Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Royalty Works

Episode Date: June 26, 2021

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, geez, about six years ago from September 11th, 2014. We talk all about royalty and probably get about 75% of it right.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry. What's your problem? This is Stuff You Should Know. My problem is I got an eye twitch. Yeah, it's a little weird. It's a little off-putting. Oh, you could see it? Who can? My left eye is just going crazy. Yeah. All right. It's, I think, stabilized. Yeah, it seems to. Yeah. My ptosis is kicking in though. You're what? My ptosis. What kind of ptosis you got? Ptosis is when you have a droopy eyelid. You know, I told you about that recently,

like you do. See that left eyelid is more exposed. It's like a force whittaker. Yeah, no, I know what you're saying. I see that if I compare it to the other eyelid, I can see more of your left eyelid, but it doesn't appear droopy. I don't think that's the right term for it. Ptosis? No, droopy. No, well, it's ptosis is a droopy eyelid and I have it. I think it's a ptosis eyelid. That's what you got, man. I was diagnosed and it's apparently going to get worse. So who is it, force whittaker? Who else? I think Tom York of Radiohead. Oh yeah, you're a good company. And I think Paris Hilton has ptosis. Oh yeah, she does. And me. The four.

It's worse when I'm sleepy or if I'm drunk. Yeah, I could see that. But I'm never either one of those. So you're always fine. Yeah, I don't know why I'm drooping today. Are you drunk right now? No. That's good. You should not be drunk while we do these, Chuck. It's too important. That's right. So I've got an actual info for this. Oh man, like the old days. In my head, it could be up to like 20 minutes long. So just sit back and relax. Perfect. So Chuck, up until about 9,000, 10,000 years ago, all humans walked around and gathered food and followed herds of animals, which they hunted and killed in eight. And on any given day, you ate what you gathered and then you just kind of moved along to the next spot.

That was typically the way things were done. Yeah. 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 has made things very stable. Very stable. More stable. Tied people to the land. Sure. 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 are 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. Sure. That means everybody's pretty much equal.

Maybe one guy takes mushrooms more than 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 a year where everybody else in the area has a bad bounty, that person's in what's called a position of power. Yeah, they have an advantage. Yes, they do. That happens a few times to the same people. And if they are clever enough to consolidate that power and have more and more kids in a larger and larger kin group. Yeah, which they would if they're more powerful. You know, they're gonna have more kids. Yeah. Then they can form what you would recognize today as a dynasty. And then over time, these people would

say, you know what, this 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. Yeah. So by proxy, I'm the sun God's ruler here on earth, which means I'm in charge of you. Right. And while you're at it, give me some of your surplus. And all of a sudden now, you have a king. Yeah. A kingdom. And this happened roughly all around the world independently. But following almost the exact same course, you got agriculture, you have surplus, you have certain people consolidating power, rising to power, associating themselves with gods to make their power that much more stable and unchallenged. Yep. And then you have kingdoms. That's what happened. Boom. Over time, these

kingdoms did more and more crazy stuff, but they all follow roughly the same thing. Yeah. And if you're out in the middle of a desert, you don't have a lot of 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. So you're kind of stuck. Yeah. Because you still need, you know, your potatoes. Sure. You still need your grain. And if you can't move very easily, if you're getting resources from being a member of a community, then that explains why you as this normal, independent, minded person might go along with some guy saying, he's the descendant of the sun god. Yeah. And you have to give them half of your grain for no good reason. Yeah. Or if you're in the Amazon, where

you're not surrounded by desert or mountains, and you can say, screw this guy, I'm out of here, yeah, then you may be a little 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 therefore the more crops or whatever, you can get under your power, the 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.

Yeah. Then you become even more powerful. So you export this kind of mentality of being ruled by a single person who's getting fed 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 Simon Powers, because we didn't just make all that stuff up. No. Did Simon Powers the researcher or the writer? He is an author of the study that kind of looked at that theory that we've been talking about and made a model that, I don't know if it proved it, but made it seem pretty likely. Yeah. How despots arose during the Neolithic Revolution.

Yeah. It's a way to go Simon Powers. And if you're interested in that kind of thing, also go back and read Dr. Jared Dimon'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 Dimon wrote the same article and it was, the answer was saved by the bell. Yep. The worst mistake in the human race. Hey. That was a good show. All right.

In all the wrong way. You're right. So, in this article, how royalty works, 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 going to explain all that stuff finally, once and for all. Because that's what we were exposed to. That's kind of the Western English-speaking standard, the British monarchy.

Sure. But you can kind of substitute in a lot of ways this, a lot of the way that it developed for just about anywhere in the world. Yeah. Because again, the idea of hierarchies, of class, of social stratification, and then some group of people being at the absolute pinnacle is extraordinarily ancient. Yeah. And it all comes down to land and owning land since people had trod the earth. The most powerful ones are the people that owned more of it than their neighbor.

Yeah. But not since they trod the earth. I mean, we're talking just in the last 10,000 years. And even after that, the English didn't create this idea that you could take the 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? Then you say, oh, I forgot to tell you,

if you don't do this, I'm going to kill you and your entire family. Yeah. So do it. And they created what's known as the feudal system. Yeah. Let's get in 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 15th century. Let's do it.

Because it doesn't matter. It's all about the same. That's not true. To the feudal systems of medieval Europe, basically what went on was there were very few people that owned a lot of the land, 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 going to divide it up and I'm going to let other people use it. I'm going to call them vassals and you're my vassal. You're going to go out and you're going to manage that territory for me.

I'm going to collect some taxes. You can keep some of that. Yeah. You can farm. You can keep some of that. Well, they didn't farm. They had people farming for them. Well, sure. So it's like a hierarchy. Have it farmed. Like you can imagine all of England is being owned by the king.

Yeah. And then you divide it up and then those people further divided it up. Yeah. Because a vassal could divide theirs up for sub-vassals. I guess, serfs. Yeah, I guess so. Is that what they're called? Yeah. And you guys, how about raising some armies for me?

You're all going to be beholden to me, but I'm going to let you keep a lot of the dough as long as you still give me some. Yeah. And prior to this, Chuck, this is kind of a sweet deal. And the way that you ended up with a vassal is you had an army that could conceivably challenge this guy who said, I'm the king of England, everybody. Yeah. And everyone said, where? And he's like, here, this is England now and I'm the king.

And so if you had an army that he could probably defeat with his army, but could still pose a problem, he turned you on to his side and said, well, wait, before you say anything, I'm going to give you, let you handle some of this land, like you said. Yeah. 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 smaller version of me.

Yeah. And we'll be more powerful together. Exactly. And that's how this hierarchy, at least under the feudal system, began. That's right. And these vassals, they had rules of succession, a lot like inheritance. You could pass your land on to your children and then they would be a vassal. Yeah. You also passed your obligation to the king. Oh, sure. On to the children too. It wasn't just the sweet life. Oh, no, no, no. You could never, you were always beholden as long as you maintain that land.

Right. And it was the same in other parts of the world. Japan had the imperial system that was similar to the European monarchies. And 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 BCE. That's crazy. Yeah. Although they are purely ceremonial at this point, right?

Well, yeah, but they were the exact opposite of just purely ceremonial up until 1945. And G.I. Joe came in and said, you guys aren't divine deities any longer, which is what everybody considered them up until 1945. And check out my kung fu grip. So everything was going along well until about the 17th century when republicanism began to kind of just chip away at the royals and the power that they held throughout Europe. And little democracy starts to form. And sometimes it happens gradually and kind of nicely. Sometimes it happens via revolution, like in France.

And sometimes when they would kick out the monarchy, they would come back with a vengeance, like after the English Civil War, between the round heads and the Cavaliers. We had King Charles executed, his heir, Charles II was exiled to France. Parliament gained a lot of control, but they would later come back, of course. Charles II. Well, just the monarchy period. You're right. Yeah. But after that, the monarchy just was never the same.

No. Although, maybe under like Elizabeth, she was pretty powerful. Yeah. But I think parliament had gained a lot of control. Yeah. Everybody after that point had to deal with parliament before anybody had under Charles I. The same stuff was going on in the Middle East. It was a little different though, because religion was so much more a part of their monarchies. They had, is it called a caliph? Yeah. Was the head, I guess, would be the king? Yeah, I guess so.

The head of state. If you compared it to like the English model, the caliph would be the head, the king of England. Right. And then beneath them would be sultans, which would be like vassals, which are powerful kings, but they are not the religious leader. So you get 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, very early on, look at Egypt. All of the Egyptian 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. In the Middle East, the caliph is a religious figure. In the Holy Roman Empire, the kings ruled along with the pope. So there's always been this real 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 the religious aspect of it gives

credibility to the rule of the political ruler. Yeah. That makes sense. 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 of the king. And we just made that up. But exactly. Yeah.

But I mean, and it had been going on for millennia since before then, but that was like they just put it down into text. Like, yeah, that's the way it is. That's right. Unfortunately for the king, that meant that the only way to be gotten rid of was to be murdered. Yeah. But they figured it'll be a pretty wild ride until then. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the risks when you're the king. So now you have royalty. You have this class system. Royalty is actually Transcend's class

because it's the bloodline. Like a noble, that's a difference between nobility and royalty is nobility. The nobles didn't have the bloodline going. Yeah. It depends on the country that you're in. So like... Yeah, that's true. 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 the ability to be the heir to the throne. Right. Right. So in other countries, it's like there is one group of royals and they're the only royals in everybody, no matter how powerful and no matter their noble title. Yeah. They're still technically commoners. Exactly.

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 in the monarchy, you're going to be wealthy. In some cases, also, they're considered an actual part of their country. Yeah. They're that much ingrained into the national fabric. Crazy. So we said that in some countries, there can be more than one royal family.

That's right. And this kind of comes into play when there's not a clear line of succession. Yeah. Things can get a little messy when the king dies. So if you have what's called an agnatic succession, that means that the oldest male heir inherits the throne. Yeah. And actually, agnatic, it means your brother takes over and not your son. Okay. So it's patrilineal. It's on the father's side.

But instead of giving the throne to your child, like your firstborn son, it goes to your little bro. Okay. Your oldest little bro. Okay, gotcha. And then 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 female heir in 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 they're still the member of that family, which is also known as a house. In a country where there's more than one royal house, and there's a dispute or 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 just say, you know what? It's no man's 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 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, is they just ascended to royalty millennia ago rather than right now. Right now. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and

pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, titles. It's all about the title. The very top of the chessboard. You're going to have your king and queen or an emperor or empress, depending on if that's the kind of game you play in your country or your empire.

Then the relatives of the king and queen. It really depends on the country and the monarchy. A lot of times they're princes and princesses. It can be your children, your grandchildren. It could be your brothers, it could be your cousins. 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 the peerages, at least in European royalty, go in from an order of importance and from the lowest number to the most number. Duke Marques 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. Everybody says Viscount. Good. And then the dukes are the most powerful, but there's the fewest of them. And so if you have a hereditary peerage, you inherited that. At some point in time, some king or queen said, you are now the duke of blah, blah, blah. And you're a noble, but you are not royal.

Right, exactly. So although you can be royal. Yeah. Like I believe Prince Charles is the Duke of Windsor. Right. You know? Yeah, 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 than Duke of Windsor, you know what I mean? Yeah, and that's called being absorbed into the crown. Exactly. Or by the crown. The title can also just be left like if there's no heir.

Yeah. 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. Yeah, probably. And then there's a whole other kettle of fish called life peerages, which basically says you are now a baron or a baroness. While you're alive. Right.

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 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. Right.

Sometimes it's just a noble. When Britain ruled India, they made a very clear distinction that your rulers and your provinces in India are going 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. I know. But now they were all downgraded by the British. Yeah.

We should also say that if you receive a peerage of any sort, you are automatically a member of the House of Lords, which is the upper chamber of British Parliament. That's right. And so it's part of 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 there's an appropriate representation of everybody in the House of Lords.

Yeah. And you also get season tickets to Man-U games. Do you? No, I don't think so. I'll bet you do. 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 actually have real duties. And I guess, well, let's just start with England. Okay. So with England, do you want to read 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 in the UK. We're going to set the record straight here today. Okay. Because technically calling QE2, we know her. We love her. Calling her the queen of England is not correct. No, and it's pretty disrespectful to some people. It is.

And we're going to explain this right now, follow along with our little history lesson. And man, I hope we get this right. Where'd 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. Oh, okay.

But here we go. 1567, you have King James VI. He ascended to the throne of Scotland after mom, who was Mary Queen of Scots, advocated the throne. At the same time, you have Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII. She was the queen of England. Right. And she was Mary Queen of Scots' first cousin, once removed.

Go forward a little bit to 1603. Elizabeth I dies. Then James was King James I of England and King James VI of Scotland at the same time. Does it make any sense? Not so far. They have united the crowns of England and Scotland. Oh, okay. Even though they were separate kingdoms, they had separate parliaments,

separate institutions, it is a crown united with England and Scotland. Okay. Now we have the birth of Great Britain. That was in 1707. Yeah, man, everyone in the UK right now is just like following along so closely. Just waiting for us to mess up. So after the union of the crowns of England and Scotland, it was a rough time.

There were different monarchs. There were a lot of wars. Eventually the wars ended. In 1660, the monarchy was restored. And in 1702, Queen Anne became Queen of England, Queen of Scotland, and Queen of Ireland. Okay. It's very confusing. Where's the rub?

Well, Scotland was still independent. They still had their own parliament, their own legal system. In 1707, during Queen Anne's reign, the English and Scottish parliaments passed separate acts of union. And on May 1st, 1707, the kingdoms of England and Scotland ceased to exist and were replaced by the Kingdom of Great Britain. So now Anne is the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Okay.

So that means that while Anne was Queen, she was the last Queen of England. Yes. And then after these acts were passed in 1707, she automatically became the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. That's right. Since 1707, it has been incorrect to call anyone the King or Queen of England. Yes. Stories not over yet.

It gets more complicated. The next century, Ireland was a separate kingdom. It gained its own parliament. And in 1800, that all changed when Irish and British parliaments passed separate acts of union, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. One country, 1801. So it was three separate kingdoms prior to 1707. Now one kingdom ruled from London.

The act of union passed in 1800 and is still enforced today, although there have been amendments, of course, along the way. Then George III 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. In 1922, they partitioned off what was the Irish Free State, and then eventually the Republic of Ireland was created. And in 1927, the name was changed to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And at that same time, United Kingdom was removed from the title King George V.

The King of the Time became King of Great Britain and Ireland. Eventually in 1953, we arrived at Her Majesty Elizabeth II by the grace of God, the Kingdom of Great Britain and 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.

You don't hear England in that title. And then she also has 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. Yeah. But 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 Queen of England and the Queen of Australia is because there was a treaty and 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 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 do all the work, right? 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 treaties and all sorts of powerful legislation, but 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 them or they could be subject to tyrannicide. Yeah. And basically, 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 tyrannicide can come in. Exactly. So you want to pretty much kind of keep things copacetic as much as possible or you're going to have the English Civil War. Yes, if you're smart and not an inbred dingbat, you know, because there were plenty of kings that ruled like complete nut jobs. And then those nobles too that we talked about that weren't royal, but noble, they also formalized and the Dukes and bishops started evolving eventually

into what became the 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 what 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 role in England. She's a huge tourism draw. She's the head of state.

All that jazz, yeah. But then in other countries, the monarchies are even more ceremonial, like in Japan, the imperial family. Yeah. The heir to the emperor ship. Sure. His name is Prince Hisahito, and he recently got his ceremonial age six haircut. Really?

And wore 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 BCE for this lineage, but they are strictly ceremonial as a result of World War II treaties. It's the same lineage? Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. That's 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 as well. Wow. Sometimes it's not ceremonial at all. Like in Jordan, they're a constitutional monarchy.

And the king of Jordan, in this article, they equate it to the US president. So they have appointments, they appoint judges, they sign laws, but they can be overruled by the National Assembly, but they actually have a job to do in Jordan. Oh, yeah. It's good for them. Although it might be nice just to be purely ceremonial. I bet 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. Yeah. But yeah, I'm sure if you're like Harry, he's having fun. Yeah, you bet he is. 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. Yeah, just regular folks. Yeah, they ride bikes.

Yeah, I don't know about regular folks. Just like everybody. Yeah. They're not even expensive bikes. I bet they're pretty nice. But when you think royals typically, you think like Sultan of Brunei or King of Monaco and Princess Grace Kelly and just incredible wealth or the British monarchs again. That's a good well 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. 240 bedrooms in London, 400 servants, not bad. That seems excessive. Windsor, QE2's family retreat, eight thrones, eight thrones among 650 rooms, not bad. But you mentioned it's pretty good ratio. Brunei, that is where things get really crazy. That is the world's largest palace, almost 1,800 rooms. They have a throne room, tiled and solid gold and chandeliers that cost $12 million.

Wow, they must be royal. And the Britannia, which 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 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? Who'd he sell it to? Private company. Really? That's kind of cool. And then I guess we should talk about pretenders to the throne. Yeah. That's an important thing.

That is not someone pretending to be king, although sometimes that's a case. But a pretender is someone who doesn't hold the crown but lays claim to it. They're saying like, hey, that person is an illegitimate king. Right. I should be king, but I'm really just a sad pretender. That happens sometimes when like a monarch is deposed. Oh, okay. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's somebody who's holding the throne, although it can.

Like there can be no throne anymore and whatever family was in charge when the monarchy was deposed is still keeping track of all this stuff in case they can ever 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 after this break, we're going to talk a little bit more about what life is like if you are a royal. I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep.

We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and

pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. The situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we talked about some of the opulence of the royals and how they love to show off their wealth. Stick your nose in it, you're a commoner. These days, children, if you're a royal child, you have all the best education.

But that wasn't always the 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 tactics because they wanted them to just sit around and eat turkey legs all day. Don't even worry about the book learning. Right. So you had a bunch of dumb royals back in the day, dumb monarchies. Yeah, again, Prince Isahito is the first in the Japanese imperial family to go to an elementary school

rather than the specific school design just for 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. But they call it a school. If you're really young, sometimes you'll be a king and you're just a little baby. Or like you said, like a little toddler, you're going to be assisted by people called regents.

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. People often take pot shots at royals saying that they're genetically unsound. It's true. It is true. Apparently, pretty much around the world, royal families are fairly well-embred. That'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 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 results in some disease and... Genetic defects. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And like apparently that's where 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 narrow or shallow gene pool that you're pulling from, the possibility of recessive genes appearing is increased. Right. So if you have two people who both have a copy of a recessive gene, that gene's 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 intermingling in a normal size gene pool, you're going to have a lot of problems because these people all share the same genes roughly and so recessive genes 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 mad. Yeah, you found an article on some mad ones, didn't you? Yeah, I picked out a few of these. King George III, he was probably the most famous. The movie Madness of King George is in my top 100, by the way. Oh yeah.

Great, great movie. So I was listening to, is it Kenneth Durant who does NPR movie reviews? I think so. He did this awesome like essay on sequels and how there's an art to naming a sequel. And he was saying that the stage play originally was the madness of George III. But when they turn 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 III. I missed the first two. Oh wow, that's funny.

Isn't that interesting? Yeah, dumb Americans. Yeah, Madness of King George. He had all kinds of wacky behavior 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. These days, you know, they try to diagnose all these people now with what they think they might have had. And they believe he might have had schizophrenia or maybe he was bipolar or maybe he had this blood disorder called porphyria.

And that is hereditary and it can mimic madness. And then you have Christian VII of Denmark from 1787 to 1808. He had these wild mood swings, hallucinations, paranoia, self-mutilation. 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's my favorite. In 1936?

Like you can find pictures of this guy, which is kind of fun. Well, yeah, he was around in 1936. He loved his sports cars so much so he loved his red sports cars that 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 was also reportedly a kleptomaniac who may or may not have stolen Winston Churchill's watch. So he was a little wacky too.

I lied, Chuck. That guy was tied for first for my favorite. King Charles VI of France. What was his deal? He was pretty out of it. He apparently got very paranoid that people were after him. So he murdered some of his own knights and he, man, thought that he was made of glass. What?

And had clothes made for him, special clothes. He wouldn't allow anyone to touch him because he thought that he would shatter actually. And apparently he would forget he was king and didn't recognize his family. Wow. They're not exactly sure what it is. Like all of these guys, they diagnose them schizophrenia, bipolar. Right, right. I think the most exact one was misophobia for Farouk.

Yeah. But the rest of them, how do you diagnose somebody like that? You can't like hundreds of years later. Yeah. It's tough. But there have been some wacky mad rulers. There have. Some monarchs.

You got anything else? Yeah. There's 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 is true. Apparently they have different crowns worn by their ancestors and they even create their

own for special events. Well, like coronation. Yeah. Or a wedding ring. Or you could have your own crown or something made for you. Yeah. And you've heard the term heavy weighs the crown. They can be super heavy.

King William the Force coronation crown was seven pounds. That's heavy crown. That is heavy. King George V had a two pound crown with 6,000 diamonds, but Queen Victoria was like, that's stuff. I want a little light crown because it's obnoxious and hurts my head. I was trying to find, I have this idea that crowns were originally fashioned to represent a halo.

Oh, is that right? So I don't know. I'm making it up. Oh, gotcha. It sounds right because remember forever Monarchs has been like, remember, I'm holy. And the closest I 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 looked like the Statue of Liberty's crown, which emulated rays of sunlight.

So that's what those early crowns are based on. I like your theory. I'm going with it. Statue of Liberty is a member of a Roman sun cult. Well, no, I like about the halo. I'm just going to start telling people it's true. Okay. I think, yeah.

Tell them Josh sent you. Yeah, I'm telling Josh sent you. You get it? I got nothing else. All right. Well, if you want to learn more about royals, you can type that word into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and it will bring up this excellent article by Ed Grabinowski. Yeah, the Grabster.

And since I said Grabinowski, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Random Number Generation. We did our show on number stations and Random Number Generation is a key to the number station. This is from Aaron in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Yeah. Hey guys, just listening to your recent podcast and number stations, it was fascinating. Had no idea what these words were until you described them and gave an example. And I suddenly remembered scanning through the frequencies on my little short way radio

and picking up some of those transmissions. 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 the voices 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 use some true random data to seed a high quality pseudo 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. Seems like it. 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 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. Yeah, really? And I said, you're coming to see us in Toronto for a live show. He's like, I didn't even know. How do you not know?

And then he bought tickets and I think he's going to come. Awesome. Yeah. I'm very excited. These are going to be fun shows. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and I, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot,

sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the

White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.