I'm going to show you how great I am.

This is our fighting power.

I just want to say from the bottom of me heart, I'd like to take this chance to How to Take Over the World.

This is Ben Wilson and happy Halloween.

This episode is a special mini episode about Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler.

Vlad was an impressive figure.

He was a great warrior, an effective and ruthless king.

He also earned a reputation for bloodthirstiness in his own time that has lasted obviously up until the current day.

A reputation that was renewed with even more interest in 1897 when Brom Stoker released his best-selling novel, Dracula.

So if you actually say until the end of the episode, I have a discussion with James and Olson of the becoming the main character podcast about the character of Dracula in history and in literature and the connection between the two, how Vlad the Impaler becomes the undead vampire Dracula.

So I hope you enjoy this episode.

Obviously, Vlad is probably not the best person to learn from or try to emulate.

So maybe this episode is a little bit out of character.

But I really enjoy a good Halloween episode, right?

So that's what this is.

And there definitely are things to be learned from his life.

My sources for this episode are Vlad the Third Dracula,

The Life in Times of the Historical Dracula by Kurt Trepdow and Dracula Prince of Many Faces by Raymond

McNally and Radu Florescu of the two the Treptow biography is more accurate and more subdued

but the McNally and Florescu biography is the much more compelling read if you have to just pick up

one I would probably do the McNally and

Florescu one, but do keep in mind that I don't think it's the most critical analysis.

...