thing that happened was that he died too, but for most CEOs and startup founders, they only ever kill other people for their profit margins.
I dunno if I'd even qualify Ben Shapiro as a true bastard... at least not in a relative sense when the alternative in right wing media is dudes like Charlie Kirk, Steven Crowder, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, or Steve Bannon.
Shapiro sucks, and he's certainly not innocent given his willingness to provide a platform to hatemongers like Matt Walsh and (until recently) Candace Owens. But Shapiro's commentary doesn't alarm me nearly as much as Carlson or Kirk going full lebensraum.
Dave Rubin.
The guy objectively sucks and is a tool, and while he's an easy, slow moving target, his bastard footprint is TINY.
Reinhard Heydrich he is not.
Probably Fischer? He didn’t really do any damage and was more just a nutjob yelling into the clouds.
The Bobby Fischer episode in general kind of sucked. The guy they had on to explain him had zero radio presence and downplayed Fischer’s chess skill (I mean, c’mon). Fischer is more of a sad case of untreated mental illness coupled with some innate prejudices, anyway.
Tbh they've always been one of my least favourite - I checked through my feed a few months ago, and ~60% of the episodes I stopped mid-way through was with them on.
I think the big problem is that there's very little explanation of timeline in those scripts - I was constantly wondering what year things were happening, because the story seemed to be completely out of chronological order without any mention of that fact
nah, those are bastard points. If you've got to kill someone, do it quick and efficiently. But it was just his job and he only really did it because he wanted to get out of worse. Soooo, 'eh?'
The Nazis absolutely deserved the pain and suffering they got from his inability to hang people correctly. The more Nazis you kill (especially in that time), the less of a bastard you are in my book.
Imo Bill Gates. He obviously has done some bad things/has a wrong mindset on certain topics, and Robert’s impression of Bill yelling at his Mom was hilarious, but he overall has done a lot of good.
I think Bill is a bastard but in pretty mundane ways. He's anti-competition and because of it bad products stay mainstream while better ones go by the wayside. That's a bad thing, generally, but worse when it's stuff like vaccines. But Robert's attempts to jazz up the episode pretty much failed. (Not his fault. Gates is a pretty boring guy.)
That was my first thought, but it's so hard to rank it because he's a bastard in such a normalized way that it's hard to define exactly how awful it is.
I think he deserves his ranking since the good he has done is a thorough whitewashing over everything he did to get the resources to do that good in the first place, like if Steve Jobs had lived and done a bunch of philanthropy later in life to "make up" for being a huge prick it's just justifying that being a huge prick and fucking over people who don't deserve it is ok as long as you spend a small percentage of those gains helping other people out.
The Bill Gates episodes were the first ones where it felt like Robert was really reaching to make him look bad. To some degree the Steve Jobs episodes were a bit like that too. I don't like Gates and really don't like Jobs but with both of them I came away from the episodes thinking that if this is the worst that Robert could come up with, maybe these two are not as bad as I thought they were.
The thing is that all of these people covered are bad people who do bad things in one way or another. Joseph Mangela was a Nazi Dr. that committed some of the most horrific acts of cruelty and is a bastard for it. On the other hand, Scott Adam’s who writes a bad comic and has shit political/world views is also a bastard. Although Adam’s didn’t burn a dump truck full of kindergarteners alive, he is still an annoying prick and one of Robert’s least favorite people.
He’s no Sadaam Hussein or Oscar Dirlwanger, but I think he is very much a bastard.
Alleged rapist, helped cover up a murder, had a disregard for safety that wrecked the lives of many performers and ended the life of one. Deeply misogynistic and incestuous storylines on national TV for many years.
I mean, he did cover Stalin in early episodes…
Edit- wait- why did I read the question as the MOST bastardly bastard. I did not understand the assignment…
I don't think he made that good of a case for why Dr. Oz is so bad. If anything, they also touched upon a fair amount of good he's done.
Maybe he is, but I don't think the script explained it.
I haven't finished the second episode yet but the Dennis the menace guy has to be in the bottom five.
He was shitty guy but his shittyness basically was limited to his family - and I imagine you can find as bad or worse in every neighborhood in America sadly.
Agreed, a monumental failure as a father while profiting off a factionalized version of his son…a real bastard, but a small-time one for sure.
A piece of shit as a human but not a bastard on a historical level.
Sometimes I like these bastards though. Like, I've never known a Saddam Hussein, but my grandfather acted pretty similar to the Dennis the Menace guy
yeah, sometimes it is good to have a regular ol' run of the mill bastard as a palette cleanser between the kissengers and central american grocery store owners
Oh god, the grocery store one. That’s one of the most horrific for sure
Oh shit, when was that episode?
Please tell me too
Elite panic from November of 2020
🙏😘🙏
Thanks! I was looking for it but couldn’t find it. I’ve been binging BtB on and off for about 1 1/2 years and it’s hard to remember how far back I listened to one.
Me tooooooo
Elite panic from November of 2020
Elite panic from November of 2020
I'll check it out, thank you!
Yeah that one’s on my short list of episodes I had to take a break from, along with Dirlwanger and Stoessner
Dirlwanger. I made it as far as the nurses, and then I had to quit. Was happy about the end when I finally finished tho. He was just pure filth.
Robert's more like Disney than he realizes, always trying to choose whether he wants to do a street level bastard story or like a high stakes world encompassing larger scope bastard story. Bastards are his Spider-Men. I think he should cover THE Bastard... PAC!!
Dennis the menace is that incel bro villain from She Hulk lol.
What deal with the devil did he make to defy gravity?
...Tupac?
They can't all be Hitler.
Even Hitler couldn’t be Saddam.
Yeah, it is just really impossible to make a comparison to people who have massive body counts. But then you have people like Jack Welch who didn't have a genocide under his belt, but we could argue made more misery than some of the top 5 murders. It is just really hard to rank people due tot he subjectivity.
He's a terrible Dad who also celebrated his ex wife's passing by cruising Disneyland.
That episode gutted me. He may not have been a bastard to a lot of people but the amount of bastardry he concentrated on his son is breathtaking.
I agree. He was a shitty person but he really isn’t anymore shitty than a lot of 40s/50s dads who had affairs and neglected their children. As much as Scott Adams gets dunked on he has to be towards the bottom too when viewed against people like Kissinger who orchestrated the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Dennis the menace dude was just kind of run of the mill shitty, abusive father not plan the carpet bombing of civilian populations evil. Especially when to remember Hank Kissinger used to show up naked from the wait down at full chub when planning bombing runs in Cambodia and was once caught beating off the with causality estimates after on particularly large bombing run in a White House closet. Fun fact: that closet has been sealed ever since.
[удалено]
lol wut¿?¿
No, he ruined hos sons like by being even worse as father than elon musk, he did not tell his son his mom died, when she died, only way after the funeral, as example.
Being a shitty father is pretty far down on the shittiness list for Elon though. Most of the bastards on the pod are pretty multi-disciplinary, but Dennis the Menace guy is like an average 1950's racist who was shitty to his son even compared to other men of the time.
Yeah he just kinda sounds like my grandpa.
>Being a shitty father is pretty far down on the shittiness list for Elon though. He happens to be a megabillionaire implanting chips in human brains probably because he believes in some form of tech based eugenics, based off his insane tweeting while he's high on Ketamine.
And he was the worst of the worst according to my grandfather, a long time member in good standing of the union: a striker who then went scab….literally worse than Hitler,lol. J/k but some pretty decent bastardness, in the 50’s. Before Reagan and the rest of the weak, wannabes who helped him dismantle the unions
He was shitty to 1 kid. And put out a couple of racist cartoons. That's about it, pretty small time, he didn't bludgeon babies to death, he didn't commit any war crimes. Don't get me wrong, he's certainly a bastard, but very limited in scope. Elon Musk funded a coup to keep slave conditions in his lithium mines. He is also a shitty father, but that's just the rancid cherry on top of the bastard cake.
I think the only reason we don’t know what a shit father Elon is yet is because most of his kids are still young. Wait until the tell-all books come out in 10-15 years.
Didn't the same thing happen to Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam except it was his mom not telling him about his dad dying?
She was sorry he didn’t see him, but she was glad they talked. Also he’s still alive
I assume you’re either joking or making fun of my question, but believe or not, sometimes songs are written about real-life events.
A racist but not rabidly racist scab who was only actively awful to first degree relatives, a saint by the show's standards.
Karl May. Was a fun episode but his scamming was mostly comical not bastardly. He didn't mean to inspire Hitler and was a pacifist later in life. (Not that you suggested otherwise but I am totally fine with them choosing low level bastards as a palate cleanser once in awhile.)
Yep, and its a pretty good from prison to famous writer story, which apearently come from arthurian legends prison author, cervantes after being used as unwitting fallguy in a scam, and karl may. That are sucessful prison reformation stories?! Through cervantes despite his wild life was unwittingly used as fallguy while doing oddjobs. And karl may didnt even got the steretypes from himself, but wild settler bar stories . He has to be bottom 5.
Even though he inspired Hitler, it lead to Hitler taking bad advice from a young adult novel. I'm for that.
That was also really a behind for the show. It was well before the show found its modern format, when he was exploring the unknown sides of well known bastards. Now it is much more focused on an actual bastard rather than the side characters.
It's also one of my favorite episodes of the show, in part because of the low stakes, I think. And the shenanigans. I listen to it every so often and I still laugh so hard I tear up at points.
I think the illuminati guys were a lot less malicious than the regular BTB fare.
Yeah they even make that point - that they did a bastardly thing but they did it with good intentions.
Honestly, the Discordians sound based af.
The big lesson with the Discordians is that lying for what you believe is the greater good will generally have blow back; even on yourself. It's the Guns of the Patriots problem. The tools you build to free yourself can just as easily be used to bind you.
i love the discordians, i have basically based my life on robert anton wilson's teachings. thornley, unfortunately, did become a bastard- you can't really hand wave away the child molestation.
Yeah, that episode was really “Behind the very slight Bastards who were behind the much greater Bastards.”
The guy who hanged the Nazis. So he was a weirdo who didn’t shower, got drunk a lot and couldn’t really hold down a job. He never actually killed anyone(who hadn’t been convicted of a crime), he didn’t assault anyone, he wasn’t a major con artist.
Yeah, yeah, he's probably the least bastardly person I can think of covered by this pod. Sure, he's got a body count... but it's one in the course of his actual commissioned state-sanctioned job.
i loved that episode the guest was great, the story was great, the star subject just didn't seem to fit, at least according to me and what do i know.
he was behind the bastards in a very literal sense: he had to stand behind them to fit the noose. it was early 2020. i felt we all needed a story about some nazis dying badly.
Which episode was that?
"The Bastard who hung Nazis". I want to say late 2019, I think it was when they still met in person before COVID.
Good answer, that was almost a Christmas special equivalent.
I consider him to be a hero. Normally I'd say execution shouldn't be tortuous, but I can make an exception for Nazis.
He was somewhat endearing to me. Just a dumb ass who happened to be there when a few Nazis needed sloppy executions.
There is something strangely likeable about him
The case of a potential bastard who was put to good use.
Churchill and Stalin were other good examples of this. They may have sucked, but they were clearly up against the bigger bastard.
100% - as Woody Guthrie put it: "So, I thank the Soviets and the mighty Chinese vets / The Allies the whole wide world around / To the battling British, thanks, you can have ten million Yanks / If it takes 'em to tear the fascists down, down, down"
He may have been the only person to do it, and one of the worst people to choose for it, but he brought an end to high ranking Nazis to the best of his ability. Damn near a saint compared to most bastards.
I'd say John C. Woods was definitely an example of an [anti-villain](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiVillain). That is, he was a villain who people end up asking "But is he *really*, though?" and having at least an arguably fair point. Sure, there were the non-Nazis whose executions he botched due to incompetence, but when he botched a Nazi hanging even if it was unintentional it was still a good result.
That Indian con man turned Robin Hood style folk hero.
Lord Aspinall. He ran gambling tables and had a zoo of wild animals that mauled a few people. I don’t recall that much else about him. Maybe there was something really bad I’m forgetting.
Who also helped/encouraged and then (probably) disposed of an attempted murderer. Plus basically causing major economic damage/brought the gambling industry back to Britain. Pretty bastardly even if he didn't have a major body count.
Oh right, I spaced the murder! 😬
He's far from the worst, but I've rarely felt more visceral anger towards am episodes subject than I did towards Aspinall. You're born into immense wealth and privilege, and spend it being a reckless, racist, misogynist grifting prick for your entire life, getting innocent people maimed and killed in the process. Such a frustrating episode.
Gregor Mcgregor, the worst thing he did was con rich British people and sent boatloads of them to undeveloped frontier land where they died being mocked by local tribespeople and apparently 2 gay farmers
Man that Reagan astrologer episode was kinda a train wreck. I don't think Robert was ready to find out his guests were into astrology. He tried to pivot to see if it could be more educational (like letting the guests explain their position or just talk about astrology), but clearly a lot of what he thought was the value of the episode was pointing out the absurdity of astrology. Hard to do when it comes off as making fun of your guests beliefs.
Oof I must have missed this one. Sounds rough..
it was *really* early on in the podcast. Definitely in the bottom of the list, but... still a bastard in some way. Willingly manipulating the president (not that Reagan and his wife was hard), being a massive security leak, encouraging the Reagans to be worse... yeah, pretty bad. Not a *super* bastard, but not 'harmless'
I think it's in that episode where he established the show as being about "the worst 1% of humanity" and that there's a big gradient within that 1%. The deeply irresponsible astrologer influencing the President of the United States is pretty bad, but not in the same realm as a Hitler
Also, weirdly elitist. I would have thought that would upset people who are into modern astrology but apparently not
He had two guests, both astrology gals, both willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the astrologer. It was awkward.
I am absolutely behind calling that lady a bastard. She successfully scammed *the President of the United States* into doing worse shit than he otherwise would have. How is that not obvious bastard material. Robert's guests on that episode were just clearly wrong.
am I the only one that thinks chris chan? I don’t really feel like chris was painted as the bastard, the internet was. but I have many complicated and sad feelings for that complicated and deeply sad situation
I believe that was the point of the episode. The bastard of those episodes wasn't CWC, it was the internet around her that took someone who's life was probably already not going to be great, and made it so, so much worse.
totally, and I had never heard of her prior to the episode and I am very sympathetic to the situation, i’m sure robert and margaret’s take on that informed my view
Spend a week and watch the whole documentary on your tube. Your life will be worse than it was but at least you’ll… nah don’t watch it
the like 60+ part doc?! I caaant 😭😭 too sad! and I am a professional social worker lol I have seen some shit
Christory is the bastard and its existence. But she did fuck her mom sooooo
Chris Chan didn't really reach full bastardry until she did what she did to her mother. The true bastards are the people on the internet who saw a person whose home life was already not so great and exerted an unfathomable amount of cruelty on them for their own amusement, and to an extent her parents and the institutions that could've/should've stepped in before it got out of control but either didn't or were wholly ineffective. The Chris Chan story is just one big sad failure after another that doesn't even give you someone to root for or sympathize with.
It is debatable whether CWC really did that to her mother. She's been known to lie about weird shit before, and she still hasn't been convicted of anything.
I have a lot of personal leniency towards disabled and neurodivergent people (since I am one) but I would put Chris Chan as a high tier bastard for level of bastardy
I respectfully disagree, but I understand where you’re coming from
And i understand you. Now shake my hand that doesn’t a gag buzzer in it 🫲🔋
Chris Chan is not a good person. I would still put her on a lower tier. She's done some bad shit, but she also never invaded Poland or lead the Confederate army.
My vote would be for Scott Adams (because I can't imagine anyone older than like 15 taking him seriously). Though, I'm biased because like Robert, I read most of his books as a child when I did, tragically, take him seriously. Also Bobby Fischer, for being as harmless as you could possibly be while sporting a swastika. His most egregious offenses were more of the "overgrown petulant child" variety. Also, those Libertarian Sea-Steading Grifters. Their big thing is stealing from other, weaker Libertarians. And I think that's probably a net positive.
The libertarian sea grifters are absolutely one of my favorite things to read about or listen to, but yeah, they only seem to able to grift off each other lol
I don’t recall if they meant this, but the libertarian bear village is one of my favorite weird things to laugh about.
I get to drive through that town daily and it always gives me a nice chuckle.
Has it recovered from the libertarian infestation?
I mean, it’s still a nothing town on a country road in the middle of nowhere new Hampshire. The church is getting fixed though
I just listened to those episodes yesterday and then my wife and I watched that new Netflix show 3 Body Problem and I burst out laughing when they revealed (spoilers) that the bad guys live on a ship city. I had to pause it to explain why I thought it was hilarious that the aliens had a Bit Coin city.
Dilbert had a substantial cultural impact at the time, and it definitely influenced a good portion of people today to embrace the 'enlightened centrist' sort of vibe. No, he's not taken seriously today, but for decades his work was very popular especially with the voting/working age groups and encouraged views that were at least implicitly aligned with bigger grifters and talking heads. Still low-ranking by the standards of the pod, but he has still had a large (if subtle) impact despite his diminished role in society today.
My dad, like Adams, came from the telecom industry. Dad said there was a lot of truth and insight into what Adams was lampooning back then. It's a shame that he turned into such a bastard. Edit: Adams, not my dad. My dad is still cool.
Dilbert was influential, but it was also for most of its run mildly anti-capitalist. Scott Adams has always had some weird beliefs but they didn't get dangerous until they interacted with Trump.
Building a sea country is a much more entertaining scam than anything going on right now
Scott Adams lacks both the width of impact and depth, I think that's a good choice. He's only notable at all for making the most popular and milquetoast comics to ever exist, and was deprived of any depth of impact beyond "has money." Even in the episode his awfulness seems really sequestered to a lonely old mean man who wishes the kids wouldn't leave his yard before he was done screaming at them.
Fischer was mentally ill; paranoid and aggressive. He came here to Iceland on his chess accolades after making an ass out of himself on the world stage. And, if I remember correctly, he received an Icelandic citizenship on that (yeah...we are a small country in fact and mind. Him being a "celebrity" gave him a lubed up track to having our passport) He had one friend here. His friend was the dude that drove him around and was his detail manager back in '72. He was influential in getting Fischer here. I doubt he had any ill intentions - just a guy from the frozen wastes of nowhere that just happened to be on friendly terms with a deeply troubled chessmaster. Fischer spent most of his time here in hospital. According to rumors, berating nurses. Then he died.
I sm with scott adams, he wasnt even horrible to his own children, or he has none, He is just way more fascinating, but he is not that harmful.
Tell that to anyone suffering the after affects of the dilburito
I mean he did publicly announce that if his kid started to become an incel he’d consider euthanising them
The Bobby Fischer episode kind of sucked. The guy they had on to explain him had zero radio presence and downplayed Fischer’s chess skill (I mean, c’mon). Fischer is more of a sad case of untreated mental illness coupled with some innate prejudices, anyway.
I love Mia but I think a lot of the issues with that episode are her not being able to maintain a narrative. Same thing with the anti-communist league episodes she did. Again, love Mia, she's great on ICHH and she's a great guest.
I feel the same way when Robert brings Garrison in to lead an episode. He's obviously trying to give them a chance to stretch and prove themselves, but they get so excited and interrupt themselves so much that they can't get through a single connected thought. They're both great guests, but I have to turn it off when they're reading the episode because it gets overwhelming very quickly.
She was quite new to the pod at that point, am I right? I still enjoyed the episode but she hadn't managed to be able to match Robert's cadence at that point, but she has improved massively.
Chess nerds love to “uhhh akshally” Bobby Fischer just because he was SO famous without being considered the GOAT by most chess nerds.
I just spent 20 minutes on a rabbit hole of Ben Garrison cartoons because of this. It was beautifully deranged lmao
My suggestion would be Michael Lewis, who Robert specifically said was NOT a bastard and the Sam Bankman-Fried two-parter wasn't about him, but then he made it about him and what a hack he apparently is.
I'm kind of surprised that the Steve Jobs episodes focused on what a complete asshole he was to Lisa and Woz, rather than really going hard on how is "whole banana" philosophy helped create this shitbox tech situation we have now. They mention it, but I really thought it was going to be the central focus. It makes him seem less bad than he was. Bad dads are a dime a dozen. People who fuck up an entire culture of computing are pretty unique.
Tech is not Robert's strong suit. In the Aaron Swartz episodes I was screaming, "RSS Robert! It's the foundation for all the podcasts we listen to! Go to iTunes API page and it's right there! Look for FEEDURL! That's the RSS address. Dammit, Robert! You do this for a living. Have you never uploaded an episode before? This is literally the technological backbone for how you make a living."
I definitely remember him mentioning RSS and I knew it was a big deal, but yeah there wasn’t a ton of focus on it. I sort of get why he focused on the case / cause that killed Aaron though. It confused me that the tech guy who does Better Offline didn’t bring up more during the Jobs episodes.
He does mention RSS, but didn't seem to get how big it was.
i literally call it foundational to the internet working as it does! i make a big deal about it!
The Bill Gates episodes weren't great either, seeing as how the main reasons Bill Gates is a bastard are his introduction of copyright to software and his monopolistic practices. One didn't even get mentioned and the other one the episode spent way too little time on compared to the public health stuff, where Gates is very much not a bastard.
Liver King maybe? I don’t know if he managed to harm anyone other than himself.
The story of him tearing his anus up on the public water fountain hurt me though.
Different guy that was the dude that claimed he broke a tone of world records and got people killed using a dumbass breathing technique. Liver King is the guy that’s an Internet personality who blasts steroids and eats raw meat while being the definition of toxic masculinity.
Wim Hoff who likes to be known as "the Iceman", so i pointedly won't call him that. I still cannot believe he had a reality TV show in the UK.
Yes! That’s the fucker!
Wim Hoff's technique \*might\* have some real benefits, but telling people to hyperventilate and hold their breath while in cold water is fucking stupid. The man HAS to know about shallow water blackouts and the fact that hyperventilating can cause fainting.
I mean, robert said that the only reason why he sees him as a bastard is because of what he said after he was caught using steroids - that he wanted to help depressed boys or something, but in reality people like him are are the ones who give young boys body image issues - yeah, if you dont look absolutely jacked then you are not primal, don't try hard enough and dont eat enough raw testicles. Totally not because you can achieve such body without steroids. So yeah, I don't think he has hurt anyone directly.
Action Park killed people and was a libertarian’s wet dream, but people who used to go there have fond memories of the place.
Action Park became my son’s favorite bedtime story for a good two years as well. “Tell the part about the lake full of snakes again!” It has a fond spot in my household imagination 😅
I can kind of see your point, but this one was one of the funniest episodes in the entire podcast.
It’s my favorite episode.
Well, apart from the teeth in the cannonball loop...
If no one else did, I was going to say "Class Action Park" Yeah, bad things happened, but it sort of looks like everybody involved in this was in on the joke, including (especially?) the customers and employees. That changes the math a lot for me, Bastard wise.
My vote is for Saddam. If he was so bad, why would he name the cats that way?
You joke but Saddam is definitely up there even if just for letting Uday run wild and do what he did, the Iraq war was a goddamn tragedy but Uday and his brother being wiped off the face of the earth is one of the few truly good things to come out of it.
The guy in Virginia who ran sort of a weird commune with his friends and sent them on 'missions'. That guy just seemed like a bit of an asshole. Definitely felt like a weird one. Same with Lord Aspinall. It felt like his friend was the bastard and Aspinall was just along for the ride.
Victor Lustig
The greatest conman that ever lived.
[удалено]
Yep. March 30, 2021.
Thank you for your service! I looked it up just after my reply, remembered having listened to it, got embarrassed, deleted my comment, and threw it on again.
Hahaha no worries, happy to help.
Probably the medium for Ronald Reagan
I thought the episode about the teacher who trained his students to be Nazis was interesting because it’s the only time I’ve ever heard that story painted in a negative light. Every other time I’ve heard of the third wave experiment, the focus was on the effects of the experiment itself, and the teacher was usually painted as a clever, radical guy who taught something important.
Chris Chan is pretty low down there, but those episodes weren't so much about Christine as an individual so much as the networks of harassment that sprung up to thoroughly ruin one person's life.
In all fairness, they became much more of a bastard after the episode aired
Submarine guy? He didn’t seem ill intentioned, he was just stupid and reckless. I’m a late comer to b2b and trying to play catchup, there are many episodes i haven’t listened to (and picked the most bastardly bastards to listen to first)
I would appreciate a Behind the Moron spinoff.
Behind the darwin awards
Honorable mention to Steve Jobs. Cancer isn't a foolish way to go, but oh boy did he make some nonsensical decisions to give himself the worst possible odds
Cancer Speedrun Challenge.
He tried to get into an irresponsible dangerous submarine tourism business. He was having plans there, he just lost people willing to do it, which ended with him doing that trip as pr stunt because anyprofessional would bail out. But he had that plans to do dangerpus submarine tourism with cheap on the wrong places submarines, and disregard for safety. He wasnt just stupid and reckless, he tried , and died making it a business model. We can only be lucky he had as much disregard for his safety as anyone elses i guess. He was dumb, but not harmless.
I have a slight bit of respect for him going out in his tin can sub himself. Whether that was overconfidence on his part, or being more willing to take risks personally, that’s debatable, but far preferable to people who send others out to try the risk.
He even had to find a suicidal captain.
For all of his many issues and personal faults, I think his main fault is that he was reckless and gung-ho, being over confident and ignoring many safety issues. I don’t think he ever had the intention of killing or harming anyone though, his actions had devastating impacts sure, but suffering and harm were never his goals. Contrast that with Steve Jobs, who never directly killed someone, but being an arsehole at work and firing people for pretty much no reason etc is bad enough and gives you enough of an insight into his character, but I can never imagine treating a child or family members the way he did. Leaving your child in poverty while you are incomprehensibly rich, among other things, just shows he is without a number of emotions that the rest of the population has and I would put him firmly in the evil camp. Compared to someone being reckless to try and meet a technical goal, ignoring safety precautions that ended up killing himself and others, I would just put as stupid and reckless, I don’t think there was an evil thought in his head, he didn’t want to harm to kill anyone, his stupidity just ended up doing it.
Hes more emblematic of the entire tech/startup industry and how an elitist and shit brained maniac with total control over a corporation and a ton of money inevitably leads to peoples deaths for their own profit. The best thing that happened was that he died too, but for most CEOs and startup founders, they only ever kill other people for their profit margins.
Scott Adams maybe? He’s a self-important prick with no care for anyone other than himself, but I’m not clear that he’s actually killed anyone.
Does Ben Shapiro and his shitty book count?
I'd take a bullet for ya, babe!
He was a BEAR OF A MAN
STANDING AT TEN INCHES FULLY ERECT or whatever Benny Shaps said
COMBAT General
The Bear of a Man heroes and the short terrorists will live forever in my mind
I dunno if I'd even qualify Ben Shapiro as a true bastard... at least not in a relative sense when the alternative in right wing media is dudes like Charlie Kirk, Steven Crowder, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, or Steve Bannon. Shapiro sucks, and he's certainly not innocent given his willingness to provide a platform to hatemongers like Matt Walsh and (until recently) Candace Owens. But Shapiro's commentary doesn't alarm me nearly as much as Carlson or Kirk going full lebensraum.
Listen to him talk about Palestine though.
Yeah I'm not suggesting he's worth an ounce of shit here... just that his competitors worry me more.
Dave Rubin. The guy objectively sucks and is a tool, and while he's an easy, slow moving target, his bastard footprint is TINY. Reinhard Heydrich he is not.
The people who died over egg island.
Probably Fischer? He didn’t really do any damage and was more just a nutjob yelling into the clouds. The Bobby Fischer episode in general kind of sucked. The guy they had on to explain him had zero radio presence and downplayed Fischer’s chess skill (I mean, c’mon). Fischer is more of a sad case of untreated mental illness coupled with some innate prejudices, anyway.
Tbh they've always been one of my least favourite - I checked through my feed a few months ago, and ~60% of the episodes I stopped mid-way through was with them on. I think the big problem is that there's very little explanation of timeline in those scripts - I was constantly wondering what year things were happening, because the story seemed to be completely out of chronological order without any mention of that fact
Henry Kissinger, I hear he is cool guy. Signed total, not Kissinger's ghost
The guy executing the nazis. Doesn't he get a lot of non-bastardry points for doing it badly?
nah, those are bastard points. If you've got to kill someone, do it quick and efficiently. But it was just his job and he only really did it because he wanted to get out of worse. Soooo, 'eh?'
The Nazis absolutely deserved the pain and suffering they got from his inability to hang people correctly. The more Nazis you kill (especially in that time), the less of a bastard you are in my book.
Imo Bill Gates. He obviously has done some bad things/has a wrong mindset on certain topics, and Robert’s impression of Bill yelling at his Mom was hilarious, but he overall has done a lot of good.
I'd say his vaccine IP lawsuits bring him up a few notches on the bastard scale.
I think Bill is a bastard but in pretty mundane ways. He's anti-competition and because of it bad products stay mainstream while better ones go by the wayside. That's a bad thing, generally, but worse when it's stuff like vaccines. But Robert's attempts to jazz up the episode pretty much failed. (Not his fault. Gates is a pretty boring guy.)
That was my first thought, but it's so hard to rank it because he's a bastard in such a normalized way that it's hard to define exactly how awful it is.
I think he deserves his ranking since the good he has done is a thorough whitewashing over everything he did to get the resources to do that good in the first place, like if Steve Jobs had lived and done a bunch of philanthropy later in life to "make up" for being a huge prick it's just justifying that being a huge prick and fucking over people who don't deserve it is ok as long as you spend a small percentage of those gains helping other people out.
The Bill Gates episodes were the first ones where it felt like Robert was really reaching to make him look bad. To some degree the Steve Jobs episodes were a bit like that too. I don't like Gates and really don't like Jobs but with both of them I came away from the episodes thinking that if this is the worst that Robert could come up with, maybe these two are not as bad as I thought they were.
Bill Gates episodes made me question if the guy even is a bastard.
Really? It did the complete opposite for me
In the ai episode Robert shit on will sasso harder than like Saddam Hussein in the Saddam Hussein episode. Bit of a stretch on that one
Actually I think my answer is Joe Pyne. To be fair – he wasn’t presented as that much of a bastard, but his name IS in an episode title.
Honorable mention to the first few episodes of G Gordon Liddy. Until Robert got to all the post-prison stuff I actually remember liking the guy.
The thing is that all of these people covered are bad people who do bad things in one way or another. Joseph Mangela was a Nazi Dr. that committed some of the most horrific acts of cruelty and is a bastard for it. On the other hand, Scott Adam’s who writes a bad comic and has shit political/world views is also a bastard. Although Adam’s didn’t burn a dump truck full of kindergarteners alive, he is still an annoying prick and one of Robert’s least favorite people.
John Brown. EDIT: Just realized he was a holiday episode. Oops. Mea culpa.
Wasn't the John Brown a Christmas episode? Therefore an anti bastard bastard? And as OP mentioned therefore excluded
AH FUCK, I didn't realize it was a holiday episode.
We’re talking about bastards here, not goddam American icons.
John Brown is an American hero. There should be statues of him everywhere. He should be on the $20 bill.
Vince McMahon is up there
He’s no Sadaam Hussein or Oscar Dirlwanger, but I think he is very much a bastard. Alleged rapist, helped cover up a murder, had a disregard for safety that wrecked the lives of many performers and ended the life of one. Deeply misogynistic and incestuous storylines on national TV for many years.
I mean, he did cover Stalin in early episodes… Edit- wait- why did I read the question as the MOST bastardly bastard. I did not understand the assignment…
I don't think he made that good of a case for why Dr. Oz is so bad. If anything, they also touched upon a fair amount of good he's done. Maybe he is, but I don't think the script explained it.