Bonus Episode: Untitled Warhammer 40,000 Podcast

Robert and Joe Kassabian are soon launching a new podcast about Warhammer 40,000 and you. This episode acts as a legally binding teaser / preview. Tickets: Lions Led by Donkeys Podcast LIVE IN LONDON 29th May https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-tickets-1985443952308 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

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• 0:48Robert Evans?

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• 1:08Speaker 02

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• 1:40Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  Hey, everyone, Joe here. I also host the Lions at By Donkeys podcast, a military history podcast. We're talking about all eras of history, trying to make things funny and interesting. And if that sounds cool to you, you can come see us live May 29 at the Rich Mix in London. There will be tickets available for a live show and a ticket available for live streaming with video on demand, so you can watch it later. So get your tickets now. They will be in the show notes, and I hope to see you there.

• 2:25Robert Evans?

  Oh, welcome back to, well, this is the Behind the Bastards feed and this is normally where you get new episodes behind the bastards, but every now and then we, we try something new. And in the not too distant future, I'm planning to be launching a new podcast with my friend and fellow giant nerd, Joe Kasabian, also a fellow podcaster. Hey, Joe, how are you doing?

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Hey buddy, it's good to be here.

• 2:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and, and we're wanting to do, we're planning to do a podcast on Warhammer 40,000, which is a game system that some of you are probably aware of and others of you maybe aren't. I think a lot of people know about this now. It's, it's reached kind of a point of cultural critical mass, where I think a significant chunk of people on the internet are just kind of casually aware it exists in a way that they weren't when we were kids and started playing this.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, 100, like 100%. I remember back when I first heard about Warhammer through the books, like nobody really knew what it was, other than other people that would fall into that fan zone. But now, anybody who doesn't even know it's a miniature, maybe they know it from the, like the Total War games or whatever, but it's definitely the biggest it's ever been.

• 3:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and I, the, the podcast, we'll, you know, talk later about what exactly the podcast, kind of things the podcast will be covering. But this episode, I specifically wanted to talk about the intersection of Warhammer 40K and like pop culture and pop politics in the United States and elsewhere. Because it's one of having a surprisingly large impact on like the way people communicate on the internet and the way people talk about Donald Trump in particular, that's really weird. But before we get into that, because I think that's the thing that's going to be relevant to everybody, even the people who, you know, aren't into the game, at least can get something out of this stuff, which is why we're putting this up as our teaser episode in the Bastards feed. But before we do that, Joe, you've got a book to plug.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  I do. My debut gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn, comes out May 29th. So you can preorder it now, which is the best time to get it. So when you, when it arrives, it'll be nice and fresh.

• 4:37Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Well, everyone should do that. And everyone should listen to the episode, which you have no choice but to listen to, because I'm going to start reading it to you. And you're already listening to the podcast, right? So if you're at all into social media and up to date on the current political hearts of our age, you've probably heard President Donald Trump referred to as God Emperor Trump. Currently, that phrase alone returns about 4 million results on Google, and that is a reference to Warhammer 40,000. In 40k, as its fans call it, the God Emperor is the founder and deity of the Imperium, a vast million world empire that includes nearly all human beings. He was once a mighty warrior and a deadbeat dad, but he spent the last

• 5:20Robert Evans?

  10,000 years or so hooked up to life support. So you can already see, you know, the guy likes gold. He's always covered in gold, and he's a terrible father. So you can see why Donald Trump gets compared to him from time to time, right?

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Hey, I mean, recently, Trump posted a picture of himself as Jesus Christ. So maybe he's, maybe he's starting to buy miniatures.

• 5:40Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. And the emperor being a being who's lived tens of thousands of years is kind of insinuated to maybe have been Jesus, or at least somebody who like profited, you know, was influential in starting the early church. He's, he's been insinuated to have been basically everybody. But, you know, getting beyond that, if you haven't, don't know anything about Warhammer, and you just heard the phrase God Emperor Trump, you probably didn't think too much about it outside of like, oh, people are being weird about politics again in the United States, right?

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Couldn't be.

• 6:14Robert Evans?

  Couldn't be, right? Trump is kind of a singular figure when it comes to global media attention. So it's not all that noteworthy that fans of a game would reference him in memes. What makes this one unique is that people using the phrase and spreading memes about it are kind of as likely to be mocking the president as praising him. It's a real Schrodinger situation, and this aspect of it is really well embodied by something very funny that happened on February 11th, 2019, over in Italy. The Via Regio Carnival is an event held in Via Regio, a city in Tuscany, and has been a yearly parade in celebration since 1873. It started when a bunch of rich guys decided to make a parade with floats that would help put the city on the map in a cultural sense. And rather than funding the parade themselves,

• 6:58Robert Evans?

  they pushed to increase taxes on working class citizens and poor people prosisted by wearing masks and presumably committing petty crimes, right? So you've got like a classic story here. It's, it's, it really is a beautiful thing. I love a good carnival. And kind of the, the, the key feature of this is there's these huge papier-mache floats, the largest of which weighs like 40 tons, that people may spend the year making. These are massive things. They're the size of buildings and then like walk through the street, right? And they're, or drive through the street, I think now. And there's these big drunken parties and everybody wears masks. And it's a great time, about half a million people attend each year. And 2019 was like any other year, except that the pride of the parade

• 7:38Robert Evans?

  was a 65 foot tall sculpture of Donald Trump as the God Emperor of mankind.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  When you showed me this picture, I lost my shit. I had never seen this.

• 7:51Robert Evans?

  It'll be the thumbnail image of this. This one's not going to be a video episode because it's a special one. But I, I do kind of want people to see it. If you just Google like Trump God Emperor float, parade float or something like that, you'll see pictures and it really is something, it's massive, right?

• 8:07Speaker 04

  I would love to be into the planning meeting on that one. Cause you know, it took a, a small to medium sized team to build this monster.

• 8:14Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  Someone had to pitch that idea to the rest of them and explain exactly what the fuck it was.

• 8:19Robert Evans?

  It was several people's whole year.

• 8:23Robert Evans?

  The guy behind it is artist Fabrizio Gali, who created it as a critique of Trump's presidency. Some of this is obvious if you like, really look at the details of the statue. There are like four blue Twitter birds flying around the sword handle. The emperor, like this is based off of like a drawing and several drawings of the emperor, where, which is these guys wearing huge, a huge golden suit of power armor with like eagles wings on it. He's got a massive flaming sword. Everything about him is gold. Often he has glorious, long flowing hair, the kind that Trump doesn't.

• 8:57Robert Evans?

  But yeah, and the float this big sword he had, there's like Twitter birds flying around the handle, which Fabrizio put there to make the point that Trump had weaponized Twitter against his enemies. And written on the blade in Italian was the phrase, "Your taxes and your duties." And the specific way that these were written in Italian was meant to be like, bring up a different phrase, which Galli summarized as meaning, "Here's your fucking tariffs." Right? Like, that's the, the blade is the tariffs, which is kind of like prescient that he, he, he really picked those out as being a weapon in a way they weren't nearly as much in 2019 as they are now.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it still kind of works as a bit of imperial propaganda within 40K. Like, this is 100% something that the, that the emperor would have said to like, a planet in revolt, like, "Here's your fucking tariffs."

• 9:45Robert Evans?

  Here's your fucking tariffs with a literal sword. Yeah. Fabrizio said of this, quote, "It's a joke, but in fact, he's trying to destroy nations with the economy instead of nuclear missiles. This is one of the strongest actions, let's say, that powerful people like Trump can use." So we'll go back to Fabrizio in a bit, but what's relevant to my point here is, the point I was making earlier, is that as soon as pictures of this float get online, they go viral. People are sharing this like crazy, and Fabrizio's meaning sailed right over a lot of people's heads. I'm gonna quote now from an article in Time. "Many conservative commentators on Twitter appeared to interpret the float as a tribute to Trump. Several tweeted that it was a parade for Trump. Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent for right-wing Channel 1 American News, wrote, 'This carnival

• 10:30Robert Evans?

  in Italy looks a lot more fun than the Thanksgiving Day parade in New York. Just look at this Trump float.'"

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Oh, incredible. Everybody knows it can't be a Trump float because it wasn't sponsored by Coinbase or like Palantir.

• 10:41Robert Evans?

  No one was selling crypto. It was 2019. It couldn't have been affiliated with Trump.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Nobody could rug pull the parade.

• 10:49Robert Evans?

  Aw, man. I do, you know, if the emperor was a real character, he's got to be alive. He's, he should be alive then, because he's like 30,000, 40,000 years old when the game starts, which means theoretically, the emperor could have bought NFTs, right?

• 11:04Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 11:05Robert Evans?

  His madness could be entirely driven by all of his apes getting stolen. It might be what set him down the path.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, the thing that really drove him to combat chaos is someone tried to explain the concept of a slurp juice to him.

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  No, I gotta rule humanity. You people can't govern yourselves. The fuck?

• 11:23Speaker 04

  You can't be fucking trusted.

• 11:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Warhammer 40,000 and the God Emperor character have existed since the 1980s. For most of the time that the game has existed, it's been a fairly obscure pastime. It requires a lot of money in order to actually play the game. And it used to require a lot of money just to like buy all of the books and guides that would teach you anything about the game at all. But social media and video games have introduced 40K to the masses in a way that like you don't have to spend a lot or even any money to at least consume the lore. A lot of people who are fans have never played the game. You know, maybe they play some video games, but a lot of people just like watch hours of YouTube videos and those YouTube videos are largely regurgitating decades worth of

• 12:08Robert Evans?

  lore that have been like written and stored in websites or put in wikis. Like that's all, that's the hobby to quite a few people who who call themselves fans. And so as a result, when the long simmering US culture war ignited the world of gaming a year or so prior to the start of the Trump campaign, 40K became a battleground too. The fact that the Imperium that the God Emperor ruled was in the text of the game, a fascist state, um, which was, you know, largely the subject of satire in the lore, made it kind of an obvious information for white nationalists looking to hide propaganda in memes, right? The fact that like people who were playing 40K were usually playing one of the factions

• 12:50Robert Evans?

  affiliated with this evil fascist space, space empire, even though the game was satirizing, the evil fascist space empire part of it all, meant that there was like some room, wiggle room for folks to get in and try to like propagandize to people.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Ah, the all's they need is a tiny bit of, there's always enough wiggle room. It's like a mouse smashing itself under a door. There's nothing you can do.

• 13:12Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Especially since like it's, it's part of its wiggle room and part of it's like, well, what do like angry young men who aren't great at like being socialized do? Well, they spend way too much time playing games. I say as an angry young man who wasn't well socialized when he was, you know, 17.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  I see myself in these comments, Robert.

• 13:29Robert Evans?

  Playing a lot of Warhammer, right? Um, and hey, I'm well socialized now and I still love Warhammer. That's fine.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Goddamn right. Uh, which is always wild too, because Warhammer is inherently a social game.

• 13:42Robert Evans?

  It is, it is.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Like, even with all the video games or whatever, if that's how you want to consume it, great. But the second you cross that line and start buying minis, you have to go into a room and start talking to people.

• 13:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. At some point, you're going to have to be around other people if you really want to do it. So God Emperor Trump memes started spreading on 4chan back in 2015, right around the same time Trump announced his campaign. On December 25th, 2015, a YouTuber named Talet uploaded a video that collected a bunch of early memes and titled it Donald Trump Emperor of Mankind. Talet was a very small time creator. We're talking about a thousand subscribers, but this particular video broke half a million views. And part of it, like the imagery in the video is, there's a famous piece of art from the lore of the game. That's the emperor fighting his son who betrayed him over the body of one of his other sons that was murdered by the betrayers.

• 14:36Robert Evans?

  It's a very famous drawing and they just included that, but they had swapped out the emperor with Donald Trump very crudely. And I believe Hillary Clinton was playing the role of Horus, his evil son. I'll, uh, I'll do a screen share so you can see this, Joe.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  That is very confusing.

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  This is a real beautiful find. I think that's Hillary in there. Yeah, that's Hillary.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, that's Hillary.

• 14:59Robert Evans?

  That's Hillary. And then there's a, there's Donald.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  Who would have thought, who would have thought that Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton's gene seed father?

• 15:07Robert Evans?

  Yes, it is implied, the meme, because again, this is his son who is the evil he's fighting. So yes, this kind of is implying that Hillary Clinton was created by Donald Trump.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  And she's absolutely towering over him too.

• 15:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, she's towering, she looks way cooler. She just killed an angel. Um, it's pretty sweet. So the meme broke, the God Emperor meme, broke mainstream awareness in 2016 when New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman wrote about the hate mail and threats that he received online from Trump supporters. Quote from that article, "The antisemitic hate, much of it from self-identified Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn't stopped since. Trump God Emperor sent me the Nazi iconography of the shiftless hook-nosed Jew. I was served an image of the gates of Auschwitz. The famous words 'Arbeit macht frei' replaced without irony with Machen Amerika great." So again, this guy and this journalist, like Weisman doesn't recognize that this guy's

• 16:05Robert Evans?

  making a Warhammer reference, or at least he doesn't write about it.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  I was going to assume.

• 16:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  What the fuck is this?

• 16:11Robert Evans?

  The username of the guy messaging him. And again, like, why would he have, right? Like, if you don't, like, you wouldn't assume Trump God Emperor is someone referencing a video game. You just, in this context, you just assume it's a crazy fascist, right?

• 16:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. But about two months after that column came out, a writer with the Huffington Post, Nick O'Pitney, wrote an article about the growing Trump God Emperor meme phenomenon. Quote, "Among Trump's active online supporters, using the nickname is now commonplace. The Post announcing Trump's participation in a Q&A heralded 'Our God Emperor,' and a search of the phrase returned over 200 posts in the day after Trump's appearance. Some forum members say 'God Emperor' is simply a tongue-in-cheek attempt to rile up Trump opponents who fear he would be as strong a man as president. The term is attributed variously to God Emperor characters in the science fiction series Dune and a tabletop game called Warhammer 40,000. We know he can't literally be one, wrote member New Jersey 908, but the phrase

• 17:06Robert Evans?

  whipped people into a frenzy, saying that we literally want a dictator."

• 17:11Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. Well, at least you're just saying that.

• 17:13Robert Evans?

  Fun, Mark guy.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Even back then.

• 17:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It was nicer back then when they had to pretend it was a bit.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  And I do have the, well, it could be Dune, like, well.

• 17:23Robert Evans?

  It could be Dune. It could be, but it's not. Like Warhammer is kind of, like, a lot of Warhammer was originally ripping off Dune, and the Emperor character is based heavily on, on Leo Atreides, right? Like, there's, that's certainly like, like, Warhammer is essentially all of the sci-fi that was big in the 1980s and before, getting put into a blender and, like, merged together, right?

• 17:47Speaker 04

  Mixed with Thatcherite UK, yeah.

• 17:51Robert Evans?

  As we'll talk about, yes. So, like, the journalist there is correct, like, yeah, I mean, they could have been, but in this case, they definitely weren't. They were talking about the Emperor from 40K. Now, a big part of the appeal of the God Emperor character for these people is that he was explicitly, in the lore of the game, genocidal. The way the backstory goes, you know, Warhammer 40,000 is set in the 41st millennium, like, 40, like, 39 or so thousand years into the future. But in the lore of the game, in, like, the year 30,000 or so, about 10,000 years before the current day of the setting, the Emperor, while he was still alive and healthy, launched a great crusade. After unifying Earth, you know, there had been a big space empire before, but it all crashed after the AI, you know, went crazy and fucked everything up.

• 18:36Robert Evans?

  So Earth was just like this warring mess of techno-barbarians and shit. And the Emperor takes over, he unifies Earth, and he makes a bunch of gene-modified super soldiers called space marines, and he sends them out into the galaxy to commit mass genocide against all of the different alien species that he considered a threat in any human world that wouldn't bend the knee to him, right? They just do thousands of genocides out in the galaxy. They take over, like, a million worlds. And this all does end badly for the Emperor. Like, his sons, who were his main generals that he had created in a lab too, eventually a bunch of them betray them, and he's badly wounded, and he has to be on, like, this life support system forever and ever, which leads to the nightmare future that the game itself is set in.

• 19:21Robert Evans?

  But the fact that, like, none of this works for the Emperor, and that, again, kinda... In, in the lore, you're not supposed to be like, ah, the emperor, what a good guy who was doing a good thing. You're supposed to be like, oh, he's just like wiping people out for no reason. Like, he was just a real, real dick.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, people always like to say, like, oh, it's, you know, and nobody's good in the world of Warhammer 40k, which is true.

• 19:44Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  But specifically, the Imperium is horrible.

• 19:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Absolutely horrible.

• 19:51Robert Evans?

  And in the books about this genocide, there's like moments where your favorite characters are wiping out a species and like the last members of the species will be like, we just wanted to be left alone.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:01Robert Evans?

  Like, these, they're not subtle. Like, the, the writers are not super subtle about them being the baddies.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Say, say what you will about Warhammer 40k, but subtle is not one of them.

• 20:12Robert Evans?

  Subtle is not something you can apply to this game. However, some people fail to see the broader message in the lore and just hone in on the things that appeal to them. And there's a great 4chan post I found from this, uh, the, I think, July 21st, 2015, where someone posts a picture and it's yet another one of those, like, Photoshop things where you've got, like, Donald Trump in the place of a space marine. "Year is now 40,000. Trump turned out to be the god emperor and initiated the Imperium of Man, killing Xenos all day, every day in his honor. Life is good." And again, like, in the game, things aren't good in the 41st millennium. The emperor's stuck in a life support chair and everyone worships him, even though he was a major atheist.

• 20:55Robert Evans?

  And everything's falling apart all the time. Life is not, in fact, good.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  And anywhere the space marines came from is by design terrible.

• 21:03Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah. They're abducted child soldiers who are, like, genetically enhanced so they can go crackdown on rebellions against the state. They're not, like, it's not a, like, it's, like, it's a fun game. There's a lot of, like, the lore is interesting and the models are cool, but you're not supposed to think, boy, I wish I lived in that world. That would be silly.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Imagine if RFK Jr. got the keys to the space marine program.

• 21:29Robert Evans?

  Absolutely not.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  He's already got a strategic stockpile of tren and like butter ready to go.

• 21:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's the first step towards having space Marines. They should just let RFK cook up like whatever kind of like mammal penis based potion he can to to invent the extra organs that that make you a super soldier.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Fuck, he's America's first like first neo apothecary.

• 21:55Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah, he's he's he's the beginning of the techno barbarian tribes.

• 22:01Robert Evans?

  So the very first edition of Warhammer 40,000, which was was called Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Traitor. It was a tabletop war game published first in 1987. Before 87, its manufacturer, Games Workshop, published a wide array of board games and miniatures, most of which were focused around fantasy, wargaming, and role playing. Tabletop war games have a long history. The ancient Greeks, we're talking thousands of years ago, had a game called Patea, where players would simulate phalanx combat using game pieces and some sort of rule system. I don't think we actually have the rules, but I don't actually know that much about it. But they did have a-

• 22:37Speaker 04

  How many dice did they need?

• 22:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, what kind of dice? We know the Romans had D20s. I mean theoretically, right?

• 22:43Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 22:44Robert Evans?

  But um, yeah, and there was like it was for military training. It was to help people who were going to be like officers, I think sometimes figure like learn the ropes or and whatnot and learn to think strategically. The Romans, being Romans, plagiarized the Greeks and made their own war games, which were similar but often much more complicated. The earliest form of chess, which is a tabletop war game, was created in India in like the 600s, I think. And I think that the 1600s is when you start to get like modern chess. And by the 1800s and early 1900s, people had started selling and marketing war games with little lead soldiers, often simulating Napoleonic combat or like American Civil War combat. But this is when you start to get war games that at least you could recognize

• 23:28Robert Evans?

  at a glance as the same kind of thing as Warhammer, where you've got two dudes and they're pushing little models of soldiers around a table, right? Like that's that's kind of when that comes into being. Games Workshop had been founded in 1975 by three friends who loved these first stirrings of nerd culture and wanted to make and sell games of their own. The first edition of Warhammer, which is now called Warhammer Fantasy, came out in 1983. In 1986, Games Workshop published an issue of their company magazine, White Dwarf, that featured an orc model carrying a banner with the face of Margaret Thatcher, and the Prime Minister of the UK painted on it. And the piece was labeled Maggie's Death Banner. And there's a... I'm gonna show this to you, Joe. It's fucking great. Yeah.

• 24:12Robert Evans?

  First off, pretty good paint job. Like, this, it's a credible, credibly painted orc, and that's just straight up Margaret Thatcher's face on a banner with like a severed hand on the top. It's great.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  That's good. And like, the orc's understanding of technology is pretty much Margaret Thatcher's understanding of how economics work.

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  Right. Yes, yes.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  If you privatize it, it go faster.

• 24:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right. In a 2023 article for The Gamer, Ben Sledge writes, "She later appeared," she being Thatcher, "in The Evil Within: A Campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The name of the campaign itself is a reference to one of Thatcher's speeches, where she infamously said, 'We have always to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.'" She was, of course, talking about the striking miners who feared for their livelihood, livelihoods in the face of countless mine closures under her regime. "The Empress Margarita," also spelled Magrita, "is a clear satirical representation of Thatcher, ascending to power in 1979, the same year as the British Prime Minister."

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Oh, that's so cool.

• 25:15Robert Evans?

  It gets better. "Ian McGregor leads an army of orcs against Arca Zargal's dwarfs, who themselves are suffering miners. If those names aren't recognizable to you, Ian McGregor was responsible for shutting down countless mines under Thatcher's orders, and Arthur Scargill was the leader of the National Union of Mine Workers during the strikes in 1984 and 1985, who later founded the Socialist Labour Party." So, that's not subtle.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  We have to unionize the dwarves.

• 25:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yes, all dwarves are unionized, as are the sponsors for this podcast. Unless they're not, I have really no way of knowing.

• 25:55Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rosso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Daskalakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big time advocate in LGBTQ+ health, HIV prevention, and health equity. Think of it as the after show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing and why are they swabbing there?

• 26:36Robert Evans?

  Finding a doctor who's not so judgy, and so much more. It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. History's full of dirty players. Don't let your butt be one of them. You know what bastards and buttholes both have in common? They're full of [BLEEP]. But with Dude Wipes, your butt doesn't have to be. Don't let dry TP dictate your aftermath. Dude Wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Dude Wipes are the perfect poop time partner in crime, at home or on the go.

• 27:18Robert Evans?

  Flushable, plastic-free Dude Wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for methods of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, Dude Wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battles here. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats: individually wrapped singles, eight-count pocket packs, and 48-count big daddies. So the wipe can match the crime, every time. Dude Wipes in a good World War II novel: two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two. So stop Stalin, grab a pack of Dude Wipes and wipe the slate clean. Dude Wipes: Best Clean Pants Down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 28:03Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So I think that has established politics and political satire was kind of embedded in the foundations of Warhammer from the beginning, right?

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:13Robert Evans?

  But it was also more a thing in fantasy than 40k. As Sledge notes in his article, after 1987, the people making Warhammer 40,000, I think in part because 40k really started to take off and they were like, oh, this could actually be big. We probably shouldn't like, make so many jokes about partisan politics. That might stop people from wanting to buy the game.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Maybe we shouldn't put Margaret Thatcher's face on a banner.

• 28:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, probably shouldn't have Maggie's face on as many banners. So they got a little more subtle with things. The politics didn't disappear entirely. And you could always tell it was like punks making it in that period of time. The early years of 40k are art and lore contained many references and allusions to aspects of punk culture. So today in the game, space marines are these gigantic, much taller than people like monk-like, like heroic warrior monks, right? And they're, you know, they're all superhuman. They're the result of all of this genetic tinkering. And, you know, they're incapable of fear and they're these, these kind of like idealized, like the absolute ideal of like a stereotypical

• 29:18Robert Evans?

  like warrior, right? Like that, that's everything a space marine is. That's not what they were at first. The first space marines were basically like mercenaries and like drafty cops of like this brutal imperium that were there to like crack down on dissent and stuff. There's a great from an early White Dwarf magazine. There's a piece of art that I'm showing Joe now. That's like an early, it's a drawing up. There's like a punk who's been spray painting marines out on a wall and he's got his hands against the wall and there's two space marines standing behind him. You know, they're not taller than him because they weren't initially superhuman. They were just guys in armor. One of them's got what looks like a stun baton in his hands. And then there's text underneath it that says, "When the eye of terror blinks, ships fly between lost worlds and the rest of the galaxy.

• 30:03Robert Evans?

  Miners ship their oars and slavers play their loathsome trade. Where chance permits, the forces of the Imperium make their mark, bringing to the lost worlds..." The brutal order of the Imperium, if only for a few days. So they're space cops, right?

• 30:16Speaker 04

  Space Marine cops flying through space so they could play Candy Crush and do nothing at a different location.

• 30:21Robert Evans?

  Right? That's not the only way space Marines were depicted, but they were often depicted as that, as like cops and bullies. They were nearly always thugs. They were not, you know, they weren't, like, they looked cool, but like their personalities were not cool, right? They weren't meant to be.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Went from being like a warrior knight to starting off as like Sully from Long Island.

• 30:46Robert Evans?

  That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Strong Sully vibes in these guys. So again, even though after this point, there's no more whole campaign settings created to mock like Union busting and the like. The designers behind 40k were always pretty direct about the fact that the Imperium are not the good guys and the Emperor is not a great leader. In fact, here's how the first ever Warhammer 40,000 rulebook opened. "For more than a hundred centuries, the Emperor has sat immobile on the golden throne of earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the dark age of technology. He is the carrion lord of the Imperium, to whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day,

• 31:27Robert Evans?

  and for whom blood is drunk and flesh eaten, human blood and human flesh, the stuff of which the Imperium is made."

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Much more explicit. Now it's, now it's kind of couched in the pseudo-religious terms that the entire Imperium exists as, but fact that it was definitely very much, you couldn't hide from like, no, this is an empire that runs on blood and death.

• 31:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And there's, you know, there's still that bit, that intro goes on to include some of the texts that they have at the start of, of every gamebook now. And they always do make the point that like, this is a bad, this is the worst possible regime, right? They've been very consistent about that. But I love that bit at the start, right? Which you pointed out where they're like, the Imperium runs on the blood and flesh of human beings. It's a cannibalistic nightmare regime.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Yep. Nothing changes.

• 32:15Robert Evans?

  Nothing changes. Variations of that passage have been included in basically every book of rules and lore published by Games Workshop in the years since. Unfortunately, they didn't do that in a vacuum. And over the long years of the game has existed, they also expanded the lore behind the Space Marines and turned them into what they are today. And because the Space Marines are what sold the best and what looked the coolest, most of like, especially the kids who were just getting into the hobby got into, the Space Marines were who they marketed and focused more and more of the game around. And there's a lot of different alien races and stuff in it, and obviously those had to become more monstrous to match, right? Because that makes the Space Marines look cooler and more heroic. And

• 32:57Robert Evans?

  all of this led to a situation where a lot of players didn't realize, really, that the Imperium aren't the good guys, and that Purge, the Heretic, and other Imperial catchphrases shouldn't be seen as admirable. But again, Space Marines look really, really cool. And Warhammer players and writers have created so much fiction and fanart over the years that a lot of people have made that aesthetic a real part of their lives. And this has happened in some pretty extreme cases. Probably the most extreme example of this would be the fact that if you watch enough videos put out by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, there are just a ton of combat footage from the war in Ukraine, where you can see a lot of Ukrainian soldiers, you'll inevitably run across dudes with decorations in their armor or gear that look like this. And Joe, you're seeing this now, but this is essentially

• 33:42Robert Evans?

  a, I mean, it's a wax, like, stamp with some papers underneath it that's adhering it to the armor.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. I've seen some, but I haven't seen this. Yeah.

• 33:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, these are in the game, these like, wap papers adhered to like, armor by these like, wax seals. It's called an oath of moment, right? Or purity seals, too. Like, there's two different kinds of things that both sort of, you know, involve there being like, papers attached to it. But like, these are things, like, an oath of moment is like, before battle, Space Marines like, write down like, what their goal is for this fight, or like, make a vow that like, this, you know, the enemy won't pass this point or something. And then they'll like, adhere that to their armor, to like, hold them to it, right? And, you know, this was like, they started putting these on the armor of the models, these like little bitty, like you could see these like scraps of paper adhered by like wax seals.

• 34:33Robert Evans?

  Because they made the power armor the Space Marines had look, have more of like a medieval knight vibe. And that's a big part of like the 40k aesthetic is you have like a lot of these medieval, like weapons and armor, but it's also like futuristic. That's a big part of like the appeal of the aesthetic of the setting. And it appealed to people so much, and there's so many fans of Warhammer in Ukraine that like one, a lot of young Ukrainian men started going into battle. They started putting purity seals on their armor, like to the extent that like now people make and sell period, like seals that you can put on your gear, right?

• 35:09Speaker 04

  I've seen like detachments named after like Space Marine stuff as well.

• 35:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, like it's, it's, it's fucking wild. And there's even like, if you look down there, there's another example of one on a guy's armor with a bunch of like Warhammer patches on his body armor.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it's nothing but Warhammer stuff going from the Deathless Mechanicus, more Space Marines, got an Imperial Guard one from the, the Death Watch of Krieg.

• 35:32Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  Or the Death Corps of Krieg, sorry.

• 35:35Robert Evans?

  Well, in that picture that you're looking at, Joe, came from a two-year-old post in the Warhammer 40k subreddit that read, greetings from Ukraine. Yeah, this has become really popular here because many of the military are Warhammer fans. So many of the volunteers who help the military try and find merchandise or patches of this type for them as a nice gift, right?

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 35:53Robert Evans?

  It's, I, and I'm not, by the way, like we're talking about this in the context of people taking Warhammer the right way or the wrong way. I haven't had any issue with this, like you're fighting a fucking desperate war for your survival. Do whatever you want to your, your armor, you know, if that makes you feel better. It's just, it's weird. It's, it was strange to see like this actually making its way to a real war. Because so many of the people fighting that war are fans of the game. Like that's just a strange moment for the hobby.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  And you can, for a comparison to how much this has jumped into mainstream, like, consciousness. When I was in the military, we had stupid, like, we call them morale patches. We had super little morale patches, too. I never saw 40K one. I mean, this is back in the early 2000s.

• 36:40Robert Evans?

  Oh, God, yeah. I can't even imagine it.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, never saw anything, never. And so within a decade, it's just like, no, there's detachments named after space marine groups. There's morale patches. Like, it's having a moment, that's for sure.

• 36:53Robert Evans?

  It's having a moment. And it's gonna get weirder, Joe, because I got another thing to show you.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 36:58Robert Evans?

  Every year, the firearms industry gathers in Las Vegas, Nevada for the SHOT Show. It is the gun industry trade show, where different companies show off new weapons, both firearms that are meant for civilian use and for police and for the military. And one big trend, as I'm sure you know, Joe, in military arms design over the last couple of decades, but it's really escalated over the last 10 or 15 years, have been small, portable, semi-automatic, and automatic grenade launchers. In many cases, ones that can fire like smart grenades, right? We have a degree of control on like, when it detonates, how far it has to go, right? Like, that's a big, it's like a major area in which weapons have like, weapons development has leapt forward over the course of the last like 20 something years in this regard.

• 37:41Robert Evans?

  You have a lot more options there than you used to for grenade launchers of that type. And periodically, you know, as some of these different products that are like, because the main weapon that a space marine carries is called a bolter. And it's this big, cool-looking rifle that's actually not like a rifle at all. It fires basically like a rocket munition that one charge shoots the munition out the barrel, and then a secondary charge actually ignites the rocket. And then the rocket will like shoot towards its target and blow up. And, you know, they're huge guns meant for future terrifying post-human war. And periodically, when you'd see one of these new automatic grenade launchers, people online would be like, oh, that looks like a bolter. We're finally making real bolters, right? Because that's kind of what they look like.

• 38:26Robert Evans?

  And this year at SHOT Show, Barrett, which is a company that makes very fucking big guns. Brought a semi-automatic grenade launcher painted in Ultramarines blue with a fucking, an oath of moment attached to the barrel.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 38:41Robert Evans?

  Hey, everyone. Robert here. The maker of that 30mm grenade launcher was actually Mars Inc., not Barrett. I made the mistake because both Mars and Barrett are making basically identical 30mm grenade launchers and competing to get a contract from the US military for this program called the SSRS system, and both had models of the SSRS on display at SHOT Show, but it was Mars Inc. that painted theirs up to look like a bolter and put a purity seal on it. Thank you.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  I have to wonder what Games Workshop feels about this.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's just a straight up 40K.

• 39:14Robert Evans?

  That's just a bolter, yeah.

• 39:17Robert Evans?

  Ultramarines blue and everything on there. Like, it's fucking wild. Yeah. So whether or not you think that's cool depends on your attitude towards the arms industry. Again, you can think about that however you want, but it represents a kind of awkward problem for Games Workshop. The fact that stuff like this is happening is evidence of the insane degree of cultural penetration that Warhammer has achieved. But having real weapons made in the image of your video game or of your of your game weapons can be problematic, too, right?

• 39:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:47Robert Evans?

  You don't necessarily-

• 39:48Speaker 04

  You don't want to be connected to someone being actually murdered by your product.

• 39:52Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Like, that that can be a problem. And speaking of things that are problematic, the sponsors of this show.

• 40:03Robert Evans?

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• 40:48Robert Evans?

  It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. History's full of dirty players. Don't let your butt be one of them. You know what bastards and buttholes both have in common? They're full of [BLEEP]. But with Dude Wipes, your butt doesn't have to be. Don't let dry TP dictate your aftermath. Dude Wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Dude Wipes are the perfect poop time partner in crime at home or on the go. Flushable, plastic-free Dude Wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients.

• 41:30Robert Evans?

  They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for messes of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, Dude Wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battles here. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats. Individually wrapped singles, eight-count pocket packs, and 48-count big daddies. So the wipe can match the crime every time. Dude Wipes in a good World War II novel, two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two. So stop Stalin, grab a pack of Dude Wipes and wipe the slate clean. Dude Wipes, best clean, pants down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 42:10Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, as I kind of brought up before we went to break, the wide popularity of Warhammer has increasingly forced problematic confrontations, both between sort of how much people like it and how many, many things they want to stick Warhammer on and what the company, Games Workshop, may want Warhammer stuck on, and between like groups of fans themselves. And about four years ago, Spain's largest Warhammer tournament let a guy play while wearing Nazi paraphernalia, and I believe his army was kind of like Nazi-themed too. Like it was like a Wehrmacht-themed guard army or something if I'm remembering correctly. Oh, God. But he, he was like wearing Nazi shit and he'd entered the tournament under the name Austrian Painter, like real fucking subtle, my dude. Yeah.

• 42:55Robert Evans?

  And people weren't thrilled about this. I'm gonna quote from an article in Polygon. GT Talavera tournament organizers gave comment to tabletop wargaming site Spiky Bit, stating that "The club repudiates the Nazi mentality in all its aspects. Nazi ideas have no place in our group because they are contrary to everything we stand for." The organizer said that the player said he would not leave unless they involve the police. As displaying Nazi imagery is not illegal in Spain, the organizers hesitated lest this bring legal trouble upon their club. And I don't know enough about the situation to know, like, were these guys really just backed into a completely fucked corner and didn't have a lot of options? Should that probably, I'm gonna guess they could have and should have done more, but I don't really know much about that. What I do know is that this causes a lot of people

• 43:38Robert Evans?

  to get pissed off online. And it blows up enough that Games Workshop has to publish an announcement on November 19th, 2021. "The Imperium is driven by hate. Warhammer is not." And in this announcement, there's a couple of interesting lines. First off, they're pointing out that, like, "Look, the Imperium of Man is a cautionary table, like so many aspects of Warhammer 40,000. It is satirical." They go through the definition of what satire is, right? Like, that's literally in this little article that they put up. And then they note, "That said, certain real-world hate groups and adherents of historical ideologies better left in the past sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment and co-opt them for their own agendas. We've said it before, but a reminder about what we believe in. We believe

• 44:21Robert Evans?

  in and support a community united by shared values of mutual kindness and respect. Our fantasy settings are grim and dark, but that is not a reflection of who we are or how we feel the real world should be. We will never accept nor condone any form of prejudice, hatred, or abuse in our company or in the Warhammer hobby." And then they basically, they straight out say, "If you come to a Games Workshop event or store and wear symbols of a hate group, we'll ask you to leave if we don't want your money."

• 44:46Speaker 04

  Some things don't need to be said aloud until they do, you know what I mean?

• 44:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  It's an implication. And to be fair, in most places in Europe, this would have been against the law.

• 44:56Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  Spain, however, is different for different reasons.

• 45:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's that siesta vibe, you know? Sometimes it applies a little further than it ought to. And I want to note too, to be fair, I don't want it to seem like, because as you noted, like, this isn't the thing you have to say until you do. There's some valid critiques, that there were other things that cropped up for a few years prior to this, that Games Workshop should have made a statement earlier. I'm certainly not saying they shouldn't have. We may dig into some of that, you know, later as the podcast goes on, but like, they haven't handled this perfectly, but that's a pretty good message, right? That like, we don't want your money, and we don't want you in the hobby. And it's good that they did say something eventually, right? You know, this is a publicly traded corporation. They're not a, they're not a culture warrior, and they're not an activist.

• 45:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:47Robert Evans?

  But, like, I'm glad that something got fucking said. And they've, that's not the only thing they've done in the last couple of years. There's been some more subtle and some less subtle moves. You know, one thing that happened recently. So, for years, a lot of fans have asked for like, as the, because as Warhammer's gotten more popular, more women have played. And they've added in more female models for different, like, sides and stuff. There's more female guardsmen than there used to be, more female Eldar. And, you know, they've, they've at least, and the Sisters of Battle, which is an all-female line, has gotten like a refreshed line and a lot more attention. You know, they've done this a few ways, but a lot of people want there to be female Space Marines. And this is kind of a, you know, still a topic of a lot of debate. Within the actual lore itself,

• 46:31Robert Evans?

  the Emperor, like, they can only be male because of how the Emperor designed their gene seed and stuff. And the real reason for this, obviously, is that like, nobody thought about it in 1987, that like, they would want there to be like, female models for Space Marines? They weren't thinking about that kind of stuff?

• 46:49Speaker 04

  And it would hardly be the first bit of lore that was retcon. Like, the tapestry of Warhammer lore is a series of retconings.

• 46:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And that said, I also do kind of, one thing that I appreciate is in some of the more recent lore, when they've gone back to like, talk, like, feature, have books that feature the Emperor, and talk about the creation of the Space Marines. One way they've kind of retcon things is because there's a conversation between the Emperor and one of his top advisors who's like, I thought you should have made all the Primarchs, you know, the, your sons that were the leaders of these legions, women, like they should have all been girls, like their leaders in the space, because we would have had less problems. They wouldn't have all wound up going to fucking war with you. They would have been less annoying. Um, and I kind of do like the idea that all Space Marines are men because the Emperor is just kind of a misogynist. Like, and it led up destroying him, right?

• 47:38Robert Evans?

  The fact that he, yeah, it kind of does. Like, it sort of works. But one thing Games Workshop did do recently is they introduced the Emperor's Bodyguard, or these other group of fucking future super soldiers, the Custodes, who, or the Custodes, whatever, fucking fake Latin pronunciation you want to use. And they've been adding like female sculpts, like female heads and stuff. You can only really tell with the faces. But a chunk of people online lost their goddamn minds. I'll tell you that right now. The most annoying fans were

• 48:07Speaker 04

  Wow, I'm so surprised by this.

• 48:08Robert Evans?

  Raising over this shit. Uh, and it's, it's very funny because you'll see them posting stuff like, you know, if, if you just want to play the hobby, play the hobby, but don't come into my culture and try to like, change it. Because like, you want to, you want there to be blue haired, you know, girls in your, in my fucking game. And

• 48:27Speaker 04

  My culture?

• 48:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah. A lot of these guys being like, oh, this is going to destroy the hobby. Like, this is like, once woke gets in, it ruins everything. Fucking Warhammer has never been worth more money. Like Games Workshop is one of the most valuable corporations in the entire United Kingdom. Fucking little plastic models of Space Marines and orcs and shit are worth more than fishing to the British economy. And it's an island.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  I can play, uh, these weird space monsters, like Tyranids or orcs and, uh, but you know, when you, when you add women to the mix, really ruining the immersion.

• 49:00Robert Evans?

  Once the wams get in there.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  Unbelievable.

• 49:02Robert Evans?

  I can't believe it.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Fucking insane, man.

• 49:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's very silly. And, you know, at its core, this is a culture war centered over a very important problem for creatives, though, which is that like when you're creating fictional fascist organizations, whether they're impossibly advanced sci-fi empires or like a cult of deranged post-apocalyptic bikers, there's a risk that you're gonna make that some of the fans of your work will be fans of those fictional fascists. And not in a, I just think they look cool way, but in a, I have some opinions about, you know, this racial group way, right? And real fascists, as we noted, have spent decades getting really good at using stuff like that as a bridge to start propagandizing to young people. Whether we like it or not, fictional worlds are battlegrounds in the broader culture war

• 49:50Robert Evans?

  against ascendant fascist sentiment worldwide. Fabrizio Galli, the creator of that God Emperor Trump float that we started this episode discussing, said something similar in an interview that I read on heavy.com. "The time of intellectuals, philosophers, and of old and worn culture is over. We have entered the era of fantasy, video games, and virtual life."

• 50:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right on the nose there, 2019, but bang, hit the target.

• 50:20Speaker 04

  Oh, I hate, I hate when you read something from now several years ago. Yep, that's just everything now. That is, that is just everything.

• 50:31Robert Evans?

  Yep, that's just everything. Well, Joe, I think that's all I've got here, you know? How are you feeling?

• 50:39Speaker 04

  Ah, I feel, I'm feeling good, Robert, and I hate to say it. Um, because I love talking about Warhammer.

• 50:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you feel good because you're getting paid to talk about Warhammer.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  And I love, and I love the weird shit that comes out of it, especially hearing stuff like this, because I don't want people to like this, to be their first introduction to Warhammer, like, oh, wow, it's populated by fascists.

• 51:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  I go to a local Warhammer club where I live, I'm not going to dox it, but it is full of incredibly lovely people and probably one of the most diverse rooms I've ever been in, in the Netherlands.

• 51:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And yeah, it's good that we could close out talking about stuff like this because as conservative a weirdo as I was as a kid, I really do think playing Warhammer was one of like the healthier things for me in terms of connecting me to other people who believed different things. Like even within the context of like a fucking gaming group at a hobby store in the early 2000s. Like I remember after the invasion of Iraq, like a few weeks or months after, like my friends and I, like somebody brought in like a printout of like a missile strike on, I think it was a BMP on like an Iraqi troop transport. You could see frame by frame, this thing blowing up like people inside it. And we're fucking shitty kids in Texas being

• 51:53Robert Evans?

  like, whoa, like, look, I've never, I'd never seen anything like that. And one of the guys we gamed with was like a veteran who'd been like a tanker. Um, I think he had fought in Desert Storm and was not, like, I had always assumed was a pretty conservative guy and was not like the most, like, was a man in his like his 40s or 50s who would yell at children over the rules of video or of a tabletop game, right?

• 52:16Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah.

• 52:16Robert Evans?

  Like that kind of dude. But also, when he saw what we were doing and he realized what it was a picture of, he was like, don't do that. Like, there were people in there. You don't laugh at something like that. You know, like, it's not cool. It's not something to like, go like, whoa, over. Like, it's not a game. Like, like, it's the most terrifying thing you can possibly imagine, and you need to have more respect. And as like a fucking 12-year-old little piece of shit, like, that actually like hit and impacted me. And I was like, oh, yeah, I was kind of, if like, fucking this guy is calling me out for being a dick, I might have been being a dick.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, he's, he's dressed head to toe in Imperial Guard cosplay. Like, you shouldn't do that.

• 52:58Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. Absolutely. Hey, man, death isn't funny. Covered in skulls, head to toe. All right, Joe, you want to plug your book before we roll out here?

• 53:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I am the host of the history podcast, Alliance Led by Donkeys. So if you like military history, check us out. And my first gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn, comes out May 29th, and you can digitally preorder it now. So, uh, check that out. Reviews are coming in. They're very positive and I'm really excited to, for it to release.

• 53:29Robert Evans?

  Excellent. I'm very excited to read it. Um, and excited for our listeners to read it. And also, Joe, I'm excited for you and I to have a podcast about Warhammer. When's it coming out? Neither of us know. There's gonna be a little bit of a delay. Like, we're currently dealing with, you know, there's a lot of logistical issues, including like just bringing you on and signing contracts because you're in a different country and stuff. We'll figure it out. There will be a podcast and it'll be a weekly show. It'll come out at some point this year. We just don't know exactly when yet. But we wanted to tease the idea for all of you and show you kind of what we've got coming down the pipe because we both kind of teased this online and social media a

• 54:13Robert Evans?

  couple of times. And I felt like bad about not putting something out.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  People had noticed.

• 54:22Robert Evans?

  So we'll be getting you, you know, we'll have more coming out soon. The show will be usually 40 minute to an hour long episodes. We'll be covering, you know, history and the lore in game. We'll be covering like real world reporting on different controversies around the game. You have a great pitch for that based on another one of these like weird political culture war things that hits like a convention where people are like playing and gaming and doing like painting contests and how the community deals with it. So we'll be talking about like both real life, how this hobby is influencing and has been influenced by the shit going on in the world. And we're going to talk about just the nerdy shit that we love. Like, I'm looking forward to putting together a painfully detailed history of like the concept of a space marine in sci fi fiction and how that's

• 55:07Robert Evans?

  led us to like Games Workshop building an empire.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 55:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And, uh, yeah, like, uh, what are you most excited to talk about?

• 55:16Speaker 04

  I'm incredibly excited to talk about and explain how the Imperial Guard works to people and how they die by the tens of millions.

• 55:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, that's all for today, folks. We'll be back later. I mean, at some point with the show.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:52Robert Evans?

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• 56:24Speaker 05

  Honestly, honestly.

• 56:26Speaker 06

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• 56:56Speaker 07

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rushing the Field. I'm Nicole Auerbach.

• 56:59Speaker 04

  And I'm Joshua Perry.

• 57:01Speaker 07

  We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world: college football.

• 57:06Speaker 04

  From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football.

• 57:14Speaker 07

  Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch Rushing the Field on NBC Sports now.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.