The People's Princess (with Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall)

Thanks to the popularity of the television series The Crown, a new generation has become captivated by Princess Diana—her life and her tragedy. She remains an enigmatic figure, undeniably captivating, for both her vulnerability and her power. To better understand her life, and her legacy, Dana speaks with Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes of the podcast 'You're Wrong About.'

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky. As you probably know,
I tend to shy away from Noble Blood episodes featuring
modern figures, not least of all because my aim is
usually to uncover stories that haven't been told yet. But

(00:21):
Princess Diana is a figure that looms so large in
her collective consciousness, defining people's understanding of what it means
to be a princess. It seems to me that in
some ways, the tragedy of her story emerged at the
tension between the modern and the traditional. Here was a
woman very much of the nineties, trapped in an archaic institution,

(00:45):
and here was a global population with a very traditional
obsession with the monarchy, with youth, with beauty, with power,
but now armed with modern tools cameras and helicopters and motorcycles.
The myths of Diana looms so large, especially in the
wake of her death and the conspiracy theories that surrounded her,

(01:08):
that for me, actually getting an understanding of the woman
beneath it all was daunting. And so today I've enlisted
the help of the brilliant Michael Hobbs and Sarah Marshall
to join me. They're the host of the podcast You're
Wrong About and they did a phenomenal five part series
on Princess Diana, and I am so excited to be
with them here today. Sarah and Michael. Hi, Hi, Hi Danta,

(01:32):
Hi Danna, thank you so much for being here. You're
very good at this. That was like more insightful than
anything we said on our show, Data making some good.
Mike's comments do not reflect my beliefs, but I do.
Sarah doesn't think I was insightful at all. I thought
that we I think that we're equally insightful, and then
I can compliment you without chipping away at my own work, um,

(01:55):
which is what I intend to do. Well. That was beautiful, though,
Thank you. I think that you were so insightful and
I listened to your five part series that I immediately
had to invite you on the show to to do
a Noble Blood crossover. For me, it was. It's challenging
because usually I work with the historical record, and like
with media and with Diana, media itself seems like I'm

(02:19):
like a character in the story. Yes, and there's like
overwhelmingly too many facts and too much information as opposed
to like, well, this is her hairbrush and this is
what we think she looked like. It's also such an
honor for you to ask us on because I hope
people know that you're our royal correspondent and you have

(02:39):
talked on our show about Marie Antoinette and Princess Anastasia. Um,
and this is Princess Anastasia. Correct, Yeah, she's she's okay.
See I'm already tripping up a little bit here. Um.
But anyway, you have been our royal correspondent for a
while now, and those are I think are some of

(03:00):
our best episodes, or at least my favorite that we've done.
This is this is just lovely. Well, I'm so honored
to then have you back to return the favor on Diana,
who especially I think, with the resurgence of the Crown,
has sort of re emerged in the in the public
consciousness as like a fashion Nike and I see influencers

(03:20):
now in bike shorts and sweatshirts. I think she's really
come back into vote. What what do you sort of
ascribe all that to the crown or do you think
there's another factor in sort of the public interest in
Diana re emerging. Mike, I was gonna have you taken
aligned woman correspondent. Yeah. I mean I think that the

(03:45):
crown the same way, maybe that the people versus O. J.
Simpson Dave gave people a point of entry into the
life of someone that they were willing to reassess or
assess for the first time if there's zoomers. So I
feel like this is is you know, Princess Diana died
in nine and so we now have a generation of

(04:05):
young adults who either have no living memory of her
or were born after her death, and so inevitably, at
some point people in that age group, I think, wanna
learn about what was happening right as they were entering
the world, and then also learning how previous generations of
media mishandled stories. I mean, I don't know, for me,

(04:27):
that was a coming of age thing. Michael, what about you?
When did your sort of when did you come online?
In terms of understanding Princess Diana's story about three months
ago and I started researching the series. I mean, a
lot of the feedback that we've gotten from people are like,
you know, I I liked the series in spite of

(04:48):
the fact that I have no particular interest in the
British Royal family, and I think that's like where me
and Sarah came to it from, Like neither one of
us are particularly like into the British Royal family or
I'm also into royal history, but like I really have
never like when William and um, what's her face, Kate,

(05:09):
I guess see when they got married. I knew people
who got up at one in the morning to watch it,
and I was like, I'm going to read about it
on Inside Edition dot com the next day because I'm
interested and I want to see the outfit and the
pictures and everything, but like, I'm not invested, Like I'm
invested in the tutors, but you know, being invested in
people who are living their lives in front of you
right now seems weird and it'll break your heart, something

(05:33):
that I kind of thought because I'm sort of on
the periphery of that of like, really I am interested
in the British Royal family just sort of has a
power structure and like the historical legacy of that. But
I found that Americans who woke up at like one
in the morning to watch that it was sort of
like they wanted the pageantry of like an excuse to
get dressed up and eat scones. Like they used the

(05:55):
British Royal Family as mascots as like like Derby Day
or something. Yeah, Like it was just like a bag,
which I think that speaks to the larger picture where
they're more symbols than people. It's like they are an
excuse to like play fancy British, which is a very
fun thing to do, right, and speculate on someone having
or perhaps not having a baby, and then what kind

(06:17):
of baby, and then when will we see the baby,
a good or a bad? A good or a bad baby,
what will the baby be wearing? How is the baby looking?
And it's like look at your own babies. Yeah, it's
it's very much that they become mascots, at least to me,
like modern living day mascots more than people. Yeah, And

(06:38):
that's kind of what makes it such an exploitative system.
I mean, as we talked about in the show, there
are a million reasons economic, political reasons to get rid
of the Royal Family, which like everyone kind of knows
those arguments and they know the counter arguments and you
can play that debate out. But to me one of
the most compelling reasons why the Royal family is bad
is just that it's a massive human rights violation to

(06:58):
make people be in this as dum and Diana is
an interesting sort of vessel for that argument, because she
wasn't part of the system and then she gets sucked
in and you see all of the injustices. Yeah, and
then a story on a lift. And it seems to
me that Diana was very bad at being the quiet,

(07:22):
non speaking mascot side of of being a royal because
her sort of personhood kept jumping out, yes exactly. That
she understood the needs and the nature of modern celebrity
in a way that the Royal family, because, as Tina
Brown talks about in her book, they basically have the
social morays of Britain thirty forty years ago. Like whatever

(07:43):
Britain was doing years ago, that is, like their table manners,
that is their etiquette for dinner, table conversation. Everything is
a couple of decades old. And Dianna came in. I
mean she grew up in a reasonably she grew up
in a royal adjacent household, so it's not like she
was some complete common folk, but she would least had
something resembling the modern morays of British society. In the

(08:05):
night she rude the tube right like she could, Yeah,
like she knew what actual life was. The juxtaposition of
what she understood celebrity to be and the kinds of
celebrities that they thought they were is what makes the
story so fascinating and also so sort of comical that
over and over again Princess Diana is just like you,

(08:25):
people are acting insane. What are you doing? And because
everybody around her is either in the royal family or
these sort of footmen of the royal family like part
of that system, they're constantly just like gaslighting her, like
why would you want to go visit an AIDS ward?
Why are you doing this? And she's like because I'm
a good person, Like why am I getting yelled at?
What is the reason? And there's a story where she

(08:45):
was rushing to see a friend who was dying of
AIDS at the time, and they were like, you can't
leave because blah blah royal product. Yeah, you don't leave
moral on a Saturday. Yeah, And it's like you you
mustn't leave, and you must curtsy to the queen seven
times and then face west and curtsy twelve more times
or what like, there was this weird protocol and they're

(09:05):
mad at her that she left to go literally see
her friend on his deathbed. And it's one of those
things where you just you can very easily put yourself
into her shoes and be like, why am I getting
yelled at for this? This is out So here's my
hypothetical question. And not I'm not on the side of
anyone in this. I mean I'm on Diana's side because
I think that's she's a normal human being. Yes, but

(09:27):
Queen Elizabeth's sort of like non personhood has led like
longevity for the for the crown. You don't shine right,
you shine for a long time. You just you. You
can't be a flare because flares then go down. You
just have to sort of stay at the medium level
this whole time. Is there something to be said for

(09:48):
this idea that like if Princess Diana had lived, that
people would have turned against her just because figures who
are not volatile but just a exist at all, like
women who exist in any capacity with a personality and
with flaws, like the media eventually tears them down, like
does the does the crown. No sort of that. In

(10:10):
order to survive this long, you just have to do
nothing basically, I mean she she would have carried on aging,
so yes, um. I also like that you describe Queen
Elizabeth's career as like the oil at Hanakah. Yeah. I
think that, I really do think that is sort of
what the role is to do, say as little as

(10:33):
possible and just continue on as like a steady yeah yeah.
And that well, and that also reminds me of um
speaking of the only way to age gracefully, or the
only way to age in a way that the public
accepts and doesn't get mad at you about. I think,
at least historically and probably now, you just have to

(10:54):
do a Greta Garbo and disappear right, don't exist, and
then no one will yell at you for getting older
or for getting older in the wrong way, because every
way is the wrong way. When Greta Garba was in
Queen Christina, there's a final shot where she's on this
boat that's carrying her away from the man that she
loved who's now dead, and she's abdicated from the throne.

(11:15):
And in real life she was probably a lesbian, but
who cares and you know she's going toward her destiny.
And the direction that she got for how to play
the scene was like, just have your face be completely blank,
Just think of nothing, try to amount nothing, because then
people will project ship onto you and it'll be perfect.
And that's what that ending shot is. And I feel

(11:38):
as if that applies to the career of Queen Elizabeth,
both as a female celebrity and as a ruler with
a kind of power. But I'm curious about the nature
of her power, and I would love to hear about
what kind of power you think she had throughout her
career and also as a public figure during World War
Two as a pretty young person. Um. But I feel

(12:02):
as if, yeah, looking at her, that model seems to
have worked, which is that you you do as little
as possible, and you also are as little as possible,
because the more people are seeing their own ideas of
you when they look at you, the more merciful they
will be. Perhaps I also think that if if you

(12:24):
do anything and have a personality um that is anything
beyond like us weekly idiosyncrasies, people will be like, why
the hell are we bowing and putting a crown on you?
A human person, Like, why am I bowing to a person? Yeah,
I think Queen Elizabeth probably probably understand how silly the

(12:47):
whole institution of monarchy is. And if you act quote
unquote relatable like Diana did, it's like a princess can't
be relatable because why would people bow to just like
the girl next door. It's like they're rumbling the entire
thing if people realize that Diana and therefore the rest
of them are people. So I'm interested a little bit

(13:08):
in um going back and and talking a little bit
about her biographical information. When I was a child, my
only understanding of Diana was a purple beanie baby that
half that came out when she died. I had that too,
And I always thought, just as in my childhead, like
when that she was the people's princess, that she was

(13:29):
a commoner. But she was. Yes, I totally thought people's princess,
like she must be reasonably normal person. And she met Charles,
like maybe they went to college together and they bumped
into each other at the quad or something like that
was sort of narrative that I constructed in my head.
She was working at like a charming notting Hill bookstore

(13:50):
that would have been great. So Michael, who was she?
But I mean she grew up like the Royal family
was her next door neighbor growing up. And because they're
on these kind ree estates next door neighbor me they
lived like miles away because they both had these like
massive estates with like deer that they're hunting running around.
But she went over to their house. She they would
come over to her house for various things. They were

(14:11):
sort of in each other's orbit. Her great aunt was
this sort of scheming royalist person who was like trying
to arrange these marriages. Like she was very much a
part of the royal system. And her dad was the
Earl of something and wait um, and her dad was
the Earl Spencer, not the Earl of Spencer, which is

(14:33):
important for some reason. Spencer's fancier yes or something yes.
And so she grew up in this royal system and
she actually one of the only commonalities that she ever
had with Prince Charles, like one of the only things
that would have helped them get along is that they
both had these very similar childhoods where they had all
this material wealth. You know, they had servants, they had

(14:55):
amazing meals, they had horseback riding lessons, etcetera. But just
they were completely immo sationally bereft that both of them
had these parents that were absent and obsessed with protocol.
Princess Diana's father would eat by himself in his sort
of study and then the kids would kind of scrounge
for food in the kitchen and it's just you read
this stuff and you're like why. It's like, why not

(15:18):
just be with your kids for the night, But like
that wasn't done, especially if you're a man, and he's
like a single father is for commoners. And so she's
kind of raised by these random nannies who keep quitting
because she's like really shitty to them, so they keep
leaving and it's they're going to jump in the sack

(15:39):
with her dad, right, yes, And so she has this
sort of rotating string of you know, women in their
early twenties who don't last that long. Her mom is
living in London. They sort of go off to visit
her mom after they get divorced, and this is like
the closest thing to normalcy that she has. But she
really has this like very emotionally empty upbringing, and this

(16:01):
is something that like you never really get over just
the fact that your parents aren't really there in any
meaningful sense for most of the time that you're growing up.
And her parents being divorced, I think is a factor
that might have been in her mind as like a possibility,
where I think maybe for Charles that's just like not
a thing that is done. Yeah, I mean, these people

(16:23):
don't really exist in any sort of normal institutions. It's
actually very strange for parents to get divorced and then
the father to get custody. He's very odd that Princess
Diana's father gets custody. But the reason is because he's
the Earl Spencer something something. The courts are just like,
oh yeah, he's royal. He gets whatever he wants, Like
oh okay, like this is this is all the ways

(16:44):
of this system has these weird little tentacles in this
sort of official justice system that her mom never really
has a chance to get custody of Diana and her brother.
That's a weird thing of the weird juxtaposition between modernity
and this yes and to equated system that doesn't make defensible,
system that makes no sense. And of course the minute

(17:04):
that he gets custody He's like, Okay, you're both now
going off to boarding school because like, I really want
my kids. I want to take them away from my
ex wife, but I don't actually want to see them,
so I'm going to send them off to boardings. Well,
he couldn't trust her to send them to the right
boarding school. I guess I think you're being hard on
this guy. I find it fascinating that Prince Charles actually

(17:26):
dated Diana's older sister before he dated Diana. How long
and involved was that relationship. This was like very much
foreshadowing for what happens with him and Diana that they did.
I believe it's a couple of months. But the reason
why he stops dating her sister is her sister talks
to the press. She has this fateful lunch with a

(17:49):
journalist where she's just like eating fries, hanging out chatting
and right, yeah, and so she ends up telling this
journalist like, I don't know if Wherever gonna get married,
and I don't know, you know, I'm still kind of
figuring it out. And you know, I don't really care
if he's the King of England or some janitor off
the street. I'm not into him or whatever, And then

(18:11):
the Royal family reads this and they're like, did she
just compare Prince Charles to a janitor? And how dares
you imply he would ever do a day's work in
his life? And so they completely cut her off, and
so years go by before he sort of reconnects with
Diana and then he's like, oh, didn't I meet you once?

(18:33):
But this is a sign of like how much the
Royal family had too much spin it? Yeah, did you
look a little more broken in? You know? And he's
holding a crop. To me, It's astonishing how young she
was when they got together. There, What was she nineteen?
And he's thirty two. As someone who's thirty two at

(18:56):
this moment, that's weird. Can you imagine hanging with a
nineteen year right now? I can't imagine marrying one, Mike,
I can imagine hanging out with a nineteen year old,
making them dinner and gently slipping in life advice in
a in a covert way. Can I imagine having a
relationship with one? No? Oh my god. And I'm like,

(19:18):
we're just talking about the power differential of life experience
and being like kind of more established and not being
a member of the royal fucking family. And there's also
this thing. I mean, I would think about the fact
that both of them, in the weeks leading up to
the wedding, we're crying and trying to back out of
it and basically Telean Sophie and Peep show Sure, I'm sorry,

(19:44):
I don't. I don't. Yeah, go on, Uh, I've not
seen the show. So Sarah keeps bringing it up every time.
I'm like, okay, you really keep forgetting you haven't seen it.
I'm sorry. It's one of four shows I've seen in
my life, like all the way through, Dana, I've seen it,
and I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, it is. It's

(20:05):
a lot of crying and like, at one point, the
guy a character who's getting married Mike, He's like just
tries to get hit by a car, but he's like
too passive to really start a fight, so the guy
won't hit him with his car. He just swears at him.
This is Charles. This is exactly Charles. A couple of guts.
He doesn't really have the guts to truly back out

(20:27):
of this, and he knows that this is his sort
of country royal whatever duty stuff, and so he kind
of sleep walks into this marriage, and also Diana sleepwalks
into this marriage, and it's just like everyone around them
sort of knows that it's a bad idea, but there's
this idea of like, you know, it's it's what's done.
Or one of the big things at the time is
that if he doesn't marry Diana, it's like, well, there's

(20:49):
nobody else, Like she's the last one because she has
to be sort of royal adjacent. She has to be
sort of lord whatever titled, and she also has to
be a virgin, which is outrageous, and she has to
sort of look the part and sort of have this
trophy ish kind of personality, and literally part of the
argument is like there's no one else. There's no one left.
He's dated everybody else, and everyone else, like Camilla has

(21:12):
like had sex and like seems to maybe enjoy sex
with other human beings, and like she's obviously ineligible for this.
So he has to marry this person who like he
doesn't like that much and she doesn't like him, so
he dated. Like how big of a pool is this really?
Like hundreds? My understanding is that there's two sort of
theories of this. One is that he was kind of

(21:33):
a playboy for these years. You know, he's thirty two, right,
so that's a lot of years in which he can
be dating people, and so he has a lot of flings,
and there's sort of women getting payoffs and n d
a s to sort of disappear into the night. There's
this as a rumor, But then other sources will say
that all of this playboy stuff was something that was
deliberately constructed by the royal family to make him seem
like an eligible bachelor. He wasn't actually doing this. All

(21:56):
loads and loads of women would date Prince Charles and
have flings with Mike. Well that's we don't We don't know, so,
like I know, I guess I think both theories are
plausible because like it's hard to know how charismatic someone
is unless you meet them when they're like twenty nine
or whatever, Like we can't go back in time and know.

(22:16):
But like it's yeah, I feel like it's a combination
of Like I guess a lot of people would date
the prince no matter what he looked like, Like there's
only you know, the whole country. My hypothesis based on
just your interpretation and what I feel like is both
factors that he is not charismatic and not charming but

(22:37):
a playboy because people want to sleep with the future
King of England and he kind of knows it in
the back of his mind. I feel like he has
this deep seated insect of like, I know, people kind
of only like me because I'm the here to the throne.
But maybe you do know they're forced to like you,
and maybe that's a kind of confidence. I don't know, Mike,

(22:58):
I'm sorry, going That's the thing. I don't know to
what extent these people know how artificial their lives are.
Because if you've grown up your entire life in that system,
Prince Roles has never had a friend who didn't know
acutely that he was going to be the king one day. Right,
So all of your relationships, ever, every small talk conversation
you've ever had in your entire life, is with somebody

(23:18):
who knows that you have more power than them or
will in the future, and so there's nothing to compare
it to. Right Like, if if any of us sort
of got into the royal family and all of a
sudden people were treating us differently, we would understand that
as different, but He's just like, Oh, I guess everyone
just sucks up to you all the time. And that's
what being alive is like. It's that they would have
any idea that this is extremely strange. Well, it's like

(23:39):
how the super rich in America, you know, we have
the like affluenza defense, which I forget what that is
supposed to refer to. But I do think there's kind
of I don't know if it's insanity, but you're like,
you are less connected to reality when you grow up
extremely wealthy, because like the material world has fewer consequences.
Your parents like whisk away problems and have them from you.

(24:00):
Probably you can just buy your way out of seemingly anything.
And I do feel like you might just persist in
the idea that the world is a soft play area
until it's too Yeah. Yeah, you know what I always
think of. I always think of Gwyneth Paltrow did that
abysmal movie Shallow How which that suit and one day
the director made her walk around in a fat suit,

(24:22):
sort of live as a fat person. We were talking
about this on Oprah like experiment, Yes, yes, And the
thing that she said on Oprah that I cannot get
over is She's like, I would walk into a room
and no one looked at me, which is like, that's
that's the experience of like not being a super hot
blonde lady. At this point, she's famous for years and year,

(24:44):
the daughter of blythe Stanner, famous for her entire life,
Like she just has no idea what it's like to
walk into a room and no one really notices what,
which is the experience of like nine percent of humanity
every time you walk into a room. But that's never
happened to her, So that, to me is fascinating that
she just doesn't understand what the experience of a non famous,

(25:05):
non hot, non blonde person would be. And I think
she was blonde still, but aside from every everything else
is different though. Okay, so here's I also think, like
a question that like as a child, I didn't couldn't
quite wrap my head around. Princess Diana is beautiful and
seems cool and fashionable and charismatic. Why doesn't Charles like her?

(25:31):
You know, like why he really seems to resent her
and just like doesn't like her on like a fundamental
person level, and yet everyone else fell in love with her.
How did what do you ascribe that disjoint too. I mean,
I think so much of it is just they're just
fundamentally mismatched as people. The age thing is part of it,
and because of the age, I don't think he ever

(25:52):
sort of understands the extent to which age plays into this.
But he always sees her as frivolous because she's not
a sort of an into lectual. She's she's had used. Well,
that's the thing. I mean, so much of his sort
of self conception is of himself as sort of like
a thought leader. He's always been somebody who wanted to
be more outspoken than his mother was. He takes policy

(26:15):
stances on issues very early, and he's always thought of
himself as like doing very innovative philanthropy, and he wants
to talk about you know, big global issues like overpopulation,
even though like that leads to some really gross areas eventually.
Sona and I both made the same face when he
said that, just like just early stage. Yeah, yeah, I

(26:39):
mean he really thinks of himself he again, because he
doesn't understand her privilege. He is, he doesn't understand all
the factors that play into why people treat him the
way that they do. He thinks that he's this like
intellectual and so there's this really interesting moment on one
of their first royal visits when they're in Wales and
they go and they do the sort of shaking hands
thing and they do the line and she's on one
side and he on the other thing, and then he

(27:01):
goes and he gives like an hour long speech about
like the social issues facing Britain. And he works on
the speech for days, and he thinks that it's going
to be like a real sort of coming out moment.
I'm going to promote all these interesting ideas, and it's
nowhere in the papers. Nobody gives a ship, and all
on the coverage the next day is what is Diana wearing?
What did Diana say to people in Wales? Diana made
like a three or four minute long speech. What did

(27:23):
she say? And his sort of ideas, what he considers
these really innovative ideas are just completely ignored in favor
of her quote unquote frivolous nonsense like what her fault. Obviously,
of course she works at all the newspapers and writes
all these pieces and she gets the pictures of Spider Man.
I mean, I also I'm like, when I hear our
lying speech, I'm like, of course, Charles doesn't realize that

(27:47):
nobody wants an hour lying speech on anything, and that
the beauty of a three to four minutes speech that
probably is what he considers frivolous, is that people can
follow it. I mean the Gettysburg addresses like two minutes
right famously, and what was Lincoln wearing? We talked about
that a lot too, and he was a pretty good guy.
You know. It's also kind of interesting because Michael, you

(28:08):
brought up like what actually is the power of the
royal family, And to be honest, like in Charles defense,
whether or not he's a smart person, he's not like
a politics professor at Oxford. He has no special expertise
in this. Their real power is doing what Diana was
really good at, which was bringing attention to things, yes,

(28:29):
and like connecting with people. And you know, even the
thing he always considered it very frivolous, the way that
she would, you know, go to homeless shelters and talk
to homeless people and sort of connect with them seem
like a cartoon villain. Well, this is the thing is
because it's it's not sort of linked up to policy,
it's not linked up to sort of broader social change.
If you really want to solve homelessness, you don't need
to visit homeless shelters. You need to sort of change

(28:50):
the policy and change the funding and get private sector
investment blah blah blah. And what she understood is that
like that's not really her job. Like what she does
when she goes to a the shelter, she is actually
bringing attention to the issue of homelessness. And he never
actually understood it that you can actually do policy in
this like back doorway by just deciding which issues to

(29:11):
bring attention to. I mean, the tragedy is they could
have made a in theory, are really good team I
know doing that if he if he wasn't threatened by
her and could harness and work with her power. Dana.
I'm curious about the parallels you see to Marie Antoinette,
because this is something that I always think about when
we're talking about Diana, which is like, here's someone who

(29:33):
you know grew up in this world, but not in
exactly this world, and who grew up, you know, riding horses.
I guess Charls wrote a lot of horses growing up
but who who wasn't expected to be important basically and
then married someone who was almost defined by social awkwardness
and just could never fit in somehow because she was
too good at what no one wanted to admit her

(29:55):
job was. Yeah, I find the parallels really ear especially
because like from all the records, Marie Antoinette was really
good about poverty and like poor people on the ground level.
She quote unquote I used the word adopted because that's
the words that they used at the time, like adopted orphans,

(30:16):
which meant like paid for their funding, but specific people
like she didn't enact big policy changes about like the
poverty structure in France, but like literally if she was
in her carriage on the side of the road and
she saw a child on the side of the road,
she stopped her carriage and it was like, I'm gonna
pay for your funding for the rest of your life,
which sort of is like the the Diana approach, which

(30:39):
is like do this on the on the micro level,
not the macro level. The soft heart be in the
world and the husband is like, no, we can fix everything,
and it's like can you though, But that's just I mean,
I don't blame Marie Antoinette for doing anything wrong, because
it's sort of like what you described, like that just

(31:00):
all she was born and new and cared about like
you can't the last thing a fish can describe as water.
And it's the unfortunate timing of like people being racist
to Austrians and and people painting the monarchy at that time,
where it's like, I think if people, fundament if the
temperature of England was hating the monarchy at the time,

(31:20):
people would not have been short of finding reasons to
hate Diana. Yeah, there's also the thing. I mean, they
were in this weird place where sort of different people
understood Charles and Diana's marriage as different levels of arranged.
So if they could have just agreed on the fact, look,
we're not a love match, we're never going to be
in love, but we could actually make a pretty powerful

(31:44):
and impactful royal couple together, and so let's just do
our duties and Diana will be on the front end
shaking hands and Charles will be on the back end
like bilking rich people for money to fund policy initiatives.
Find they could have easily done that, but that would
require both of them to be nest about what the
marriage was, that it wasn't a love marriage, and it
seems like he has too much of an ego to

(32:05):
ever want to be the behind the scenes person exactly,
and so he wanted one of the really foundational things.
And it's very easy to forget, is it. Before Diana
came along, Charles kind of was the Diana that there's
this famous trip to Australia before he starts dating her,
where he goes and he shakes hands and he does
these events and thousands of people come out. He was
seen as a sort of the young, authentic, likable one,

(32:28):
which on the scale of sort of everyone else in
the royal family, he absolutely was. He was very charismatic
compared to you know, Prince Philip, for God's sake. But
then of course once Diana is around, it's like you've
you've upgraded, like from a Honda to like a sort
of yeah exactly. And so he all of a sudden, kids,

(32:48):
do you want to take the Honda out again? And
they're like, well, she she she broke the curve, right,
And so he had the sort of glimpse of himself
as the sort of the likable one, the normal one,
the face of the new royal family and then he's
just completely buried under all of the coverage of Diana.

(33:09):
And so he again, if he was able to be
honest about this, like what are my strengths, what are
my weaknesses, this all could have worked out. But neither
one of them were able to admit what was really
going on. And you know, she still had this myth
in her head that it was a love match, right
like she she thought it was a fairy tale romance,
and she kept trying to get back to that. And
he always thought of it as a little bit more
wrapped up in duty than she did. And so the

(33:32):
just the different expectations of her and him and his
miserable family really what made it just completely unworkable. Uh
do you do you think the public at the time
viewed it more like a fairy tale. It seems like
the merchandizing at the time was following that narrative like
plates and stuff. Uh, well, Mike, I'm actually curious, like,

(33:56):
do you know how much money this union generated just
in terms of you know, memory billion tourism and stuff. Oh,
there's probably like a PhD written about that, because you
come across figures when you were researching no, because it's
so hard to do the direct versus indirect. It's one
of the arguments against getting rid of the royal family
is always that it would affect tourism. So some percentage

(34:17):
of tourism is generated by like visiting the Buckingham Palace
and like going to see all the royal sites, etcetera.
And so people wondering the guards, right, everyone wants to bother,
and so some percentage of sort of visits to Britain
would have been arranged around their wedding and it would
have spiked slightly in the months afterwards. Like there's all

(34:39):
these sort of very difficult to measure effects of this,
but it would be in the sort of probably in
the billions eventually. I mean, the the amount of stuff
that you could buy with their faces on it. I
mean people have been sending us like like my mom
and her cupboard has you know this like dollhouse that
was like an official royal family thing, or like towels
and plates like just murt was nuts. Yeah. Yeah. And

(35:04):
and also I feel as if they were considered important
for the morale of the country, right, yeah, like what
like who will we look up to? Who is a
positive figure, like we're having a bad time economically, UM,
like we need this, you guys, Like, I feel like
that's kind of the I don't like. Just from what

(35:26):
we've talked about in this series, I feel like that
was a feeling that was present. I'm also now wondering
because we guess recorded an episode on John Delorian, who
had to negotiate with Margaret thatcher Um at one point
in his career because he was manufacturing in Belfast. I
was like, did he ever, you know, maybe meet the

(35:46):
Charles and Diana seems possible that Peter Morgan's going to
figure it out if they did. I feel like I
would show up in a DeLorean deep dive more than
Charles and Diana deep dive because they met every buddy.
But yeah, and I mean it's funny. I was just
watching Muriel's Wedding, which has a scene where the main character,
who's obsessed with getting married and with weddings, is working

(36:09):
in a video store and she is watching and specifically
watching and then rewinding and rewatching Princess Diana approaching in
her carriage and getting out and the dress being unveiled,
this dress, And I remember, Mike you describing like it's
just her little Diana and her little dad in her

(36:30):
little carriage with her giant dress with feet of train, yeah,
like packed in. They're like when you order command hooks
from Amazon, and they're like, we thought you needed seventy
five thousand peanuts to keep these command hooks nice and safe.
And you know, and I do feel like just having

(36:52):
that resonant image of a bride, like I just I
understood her to be iconic before I understood anything else
about her. So I guess I don't know. My sense
is that like, no matter what, you're more nuanced attitude
towards the whole situation. Like I think the general consensus

(37:13):
was like, these people are not going anywhere. Like it is,
even if I don't like them, it is unimactionable that
they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. It's actually very
interesting to think about the ways in which, even as
she critiques the Royal family and in a lot of
ways revealed the flaws of the Royal family, Princess Diana
I think was also very important for promoting the idea
of the royal family. You know, for more than a

(37:35):
decade there after their wedding, she was extremely popular, and
there was a sense of like, this is part of
our national character that we have this dollhouse with these
pageant ish characters that are going around the world and
meeting with high level people and they're promoting land mine
stuff at the u N. I mean, this does actually
affect public moral and a lot of it, Like there's

(37:56):
there's sort of possibly not true stories of you know,
Austra really a thinking of trying to leave the Commonwealth,
and then there's a visit by Charles and Diana and
they're like, maybe the Royal and so these kinds of
things do actually matter for sort of how do we
think about this institution And so it's interesting and that
you know, she was so critical of the Royal family

(38:17):
and the royal family treated her terribly, but as a
symbol of the Royal family, we finally had a likable
symbol that like people were like, maybe we can wait
a couple more decades before we get rid of this thing. Yeah.
That was a really I think fun episode of The Crown.
If you watch the most recent season with a god,
I'm going to get this wrong, and I apologize in advance.
Whether the Prime Minister or the President of Australia. Uh,

(38:41):
Prime minister, Prime minister, thank you? Uh was you know,
garnering public support for leaving the Commonwealth but people like
Diana so much. He's like, well, I can't have this
conversation now. Yeah. I mean I think that they were
playing that up a little bit in the ground and
like that episode is like factually like there's massive factual
errors in that episode, but like it is saying something

(39:01):
about it's easier to sort of swallow the royal family
when the main face of it is genuinely likable and
seems like somebody who's you know, down to earth, and
like she is visiting homeless shelters and doing stuff on aids, etcetera.
She also looks like a princess. I feel like the
Sufi dress that like shoulder dressed, and the literal princess
skirt and the getting out of a carriage even that

(39:24):
like articulated in my conception the archetype of what a
princess is for a long time. Yeah. I think it's
really important that people need beautiful things to look at,
and people want to see pageants and we want to
see you know, beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes, and we

(39:44):
will just you know, we will go to great links
to have that in our lives. And I think that
if we recognize that that's a human need, we would
obtain it in ways that are less weird. So now,

(40:06):
moving a little bit further in the story, I'm interested
in when the marriage dissolved, which seemed sort of inevitable
based on their personalities, as you mentioned, Michael, how did
the public react. Who's who was the one that people
blamed at the time. I mean, this was it depends.
I mean there were there were parts of the British

(40:28):
establishment that blamed her that you know, the minute she
did the infamous Panorama interview. She spoke to this journalist
Andrew Morton for a sort of unauthorized biography about her,
and she pretended that he didn't interview her for years
when he actually did so all the information was true.
The establishment was like, oh my god, it's so cringe
e right, she's talking about eating disorders, she's talking about

(40:51):
suicide attempts. You know, this is not done by high
level royal people. How there she But then most of
the public was like, hey, she's a person in like
this is actually really relatable and she's in like a
shitty marriage with like this kind of trash dude, and
that sounds like my life too, and so the sort
of the people who quote unquote matter really blamed her

(41:11):
for it, and we're just mortified at the fact that
she was putting all this stuff into the public realm.
But the subjects, like people in Britain really liked her
after this and like hated Charles for years after this.
I read somewhere and I think this is correct that
for a little while before Prince Charles married Camilla, you know,

(41:35):
in the recent last few decades, he hired like a
very famous, expensive publicist to try to revamp both of
their public images, and so the way that he reintroduced
Camilla to the public was a very very controlled, systemic
interesting like like they made a few appearances not as
an official couple. Then you know, like it was incredibly

(41:58):
controlled how they were introduced Camilla to not be the
other woman at a point where they're like hopefully people
kind of forgot about Diana a little bit, and then
I just feel like the Crown came out and they
had to set their Instagrams to private or like, hey,
wait a minute, I knew I from they were really

(42:19):
trying to sneak back in there. So just one brief aside,
what do you make of Camilla, both of you, that
class woman. The pictures of her when she's younger, she
looks like this, like hot, sporty, you know, posh lady.
And I'm like, well, and then she married someone else,
so it just wasn't quite to be. But then of

(42:40):
course she and Prince Charles, Like, I mean, how soon
did they start having an affair into the Diana relationship, Mike,
It depends if you ask, but it's either like four
years or like two years, okay, so like between two
and four years, so like not, you know, this is
a young marriage, um that is already sustain you know,

(43:01):
some some some heavy winter weather. I guess I don't
know in the form of Camilla, but it's because clear
that they were a love match with each other. And
I remember we talked about, you know, the squidgy Gate
tape where Charles is on the phone with Camilla, and
I am a staunch defender of Charles against you know,
this idea that it is somehow embarrassing to say that

(43:24):
you wish you could turn into a tiny man who
lives in the vagina of the woman you love, Like,
I think that's beautiful. I will ploset that there are
intimate texts and emails and phone calls between every couple
that would be humiliating if they've made the light day
so ei, there aren't humiliating texts or like little or

(43:45):
phone conversations or just nicknames or sexual concepts between you
than like maybe or maybe you could be communicating more.
I don't know. I also think, I mean, we did
a dramatic table read of infamous tampon tapes for some people, yes, extremely,
including my boyfriend, and what really comes out from those.

(44:09):
Of course everybody focuses on the tampon jokes whatever, but
it's like a forty five minute long transcript and it's
a portrait of like a very functional relationship and it's
really the only functional romantic relationship that he ever had
in his life. And you know, Camilla's like, hey, what's
your speech about tomorrow? Tell me a little bit about it.
You know, the last speech you gave was really good.
Can't wait to see the transcript of this one. Just

(44:30):
basic like supporting your husband in his endeavors and asking
him about his ideas. And that's what it is to
love someone to be genuinely interested in their stupid speech
that I'm sure it's very long, and but like it's
like you have to care about someone a lot to
want to read the transcript of their speech on like
the Welsh economy. Yes, and like Princess Diana was not

(44:51):
someone who was really interested in that aspect of his life.
And they were, you know, even as he sort of
tried to spoon feed her and force with her these
these pseudo intellectual ideas, she saw there as a vessel
for like really nasty behavior from him, and so she
never really engaged with him on that level. She never
gave him praise, but like, hey, you did a really
good job at your speech the other day. I read
it like that was not an aspect of their relationship.

(45:14):
And so in those tapes, like the tampon things kind
of an inside joke, like a cute inside joke. And
that's a hallmark of functioning relationships, when you're generating inside
jokes with each other and you sort of riff on
the same concept with each other. And it's not clear
that he was ever getting that from Diana. It was
always this very formal thing he could never really be
himself around her, she could never be herself. It just

(45:37):
never matched. And so those tapes are like really a
portrait of a couple clicking with each other, and it's
kind of nice. I mean, once again, I'm reminded of
Marie Antoinette or guess sort of royal frank royal family
protocol generally, because one of my favorite things about Versailles
and Louis backed this trend. But it was like a
salary position to be a royal mistress, and like there
was money, you know, budgeted for that, and it was like, okay,

(46:00):
new fiscal year for the royal mistress, and everyone agreed that,
like someone had to do that. And I just feel
like this is one of those relationships where like everyone
at the outset was like, okay, here the ground rules.
We're gonna discreetly have affairs. I don't want to see this,
you don't want to see that. And then you know,
just like if like their marriage is is a career,

(46:22):
you know, I feel like you can't if you're if
your marriage to someone is your vocation, then I it
just seems like it's really hard for that to be
also your primary romantic relationship, Like you have to be
really strong going in I think, and you know that
another really interesting parallel between Diana, not a parallel, a
a point of comparison between Marie Antoinette and Diana, because

(46:46):
historically the purpose, not the purpose, but an incidental purpose
of a royal mistress was to deflect fire away from
the queen. I didn't realize that that's so great. It's
sort of a Madonna whore complex, which is is troubling,
but but was really effective where people could see the
queen as as maternal and and um, you know, perfect

(47:10):
and flawless, holy and quiet, and then they could fulfill
their needs of like gossip and like petty little like
incidental talk about the royal mistress. And as you mentioned,
Louis the sixteenth buck to the trend, he didn't have
a royal mistress, so all of that like petty gossip
energy just funneled only to Marie Antoinette, where in another

(47:30):
case it would have been, you know, distributed probably between
two or three other women. Because as a society we
just culturally love talking about and gossiping about and diminishing.
You just have to have at least one the the
what we've learned is that you have to have at
least one woman in the public sector to just be
like a spittoon for for public enmity, and then you

(47:52):
can protect, you know, and then another woman can quietly,
you know, not be loath. But you do have to
have at least one for people to hate there somewhere
Like there's also an interesting thing with Camilla because it's
one of the only times that we have this weird
sort of switching of who is the wife and who
is the mistress, because if you look at them aesthetically,

(48:14):
Camilla should have been his wife and Diana should have
been his mystery. It's one of those American hustle things
where like he's he's married to who, and he's having
an affair with which one yes, So it's this weird
It's just it's sort of rejiggered the way that the
tabloids sort of dealt with this, that Diana ended up
being the vessel for a lot of the gossip and
Camilla was just sort of like this empty presence. There

(48:36):
wasn't much to project on her. But I think the
benefit of Camilla those people could hate her and then
make Diana seem more saintly by comparison, yes, exactly. And
also I mean Camilla didn't like Diana. Camilla treated her terribly,
like I don't I don't want to sort of be
the you're wrong about Camilla necessarily. I think all three

(48:56):
of these people acted terribly to each other and did
not each other in ways that manifested into people. Yeah.
One of the one of the academic articles that I
read that I didn't get to bring up on the
show was called I Believe the Croning of Camilla, and
it talked about how in the press, whenever they would

(49:19):
talk about Camilla, they would always unfavorably compare her to Diana,
you know, like her beak like nose and her wrinkled eyes,
and it was something that every time they brought her up,
they had to mention that she was like less attractive
than Diana, Right, And so it did make her seem
somewhat tragic to me that, you know, she's with this

(49:39):
guy in this like pretty functional relationship, and yet whenever
she shows up in the media, they have to say like, oh,
she's ugly and anyway, he seems really like her, and
they're in this blah blah blah. Right. It just it's
just interesting that like that was something that they had
to do. And I feel like there's something weird about
just constantly being compared to somebody like Diana that I
think would be really hard, especially and this is now

(50:00):
a transition, Especially when you die at your peak and
never and never have to age in public or you
know you can, you can only always be remembered favorably.
Diana is very tragic death then catapulted her from global
celebrity to icon. What even is higher than icon? Yeah? Symbols?

(50:26):
I don't know. Yeah, why do you think there are
so many conspiracy theories around her death? Because the Royal
family killed? Are using m I six did the Royal
family killing? I thought that was clear? Do they kill
the loved private sitisens? I think my theory on this,

(50:47):
like all conspiracy theories, is it's just such an unsatisfying
end because the sort of larger than life figure. And
then how does she die? She dies in a drunk
driving accident. It's like the most pedestrian, Quotitian way that
somebody can die, and that just but she wasn't wearing
her seatbelt. It's like an ad that should play for

(51:08):
high schools. Dude, yeah, I know, and it's just like
there's just something so kind of unresonant about the way
that she died. It seems wrong, right if you were
making a movie about it, she would like kill herself
or you know, she would disappear off the face of
the earth due to the pain or something. That sort
of seems like it fits with the rest of her
life because the rest of her life was so sort

(51:29):
of mythical, and then she dies in this way that
like tens of thousands of people die every year, and
it's like, oh, it's like common, you can And when
we talked about in the episode like where the idea
was like, it's isn't it weird that she died in
a car accident, you know, with this timing, etcetera or something,
And it's like, it's not weird because people die in

(51:49):
car accidents constantly in this country, like constantly and inevitably
it's going to happen to some famous people. Yeah, exactly,
it's like statistically the least weird, and all the other
countries too, by the way, in the world. Sorry, yeah,
I was gonna make a bring up a point that

(52:10):
you made on the your podcast, which is so brilliant
that I find myself echoing it almost constantly, that we
think that significant events have to have significant causes. I
think you brought that up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the the
idea that, like, because her death had such a massive
effect on everyone, it seems like the cause also should

(52:31):
be massive. Yeah. And then you look at the actual
factors behind it, and there's basically three main factors that
the the driver of the car was drunk, he was speeding,
he was going a hundred and ten miles an hour
when he went into the tunnel, and Diana and Dodi
were not wearing their seatbelts. And if any one of
those things was different, there's a chance that they wouldn't

(52:51):
have crashed or they would have lived. But you take
all three of those factors and put them together, and
it's just like a very normal kind of crash. And
then and isn't it like the tunnel itself, like it
just had this little like dip in, this little curve
in it. Yeah, that we're just like basically basically, yeah,
it was this perfect thing where the tunnel slopes downward

(53:13):
and curves at the same time, and so the driver
was going so fast that the car almost jumped off
of the road, and by the time the driver was
able to sort of see that he was going out
of control and turn the wheel, they had sort of
settled back down onto the road, and he overcorrected and
then he just rams into this pole, which is how
these catastrophic plane crashes sometimes happened to We had you know,

(53:34):
it was the Dreamliners or whatever, right the what was it?
We had a series of high profile plane crashes in
the past few years, and basically I think what was
happening was that pilots were overcorrecting because the software was
malfunctioning and telling them that they were in a nosedive. Yeah,
and they were overcorrecting for that, and just you know, yeah,

(53:57):
over correction errors. Like it just it's so and it's
I mean, don't you think that it's like really upsetting
to realize that someone is not just mortal, but like
that mortal. Yeah, they're just sort of in the blink
of an eye, and like a few, like a few
bad decisions happened. And this guy was like I always
thought he was like a little drunk, like he'd had

(54:18):
some wine or something, but he'd had like several scotches
or something. He was three times the legal limit. He
was like super drunk, and he hadn't eaten all day,
and he was taking medication that amplified the effect of
the alcohol. I mean, he was very impaired. And you
get into the details of this in your podcast. Was
anyone more interested in like the specifics? I think that's

(54:38):
a wonderful source. You also go into the fact that like,
he wasn't an actual driver. He said he was like
the head of security. He wasn't the driver. And the
main thing to me is most of the conspiracy theories
are around this tunnel that you know, they flashed a
light in the tunnel that blinded him and then he
swerved the wheel, or there was a motorcyclist in the tunnel, whatever,

(54:59):
And they thing to know is that there was no
reason to expect that they would be in that tunnel.
If you look at the hotel where they were leaving
and the apartment that they were going to, there is
a straight line from one place to another, and it's
not the tunnel that they went in. But the traffic
was so bad on the schams Aliz that they had
to take a different route. But Paris is like a

(55:19):
winding mess of hundreds of streets, right, So so even
if you knew that they weren't going to take the
Charm's Elise, there's forty fifty different routes they could have
taken to Doughty's apartment. So even if you were sort
of the royal family and you were trying to murder
Princess Diana, there's no way you would know that they
would have taken that route. There's no way you could

(55:40):
ever have planned for this, and there's just there's also
people have talked about how it's just really bad to
try to kill somebody in a car because you can't
expect what the driver is going to do. Like, there's
no reason to think that flashing a light in somebody's
eyes would result in a fatal car accident. It would
just be like, oh, it's annoying, and then it's okay,
can you can you go to the basic conspiracy theories,

(56:01):
because like there's the light flashing, and then there's like, general,
the royal family did it, General the paparazzi did it,
and then I'm sure a small slice of like the
Clintons did it. Yeah, Hillary Clinton, Diana, as we all know,
I piggyback down that I just have one sort of
additional question is why would the Royal family want to

(56:22):
kill her at this point? The main reason that I mean,
it's actually a very sad story that one of the
main purveyors of the conspiracies is Doti Faed's father, who
has like a very sort of justified beef with the
Royal family and with the British establishment. His claim has
always been that they're super Islamophobic, which like they are
like as a general principle, like yes, these are not

(56:44):
people who are like super into diversity in the country,
and so he has felt sort of shut out of
the British establishment, which he was, and so he has
built up even though he owns Herod's right, even if
he were white, like he probably would be like a
big bagre baiting, you know. Yeah, in the country it's

(57:06):
wrapped up in like wealth stuff and like old stuff
that there were deals that he didn't get and there
was like they never approved his visa, which like genuinely
is both that they just kind of left it at
the back of the pile for decades. So he has
legitimate grievances, but he builds up this idea that they
didn't want her marrying a Muslim and that she may
have been pregnant with Doughty Alfa Yette's baby, and so

(57:28):
there was gonna be this like royal baby who was
the sort of half brother of the future King of
England who was going to be a Muslim, and they
couldn't handle that and they freaked out. But at the time,
there was no actual evidence that Diana was going to
marry Doughty. There was no evidence whatsoever that she was pregnant.
The only evidence that she was pregnant was somebody took
a photo of her in a bathing suit and she

(57:50):
like has a tummy. She is a middle aged woman,
Like she has like a little bit of a tummy
in this photo, and they're like, she's probably It's like,
that's that's it. That's your evidence that she's pregnant. It's
like one photo every single Star magazine, every celebrity is
pregnant at every given moment. I also like how you

(58:13):
can speculate that that's evidence of someone like growing more
comfortable with their body and successfully, you know, being on
the road to recovery from an eating disorder, like she's pregnant. Yeah,
So the sort of the that's like the arth theory
of this. The Royal family wanted her out of the picture,
But it just doesn't make any sense, and it especially

(58:34):
doesn't make sense given that they killed her on that
day because Dotie Fayette had started telling people that he
was going to ask her to marry him, but the
first person he told was that morning. So if the
Royal family was really afraid that she was going to
marry Doughty al Fayette, they somehow would have put together
this mastermind plan in like six hours. And they can't

(58:55):
even plan a fox hunt in less than a month,
I'm sure. And they're bad at a like relate, they're
bad at things the things. Yes, so you know there's
a million I mean I read two books about it,
Like you can go into all of the specifics. There's
like a guy who was driving a Fiat that night
who might have been a paparazzi, But it's like they

(59:17):
don't add up to anything because it's just like, well,
what's the actual theory that somehow they knew that he
was going to take this route. They faked the blood
alcohol content of the driver, They convinced Diana not to
wear a seat belt, Like if you try to put
it in chronological order what the theory actually requires, Like
you just can't make it plausible. It's like a lot
of the O. J. Truther theories. You're like, individually, these

(59:38):
elements could have happened, maybe, but it's very it's like
impossible for me to believe in a world where all
of them happen in sequence, and where people actually managed
to plant behind the scenes. Yeah, exactly, in like six
hours right there, they're swapping out vials of blood. There's
all kinds of telepathic communication happening in these scenarios, people
like just sort of unspeakingly, uncommunicating Lee all carry out

(01:00:02):
plans with maximum efficiency and discretion in a way that
never happens anywhere else. And you also have to imagine
that if they have the power, if the Royal family
had the power to orchestrate this massive and immediate conspiracy coup,
they would also have the power just to like have
made Charles more likable. Like, if they have, if they

(01:00:22):
have the infrastructure to orchestrate this elaborate fake death, use
that manpower. They should have just used that manpower to
like make people like Charles a little bit more, to
make him see less of like a little bit of
a wet blanket, right, they could have blocked the panorama interview,
like they could have stopped the publication of this tell
all biography. Like, there's many smaller steps they could have

(01:00:45):
actually to make her murder to make her look like
less likable also like that. I mean, her death is
is a human tragedy obviously, but on the largest scale,
it made people love Diana more than they had. That's
the thing, Yeah, exactly, which they surely would have foreseen.

(01:01:06):
If they can arrange like a seven hour murder, conspiracy
and two languages, they probably could have foreseen that this
would make her more popular eventually. Yeah. So you know,
with Diana having been dead for oh god, over two decades,
where do you think her legacy sort of stands now?
Just a near professional private opinions. I mean, I feel

(01:01:30):
like the Crown has left people with a chance to
feel like they have a firsthand experience of kind of
the compressed storyline of her her marriage and life and
divorce and death. Um, and it seems as if, you know,
that's giving people a new access point with which to

(01:01:53):
love her, Like I think that like Marie Antoinette or
any number of figures who have endured a sespecially after
an untimely passing. I think there is she was able
to interact with the press or with the forms of
media that recorded her life in a way that I
think gave people at the time and continues to give

(01:02:15):
them a feeling like they have some real connection with
who she was. Like, I think what made her great
at what she did was that, you know, despite all
the performance, despite the great pain of her life, a
lot of the time, I feel like she did I
hate to use this word because it's just been it's
so gross now in the age of influencer culture, but
like she kind of maybe was one of the people

(01:02:37):
who helped invent authenticity as we know it today. M hm, Sarah,
do you think I am trying to come up with
the most articulate way to ask that people tend to
fundamentally hate women in power for a variety of what
Do you think that part of the reason Diana was

(01:02:58):
so beloved was because she was vulnerable and and tragic?
Do you think there was there was a victim aspect
to why she was able to remain so beloved And
I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, yeah, I
I mean I would say yes. And I feel like
my first memory of thinking critically about Diana was listening

(01:03:18):
to the version of Candle in the Wind that was
rewritten and tribute to her, and then realizing soon after
that that was a rewritten version of a song originally
about Marilyn Monroe, and I was like, that's kind of odd.
I just think that's odd to have some other girls
song rewritten for you. Um I I don't know why
I'm bothered by that. I just am. I know it's

(01:03:40):
hard to write a new song, but um, it just
feel but it does feel like it expresses this thing
of like I mean, it's like Mike and I guess
recorded on Miss America. And I keep thinking of that
because a lot of the themes are the same, like
she must be a virgin, she must be you know,
this age and and this you know, all these other qualifiers.

(01:04:01):
And we were talking about how it feels like it
feels to me like when you are anointed and crowned
Miss America, like you were the human carrier of the
spirit of Miss America, and then you know, you show
up the next year and give the crown away, and
then your little husk um crumbles and blows away in
the wind and falls into the beach on Atlantic City

(01:04:24):
and is washed away by the surf, and then you
become a mermaid. Yeah. I think that's what happens, and
that's why you never see them again. But just this,
it feels like that song being kind of rewritten and
reused fits with this idea that we have a society
that just consumes women and that we somehow apologize for

(01:04:46):
it by selectively mourning some of them. Um, and that
Maryland was one who was consumed by the fame machine,
and Princess Diana became, you know, another and it was
just she was consumed by more you know, the O
family and British tabloids than by the Hollywood treadmill or
whatever it was. And her presence is one that I

(01:05:08):
think carries us potentially into really meaningful experiences of thoughtfulness
and empathy. But she's also very accessible because she is
kind of poured into the mold that we are most
conditioned to find sympathetic and lovable, partly because you know,
there's there's nothing less intimidating a woman who's already dead,

(01:05:30):
Like there's a reason why so many of our beloved
young women in society are murder victims, you know, they're
They're not very uppity, are they. And it's also like
the media then loves this idea of like, oh, we
all killed her. Yeah, god, the maya culpa that the
self flagellation of the maya culpa, I think is an

(01:05:51):
instinct that everyone kind of likes to indulge in. Let's
not blame the very specific tabloids and very specific editors
who were like buying photos of her that were taken
at night and clearly invasive, Like no, no, no, Let's
not blame the people who actually made decisions. Let's blame
everyone who was like no Jenkins, you know, let's blame

(01:06:12):
literally everybody instead of like the eight people who actually
made her life to it was all of us. It
was society. I think my big thing with Diana is,
you know, you can talk about the authenticity in this
sort of clinical way, but you know, one of the
things we mentioned on the show was that diagnoses of
bulimia I believe quadrupled in Britain in the early es

(01:06:35):
once she started talking about this, because people were finally
getting diagnosed, people were finally talking about it. And I
think to me, as somebody who lived in Europe for
eleven years. I lived in Britain. There's a huge problem
with sort of official, aristocratic European society that does not
talk about stuff. And this was one of the things
that Diana really struggled with, that she would go to
these dinner parties and you're not allowed to talk about

(01:06:56):
anything real, You're not allowed to reveal anything of yourself.
You just make this excrew cruciating, superficial small talk for
hours and hours and it never ends. And I think
one of the things that she really did was break
that habit and point out that, like, this isn't serving anybody, Like,
who is it helping for us not to talk about
what we're struggling with. Why would we do this to ourselves?

(01:07:16):
Why do we raise our kids this way? Right? And
so I just think that it's a model that the
solution to the things that Diana struggled with in her
life is not to push them under the rug. It's
to bring them out into the light and talk about
how you're not a broken person for struggling with an
eating disorder. You're not a broken person for like still
dealing with the trauma of your weird cold upbringing and

(01:07:37):
you're terrible sandwiches, Like you're allowed to talk about this stuff,
and so I just think if there's a model, it's
really like bringing things into the light and talking about
yourself as a whole person, that you are beautiful and
you wear these outfits and everything, Like you can talk
about the sparkly stuff, but you can also talk about
the dark stuff and that doesn't take away And one

(01:07:57):
thing doesn't take away from the other's beautifully said. And
I also want to go on the record finally and say,
like I reject the dichotomy that people who are interested
in like fashion and and uh clothes are automatically frivolous,
Like yeah, like I think her her fashion is is
interesting and and worth as worth talking about as Prince

(01:08:21):
Charles's non expertise on Welsh economic policy. Great men are
interested in sports. There is nothing more frivolous than like
knowing sports statistics. Like you're not going to talk shit
on somebody who knows the names of a couple of
designers if you can tell me what like cal Ripken,
hit in four or whatever. Sorry, it's all frivolous. You

(01:08:44):
don't get to talk ship on other people's frivolous stuff. Also,
I gotta say, I don't know how men look in England.
Maybe they look great, who knows. In America men look awful,
and so many of them could just learn how to
dress better, just a little bit, just five to ten
were sent better because like, quality of men's wear is
a beautiful thing. Like men can dress gorgeously. Like watch

(01:09:08):
Robert de Niro and Casino. If you want my point
to be probably proved to you. So I have the
movie I thought you were going to bring up. I
love the best dressed men. I might think. Listen, Robert
de Niro has more costume changes in that movie than
Sharon Stone, and I think he's probably accessible on the
scale of masculinity. But he wears like beautiful loud suits.

(01:09:29):
But the point is that, like, men could look so
much better and have so much of the passive power
that comes from looking good, but they're just terrified of it.
And it's hilarious to me because you could just you know,
it's it's right there in front of you, but you're
afraid of taking it. And I argue, if you're rich,
it's pretty easy to be hot. Oh yeah, you just

(01:09:52):
hire a couple of people, you're like, tell me, give
me a skincare routine, dress me, give me a capsule wardrobe.
Thank you? Ye. So on that note, before we go,
I do want to ask each of you what your
favorite iconic Diana fashion moment is. Do you have a
favorite Diana look that comes to mind? I know what

(01:10:12):
I was going to say, do you? I think you do? Yeah? Okay,
So my favorite look is that picture you showed me
Mike where she's wearing mom jeans and a T shirt. Yeah,
I knew, you know what was that? I think I
said Duluth. But either way, when was that photo taken?

(01:10:34):
That was right after the divorce, so I believe ninety four. Yeah,
And and of course these weren't mom jeans at the time.
These were very fashionable genes of the kind that you
know Meg Ryan was wearing in. But she's wearing like
high cut, you know, just like but it is it's
like a very like Meg Ryan kind of a look.
It's like, these are my jeans, I am a mom.

(01:10:54):
And then like you know, and I'm sure these are
all made by designers. And then a T shirt with
stars on it, and she just looks like she could
be the former Princess of Wales. Or she could be
like the prettiest mom in Duluth, Minnesota, like picking up
her kids from gymnasts. If I want to google, if

(01:11:16):
I want to google this picture, what do you think?
I what's the best most effective search? Mom jeans? I think, honestly,
Princess Diana, mom jeans. Oh yeah, yeah, Diana mom jeans
star T shirt and she's like walking downstairs. It's a
white T shirt. Yeah, yeah, totally. She looks like she
could be at the Mall of America. Yes, love that

(01:11:37):
in the best possible way. Yeah, I look, I wish
I was in Minnesota right now. I am a huge
fan of Duluth Wine moms, and she looks better than
any of us could trying to be a Duluth Wine mom. Yeah.
And just that she's like that, I mean, I mean,
I know that mom jeans has acquired a pejorative connotation.

(01:11:57):
I think that's unfair, and I feel as if like
this is a picture of her being a mom, which
is an opportunity she was really deprived of for a
lot of her marriage. That is a good segue. I'm
I'm superseding you, Michael and doing mine now. A look
that I love because it feels very twenty twenty or um.
Also sort of a mom jean, like a like a

(01:12:19):
light washed jean, boots, brown boots, a crew neck sweatshirt,
a blazer, and a hat. Oh I know the photo,
it's like a balloon on her shirt. I think she's
also with William the British Lung Foundation. Oh yeah, there
we go, British Lung Foundation. She just looks very sporty
and like she casual in a way that I wish

(01:12:40):
I could emulate. And it feels very modern. I think,
even like I was gonna say, Hilaria ulan Um, who's
Justin Bieber's wife, Haley Haley Bieber. I think Haley Bieber
recordlated some of these looks for like a fashion sir.
Looks white sweatshirt, So she's wearing a white sweatshirt under

(01:13:02):
a blazer with a baseball cap on. Like this is
like Billy Crystal at a baseball game. Almost like but yeah,
and it's like you know, yeah, she like she knew
how to put items together. He didn't. She. She was
also really good in the look of like a crew
neck sweatshirt with bike shorts. She looked really good doing that.

(01:13:24):
I think this is such a cliche, but mine would
be the infamous revenge dress. Oh and please describe the
context of their revenge dress. This is why I think
it's so important, Because I don't know that much about fashion.
I can't say much about the actual dress itself, but
it's such a metaphor for the way that women can
use fashion as power. So the entire thing was Prince

(01:13:46):
Charles was on this sort of pr kick. He was
doing a documentary for the BBC that was supposed to
like humanize him and make him seem cool and down
to earth and authentic. And I have seen it and
it does not mean any of those things. But he
was convinced that it would. And so Diana had gotten
this invitation to go to the Serpentine Gallery and she
had turned it down whatever, I'm busy. That night, she

(01:14:07):
finds out this BBC documentary is airing, and she's like,
on second thought, I am going to go. And she
shows up in this cracker jack knockout black dress with
like shoulders out and this big necklace, and she just
looks like a billion bucks. And she did this deliberately
to knock Prince Charles off the front pages. She wanted

(01:14:27):
to take the nation's attention away from him and put
it on her, and it worked. All of the front
pages the next day are like knock out Diana, and
Prince Charles is on page seventeen, just like his dumb
Welsh speech and she's like yeah, words, yeah, and it's
like I can still do this, and I just think
it's like it's such a moment of her understanding herself

(01:14:50):
as a symbol in ways that she didn't at the
beginning of the marriage, in ways that she didn't at
the beginning of her career. She's like, this is the
way that I can communicate with the public, This is
the way that I can get my message across. Sometimes
it's literally just me showing up to something in a
dress that is enough and so to me, it's just
such a confidence moment her totally understanding and using the
power that people ascribe to her gave to her. Yes,

(01:15:15):
and it's so rare to see a woman do that,
and sort of, you know, women throughout her life she
was criticized for being frivolous, like oh, she's always shopping
and she's doing all this fashion stuff, and it's like
that's literally her job. It's absurd to criticize her for
understanding her job, Like she achieved peace in the Falklands. Yes, exactly.
And she's going to these events where she has to

(01:15:35):
change into different formal clothes three or four times a day,
so that requires a lot of shopping, Like you just
have to have a lot of dresses for that. Also,
that's the thing that people were writing about her and
talking about her a lot in interviews. No one was
asking her her take on the Falklands because she's not
an expert on the falk List. She's like this just
this random woman basically shows up at things. It's fine.

(01:15:57):
So this was a rare moment of a woman in
public life actually using that kind of scrutiny to send
a message. And it's just like a nice little power moment.
I love that. I think that is a perfect place
to end. Sarah Michael, thank you so much for joining me.
Where can people find you on the internet if they're
inclined to hear more of your wisdom and perspective. Our

(01:16:19):
podcast is on all of your major podcast apps. It's
called You're Wrong About And you can find Sarah also
on Why Our Dads, which on your telephone find Mike
also on maintenance phase. You know. Yeah, and so you've
talked about dr Oz recently. I've talked about the Dark
Night recently. We have a few other interests sometimes, Yes,

(01:16:41):
perfect and I think both dads and uh. The public
obsession with weight and bodies also feeds into the Diana issue.
So this is all it. She had a dad and
she was on diets. You well, thank you so much
for joining me. H, have a have a good one.
How do people sign off of these things? I'm usually

(01:17:02):
talking alone to myself in a closet. Fairly well, Dana,
bless you, God, Bless Princess Diana, Bless bless us everyone,
everyone Perfect. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart

(01:17:23):
Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Monkey. The show
is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by
Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble
Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and
you can learn more about the show over at Noble
Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(01:17:46):
you listen to your favorite shows,