Welcome back to the Lila Rocheo. So happy that you guys are here. I'm excited to have you here because this is such a special moment with the conclave. I know everyone is very excited today. Like, is there going to be white smoke? And we didn't get it.

Mm-hmm. Did you think there was a chance we would get white smoke today?

If we had white smoke today, there would only be about two possible cardinals that would have been. Oh, okay. I got it. Franco, can you pull up the white smoke picture actually? We can see it. These images are so iconic too and so gorgeous. I mean, this is like, you know, the one of the most beautiful places on planet Earth, Italy, and then the gorgeous Vatican. Let's get up the white smoke. But Joe, you just said,

sorry to interrupt you, but you just said there were only two candidates that could have

possibly made it today. If it had been white smoke, I would feel like I'd have a 50-50 shot at

knowing who the candidate was. But a small margin of it being somebody else, but it just wasn't

likely. So I mean, a little bit of background

for why this is. The College of Cardinals is more geographically diverse than in any point in history.

Wow. And you know, Pope Francis really made a point of, you know, choosing from the global

peripheries. And so, you know, many countries have their first cardinal ever. And so Italy has the most cardinal

still, but only has 17. So you don't have out of 130.

It says it's 133. Yeah, 133. But as a result, so, okay, Italy has the most at 17. But 17 out of

133rd, it's nowhere near a two-thirds majority. So even if you're beloved by every other

cardinal in your country, most of the rest of the world probably doesn't know you very well.

There are a handful of exceptions, people who are in positions where they're crossing paths

with a lot of the world's cardinals by virtue of the role that they were in under the prior

pontificate. And so there's only a

handful of people who are even well enough known that they would have been like an obvious shoe in.

Everybody knows them. They have an opinion about them. And that would be Cardinal Perilyn and

Cardinal Zupi. And I was skeptical it was going to be, I mean, it could still be one of those two.

The media was treating them much more as kind of like obvious.

And I was a little skeptical that they were going to go that route.

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