June 26, 2021 • 46 mins
In some nations royals are so ingrained in the national fabric they are considered part of the country. In this classic episode, Josh and Chuck take a look backward in time at the ancient tradition of despotism and unbridled privilege.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Mr Chuck Bryant here, Charles w. That is,
if you want to know how royalty works, we can
sort of explain that. This is from Jeez about six
years ago, from September eleven. We talk all about royalty
and probably get about right. Welcome to Stuff you should know,
(00:25):
a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w. W W, Chuck
Bryant and Jerry. What's your problem? This is should know?
My problem is I got an eye twitch. Yeah, it's
a little weird. Okay, you can see it. Who can't?
(00:49):
My left eyes is going crazy? All right, it's I
think stabilized. Yeah it seems too. Yeah. Mitosis kicking in.
You're what mitosis? What kind of toasts you got? Uh?
Tosis is when you have a droopy eyelid. You know
I told you about that recently. You're like, you do
see that left eyelet is is more exposed. It's like
(01:11):
a forest Whittaker. I know what you're saying. I see that.
Like if I compare it to the other eyelid, I
can see more of your left eyelid, but it doesn't
appear droopy. I think that's the right term for it.
Tosis no droopy No, well it's tosas is a droopy eelid,
and I have it. I think it's a toasta highlid.
That's what you got, man. I was diagnosed and it's
(01:33):
uh apparently going to get worse. So who is it?
Forest Whittaker? Who else? I think Tom York of Radiohead,
Oh yeah, you're company. And I think Paris Hilton has tosis.
Oh yes she does, and me the four It's worse
when I'm sleepy or if I drunk. Yeah, I could
see that, but I'm never either one of those. So
(01:55):
so you're always fine. Yeah. I don't know why, stroop.
Are you drunk right now? That's good? Should not be
drunk while we do these? Chuck, it's too important, that's right.
So I've got an actual infro for this, oh man,
like the old days in my head. It could be
up to like twenty minutes long. So just sit back
and around perfect um, So chuck up. Until about nine
(02:19):
years ago, all humans walked around and gathered food and
followed herds of animals which they hunted and killed and
eight and on any given day, you eight what you
gathered and then you just kind of moved along to
the next spot. That was typically the way things were done.
(02:39):
They were called hunter gatherer societies. Then, during what's called
the Neolithic Revolution, people started selecting plants in their area
and realizing that they could replant the seeds from those plants,
and all of a sudden you had agriculture, which is
made things very stable, very stable, more stable tie people
(03:02):
to the land. But it also gave rise to something
that hadn't been around before, which was surplus. Because if
you're a hunter gatherer and all of your buddies and
family and friends or hunter gatherers, and you're all just
hunting and gathering just enough to sustain you for that day,
then there's no such thing as surplus. That means everybody's
pretty much equal. Maybe one guy takes mushrooms more than
(03:24):
the rest of you, so he's your religious leader or
something like that, but for the most part, everybody's roughly equal.
Now that there's a surplus, say somebody has a particularly
good bounty on the year where everybody else in the
area has a bad bounty. That person is in what's
called the position of power. Yeah, they have an advantage, Yes,
they do that happens a few times to the same people.
(03:47):
And if they are clever enough to consolidate that power
and have more and more kids in a larger and
larger kin group, at which they would if they're more powerful,
you know they're gonna have more kids, then they conform
what you would recognize today as a dynasty. And then
over time these people would say, you know what, this
(04:08):
is my birthright to rule you guys, to be rich.
I'm going to just say that I'm connected to the Sun,
which is our god that we worship, So by proxy,
I'm the Sun, God's ruler here on earth, which means
I'm in charge of you. And while you're at it,
(04:29):
give me some of your surplus, and all of a sudden,
now you have a king a kingdom. And this happened
roughly all around the world, independently, but following almost the
exact same course. You've got agriculture, you have surplus. You
have certain people consolidating power, rising to power, associating themselves
(04:52):
with gods to um to make their power that much
more stable and unchallenged, and then you have kingdoms. That's
what happened. Boom. Over time, these kingdoms did more and
more crazy stuff, but they all they all followed roughly
the same thing. Yeah. And if you're out in the
middle of a desert, you don't have a lot of
(05:13):
options to go other places, so that helps along the king, Yeah,
because you don't have any choice. Or if you're in
Peru there's a big mountain range there, kind of stuck. Yeah,
because you still need you know, your potatoes, you still
need your grain. Um. And if you can't move very easily,
if you're getting resources from being a member of a community,
(05:33):
then that explains why you, as this normal, independent minded person,
might go along with some guy saying he's a descendant
of the Sun God and you have to give him
half of your grain for no good reason. Yeah. Or
if you're in the Amazon where it's you're not surrounded
by desert or mountains and you can say, screw this guy,
I'm out of here, then you may be a little
(05:54):
slower to have something like a king, yeah, or maybe
not at all. And so all this whole mentality, this
whole process took place independently, like I said, the world
around and also everybody seemed to have come to the
same idea that you need to export this stuff. The
more power or the more land and there therefore the
(06:15):
more um crops or whatever you can get under your power,
more powerful you are. And the way to get that
is to get a bunch of guys who are sick
of farming and like to mess around with spears, to
go conquer some other cities and make those people give
you half of their grain. Then you become even more powerful,
so you export this kind of um mentality of being
(06:37):
ruled by a single person who's getting fat off of
taxing everybody else. And still today we have virtually all
of these same processes just in a different guys. Yeah,
and we should give credit to uh, Simon Powers, because
we didn't just make all that stuff up. No, as
the Simon Powers, the researcher or the writer, he is
(06:58):
really uh an author of the study that um kind
of looked at that theory that we've been talking about
and made a model that UM, I don't know if
it proved it, but made it seem pretty likely. Yeah,
why how despots arose during the Neolithic Revolution. Yeah, so
way to go, Simon Powers. And if you're interested in
that kind of thing, also go back and read Dr
(07:20):
Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake in the History of the
human race, which talks a lot about this transition and
basically argues that we were all better off as hunter gatherers. Yeah,
Dustin Diamond wrote the same article and it was the
answer was saved by the Belle the worst mistake in
the human race. Hey, that's a good show. Um, alright,
(07:41):
all the wrong way. You're right. So in this article
how royalty works, like, we're going to kind of default
to England. Yeah, here and there for the most part,
I'm sorry, great Britain. Well, we're gonna explain all that
stuff finally and for all, because that's, you know, that's
(08:01):
what we were exposed to. That's the kind of the
Western English speaking standard, the British monarchy. But you can
kind of substitute in a lot of ways. This this
um a lot of the way that it developed for
just about anywhere in the world. Because again, the idea
of hierarchies, of class, of social stratification and then some
(08:24):
group of people being at the absolute pinnacle is extraordinarily ancient. Yeah,
and it all comes down to land and owning land.
Since people have tried the earth, the most powerful ones
are the people that owned more of it than their neighbor. Yeah,
but not scessarily tried the earth. I mean we're talking
just in the last ten thousand years. And even after that,
(08:46):
the English didn't create them this idea that you could
take land and say this is my land. Now you
used to farm it, but you can still farm it,
but you owe me because this is my land and
I'm letting you farm on it. Yeah. And after everybody
was like, wait what, and you say, oh, I forgot
(09:07):
to tell you. If you don't do this, I'm gonna
kill you in your entire family. So do it. And
they created what's known as the feudal system. Yeah, let's
get in our our way back machine. Awesome, let's pull
the cover off this bad boy and let's go back
to oh like anywhere between the ninth and fifteenth century.
Let's do it because it doesn't matter. It's all about
the same. That's not true, but it's similar, uh to
(09:34):
the feudal systems of medieval Europe. Um. Basically what went
on was there were very few people that owned a
lot of the land, um a lot of territory. But
they basically looked around at one point and says, you
know what, I have too much stuff to govern on
my own. So I'm gonna divide it up and I'm
gonna let other people use it. And I call them vassals.
(09:56):
And you're my vassel. You're gonna go out and you're
gonna manage that territory for me, going to collect some taxes,
you can keep some of that. You can farm and
keep some of that. Well, they didn't farm, They had
people farming for them. Well, sure, so it's like a
hierarchy habit farmed. Like you can imagine all of England
is being owned by the king and then you divide
it up, and then those people further divided it up. Yeah,
(10:18):
because the vassal could divide their's up. And for sub
sub vessels, I guess serfs, Yeah, I guess so either
they're called um And you know, you guys, how about
raising some armies for me? Um, You're all gonna be
beholden to me, but I'm gonna let you keep a
lot of the dough, um, as long as you still
give me something. Yeah. And and prior to this, chuck like,
(10:40):
this is kind of a sweet deal. And the way
that you ended up in vassal is you had an
army that could conceivably challenge this guy who said I'm
a king of England and everybody and um, everyone said
where and he's like here this, this is England now,
and I'm the king. Uh. And so if you had
an army that he could probably defeat with his army,
(11:03):
but could still like pose a problem. He turned you
onto his side, sure, and said, well, wait before you
say anything, I'm going to give you. Let you handle
some of this land, like you said, and you can
get these people who are farming the land to give
you some of their grain. You give some to me,
but you keep some yourself. Yeah, you'll be like a
(11:26):
smaller version of me. Yeah, and we'll will be more
powerful together exactly. And that's how this hierarchy, at least
in under the feudal system began, that's right. And these vassals,
they had rules of succession a lot like inheritance. Um,
you could pass your your land onto your children and
(11:46):
then they would be a vassal. Yeah. You also passed
your obligation to the king onto the children too. It
wasn't just the sweet life. Oh no, no no, no, they
could you could never. You are always beholden as long
as you maintain that land, um, and it was the
same in other parts of the world. Japan had the
imperial system that was similar to the European monarchies, and
(12:10):
Japan's actually their monarchy is the oldest in the world.
Did you know that? Yes? I did. The Japanese imperial
family traces their lineage back to the sixth century b
c e. That's crazy, although they are purely ceremonial at
this point right well, yeah, but they were the exact
opposite of just purely ceremonial up until and uh g
(12:33):
I Joe came in and like said, you guys aren't
divine deities any longer, which is what everybody considered them
up until and check out my kunk fu grip. Uh.
So everything was going along well until about the seventeenth
century when republicanism began to uh kind of just chip
(12:54):
away at the royals and the power that they held
throughout Europe, and democracy starts to form, and sometimes it
happens gradually and kind of nicely. Sometimes it happens via revolution,
like in France, and uh sometimes when they would kick
out the monarchy, they would come back um with a vengeance,
(13:15):
like after the English Civil War between the Roundheads and
the cavaliers. Um, we had King Charles executed, his heir,
Charles two was exiled to France. Parliament gained a lot
of control, but they would later come back of course.
Charles the second, well, just the monarchy period, yeah, but
after that the monarchy just was never the same now,
(13:37):
although maybe under like Elizabeth, she was pretty powerful. Yeah,
but I think, um, Parliament had gained a lot of control. Yeah,
everybody after that point had to deal with Parliament before
anybody had. Under Charles the first, the same stuff was
going on in the Middle East. Um, it was a
little different though because religion was so much more a
part of uh, their their monarch's um they had was
(14:01):
it called a caliph? Yeah, was was the head? Uh?
I guess that would be the king, Yeah, I guess
so if you had if you compared it to like
the English model, the caliph would be the head, the
king of England, and then beneath them would be sultans,
which would be like vassals, which are powerful kings, but
(14:23):
they they are not the religious leader. So you got
the caliph and the sultans. Yeah, and sultans were like
military commanders but not priests, right, but they were involved.
Everything was all tied into religion still is of course. Yeah.
And then if you look at the Middle East model UM,
you know, very early on, like like look at Egypt,
(14:44):
all of the Egyptian UM rulers were considered deities up
until America said no, no, no. The Imperial King, the
Emperor of Japan was considered a deity of the Shinto
religion like a god um In in the Middle East,
the caliph is a religious figure. In uh, the Holy
(15:08):
Roman Empire, the king's ruled along with the pope. So
there's always been this real um marriage, either in the
form of one person or in the form of like
some sort of allegiance between the holy ruler and the
political ruler, because they the religious aspect of it gives
(15:29):
um credibility to the rule of the the political ruler,
and like like even in England they went so far
as to come up with the Divine Right of Kings,
which said, the king is God's emissary here on planet Earth,
and the king is therefore infallible. Nobody can get rid
(15:49):
of the king. But exactly, but I mean it ended
up been going on for millennia since before then. But
that was like they just put it down into text like, yeah,
that's that's the way it is. Unfortunately for the king,
that meant that the only way to get be gotten
rid of was to be murdered. Yeah, but they figured
(16:10):
it will be a pretty wild ride until then. Yeah,
I mean that's one of the risks when you're the king.
Uh So now you have you have royalty, you have
this class system. Royalty is actually transcends class because uh,
it's it's the bloodline like a noble. That's the differencetween
nobility and royalty is nobility. The nobles didn't have the
(16:31):
bloodline going. Yeah, it depends on the country that you're in.
So like in some countries, there are more than one
royal family, right, yeah, different houses, but just one of
them holds the throne at a time. Yeah, just one
of them has uh the ability to be the heir
to the throne um. So in other countries, it's like
(16:56):
there's one group of royals and they're the only royals,
and everybody, no matter how powerful, no matter their noble title,
they're still technically commoners exactly. They're they're almost always wealthy,
even though technically wealth doesn't have anything to do with
it because it's about your bloodline. But if you're if
you're in the monarchy, you're going to be wealthy. And
(17:16):
in some cases also they're considered an actual part of
their country. Yeah, they're that much ingrained into the national fabric.
So we said that, Um, in some countries there can
be more than one royal family and um, this kind
of comes into play when there's not a clear line
of succession. Yeah, things can get a little messy when
(17:38):
the king dies. So like if you have, um, what's
called an agnatic succession, that that means that the oldest
male heir inherits the throne. Yeah, and actually agnatic, uh,
it means your brother takes over and not your son. Okay,
So it's patrilineal. It's it's on the father's side, but
(17:59):
instead of giving the throne to your child, like your
firstborn son, it goes to your your little bro okay,
your oldest little pro Okay, got youa um. And then
in in other lines, it can be the oldest heir, right,
that's right, whether it's male or female, like how Queen
Elizabeth is the queen Now, yeah, you can be a
(18:20):
female heir Britain of course, so all of these people
are all related. They're part of the royal family. They're
either a sibling, a child, a grandchild, even a cousin.
But there's still a member of that family, which is
also known as the house. In a country where there's
more than one royal house and there's a dispute or
(18:42):
a problem with the succession the normal succession rights, then
you can have a challenge to the throne by another
royal house. Yeah, or it's just simply elected by a
committee of nobles. Maybe who that next king is going
to be? Yeah, Or if there's not a very clear line,
they can say, you know what, it's it's no man's
(19:02):
land here, and whoever ends up with the crown may
not even be a part of the bloodline. Maybe they
just had the best military or the most money, right,
And that's I mean, that's how original houses were set up. Yeah,
I mean the only difference between that situation happening now
and someone else's house, like taking control of the throne,
(19:23):
is they just descended to royalty, you know, millennia ago,
rather than right now. Yeah, all right. Titles, it's all
(19:48):
about the title. The very top of the chessboard. You're
gonna have your king and queen or an emperor empress,
depending on if that's the kind of game you play
in your country or your empire. Uh, then the elatives
are the king and queen. Um. It really depends on
the country in the monarchy. A lot of times their
princes and princesses can be your children, your grandchildren, could
(20:09):
be your brothers, could be your cousins. Um. It just
kind of varies depending on what country you're in. And
those titles are called peerages, and there's hereditary peerages, and
then there's life peerages. That's right, and um. The peerages,
as at least in uh in European royalty, go in
(20:32):
from an order of importance and from the lowest number
to the most number duke, marquess or marquis, earl, viscount
and baron. So the barons are at least powerful, but
there's the most of them, is it viscount. I've been
saying viscount my whole life. Viscount. It's all right, man,
(20:53):
everybody says viscount. Um. And then the dukes are the
most powerful, but there's the fewest of them. And so
if you have an hereditary peerage, you inherited that at
some point in time, some king or queen said, you
are now the Duke of blah blah bah, and you're noble,
but you are not royal, right exactly, so um, the
(21:14):
although you can be royal like I believe Prince Charles
is the Duke of Windsor, you know, yeah that man,
it gets confusing. It definitely does get confusing. It gets
even more confusing because when Prince Charles becomes King Charles,
the Duke of Windsor will vanish. That title will vanish
because he became king, which he'd much rather be king
(21:36):
than Duke of Windsor, you know what I mean. Yeah,
And that's called being absorbed into the crown by the crown.
The title can also just be left, like if there's
no air. You can also take it and give it
to another family, although I think that that probably is
subject to being approved by the queen or the king. Um.
And then there's a whole other cattle of fish called
(21:57):
life peerages, which basically says you are now a baron
or baroness while you're alive, right, And and then your
kids will still receive some sort of honor. They won't
receive the title, but they can call themselves the honorable,
which suggests that their parents had a life peerage, but
(22:17):
that that it wasn't a hereditary title, so the kids
don't inherit it. Yeah. And to add further confusion, a
prince isn't always the male child of the king. Sometimes
that is the king, um, sometimes it's just a noble.
When Britain ruled India, they made a very clear distinction that, um,
your rulers and your provinces in India, um are going
(22:41):
to be called princes, just so it's clear you're not
going to call yourself a king, which is bs because
India already had its own monarchy system, um, but now
they were all downgraded by the British. Yeah. Um. We
should also say that if you receive a peerage of
any sort it you are automatically a member of the
(23:02):
House of Lords, which is the upper chamber of British Parliament. Um.
And so it's part of them the duty of the
Queen to appoint these things, to appoint these peerages, but
in these modern times she wants to kind of appoint
them along party lines to make sure they're an appropriate
(23:24):
representation of everybody in the House of Lords. Yeah. And
you also get season tickets to uh men you games?
Do you know? I don't think so, I'll bet you do. Uh.
All right, So I guess we can move on to
the functions of these royals, because it really has varied
throughout the years and depending on which country, whether or
not your ceremonial figurehead or you're actually have real duties. Um,
(23:51):
and I guess it's well, let's just start with England. Okay,
So with England? Do you want to read her her
Majesty's full title? Should we get into this now? I
think we should, all right, because boy, we have botched
this over the years with saying Britain and England and
Great Britain and the UK. We're gonna set the record
(24:12):
straight here today because technically calling q E two, we
know her, we love her, calling her the Queen of
England is not correct now and it's pretty disrespectful to
some people. It is. And we're gonna explain this right now,
follow along with our little history lesson and a man,
(24:32):
I hope we get this right. Where did you find this?
By the way, Oh I found it on the internet.
I can't remember where it's all over. There's many different versions,
but um, here we got seven. You have King James
the sixth. He ascended to the throne of Scotland after Mom,
who was married Queen of Scott's, advocated the throne. At
(24:53):
the same time, you have Elizabeth one, daughter of Henry
the eighth. She was a Queen of England and she
was Mary, Queen of Scott's, first cousin. Once removed. Go
forward a little bit to sixteen oh three, Elizabeth one dies.
Then James was King James one of England and King
James six of Scotland at the same time. Just making sense.
(25:18):
They have united the crowns of England and Scotland. Even
though they were separate kingdoms. They had separate parliaments, separate institutions.
It is a crown united with England and Scotland. Now
we have the birth of Great Britain that was in
seven Yeah, and man, everyone in the UK right now,
it's just saying like following along so closely, waiting first
to mess up. So after the union of the crowns
(25:41):
of England Scotland, it was a rough time. There were
different monarchs, there were a lot of wars. Eventually the
wars ended uh in sixteen sixty the monarchy rose restored,
and in seventeen o two Queen Anne became Queen of England,
Queen of Scotland and Queen of Ireland. It's very confusing
where well, Scotland was still independent, they still had their
own parliament, their own legal system. Uh. In seventeen o seven,
(26:03):
during Queen as Queen Anne's reign, the English and Scottish
parliaments passed separate Acts of Union, and on May first,
seventeen o seven, the kingdoms of England and Scotland ceased
to exist and were replaced by the Kingdom of Great Britain.
So now Anne as the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Okay.
(26:24):
So that means that while Anne was Queen, she was
the last Queen of England. Yes. And then after these
acts were passed in seventeen o seven, she automatically became
the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. That's right. Since
seventeen o seven it has been incorrect to call anyone
(26:44):
the king or Queen of England. Yes. Stories not over
yet gets more complicated. The next century, Ireland was separate,
separate kingdom. It gained its own parliament and then eight
hundred that all changed when Irish and British parliaments passed
separate Acts of Union, creating the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland one country eighteen o one. So it
(27:07):
was three separate kingdoms prior to seventeen o seven. Now
one kingdom ruled from London. The active Union passed an
eighteen hundred and it's still in force today, although there's
been amendments of course along the way. Then George the
Third at that time was the King of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It's even more confusing
because Ireland had their problems. Nineteen twenty two, they partitioned
(27:30):
off what was the Irish Free State and then eventually
the Republic of Ireland was created. In the nineteen twenty
seven the name was changed to the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland UH and at that same
time United Kingdom was removed from the title King. George
the Fifth, the king at the time, became King of
Great Britain and Ireland. Eventually, in nineteen fifty three, we
(27:53):
arrived at Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the grace
of God, the Kingdom of Right Britain, in Northern Ireland
and of her other realms and territories, Queen Head of
the Commonwealth, Defender of the faith man. So she's not
the Queen of England, Nope, not. You don't hear England
in that title. And then you know she also has
(28:14):
titles in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Jamaica. Yes, she's
the Queen of Canada. I didn't know all that stuff.
The Queen of Australia, yeah, And they're not the Queen,
not the Queen of England, no man. She's the Queen
of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
But the reason why she is the um the Queen
(28:38):
of England and the Queen of Australia is because there
was a treaty in agreement amongst these other countries and
Great Britain that basically said, you guys can go off
on your own, but keep the queen, will you. And
she's not the Queen of like you guys aren't part
of this territory, but keep her as your queen. So
(28:59):
she is, in addition to the Queen of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland separately, the Queen of Canada and the
Queen of Australia, but she assigns a governor to like
do all the work, right, and so she's strictly a
figurehead there. And the reason why she's strictly a figurehead
there is because in practice she's supposed to approve all
(29:21):
treaties and and all sorts of powerful legislation, but her
her agent never opposes the Parliament of Canada or Australia. Yeah. Man,
it's super confusing, but she's still the Queen of Canada
and the Queen of Australia. Back in the day, it
was a lot easier because the monarchs had absolute power,
well not absolute power, well remember the Pope could get
(29:44):
them or they could be subject to train aside. Yeah,
and basically they they had the last word, but they
had all these other people that were advising them. And
you don't want to make enemies of the people that
are taking care of your land and making you money
and raising their own private armies, because that's where the
taraniside can come in exactly. So you want to pretty
much kind of keep things copacetic as much as possible,
(30:07):
or you're gonna have the English Civil War yes, if
you're smart and not an inbred dingbat, you know, because
there are plenty of kings that ruled like complete nuts jobs.
And then those nobles too that we talked about, um,
that weren't royal but noble. They also formalized and the
dukes and bishops started evolving eventually into what became the
(30:30):
House of Lords, which is the upper house of British Parliament.
And even today the House of Lords is still made
up of several dozen of those hereditary nobles and a
lot of life peers that are appointed by the Queen.
And that's when you were talking about with you know,
she has to sort of balance it out politically with
these peerage appointments. And she still plays an enormously ceremonial
(30:52):
role in England. You know, she's a huge tourism draw.
She's the head of state, all that jazz. Yeah. Um.
But and in other countries the monarchies are are even
more ceremonial, like in Japan, the Imperial family UM the
heir to the um the emperorship. Sure, his name is
(31:14):
Prince he Saihido, and he recently got his um ceremonial
age six haircut really and more pants for the first time.
There's like apparently if you're from the outside, you're like,
what are these people doing? But this is like these
are traditions that are steeped back again to the sixth
century BC for this lineage, um, but they are strictly
(31:39):
ceremonial as a result of World War two treaties, it's
the same lineage. Yeah, yeah, remarkable, but then and supposedly
they're no longer deities. But if you're a Shinto in Japan,
you like view the emperor as the highest apex of
your religion and of you know, the monarchy is why
(32:00):
wow uh sometimes you it's it's not ceremonial at all.
Like in Jordan's they're a constitutional monarchy, and the king
of Jordan's um in this article they equated to the
US president. So they have appointments, appoint judges, they sign laws, um.
But they can be overruled by the National Assembly. But
they actually have a job to do. In Jordan, it's good,
(32:22):
good for them. Although it might be nice just to
be purely ceremonial. I bet that's a that's a cushy
life right there. I bet it wouldn't be very nice
for whatever transitional monarch lost power and now has to
just do whatever Parliament says. But yeah, I'm sure if
you're like Harry, he's having fun. Yeah, you bet he is.
(32:43):
Some of them, some royals are famous for not letting
all of this go to their head. Like apparently Scandinavian
royals are called bicycle monarchs. Just regular folks. Yeah, they
ride bikes. Yeah, I don't know about it's like everybody. Yeah,
they're not even expensive bikes, not bit. They're pretty nice.
But when you think royals typically you think like Sultan
(33:04):
of Brunei or um King of Monico and Princess Grace
Kelly and just incredible wealth for the British monarchs. Again,
that's a good will to go back to for this
one too. Yeah, let's go over a couple of these things,
because life is pretty good at Buckingham Palace two hundred
forty bedrooms in London, four hundred servants, not bad. That
(33:27):
seems excessive windsor q E two's family retreat eight thrones,
eight thrones among six d and fifty rooms, not bad,
but you mentioned it's a pretty good ratio. Brunei. Uh.
That is where things get really crazy. That is the
world's largest palace um almost eighteen hundred rooms and they
(33:49):
have a throne room tiled and solid gold and chandeliers
that cost twelve million dollars. Wow. They must be royal
in the Britannia, which um, I don't think they use anymore.
I wonder why not the royal yacht? Did they retire
it because it was wasteful? Do you know? No? I
(34:10):
don't know. Someone will tell us. I know that Jimmy
Carter sold the presidential yacht because he thought it was
wasteful and excessive? Did he really? Did he sell it
to private company? Really? That's kind of cool? Um? And
then the I guess we should talk about pretenders to
the throne. Yeah, that's an important thing. Um. That is
not someone pretending um to be king, although sometimes it's
(34:33):
a case. But a pretender is someone who uh doesn't
hold the crown but lays claim to it. They're saying like, hey,
that person is an illegitimate king. I should be king,
but I'm really just a sad pretender. That that happens
sometimes when like a monarchy is deposed. Okay, it doesn't
necessarily mean that there's somebody who's holding the throne, although
(34:55):
it can it can like there can be no throne anymore.
And this whatever family was in charge when the monarchy
was deposed is still keeping track of all this stuff
in case they can never go back. And whoever is
the king in that secession is the pretender to the throne. Okay,
I got you. That's the other way it can happen,
all right. Right for this break, we're gonna talk a
(35:17):
little bit more about what life is like if you
are a royal m m all right. So we talked
about some of the opulence, uh of the royals and
(35:40):
how they love to to show off their wealth and
stick your nose in it. You're a commoner. Um. These days, children,
if you're a royal child, you have all the best education.
But that wasn't always a case. They used to be
big dummies for the most part. Like they didn't even
want them to go to school or to learn military
tech dicks because they wanted them to just sit around
(36:03):
and eat you know, turkey turkey legs all day, don't
even worry about the book learning. Right, So you gotta
had a bunch of dumb royals back in the day,
dumb monarchies. Yeah again, um, Prince he Sahito is the
first in the Japanese Imperial family to go to an
elementary school rather than the specific school designed just for
(36:26):
the youngest kids of the royal family, like a school
of three people, yeah, or one at the time. Yeah,
that's private tutelage, right, yeah, I guess so, yeah, but
they call it a school if you're really young, like
sometimes you'll be a king and you're just a little
baby or like a like you said, like a little
little toddler. You're gonna be assisted by people called regents,
(36:47):
and they are going to be running the show for
the most part until the king or queen can come
of age. So chuck, here's the thing, um there. People
often take potshots at royal saying that they're genetically unsound.
It is true, apparently, um. Pretty much around the world,
(37:10):
royal families are fairly well in bred. It's because of
power consolidation over millennia, and so even if you had
let's say two or three royal families in a country
that were considered royal, but only one was in line
for the throne at the time, they might want to
(37:31):
kind of keep it amongst themselves. So even though they're
intermarrying between the families. It's still just basically like intermarrying
between three families. Yeah, and it's to keep the bloodline pure,
which has always struck me as odd because it's uh
results in some uh you know, disease and genetic defects
pretty much. Yeah, and and um like, apparently that's where
(37:53):
hemophilia came from. Yeah, and that was a gift courtesy
of Queen Victoria. Apparently. The reason why this happens is
you can't just say it's inbreeding. It's when you have
a narrower, shallow gene pool that you're pulling from, the
possibility of recessive genes appearing is increased. So if you
(38:17):
have two people who have both have a copy of
a recessive gene, that genes going to become dominant and
come to the forefront, and so a lot of stuff
that normally wouldn't pop up in a person when you
just are inter mingling in a normal sized gene pool,
you're gonna have a lot of problems because these people
all share the same genes roughly, and so recessive genes
(38:40):
are popping up in pairs. That's right, that's a big
problem actually. Yeah, and a lot of royals throughout the years,
and a lot of different countries have been um have
been mad. Yeah, you found an article on some mad
ones since Yeah, I picked out a few of these. Um,
King Georgia third, he was probably the most famous. Um.
(39:01):
The movie Madness of King George is in my top
one by the way. Oh yeah, great, great movie. So
I was listening to is it Keneth Durant who does
uh MPR movie reviews? I think? So? He did this
awesome like essay on on sequels and now there's an
art to naming a sequel, And he was saying that
(39:21):
the stage play originally was the Madness of George the Third,
but when they turned it into a movie in America,
they decided they need to rename it because they didn't
want American filmgoers to think that this was the Madness
of George three than that missed the first two. So yeah,
wow it's not interesting. Yeah, dumb Americans. Yeah, Madness of
(39:43):
King George. Uh he had all kinds of wacky behavior. Um,
supposedly attempting to shake hands with a tree because he
thought it was a King of Prussia. Didn't that sound
like something Mr Burns would do? Yeah, totally Uh these
days Um, you know, they tried and diagnose all the
people now with what they think they might have had.
And they believe he might have had schizophrenia, or maybe
(40:06):
he was bipolar, or maybe he had this blood disorder
called poor porphyria and that is hereditary and um, it
can mimic madness. And then you have Christian the seventh
of Denmark from seventeen eight seven to eighteen o eight.
He um had these wild mood swings, hallucinations, paranoia, self mutilation. Um,
(40:31):
he may have been schizophrenic and also may have suffered
from porphyria or porphyria. So that was another one. And
then more recently Farouk of Egypt. This one is my favorite.
In ninety six, Like you can find pictures of this guy,
which is kind of fun. Well, yeah, he was around
in nineteen thirty six. He loved his sports cars so
(40:52):
much so he loved his red sports cars. They he
decreed no one else was allowed to have a red
car in all of Egypt. Yeah, and he would apparently
shoot out the tires of people that passed him on
the road. And they think that he had misophobia, which
was a fear of contamination, so he would search for
germs and little imaginary bits of dirt and um. It
(41:15):
was also reportedly a kleptomaniac who may or may not
have stolen Winston Churchill's watch. So he was a little wacky.
Two I'd lied, Chuck. That guy was tied for first
from my favorite king Charles the sixth of France. Melissa's deal. Dude,
he was. He was pretty out of it. He um
apparently got very paranoid that people were after him, so
(41:38):
he murdered some of his own nights and he uh man,
I thought that he was made of glass and had
clothes made for him, special clothes. He wouldn't allow to
anyone to touch him um because he thought that he
would shatter. Actually, apparently he would forget he was king.
He didn't recognize his family. They're not exactly sure what
(42:00):
it is like all these guys. They diagnose the schizophrenia, bipolar,
right right. I think the most um, the most exact
one was missophobia for Farouk. Yeah, but the rest of
them is how do you diagnose somebody like that? Now?
You can't like hundreds of years later. It's tough. But
there have been some wacky mad rulers. There have some monarchs.
(42:23):
You got anything else? Yeah, this one last bit about crowns.
I learned this. I thought there was one crown that
was like, if you're the king or the queen, you've
got your one single crown. Yeah, that's what I thought too,
but that isn't true. Apparently they have different crowns worn
by their ancestors, and they even create their own for
(42:43):
special events like coronation. Yeah, where to have your own
crown or something made for you. Yeah, and you've heard
the term heavy ways to crown. They can be super heavy.
King William the Force coronation crown with seven pounds. That's
heavy crown. That is heavy. King George the Fifth had
a two pound crown with six thousand diamonds. But Queen
Victoria it was like that stuff. I want a little
(43:06):
light crown because that's obnoxious and it hurts my head.
I was trying to find. I have this idea that
um crowns were originally fashioned to um represent a halo.
So I don't know, I'm making it up. Oh gotcha,
but it sounds right because remember, like forever, monarchs has
been like remember I'm holy um. And the closest I
(43:30):
could find is that in pre Christian Rome. There was
a cult, a sun cult that I think a lot
of the Roman emperors were members of, and they would
wear crowns that look like the Statue of Liberties crown,
which emulated rays of sunlight. Ah, so that's what those
early crowns are based on. I like your theory. I'm
(43:53):
going with it. Statue of Liberty is a member of
a Roman sun cult. Well, no, I like the about
the halo. I'm just gonna start telling people it's true.
I think. Yeah, tell him Josh you, Yeah, tell him
Josh sent you. Yeah that I got nothing else? All right, Well,
if you want to learn more about royals, you can
type that word into the search part at how stuff
(44:13):
works dot com and it will bring up this excellent
article by Ed Grabmanowski. Yeah, the grab Store. Uh. And
since I said grab Banowski, it's time for listener. Now,
I'm gonna call this random number generation. We did our
show on number stations and random number number generation is
a key to the number station. This is from Aaron
(44:36):
in Toronto, Ontario, Okay, Canada. Hey guys, just listen to
your recent podcast and number stations. It was fascinating. Had
no idea what these words till you described them, gave
an example. Then I suddenly remembered scanning through the frequencies
on my little shortwave radio. I'm picking up some of
those trainsmissions. Never really thought about what they were and
what they meant at the time. I was too caught
up in thinking about where they were broadcasting from. Since
(44:59):
of vice has always had an accent, I wanted to
add a small detail about computers generating random numbers. Modern
computers are indeed capable of generating truly random numbers, but
often the random data is generated too slowly to be
of great use. So what they do is UH use
some true random data to see the high quality pseudo
(45:21):
random generator algorithm which can generate random numbers as quickly
as needed. But doesn't that make it less than random?
I don't know. It seems like every so often the
algorithm is receded from the true random source to keep
the sequences more random. While what you said is not wrong,
it was missing a bit of detail that those of
us who enjoy the nitty gritty details don't want to
(45:43):
be overlooked. Smiley face, Thanks for a great podcast. My
wife and I often listen to pass the time on
our two hour road trip to and from the cottage. Well, Aaron,
good for you for having a cottage. And I said,
you're coming to see us in Toronto for our lives.
He's like, I didn't even know. How do you not know?
(46:03):
And then he bought tickets and I think he's gonna come. Awesome. Yeah,
I'm very excited. Is it gonna be fun shows. If
you want to get in touch with Chuck and I,
you can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
stuff Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and as always,
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
(46:24):
Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody. Mr Chuck Bryant here, Charles w. That is,
if you want to know how royalty works, we can
sort of explain that. This is from Jeez about six
years ago, from September eleven. We talk all about royalty
and probably get about right. Welcome to Stuff you should know,
(00:25):
a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w. W W, Chuck
Bryant and Jerry. What's your problem? This is should know?
My problem is I got an eye twitch. Yeah, it's
a little weird. Okay, you can see it. Who can't?
(00:49):
My left eyes is going crazy? All right, it's I
think stabilized. Yeah it seems too. Yeah. Mitosis kicking in.
You're what mitosis? What kind of toasts you got? Uh?
Tosis is when you have a droopy eyelid. You know
I told you about that recently. You're like, you do
see that left eyelet is is more exposed. It's like
(01:11):
a forest Whittaker. I know what you're saying. I see that.
Like if I compare it to the other eyelid, I
can see more of your left eyelid, but it doesn't
appear droopy. I think that's the right term for it.
Tosis no droopy No, well it's tosas is a droopy eelid,
and I have it. I think it's a toasta highlid.
That's what you got, man. I was diagnosed and it's
(01:33):
uh apparently going to get worse. So who is it?
Forest Whittaker? Who else? I think Tom York of Radiohead,
Oh yeah, you're company. And I think Paris Hilton has tosis.
Oh yes she does, and me the four It's worse
when I'm sleepy or if I drunk. Yeah, I could
see that, but I'm never either one of those. So
(01:55):
so you're always fine. Yeah. I don't know why, stroop.
Are you drunk right now? That's good? Should not be
drunk while we do these? Chuck, it's too important, that's right.
So I've got an actual infro for this, oh man,
like the old days in my head. It could be
up to like twenty minutes long. So just sit back
and around perfect um, So chuck up. Until about nine
(02:19):
years ago, all humans walked around and gathered food and
followed herds of animals which they hunted and killed and
eight and on any given day, you eight what you
gathered and then you just kind of moved along to
the next spot. That was typically the way things were done.
(02:39):
They were called hunter gatherer societies. Then, during what's called
the Neolithic Revolution, people started selecting plants in their area
and realizing that they could replant the seeds from those plants,
and all of a sudden you had agriculture, which is
made things very stable, very stable, more stable tie people
(03:02):
to the land. But it also gave rise to something
that hadn't been around before, which was surplus. Because if
you're a hunter gatherer and all of your buddies and
family and friends or hunter gatherers, and you're all just
hunting and gathering just enough to sustain you for that day,
then there's no such thing as surplus. That means everybody's
pretty much equal. Maybe one guy takes mushrooms more than
(03:24):
the rest of you, so he's your religious leader or
something like that, but for the most part, everybody's roughly equal.
Now that there's a surplus, say somebody has a particularly
good bounty on the year where everybody else in the
area has a bad bounty. That person is in what's
called the position of power. Yeah, they have an advantage, Yes,
they do that happens a few times to the same people.
(03:47):
And if they are clever enough to consolidate that power
and have more and more kids in a larger and
larger kin group, at which they would if they're more powerful,
you know they're gonna have more kids, then they conform
what you would recognize today as a dynasty. And then
over time these people would say, you know what, this
(04:08):
is my birthright to rule you guys, to be rich.
I'm going to just say that I'm connected to the Sun,
which is our god that we worship, So by proxy,
I'm the Sun, God's ruler here on earth, which means
I'm in charge of you. And while you're at it,
(04:29):
give me some of your surplus, and all of a sudden,
now you have a king a kingdom. And this happened
roughly all around the world, independently, but following almost the
exact same course. You've got agriculture, you have surplus. You
have certain people consolidating power, rising to power, associating themselves
(04:52):
with gods to um to make their power that much
more stable and unchallenged, and then you have kingdoms. That's
what happened. Boom. Over time, these kingdoms did more and
more crazy stuff, but they all they all followed roughly
the same thing. Yeah. And if you're out in the
middle of a desert, you don't have a lot of
(05:13):
options to go other places, so that helps along the king, Yeah,
because you don't have any choice. Or if you're in
Peru there's a big mountain range there, kind of stuck. Yeah,
because you still need you know, your potatoes, you still
need your grain. Um. And if you can't move very easily,
if you're getting resources from being a member of a community,
(05:33):
then that explains why you, as this normal, independent minded person,
might go along with some guy saying he's a descendant
of the Sun God and you have to give him
half of your grain for no good reason. Yeah. Or
if you're in the Amazon where it's you're not surrounded
by desert or mountains and you can say, screw this guy,
I'm out of here, then you may be a little
(05:54):
slower to have something like a king, yeah, or maybe
not at all. And so all this whole mentality, this
whole process took place independently, like I said, the world
around and also everybody seemed to have come to the
same idea that you need to export this stuff. The
more power or the more land and there therefore the
(06:15):
more um crops or whatever you can get under your power,
more powerful you are. And the way to get that
is to get a bunch of guys who are sick
of farming and like to mess around with spears, to
go conquer some other cities and make those people give
you half of their grain. Then you become even more powerful,
so you export this kind of um mentality of being
(06:37):
ruled by a single person who's getting fat off of
taxing everybody else. And still today we have virtually all
of these same processes just in a different guys. Yeah,
and we should give credit to uh, Simon Powers, because
we didn't just make all that stuff up. No, as
the Simon Powers, the researcher or the writer, he is
(06:58):
really uh an author of the study that um kind
of looked at that theory that we've been talking about
and made a model that UM, I don't know if
it proved it, but made it seem pretty likely. Yeah,
why how despots arose during the Neolithic Revolution. Yeah, so
way to go, Simon Powers. And if you're interested in
that kind of thing, also go back and read Dr
(07:20):
Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake in the History of the
human race, which talks a lot about this transition and
basically argues that we were all better off as hunter gatherers. Yeah,
Dustin Diamond wrote the same article and it was the
answer was saved by the Belle the worst mistake in
the human race. Hey, that's a good show. Um, alright,
(07:41):
all the wrong way. You're right. So in this article
how royalty works, like, we're going to kind of default
to England. Yeah, here and there for the most part,
I'm sorry, great Britain. Well, we're gonna explain all that
stuff finally and for all, because that's, you know, that's
(08:01):
what we were exposed to. That's the kind of the
Western English speaking standard, the British monarchy. But you can
kind of substitute in a lot of ways. This this
um a lot of the way that it developed for
just about anywhere in the world. Because again, the idea
of hierarchies, of class, of social stratification and then some
(08:24):
group of people being at the absolute pinnacle is extraordinarily ancient. Yeah,
and it all comes down to land and owning land.
Since people have tried the earth, the most powerful ones
are the people that owned more of it than their neighbor. Yeah,
but not scessarily tried the earth. I mean we're talking
just in the last ten thousand years. And even after that,
(08:46):
the English didn't create them this idea that you could
take land and say this is my land. Now you
used to farm it, but you can still farm it,
but you owe me because this is my land and
I'm letting you farm on it. Yeah. And after everybody
was like, wait what, and you say, oh, I forgot
(09:07):
to tell you. If you don't do this, I'm gonna
kill you in your entire family. So do it. And
they created what's known as the feudal system. Yeah, let's
get in our our way back machine. Awesome, let's pull
the cover off this bad boy and let's go back
to oh like anywhere between the ninth and fifteenth century.
Let's do it because it doesn't matter. It's all about
the same. That's not true, but it's similar, uh to
(09:34):
the feudal systems of medieval Europe. Um. Basically what went
on was there were very few people that owned a
lot of the land, um a lot of territory. But
they basically looked around at one point and says, you
know what, I have too much stuff to govern on
my own. So I'm gonna divide it up and I'm
gonna let other people use it. And I call them vassals.
(09:56):
And you're my vassel. You're gonna go out and you're
gonna manage that territory for me, going to collect some taxes,
you can keep some of that. You can farm and
keep some of that. Well, they didn't farm, They had
people farming for them. Well, sure, so it's like a
hierarchy habit farmed. Like you can imagine all of England
is being owned by the king and then you divide
it up, and then those people further divided it up. Yeah,
(10:18):
because the vassal could divide their's up. And for sub
sub vessels, I guess serfs, Yeah, I guess so either
they're called um And you know, you guys, how about
raising some armies for me? Um, You're all gonna be
beholden to me, but I'm gonna let you keep a
lot of the dough, um, as long as you still
give me something. Yeah. And and prior to this, chuck like,
(10:40):
this is kind of a sweet deal. And the way
that you ended up in vassal is you had an
army that could conceivably challenge this guy who said I'm
a king of England and everybody and um, everyone said
where and he's like here this, this is England now,
and I'm the king. Uh. And so if you had
an army that he could probably defeat with his army,
(11:03):
but could still like pose a problem. He turned you
onto his side, sure, and said, well, wait before you
say anything, I'm going to give you. Let you handle
some of this land, like you said, and you can
get these people who are farming the land to give
you some of their grain. You give some to me,
but you keep some yourself. Yeah, you'll be like a
(11:26):
smaller version of me. Yeah, and we'll will be more
powerful together exactly. And that's how this hierarchy, at least
in under the feudal system began, that's right. And these vassals,
they had rules of succession a lot like inheritance. Um,
you could pass your your land onto your children and
(11:46):
then they would be a vassal. Yeah. You also passed
your obligation to the king onto the children too. It
wasn't just the sweet life. Oh no, no no, no, they
could you could never. You are always beholden as long
as you maintain that land, um, and it was the
same in other parts of the world. Japan had the
imperial system that was similar to the European monarchies, and
(12:10):
Japan's actually their monarchy is the oldest in the world.
Did you know that? Yes? I did. The Japanese imperial
family traces their lineage back to the sixth century b
c e. That's crazy, although they are purely ceremonial at
this point right well, yeah, but they were the exact
opposite of just purely ceremonial up until and uh g
(12:33):
I Joe came in and like said, you guys aren't
divine deities any longer, which is what everybody considered them
up until and check out my kunk fu grip. Uh.
So everything was going along well until about the seventeenth
century when republicanism began to uh kind of just chip
(12:54):
away at the royals and the power that they held
throughout Europe, and democracy starts to form, and sometimes it
happens gradually and kind of nicely. Sometimes it happens via revolution,
like in France, and uh sometimes when they would kick
out the monarchy, they would come back um with a vengeance,
(13:15):
like after the English Civil War between the Roundheads and
the cavaliers. Um, we had King Charles executed, his heir,
Charles two was exiled to France. Parliament gained a lot
of control, but they would later come back of course.
Charles the second, well, just the monarchy period, yeah, but
after that the monarchy just was never the same now,
(13:37):
although maybe under like Elizabeth, she was pretty powerful. Yeah,
but I think, um, Parliament had gained a lot of control. Yeah,
everybody after that point had to deal with Parliament before
anybody had. Under Charles the first, the same stuff was
going on in the Middle East. Um, it was a
little different though because religion was so much more a
part of uh, their their monarch's um they had was
(14:01):
it called a caliph? Yeah, was was the head? Uh?
I guess that would be the king, Yeah, I guess
so if you had if you compared it to like
the English model, the caliph would be the head, the
king of England, and then beneath them would be sultans,
which would be like vassals, which are powerful kings, but
(14:23):
they they are not the religious leader. So you got
the caliph and the sultans. Yeah, and sultans were like
military commanders but not priests, right, but they were involved.
Everything was all tied into religion still is of course. Yeah.
And then if you look at the Middle East model UM,
you know, very early on, like like look at Egypt,
(14:44):
all of the Egyptian UM rulers were considered deities up
until America said no, no, no. The Imperial King, the
Emperor of Japan was considered a deity of the Shinto
religion like a god um In in the Middle East,
the caliph is a religious figure. In uh, the Holy
(15:08):
Roman Empire, the king's ruled along with the pope. So
there's always been this real um marriage, either in the
form of one person or in the form of like
some sort of allegiance between the holy ruler and the
political ruler, because they the religious aspect of it gives
(15:29):
um credibility to the rule of the the political ruler,
and like like even in England they went so far
as to come up with the Divine Right of Kings,
which said, the king is God's emissary here on planet Earth,
and the king is therefore infallible. Nobody can get rid
(15:49):
of the king. But exactly, but I mean it ended
up been going on for millennia since before then. But
that was like they just put it down into text like, yeah,
that's that's the way it is. Unfortunately for the king,
that meant that the only way to get be gotten
rid of was to be murdered. Yeah, but they figured
(16:10):
it will be a pretty wild ride until then. Yeah,
I mean that's one of the risks when you're the king.
Uh So now you have you have royalty, you have
this class system. Royalty is actually transcends class because uh,
it's it's the bloodline like a noble. That's the differencetween
nobility and royalty is nobility. The nobles didn't have the
(16:31):
bloodline going. Yeah, it depends on the country that you're in.
So like in some countries, there are more than one
royal family, right, yeah, different houses, but just one of
them holds the throne at a time. Yeah, just one
of them has uh the ability to be the heir
to the throne um. So in other countries, it's like
(16:56):
there's one group of royals and they're the only royals,
and everybody, no matter how powerful, no matter their noble title,
they're still technically commoners exactly. They're they're almost always wealthy,
even though technically wealth doesn't have anything to do with
it because it's about your bloodline. But if you're if
you're in the monarchy, you're going to be wealthy. And
(17:16):
in some cases also they're considered an actual part of
their country. Yeah, they're that much ingrained into the national fabric.
So we said that, Um, in some countries there can
be more than one royal family and um, this kind
of comes into play when there's not a clear line
of succession. Yeah, things can get a little messy when
(17:38):
the king dies. So like if you have, um, what's
called an agnatic succession, that that means that the oldest
male heir inherits the throne. Yeah, and actually agnatic, uh,
it means your brother takes over and not your son. Okay,
So it's patrilineal. It's it's on the father's side, but
(17:59):
instead of giving the throne to your child, like your
firstborn son, it goes to your your little bro okay,
your oldest little pro Okay, got youa um. And then
in in other lines, it can be the oldest heir, right,
that's right, whether it's male or female, like how Queen
Elizabeth is the queen Now, yeah, you can be a
(18:20):
female heir Britain of course, so all of these people
are all related. They're part of the royal family. They're
either a sibling, a child, a grandchild, even a cousin.
But there's still a member of that family, which is
also known as the house. In a country where there's
more than one royal house and there's a dispute or
(18:42):
a problem with the succession the normal succession rights, then
you can have a challenge to the throne by another
royal house. Yeah, or it's just simply elected by a
committee of nobles. Maybe who that next king is going
to be? Yeah, Or if there's not a very clear line,
they can say, you know what, it's it's no man's
(19:02):
land here, and whoever ends up with the crown may
not even be a part of the bloodline. Maybe they
just had the best military or the most money, right,
And that's I mean, that's how original houses were set up. Yeah,
I mean the only difference between that situation happening now
and someone else's house, like taking control of the throne,
(19:23):
is they just descended to royalty, you know, millennia ago,
rather than right now. Yeah, all right. Titles, it's all
(19:48):
about the title. The very top of the chessboard. You're
gonna have your king and queen or an emperor empress,
depending on if that's the kind of game you play
in your country or your empire. Uh, then the elatives
are the king and queen. Um. It really depends on
the country in the monarchy. A lot of times their
princes and princesses can be your children, your grandchildren, could
(20:09):
be your brothers, could be your cousins. Um. It just
kind of varies depending on what country you're in. And
those titles are called peerages, and there's hereditary peerages, and
then there's life peerages. That's right, and um. The peerages,
as at least in uh in European royalty, go in
(20:32):
from an order of importance and from the lowest number
to the most number duke, marquess or marquis, earl, viscount
and baron. So the barons are at least powerful, but
there's the most of them, is it viscount. I've been
saying viscount my whole life. Viscount. It's all right, man,
(20:53):
everybody says viscount. Um. And then the dukes are the
most powerful, but there's the fewest of them. And so
if you have an hereditary peerage, you inherited that at
some point in time, some king or queen said, you
are now the Duke of blah blah bah, and you're noble,
but you are not royal, right exactly, so um, the
(21:14):
although you can be royal like I believe Prince Charles
is the Duke of Windsor, you know, yeah that man,
it gets confusing. It definitely does get confusing. It gets
even more confusing because when Prince Charles becomes King Charles,
the Duke of Windsor will vanish. That title will vanish
because he became king, which he'd much rather be king
(21:36):
than Duke of Windsor, you know what I mean. Yeah,
And that's called being absorbed into the crown by the crown.
The title can also just be left, like if there's
no air. You can also take it and give it
to another family, although I think that that probably is
subject to being approved by the queen or the king. Um.
And then there's a whole other cattle of fish called
(21:57):
life peerages, which basically says you are now a baron
or baroness while you're alive, right, And and then your
kids will still receive some sort of honor. They won't
receive the title, but they can call themselves the honorable,
which suggests that their parents had a life peerage, but
(22:17):
that that it wasn't a hereditary title, so the kids
don't inherit it. Yeah. And to add further confusion, a
prince isn't always the male child of the king. Sometimes
that is the king, um, sometimes it's just a noble.
When Britain ruled India, they made a very clear distinction that, um,
your rulers and your provinces in India, um are going
(22:41):
to be called princes, just so it's clear you're not
going to call yourself a king, which is bs because
India already had its own monarchy system, um, but now
they were all downgraded by the British. Yeah. Um. We
should also say that if you receive a peerage of
any sort it you are automatically a member of the
(23:02):
House of Lords, which is the upper chamber of British Parliament. Um.
And so it's part of them the duty of the
Queen to appoint these things, to appoint these peerages, but
in these modern times she wants to kind of appoint
them along party lines to make sure they're an appropriate
(23:24):
representation of everybody in the House of Lords. Yeah. And
you also get season tickets to uh men you games?
Do you know? I don't think so, I'll bet you do. Uh.
All right, So I guess we can move on to
the functions of these royals, because it really has varied
throughout the years and depending on which country, whether or
not your ceremonial figurehead or you're actually have real duties. Um,
(23:51):
and I guess it's well, let's just start with England. Okay,
So with England? Do you want to read her her
Majesty's full title? Should we get into this now? I
think we should, all right, because boy, we have botched
this over the years with saying Britain and England and
Great Britain and the UK. We're gonna set the record
(24:12):
straight here today because technically calling q E two, we
know her, we love her, calling her the Queen of
England is not correct now and it's pretty disrespectful to
some people. It is. And we're gonna explain this right now,
follow along with our little history lesson and a man,
(24:32):
I hope we get this right. Where did you find this?
By the way, Oh I found it on the internet.
I can't remember where it's all over. There's many different versions,
but um, here we got seven. You have King James
the sixth. He ascended to the throne of Scotland after Mom,
who was married Queen of Scott's, advocated the throne. At
(24:53):
the same time, you have Elizabeth one, daughter of Henry
the eighth. She was a Queen of England and she
was Mary, Queen of Scott's, first cousin. Once removed. Go
forward a little bit to sixteen oh three, Elizabeth one dies.
Then James was King James one of England and King
James six of Scotland at the same time. Just making sense.
(25:18):
They have united the crowns of England and Scotland. Even
though they were separate kingdoms. They had separate parliaments, separate institutions.
It is a crown united with England and Scotland. Now
we have the birth of Great Britain that was in
seven Yeah, and man, everyone in the UK right now,
it's just saying like following along so closely, waiting first
to mess up. So after the union of the crowns
(25:41):
of England Scotland, it was a rough time. There were
different monarchs, there were a lot of wars. Eventually the
wars ended uh in sixteen sixty the monarchy rose restored,
and in seventeen o two Queen Anne became Queen of England,
Queen of Scotland and Queen of Ireland. It's very confusing
where well, Scotland was still independent, they still had their
own parliament, their own legal system. Uh. In seventeen o seven,
(26:03):
during Queen as Queen Anne's reign, the English and Scottish
parliaments passed separate Acts of Union, and on May first,
seventeen o seven, the kingdoms of England and Scotland ceased
to exist and were replaced by the Kingdom of Great Britain.
So now Anne as the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Okay.
(26:24):
So that means that while Anne was Queen, she was
the last Queen of England. Yes. And then after these
acts were passed in seventeen o seven, she automatically became
the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. That's right. Since
seventeen o seven it has been incorrect to call anyone
(26:44):
the king or Queen of England. Yes. Stories not over
yet gets more complicated. The next century, Ireland was separate,
separate kingdom. It gained its own parliament and then eight
hundred that all changed when Irish and British parliaments passed
separate Acts of Union, creating the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland one country eighteen o one. So it
(27:07):
was three separate kingdoms prior to seventeen o seven. Now
one kingdom ruled from London. The active Union passed an
eighteen hundred and it's still in force today, although there's
been amendments of course along the way. Then George the
Third at that time was the King of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It's even more confusing
because Ireland had their problems. Nineteen twenty two, they partitioned
(27:30):
off what was the Irish Free State and then eventually
the Republic of Ireland was created. In the nineteen twenty
seven the name was changed to the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland UH and at that same
time United Kingdom was removed from the title King. George
the Fifth, the king at the time, became King of
Great Britain and Ireland. Eventually, in nineteen fifty three, we
(27:53):
arrived at Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the grace
of God, the Kingdom of Right Britain, in Northern Ireland
and of her other realms and territories, Queen Head of
the Commonwealth, Defender of the faith man. So she's not
the Queen of England, Nope, not. You don't hear England
in that title. And then you know she also has
(28:14):
titles in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Jamaica. Yes, she's
the Queen of Canada. I didn't know all that stuff.
The Queen of Australia, yeah, And they're not the Queen,
not the Queen of England, no man. She's the Queen
of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
But the reason why she is the um the Queen
(28:38):
of England and the Queen of Australia is because there
was a treaty in agreement amongst these other countries and
Great Britain that basically said, you guys can go off
on your own, but keep the queen, will you. And
she's not the Queen of like you guys aren't part
of this territory, but keep her as your queen. So
(28:59):
she is, in addition to the Queen of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland separately, the Queen of Canada and the
Queen of Australia, but she assigns a governor to like
do all the work, right, and so she's strictly a
figurehead there. And the reason why she's strictly a figurehead
there is because in practice she's supposed to approve all
(29:21):
treaties and and all sorts of powerful legislation, but her
her agent never opposes the Parliament of Canada or Australia. Yeah. Man,
it's super confusing, but she's still the Queen of Canada
and the Queen of Australia. Back in the day, it
was a lot easier because the monarchs had absolute power,
well not absolute power, well remember the Pope could get
(29:44):
them or they could be subject to train aside. Yeah,
and basically they they had the last word, but they
had all these other people that were advising them. And
you don't want to make enemies of the people that
are taking care of your land and making you money
and raising their own private armies, because that's where the
taraniside can come in exactly. So you want to pretty
much kind of keep things copacetic as much as possible,
(30:07):
or you're gonna have the English Civil War yes, if
you're smart and not an inbred dingbat, you know, because
there are plenty of kings that ruled like complete nuts jobs.
And then those nobles too that we talked about, um,
that weren't royal but noble. They also formalized and the
dukes and bishops started evolving eventually into what became the
(30:30):
House of Lords, which is the upper house of British Parliament.
And even today the House of Lords is still made
up of several dozen of those hereditary nobles and a
lot of life peers that are appointed by the Queen.
And that's when you were talking about with you know,
she has to sort of balance it out politically with
these peerage appointments. And she still plays an enormously ceremonial
(30:52):
role in England. You know, she's a huge tourism draw.
She's the head of state, all that jazz. Yeah. Um.
But and in other countries the monarchies are are even
more ceremonial, like in Japan, the Imperial family UM the
heir to the um the emperorship. Sure, his name is
(31:14):
Prince he Saihido, and he recently got his um ceremonial
age six haircut really and more pants for the first time.
There's like apparently if you're from the outside, you're like,
what are these people doing? But this is like these
are traditions that are steeped back again to the sixth
century BC for this lineage, um, but they are strictly
(31:39):
ceremonial as a result of World War two treaties, it's
the same lineage. Yeah, yeah, remarkable, but then and supposedly
they're no longer deities. But if you're a Shinto in Japan,
you like view the emperor as the highest apex of
your religion and of you know, the monarchy is why
(32:00):
wow uh sometimes you it's it's not ceremonial at all.
Like in Jordan's they're a constitutional monarchy, and the king
of Jordan's um in this article they equated to the
US president. So they have appointments, appoint judges, they sign laws, um.
But they can be overruled by the National Assembly. But
they actually have a job to do. In Jordan, it's good,
(32:22):
good for them. Although it might be nice just to
be purely ceremonial. I bet that's a that's a cushy
life right there. I bet it wouldn't be very nice
for whatever transitional monarch lost power and now has to
just do whatever Parliament says. But yeah, I'm sure if
you're like Harry, he's having fun. Yeah, you bet he is.
(32:43):
Some of them, some royals are famous for not letting
all of this go to their head. Like apparently Scandinavian
royals are called bicycle monarchs. Just regular folks. Yeah, they
ride bikes. Yeah, I don't know about it's like everybody. Yeah,
they're not even expensive bikes, not bit. They're pretty nice.
But when you think royals typically you think like Sultan
(33:04):
of Brunei or um King of Monico and Princess Grace
Kelly and just incredible wealth for the British monarchs. Again,
that's a good will to go back to for this
one too. Yeah, let's go over a couple of these things,
because life is pretty good at Buckingham Palace two hundred
forty bedrooms in London, four hundred servants, not bad. That
(33:27):
seems excessive windsor q E two's family retreat eight thrones,
eight thrones among six d and fifty rooms, not bad,
but you mentioned it's a pretty good ratio. Brunei. Uh.
That is where things get really crazy. That is the
world's largest palace um almost eighteen hundred rooms and they
(33:49):
have a throne room tiled and solid gold and chandeliers
that cost twelve million dollars. Wow. They must be royal
in the Britannia, which um, I don't think they use anymore.
I wonder why not the royal yacht? Did they retire
it because it was wasteful? Do you know? No? I
(34:10):
don't know. Someone will tell us. I know that Jimmy
Carter sold the presidential yacht because he thought it was
wasteful and excessive? Did he really? Did he sell it
to private company? Really? That's kind of cool? Um? And
then the I guess we should talk about pretenders to
the throne. Yeah, that's an important thing. Um. That is
not someone pretending um to be king, although sometimes it's
(34:33):
a case. But a pretender is someone who uh doesn't
hold the crown but lays claim to it. They're saying like, hey,
that person is an illegitimate king. I should be king,
but I'm really just a sad pretender. That that happens
sometimes when like a monarchy is deposed. Okay, it doesn't
necessarily mean that there's somebody who's holding the throne, although
(34:55):
it can it can like there can be no throne anymore.
And this whatever family was in charge when the monarchy
was deposed is still keeping track of all this stuff
in case they can never go back. And whoever is
the king in that secession is the pretender to the throne. Okay,
I got you. That's the other way it can happen,
all right. Right for this break, we're gonna talk a
(35:17):
little bit more about what life is like if you
are a royal m m all right. So we talked
about some of the opulence, uh of the royals and
(35:40):
how they love to to show off their wealth and
stick your nose in it. You're a commoner. Um. These days, children,
if you're a royal child, you have all the best education.
But that wasn't always a case. They used to be
big dummies for the most part. Like they didn't even
want them to go to school or to learn military
tech dicks because they wanted them to just sit around
(36:03):
and eat you know, turkey turkey legs all day, don't
even worry about the book learning. Right, So you gotta
had a bunch of dumb royals back in the day,
dumb monarchies. Yeah again, um, Prince he Sahito is the
first in the Japanese Imperial family to go to an
elementary school rather than the specific school designed just for
(36:26):
the youngest kids of the royal family, like a school
of three people, yeah, or one at the time. Yeah,
that's private tutelage, right, yeah, I guess so, yeah, but
they call it a school if you're really young, like
sometimes you'll be a king and you're just a little
baby or like a like you said, like a little
little toddler. You're gonna be assisted by people called regents,
(36:47):
and they are going to be running the show for
the most part until the king or queen can come
of age. So chuck, here's the thing, um there. People
often take potshots at royal saying that they're genetically unsound.
It is true, apparently, um. Pretty much around the world,
(37:10):
royal families are fairly well in bred. It's because of
power consolidation over millennia, and so even if you had
let's say two or three royal families in a country
that were considered royal, but only one was in line
for the throne at the time, they might want to
(37:31):
kind of keep it amongst themselves. So even though they're
intermarrying between the families. It's still just basically like intermarrying
between three families. Yeah, and it's to keep the bloodline pure,
which has always struck me as odd because it's uh
results in some uh you know, disease and genetic defects
pretty much. Yeah, and and um like, apparently that's where
(37:53):
hemophilia came from. Yeah, and that was a gift courtesy
of Queen Victoria. Apparently. The reason why this happens is
you can't just say it's inbreeding. It's when you have
a narrower, shallow gene pool that you're pulling from, the
possibility of recessive genes appearing is increased. So if you
(38:17):
have two people who have both have a copy of
a recessive gene, that genes going to become dominant and
come to the forefront, and so a lot of stuff
that normally wouldn't pop up in a person when you
just are inter mingling in a normal sized gene pool,
you're gonna have a lot of problems because these people
all share the same genes roughly, and so recessive genes
(38:40):
are popping up in pairs. That's right, that's a big
problem actually. Yeah, and a lot of royals throughout the years,
and a lot of different countries have been um have
been mad. Yeah, you found an article on some mad
ones since Yeah, I picked out a few of these. Um,
King Georgia third, he was probably the most famous. Um.
(39:01):
The movie Madness of King George is in my top
one by the way. Oh yeah, great, great movie. So
I was listening to is it Keneth Durant who does
uh MPR movie reviews? I think? So? He did this
awesome like essay on on sequels and now there's an
art to naming a sequel, And he was saying that
(39:21):
the stage play originally was the Madness of George the Third,
but when they turned it into a movie in America,
they decided they need to rename it because they didn't
want American filmgoers to think that this was the Madness
of George three than that missed the first two. So yeah,
wow it's not interesting. Yeah, dumb Americans. Yeah, Madness of
(39:43):
King George. Uh he had all kinds of wacky behavior. Um,
supposedly attempting to shake hands with a tree because he
thought it was a King of Prussia. Didn't that sound
like something Mr Burns would do? Yeah, totally Uh these
days Um, you know, they tried and diagnose all the
people now with what they think they might have had.
And they believe he might have had schizophrenia, or maybe
(40:06):
he was bipolar, or maybe he had this blood disorder
called poor porphyria and that is hereditary and um, it
can mimic madness. And then you have Christian the seventh
of Denmark from seventeen eight seven to eighteen o eight.
He um had these wild mood swings, hallucinations, paranoia, self mutilation. Um,
(40:31):
he may have been schizophrenic and also may have suffered
from porphyria or porphyria. So that was another one. And
then more recently Farouk of Egypt. This one is my favorite.
In ninety six, Like you can find pictures of this guy,
which is kind of fun. Well, yeah, he was around
in nineteen thirty six. He loved his sports cars so
(40:52):
much so he loved his red sports cars. They he
decreed no one else was allowed to have a red
car in all of Egypt. Yeah, and he would apparently
shoot out the tires of people that passed him on
the road. And they think that he had misophobia, which
was a fear of contamination, so he would search for
germs and little imaginary bits of dirt and um. It
(41:15):
was also reportedly a kleptomaniac who may or may not
have stolen Winston Churchill's watch. So he was a little wacky.
Two I'd lied, Chuck. That guy was tied for first
from my favorite king Charles the sixth of France. Melissa's deal. Dude,
he was. He was pretty out of it. He um
apparently got very paranoid that people were after him, so
(41:38):
he murdered some of his own nights and he uh man,
I thought that he was made of glass and had
clothes made for him, special clothes. He wouldn't allow to
anyone to touch him um because he thought that he
would shatter. Actually, apparently he would forget he was king.
He didn't recognize his family. They're not exactly sure what
(42:00):
it is like all these guys. They diagnose the schizophrenia, bipolar,
right right. I think the most um, the most exact
one was missophobia for Farouk. Yeah, but the rest of
them is how do you diagnose somebody like that? Now?
You can't like hundreds of years later. It's tough. But
there have been some wacky mad rulers. There have some monarchs.
(42:23):
You got anything else? Yeah, this one last bit about crowns.
I learned this. I thought there was one crown that
was like, if you're the king or the queen, you've
got your one single crown. Yeah, that's what I thought too,
but that isn't true. Apparently they have different crowns worn
by their ancestors, and they even create their own for
(42:43):
special events like coronation. Yeah, where to have your own
crown or something made for you. Yeah, and you've heard
the term heavy ways to crown. They can be super heavy.
King William the Force coronation crown with seven pounds. That's
heavy crown. That is heavy. King George the Fifth had
a two pound crown with six thousand diamonds. But Queen
Victoria it was like that stuff. I want a little
(43:06):
light crown because that's obnoxious and it hurts my head.
I was trying to find. I have this idea that
um crowns were originally fashioned to um represent a halo.
So I don't know, I'm making it up. Oh gotcha,
but it sounds right because remember, like forever, monarchs has
been like remember I'm holy um. And the closest I
(43:30):
could find is that in pre Christian Rome. There was
a cult, a sun cult that I think a lot
of the Roman emperors were members of, and they would
wear crowns that look like the Statue of Liberties crown,
which emulated rays of sunlight. Ah, so that's what those
early crowns are based on. I like your theory. I'm
(43:53):
going with it. Statue of Liberty is a member of
a Roman sun cult. Well, no, I like the about
the halo. I'm just gonna start telling people it's true.
I think. Yeah, tell him Josh you, Yeah, tell him
Josh sent you. Yeah that I got nothing else? All right, Well,
if you want to learn more about royals, you can
type that word into the search part at how stuff
(44:13):
works dot com and it will bring up this excellent
article by Ed Grabmanowski. Yeah, the grab Store. Uh. And
since I said grab Banowski, it's time for listener. Now,
I'm gonna call this random number generation. We did our
show on number stations and random number number generation is
a key to the number station. This is from Aaron
(44:36):
in Toronto, Ontario, Okay, Canada. Hey guys, just listen to
your recent podcast and number stations. It was fascinating. Had
no idea what these words till you described them, gave
an example. Then I suddenly remembered scanning through the frequencies
on my little shortwave radio. I'm picking up some of
those trainsmissions. Never really thought about what they were and
what they meant at the time. I was too caught
up in thinking about where they were broadcasting from. Since
(44:59):
of vice has always had an accent, I wanted to
add a small detail about computers generating random numbers. Modern
computers are indeed capable of generating truly random numbers, but
often the random data is generated too slowly to be
of great use. So what they do is UH use
some true random data to see the high quality pseudo
(45:21):
random generator algorithm which can generate random numbers as quickly
as needed. But doesn't that make it less than random?
I don't know. It seems like every so often the
algorithm is receded from the true random source to keep
the sequences more random. While what you said is not wrong,
it was missing a bit of detail that those of
us who enjoy the nitty gritty details don't want to
(45:43):
be overlooked. Smiley face, Thanks for a great podcast. My
wife and I often listen to pass the time on
our two hour road trip to and from the cottage. Well, Aaron,
good for you for having a cottage. And I said,
you're coming to see us in Toronto for our lives.
He's like, I didn't even know. How do you not know?
(46:03):
And then he bought tickets and I think he's gonna come. Awesome. Yeah,
I'm very excited. Is it gonna be fun shows. If
you want to get in touch with Chuck and I,
you can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
stuff Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and as always,
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
(46:24):
Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Good Hang with Amy Poehler
Come hang with Amy Poehler. Each week on her podcast, she'll welcome celebrities and fun people to her studio. They'll share stories about their careers, mutual friends, shared enthusiasms, and most importantly, what's been making them laugh. This podcast is not about trying to make you better or giving advice. Amy just wants to have a good time.