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How do you describe what you do someone asks you at a dinner party tell stories? I I make I make videos on the internet is usually my my go-to. I uh, I It's a weird job 32 year old man. Don't really enjoy calling myself an influencer or uh, I guess youtubers are the one i'll say I used to say content creator then all the only fans girls took that title So I don't want people assuming I do only fans It would be a very interesting kind of only fans Everybody getting blown up limbs being lost stories from history Yeah, uh, yeah, I guess it is because historian Content creator. I mean I came across your stuff when I was first researching Uh, sir, adrian paul giselaine carton de watt. Yep. Um, obviously, you know flashing flag for british Although I think it was belgian parents, maybe belgian french parents. Um, and I was like this is this stuff absolutely rules just finding hardcore people from history Main characters, yeah main character energy. Yeah historical main character energy and then retelling their stories in a way. There's two things. It's uh, the telling of the story in a compelling way with interesting elements And and detail that feels immersive, but it's also the selection of who is the person, you know Because if it was just retelling stories that everybody's heard before it wouldn't be quite so interesting. It's like the the deep cuts Yeah from history that's it's the b-side Songs that you should have listened to that you don't know about that are awesome. Yeah, I mean it's And you see it the more and more The more time that goes on the more selective the u.s government at least I don't know about british But the more selective the u.s Government has gotten about like who they promote as a war hero Like we've gotten to the point after vietnam where we almost never promote war heroes Like I would speculate the average american can't name a single medal of honor recipient post vietnam Almost impossible gave out plenty of them during the global war on terror I bet the average american can't name a single one. It's because we quit celebrating it. We quit. Why do you think i'm famous? Uh now we're gonna get into conspiracy theories. I would say the main reason is fractional reserve banking if I had to guess For war heroes war heroes and fractional reserve. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Okay, that's why we could donate. Okay, go on. Uh, world war two How did how did america pay for the war? Cost a lot of money. How do we do it? I don't know we collected taxes What happens when we didn't have enough taxes? In america we sold we sold these things called war bonds It's basically a government bond that you would go to a war bond rally And they would have like a war hero speak or they'd have a presentation Get everybody amped up that america's number one We're going to go beat the nazis and get revenge for pearl harbor. Rah, rah, rah People get amped up and they go and they invest in war bonds Which is basically a promise from the u.s government of like hey give us 50 bucks And in five years, we're going to give you 60 bucks back That's how we did it because that's how we had to do it So in world war ii every time somebody got a medal of honor and you see this recurring in all my world war ii videos Whenever somebody gets a medal of honor and accomplishes something incredible Almost nine times out of ten. They're immediately shipped back home to america and put on a war bonds tour Right, they put them on a war bonds tour to go around the country to raise more money for the war because that is the most Effective thing that they could be doing for the overall war effort at that point in time from war hero to fundraiser We're here at a fundraiser. They parade them around they show them off. They make them famous They become celebrities so that they can raise more money to keep fighting this war. We got to buy more bullets We got to buy more tanks. We got to buy everything and this guy is going to get us a million dollars to do it That's what they do. Well after world war ii We went away from the gold standard. We went away from all this other stuff We have fractional reserve banking now So the u.s. Government doesn't need to raise money from people. They can just print more money whenever they feel like it Is patriotism not a goal in itself? not utilizing war heroes They're more effective cheaper easier. No, I think the u.s. Government specifically. This is kind of one They don't have to do it that way anymore. So it's just easier to not do it It's just easier to print more money, right? But b there's flight risk with making somebody famous If the u.s. Government takes a war hero a 22 year old And says this is the model american. This is captain america This is who you should be looking up to this guy's been through it. His opinion is something that you should listen to That's a loose cannon that could turn on him at some point dakota. Meyer starts tweeting the n-word exactly And that's that's also why it's so much harder to get the medal of honor today It's such a stricter criteria because it's interesting. They're no longer just looking at What did you perform on the battlefield to earn this now it becomes a political flight risk of Well, is this guy gonna make us look bad in the future? Safe, are you how narrative aligned? there's a humongous portion of that now much bigger than there ever was you bring up the u.s. List of Medal of honors in chronological order. Can we see who's been issued it most recently? I bet this so I bet this has once happened this year and we don't even know about it. Probably. Yeah um, but that is I I guess I just assume that having people like your own country is a An end in itself that it's this aggregate like good weather of just well people like the country But I understand that if you put a lot of key man risk as it's known into a few Particular points of failure and those fail especially very publicly on the internet. You're kind of well I think it's also a you know, obviously america has um We're more pro veteran community than I would say a lot of other countries, but it's still it's gone down a lot In my lifetime and in recent years and I think I don't think it's an accident I think they do that on purpose to kind of take away The opinion of or the the political power of the veteran community, right? because when you think about the veteran community now half the conversation is They're all victims. They all have ptsd. They're all this they're all that and I think that's on purpose because they don't want You know an organized group of veterans that get together at the vfw coming forward and calling out this politician or that politician Highly skilled highly dangerous very well reputed. Well, it's not even that it's not even like the physical threat of violence it's just the if we ingrain in american culture that veterans have That veterans are a good bellwether on what our opinions should be and what our value should be Then they have to stick to that You know and you kind of see this back in between world war one and world war two like the world war one veterans Weren't getting their benefits. They marched on dc They had a humongous veterans rally on dc They had to call in the active duty military to drive off the veterans that were demanding their benefits that they weren't getting given The old god versus a new god kind of exactly but like they don't want Veterans to be able to organize like that and influence politics in that way anymore either Let's have a look at this list. You got it mark you know, so that was the pilot that um chinook helicopter pilot Horned by machine gun fire, but safely landed the helicopter allowing the mission to continue This was the guy that did this was maduro Yeah He's getting pinned that medal of honor while holding a walker I believe Yeah, you can see he's holding the walker because he's like he's fresh out of the hospital. Yeah torn to pieces Yep. I mean that's a quick turnaround. I don't know. What does it say when he got it? It was like it was real quick. It was like a month or two It was is that do you think that that's a little bit retrospectively trying to gloss over the hey We stole a world leader from another another country like it was still in the blast radius of man I'm, not going to comment on the political ramifications, but it's definitely one of the coolest things any military has ever done ever It's actually my favorite post on reddit that i've ever seen Explaining there was there was uh, there was this post that some guy made like a year prior that was like i'm so sick of how hollywood portrays special forces and green berets and navy seals like they're These rambo characters that you could send in five of these guys to completely topple an entire nation That's not how this works If you send in five navy seals to kidnap a president They would all wind up murdered or have black bags over their heads and get executed on tv And then this happened and he comes back a year later and comments guys. I was wrong. I don't know what else to say Dude I had a dj shipley sat there and he was talking about the maduro raid and he was like that is like the olympic final For any guy that got that call and he used this analogy He was like if if you rang me or any of the guys that were serving with me and said you can do this but you need to cut off a finger and he was like We're going down like anyone would have picked up the phone to have done that and it's I don't know It's it's strange now being friends with people like andy stump or or with dj or whatever and realizing It is a little bit like a sport To them they want to play against the best team. Yeah, they want to Have a unique opportunity or the world cup final whatever the equivalent is That it's not just about the act of what's going on. It's also your Capacity how much challenge you're going to face that that's a very fascinating sort of third window that you don't really think about I mean, I don't know you spend your entire life building a really fast race car. You want to drive it, right? Straight you want to take it out of the garage and see what it can do straight, you know, yeah What's a common thread between most of the people most of the heroes that you cover? Oh common thread I mean, obviously they're all like incredible war heroes I really like covering the guys that you've just you've never heard of you know All these guys that have accomplished incredible things and I think that overall history History sucks now in school. Uh, it's boring. Um, so historians Generally speaking at in academia they teach history zoomed out Like they start completely zoomed out and then they slowly zoom in But by the time you get zoomed in where all the interesting relatable stuff is you've already lost everybody's attention, right? So like A teacher in academia is going to talk about like, all right Well, we're going to talk about world war ii but before we could talk about world war ii we actually need to talk about world war ii and how that led into the Treaty of Versailles and how the treaty of Versailles is actually the reason that was the catalyst that started world war ii And then this and then that Nobody cares like pick a war hero and be like, hey, here's Richard bong. He's a p-38 pilot in the pacific. Why is he in the pacific pearl harbor happened? What was pearl harbor? It was this richard bong accomplished this at this time at this battle Here's how this battle influenced the overall course of the war. I think when you start zoomed in and then slowly zoom out You cover less history, but people actually learn and actually retain it. Have you seen there's uh studies done on If you tell a story for a charitable, uh contribution tell a story of one person one one poor kid in in a forgotten village somewhere that needs water and That look at how influential that is at donations then you say okay Well two kids should be twice as effective because there's twice as much and then a whole village of people That's you know, like 50 times or 100 times as effective But it's not the human brain sort of discounts the importance as you start to spread out. We're not good at doing Quantitative maths I guess but also we resonate with the story and the emotional impact and I think that piercing in and going Hey care about this guy Or this girl or this fucking horse And from there we're now going to spread out and you can actually begin you're invested in this guy. Oh, why is he interesting? Well, he's actually embroiled this sort of this web of shit that's going on and this is now so I think it I think you're totally right Yeah you got to give them something to actually relate to like give them a situation they could see themselves in And then they're asking themselves question. Like how would I react if that happened? Wow, he actually did that I hope i'm the type of person that can do that And then that's how you actually get people to like learn other things that aren't dates and locations of battles you can actually start teaching like This guy's a great dude. Here's the things that made him great Here was the circumstances he was in and here's the decisions that he made anyways Despite the fact it might not have been in his best interest like so you're not only learning history like we think of normally but you're learning the history of like Decision making and how to be a good person a good man a good leader a war hero And I think that's just as important if not more important I mean, what's the the point of learning history to not repeat mistakes? 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That's function health.com slash Modern wisdom you said the people who don't get enough attention bringing attention to them is quite important Who is someone that you have brought attention to that? you still think your audience glosses over more have you got a Personal favorite that you don't think enough people paid attention to i'll be honest my audience Like once I do a video on somebody I think they do become very very popular. Um The the ones that I take the most pride in probably are the guys that I managed to track down that don't even have Wikipedia pages yet and then after I do a video they get a wikipedia page So like there's been a couple of those those were really cool. Um, well like Uh, logan weston is probably the coolest one that I think i've covered that didn't have a wikipedia page Which is incredible because the dude fought in world war ii and korea and vietnam And had every medal under the sun. I mean you could pull up a picture. He's got his shadow box of medals It's as tall as he is over 300 medals Crazy military career. What's his name? Logan weston the fighting preacher. Okay. What did he do his nickname? That's that's his medals He got shafted for the medal of honor, but he has everything else Okay. Yeah, that's insane so Yeah, you're right. He's from the floor to above his nipples is just different medals. Yep what's the story um so logan westin was uh grew up and uh you know poor kid worked in coal mines worked as a lumberjack doing all these jobs and then um he goes through a series of events where he it's during the great depression and one of his friends that has like a wife and kids is unable to find a job so he goes to the coal mine that he works and he's like hey can we get my buddy a job and he's like no we don't have any work we barely have enough work for you and he's like okay well he's a good dude give him my job and i'll go not work because he's got a wife and kids to support i don't so he gets his buddy this job a week later the coal mine collapses bunch of people die right so he's and then he goes gets work as a lumberjack his buddy survives the coal mining collapse gives his buddy's lumberjack job major logging accident bunch of people die and he just he feels like all this death is going on around him and he he gets in this super low point and he ends up trying to take his own life and he sticks a gun to his head and pulls the trigger it doesn't go off and right as he like he's pulling the trigger on the gun and right before the hammer drops he said he heard somebody say wait and he goes to stop but the hammer drops anyways gun doesn't go off and he's like what just happened and then he walks outside and shoots that same gun that didn't go off right into a tree and it goes off so he kind of interprets this as god giving him a second chance and he uh decides he's going to give his life to god and he decides he's going to go become a preacher goes to a college whatever the college the christian college school to become a minister or whatever and while he's there like his sophomore year the draft kicks off and he finds out he's got to go fight in world war ii because you can't get a college exemption for a religious college because they don't count it at the time so he gets drafted and you know this is 1940 40 or 39 so america's not even in the war yet pearl harbor hasn't happened but they're already starting the draft and he shows up he just gets on the bus he gets off the bus and they're like all right if you want to be infantry go over there you want to be a medic go over there you want to be artillery go over there you want to be this go over there there's no internet there's no tv at this point he has no idea what any of these words even mean you just get to choose he gets to choose take your own adventure military but he doesn't even know what the words are you know what i mean because like today we kind of have a general idea of like oh this is that that's a web watch tv i've seen movies none of that so he's like i i don't know so he just wanders over to infantry and goes off and becomes an infantryman and he's at i think he just finished up ait to become an infantryman gets stationed at his unit when pearl harbor gets attacked and mass chaos everywhere nobody knows what's going on he gets stationed and sent out with a group of guys to basically guard the mississippi river in case the japanese launched some type of other attack through this major that that was oh yeah they were they were deploying troops all over the country because they had they had no idea what was going on or where they were going to attack next nobody knew anything and you have hundreds of thousands of guys with guns ready to like spread them out i guess stop them somewhere if they show up some over there put some over here yeah i mean he was like literally camping out on the mississippi river for like six weeks i think he said and then they called him back in and he winds up getting deployed he gets sent over to the pacific and he's getting told you know you're going to be the tip of the spear when we get off this boat you're going to hop in the higgins boat like saving private ryan like the movies you're going to make an amphibious landing in enemy territory you're going to be taking machine gun fire by this point he's he's leading a platoon he's a platoon sergeant because he was in before pearl harbor even happened so he's one of the most experienced guys even though he's never been in war yet and um yeah the the door drops and he goes running off this higgins boat almost drowns he storms the beach and it's like enemy's not shooting at us what's going on and then they start walking up this beach and it's like there's dead bodies everywhere there's our dead bodies there's it looks like everything's just been destroyed and ransacked and he's like what is going on then they then they bump into the marines well it turns out he got sent to guadalcanal which is a major battle in the pacific for the marine corps and he was told they were going to be the first ones there he showed up like five months after the marine corps had already been there like that battle already took place and was over by the time he got there but he ran off this higgins boat like heart racing like he was about to get into the shit and it was like it was done by the time he got there so he he's on guadalcanal for a little bit longer and then they send him to a different island called new georgia very similar island warfare this time he actually is one of the first guys there so at new georgia i mean this is pacific combat jungle warfare brutal you're out there for days at the time in the jungle you got trench foot skin infections it's hot everything's working against you his company gets sent out on a mission and they get surrounded and they get surrounded for i want to say 29 days straight cut off with no supplies literally starving just holding the line against the japanese when they try to rush them and the japanese are just starving them out and you know in his his memoir that he wrote later in life he talks about they ran out of food three days in they only had the food they could bring with them nobody knew where they were at they were called the lost battalion that's been a name that gets given to every group of guys who gets lost or whatever but uh so yeah 29 days they wind up surviving he's like one of the last guys that's still ambulatory by the end of it so that happens and then he gets shipped back they regain some weight get sent back out on another mission get surrounded again and this time it's for like two weeks but it's a bunch of dudes that have already been through this so they know the game so this time they're like they've got some native guides with them this time and they're like he writes about how yeah they were surrounded but they would just get in the firefight repel the japanese and then they were actually having the native guides go around showing them what plants were edible and they were having like cooking competitions to see who could make the best food out of the surrounding vegetation and whatever mres they had so like they had a much better time the second time they were surrounded everyone when you go back to a holiday destination for the second time you've got a little bit more expertise i think that's the i've had that experience yeah well i mean it's just like the you know i've been in this very shitty situation before i got through it then i'm going to get through it this time and now i've got the expertise so he handles it way better and um it's actually funny so when they go to get out of this situation they're running low on ammo so the commander of his company basically is like weston you're our most experienced guy i trust you the most grab a guide go out at night poke around see if you can find a gap in the enemy line and we're gonna you know try to get out of here and he takes his guide with him and you know it's daylight by the time they're out there they wind up running into the japanese they take a bunch of machine gun fire they dive into a ditch they hide in a swamp they get away after they get out of the swamp they get all the mud off and they check the guide first the guide's fine he didn't get shot logan weston it's in my video but i can't remember the exact exact spots but he took one round to his helmet that skirted around the helmet and fell out didn't actually hit him he took another round like in this part of his coat went straight through i think he took one through his pocket and then he took one in the heel of his boot but he was completely unscathed the local is a guy that grew up on a pacific island right he's not he's never seen anything like this so what he does is he interprets this as wow your god that you're always talking about because remember he's the fighting preacher very religious guy he's always you know doing little church services and people for people so the guide knows that he talks about this a lot so he interprets it as wow your god must be really powerful to be able to protect you like that and he's like can i can i be a christian too and logan's like yeah man you can be a christian and he's like so they like out in the jungle they say a little prayer together and from this guy's perspective he's now a christian and he's protected by god to the same level at logan weston so he starts like singing and dancing loudly behind enemy lines because what's the worst that could happen the enemy's gonna miss me with bullets so logan spends rest and i'm like dude shut the fuck up it doesn't work that way be quiet like he wasn't buying it so like i don't and it's just that's the funny shit that happens in these stories where it's like yeah that's awesome so um they get back from that mission his his unit does wind up punching through and they get saved uh after that logan gets back and he gets two letters from home their post dated like six months prior he's been in the jungle the whole time old letters from home he's got one from his fiancee saying that she's leaving him and he's got another letter from mom and dad saying they're getting divorced sick and then they call the troops in and they're like hey uh can't tell you what it is but we got a super dangerous mission that's volunteer only who wants it and he's like don't have anything else to live for i guess so he volunteers they're like all right get on the boat they take him on a boat they take him to australia they take him here they take him there he winds up in india and he's like what the fuck is going on he hops on trains he sees the taj mahal and they get out to india and they start training well this is actually a group that would come to be known as merrill's marauders which is the predecessor for the 75th ranger regiment merrill's marauders was basically i believe 3 000 guys that were experienced in jungle warfare and their mission was to from india march into china because china's having the war during world war ii at the same time right so you've got the people that are friendly with the u.s and the people that are trying to take over and basically go in there and fight the japanese and because the japanese are fighting through china trying to connect germany and japan together go in there and conduct guerrilla warfare operations and stop them from taking over china and linking up with the germans prevent that from happening and raises a question it's all jungle terrain they have to walk it's like 800 miles they have to walk just to get to the area of operation they have to bring in mules and pack everything in it's miserable and the only way they get supplies for like the nine months they're there is by calling in airdrops literally living in the jungle for nine months straight conducting guerrilla warfare operations the only food water ammunition you get is when you call in an airdrop and every time you call in an airdrop guess who sees that fucking everybody so advertising your position each time you need to eat exactly so merrill's marauders has i forget the exact statistic but it's like an outrageous outrageously high casualty rate they started out with 3 000 dudes i think there was only 300 that 300 original members that finished all the way through he made it to like the very very end and he ends up getting medevaced back home uh because he gets wounded but he participates in almost every major battle that merrill's marauders was in so he gets sent back home to america that's pretty much the end of world war ii for him he decides he's going to stay in the military goes finds a wife gets married and he goes back to college finishes becomes a minister and he's still serving i believe in the reserves and then the korean war kicks off and he's like all right well i guess i'm going to go back into the military and this time he's like i have my college degree now i can go in as a chaplain in the military so he goes and they're like you're too old he missed the cutoff by like it's like i think it's like 32 is the oldest you could be and he's 33 at this point so like you can't be a chaplain all you can be is infantry so he's like fuck it i guess i'll be infantry again fine uh sorry the korean war does not kick off yet it's like things are looking like it might so he volunteers to go back in he gets sent to uh they give him the option he can go to germany or he can go to japan for occupation duty he volunteers to go to japan because that's who he fought he wants to you know just that's the culture he's most familiar with he goes to japan he's stationed in japan while he's in japan as an infantryman on occupation duty the korean war kicks off and they're like hey pack your shit we got to go to korea real quick in and out no big deal they literally tell him it's going to be like a one week thing don't even bring all your stuff he shows up to south korea when i don't know how much you know about the korean war basically the north koreans push the south koreans all the way down to the very very very bottom of the peninsula and they're holding off this little tiny perimeter at the very bottom called the pusan perimeter that's when logan westin shows up at the pusan perimeter like they're about to wipe south korea off the map and he shows up and he gets put on duty watching the pusan perimeter and uh they're like this is a friendly area it's no big deal you shouldn't see anybody coming and they're hanging out there they're basically camping for a couple days him he's got like a platoon that he just met just got put in charge of and he's like watching the you know watching the horizon looking for guys and here comes 90 dudes walking up and he radios it in radio's dead it's like a friendly area nobody's into it so like it's nighttime everybody already went to bed nobody's responding to the radio so he sends a runner go back to hq tell him i got like 90 guys walking up on us runner takes off comes back they said they must be friendlies they're probably south koreans he's like they're not south koreans i can tell by their uniform and they're carrying world war ii era japanese rifles i know because i fought those guys and that's what the north koreans carry go tell them i've got a bunch of enemies coming sends the runner running comes back they said it's friendlies you're overreacting blah blah blah blah this happens like two more times and then they just start taking fire so then he ends up leading his guys and stopping this major attack at the busan perimeter i think i want to say he's credited not him specifically but the men under his command were credited with killing like two to three hundred guys and there's like 30 of them holding this hill by themselves logan gets shot he gets all jacked up um yeah i mean it's an event and he basically you can make an argument that like if he would have not been able to hold when he held they would have overran the hq and like penetrated the busan perimeter and south korea might not exist so like he literally changed history with this action and this is where he was nominated for the medal of honor but the commanding officer in charge that was telling him oh no it's probably friendly south koreans don't worry about it he intentionally made sure it got knocked down to a distinguished service cross because a medal of honor investigation is much bigger and it would have made him look like a dumbass so he basically got shafted for the medal of honor so logan weston gets all jacked up he's in the hospital for like weeks and weeks and weeks i forget the exact uh day count but it's like if you're hospitalized for i want to say 90 days you just get sent back home to america so in the hospital day 89 they're like you're good go back to the front lines and by this point america's shown up at in chon the marines made their amphibious landing there we've driven the north koreans all the way back up into north korea and they're like at the yalu river which is basically the border with china so we're all into North Korea at this point. So he's at the Yalu river when the Chinese enter the war and launch their massive attack that drives allied forces back down the peninsula. He's there and he fights all the way back down with them. And, uh, at one point they run into enemy tanks and he calls like, I need an anti-tank crew out here. Anti-tank crew comes rolling up with bazookas. He's a good leader. He's leading from the front. He's like three bazooka guys follow me. And he comes running out and they sneak up on these tanks and the tanks see them first and they fire on their position, kills the entire anti-tank crew. Three guys, Logan Westin's the only one that survives. And there's three tanks in a line. He fires at the first tank with the bazooka or fires at the middle tank with the bazooka, knocks it out. And then the two other tanks realizing that this guy is somewhere out there for whatever reason, they open the hatch. So he does the only thing he can do to like try to hide from these tanks. He's already on top of this first tank over here. Like can't shoot me if I'm on top of you. Well, they open the hatch, throws a grenade in that one, takes that tank out. And then the other tank, his tank, he's on burning tank, other tank when they go to get out of the hatch he fires. So he takes out three tanks by himself and you can still pull up the newspaper articles. It's like fighting preacher dispatches three communist tanks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I pull them all up in my YouTube videos. So he does that. I believe he gets a distinguished service cross with a silver star for that action. And then when they're basically doing a tactical retreat back down South, they get pushed down past Seoul and then they fight their way back up to the 32nd parallel where the border is today. But when they're back down by Seoul, he's been promoted to like a battalion leadership. So he's overseeing entire companies of guys. And one of the officers under his command is a captain Lewis Mallette of Easy Company. And Easy Company is famous for during this period of time, leading the last bayonet charge in US military history. So Lewis Mallette, and you could pull a picture of him up. He's got a big mustache with bayonets. He's a total character. I've done a video on him too. He's a badass. So he hadn't heard that the communists who were famously running low on ammunition because they can't manufacture anything. We're kind of psy-opping their guys into being like, well, you know, the Americans are just scared to bayonet fight you boys. It's like, no, you're just not giving us bullets, but whatever. I've got a man with a mustache that says otherwise. He found out that that's what they were saying. So he leads the last bayonet charge in US military history, takes a hill. And that was under the command of Logan Westin at the time who was there when it happened also. So it's like, look at that guy. Holding two bayonets. I do not want to be stabbed in the neck by a man with a mustache like that. Look at that womb broom. Dude. And what is that? A medal of honor around his neck as well? Yeah. That's a medal of honor. He got the medal of honor for that action. For the bayonet charge? For leading the last bayonet charge in US military history. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Last company sized bayonet charge. Okay. Yeah. Probably some bloke had a crack. Yeah. There's probably a couple of guys, like three dudes ran in with bayonets, but like this was the last time that a company commander with 30 to 50 dudes was like, fix bayonets. We're going in and they did it. Sick. So yeah. So yeah. Logan Westin is actually, I think he's book number nine in the, my new book series I got coming out. So it should be pretty good. Unreal. Okay. So then he gets through the Korean incursion. Yep. So he gets through the Korean war. And by this time he is, you know, he's, he's been there done. He's done all of it. He's in his mid forties by the end of the Korean war. And after the Korean war, they come to him and they're like, Hey, we got this new thing. We're trying to start up. It's called the green berets, special forces. You're 46. You want to try out and become a green beret. He's like, sure. So he, he goes and becomes a green beret at the age of 46 years old, gets jump qualified. He's jumping out of planes at 46 becomes a green beret from here. He gets sent to the Pentagon where he helps write, literally write the book on jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics from his experience with Merrill's marauders. He then goes on to be an advisor on behalf of the U S government in Laos during the Vietnam war. If you don't know Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam war is where McAbee SOG was operating. Basically Vietnam is a long country up and down and you have Laos and Cambodia right here. So what was happening was Vietnam is split. So what was happening is like bad guys up top communists, rather than trying to fight through the American lines to deliver supplies to their guerrilla fighters, they would just cut over into less in Cambodia, run down, run over, drop the supplies off, run back. So we were sending in McAbee SOG special operators to go in and basically conduct a shadow war that didn't happen for another 40 years, the entire time. And he was a advisor in Laos while that was going on. So this guy's just incredibly, I can't work out if I think that he's the luckiest or the unluckiest man. He's really the barbell of luck. He's the main character for sure. He's got, yeah, on both sides. Holy shit. His last day in Korea, day before his last day in Korea, gets hit by an enemy sniper right in the chest. Bullet gets stopped by the Bible in his breast pocket. No fucking way. Goes, does the Vietnam thing, comes back home, retires, becomes the, I forget the official job title, but basically the chaplain for Texas A&M for 10 years. A quick aside, if you've wanted an Eight Sleep but can never quite justify the price, things just got very interesting. They've somehow managed to make it significantly better and cheaper at the same time. Introducing the brand new Pod 6. It's now 50% smaller, meaning it fits under most bed frames. And there are nine times more sensors built into it. Despite all of these upgrades, the Pod 6 now starts at just $1,999, the lowest starting price Eight Sleep has ever offered. Best of all, for the first time, Eight Sleep has introduced solar sizes, including single side options for Queen, King, and California King beds. And they've got a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally, so don't be scared by the currency amount. Right now you can get up to $350 off the Pod 6 by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. So I've had this sort of idea ever since watching a lot of your stuff and getting more interested in these kinds of stories. Carton de Watt was the first one that got me into it. Alistair Urquhart, the Forgotten Highlander. So that was one of the first stories that got me into this. And then I guess a similar one, like John Boyd, fighter pilot guy. Okay, I'm kind of excited. I'm kind of interested in this. But there is this sense in the back of our mind that, well, war's not stopped. War's kept on going. Why is it that all of the heroic stories that I'm hearing about seem to... There's like an expiration date on the new models of these coming out. Why is it that we've not got new war heroes in the same way? And you've got your theory behind that. We know way more about it than me, but there is this sense, I think, that first off, when I think about war, I'm not thinking about guys with tactics. I'm thinking about drones and missiles hitting schools and shit. I don't even know if we have room for war heroes in the same way anymore. We do. Okay. Again, me being a conspiracy theorist, I think they portray it that way on purpose. I really think that very powerful organizations, governments, entities, people, whatever, they don't want you to realize how powerful one man or a small group of men that are determined to accomplish something, how powerful that is and what they can actually accomplish. And the analogy that I'll give you is you always hear one of the big criticisms of the Second Amendment. It's like, I understand the Second Amendment was created to stop a tyrannical government, but the tyrannical government has Abrams tanks. What are you going to do with your AR-15? It's like, all that tells me is you have no concept of how war actually works. Yeah, the government does have a lot of very big, very powerful, very fancy toys. They're very, very fragile, especially in America, for example, like the amount of logistics that has to go into keeping an Abrams tank on the battlefield is insane. The amount of mechanics, equipment, specialized stuff, all of that. And it's like America has somewhere in the vicinity of 8,000 Abrams tanks. Let's go to magical fairytale land. Okay. Let's say they run on fucking magic. They don't run on diesel. They're autonomous. They're ran by robots. They're solar powered. They self-charge. They don't need any logistical capability whatsoever. 8,000 of them to cover all of the United States. If there was some war scenario where the people tried to rise up against the government, that's one Abrams tanks for like every 1,200 square miles ish. What's one tank going to do in covering 1,200 square miles? So it's just kind of the concept of like war is always going to come down to one guy with a gun and you're going to have all the big fancy toys. You're going to have drones. And all of that is going to be on the very front end of the war. And then the supply chains are going to get broken and shit's going to quit working. Somebody at the factory, the factory that makes the drones is going to get blown up. Somebody's going to figure out how to interrupt the Bluetooth signal. That's why all the drones over in Ukraine now are guide by wire at somebody it's all going to, it's always going to come down to dudes on the ground, getting shit done. Do you think this does society suffer if there's no outlet for heroism? I don't know that it needs an outlet for heroism, but I think society suffers when you quit glorifying heroism. Like I think that needs to continue. And I think that's a big reason. Like why I think that's one of the big downsides of not promoting war heroes anymore. For example, you don't give people someone to strive for someone to, you're not giving people good role models. You're not saying like, Hey, this is the guy you should be looking up to. This guy knew that he was going to die, ran into the Bernie building anyways to save these people. Like you quit glorifying that guy, people quit doing those things. You quit. And on top of that, some of these stories like Logan Westin, like that seems impossible, but it's possible. And like, if you know that that's possible, maybe you'll be inclined to do it too. And then you can accomplish something great, but people don't want to, people don't want to share the stories. How many of the stories that you cover end with Alistair Ockhart living and his family's country estate until 80 or an outrageous amount, like lots and lots of the heroes actually make it home and just become a chaplain UT or whatever the fuck, a significant portion. And like, that's the coolest part to me is you take somebody like Logan Westin that was able to do what he did. And like that dude objectively killed a lot of people across three wars, across three wars, a 38 year long career. And he went back home, became a preacher, outstanding member in his community, probably would have had no idea that he was anywhere near that badass ever. And he just went back to being normal. Like that's the most incredible part to me is, you know, what's the, what's the quote, the best deterrent for bad guys is good men, skilled in violence. Like that's those guys. And they're just wandering around. And like, you've talked about, you've talked about having DJ Shipley on and like all these other special operators. Like I've never met him or Andy Stump, but I've met plenty of people like them. And they're usually the most like chill. I mean, they don't look like they're a pansy ass or anything, but you're not sitting there being like, yeah, that's that level of badass. They're unassuming. They're just normal dudes for the most part. Yeah. There is a, Andy, Andy in particular is an unnerving human because I feel like if he was killing me, he would kill me with a smile on his face and enjoy a coffee afterward that, that, that is a, I don't know. Do you think that these are these people built different? What, what is it that sort of distinguishes the kinds of people that you cover from what normal people assume it would a normal person if put into that situation, just behave the same. What have you come to think about the difference between heroes and people that don't, that aren't. I don't know. It's interesting. Um, obviously like PTSD is a relatively new discovery or like understanding, um, but I was shocked in world war one. Yeah. But like the, the thing that catches me up that I find really interesting about that is, I think it changes a lot based on, you know, just media has changed everything. So what I'm trying to say is for example, when you look at the archetype of like Vietnam, Korea, world war two, specifically world war two, all those guys came back home. And the story is the same. I hear it from, I get emails and everything. My grandpa was in world war two. We never talked about it. He never talked about it. He never talked about it. He never told me anything. The amount of times I get an email where it's like this, I found this in my grandpa's attic after he passed away. And it's like a shadow box with all those metals. I have no idea what I'm looking at. Can you tell me what I'm looking at? And like, grandpa's got like five bronze stars with V device. And it's like, oh, grandpa's a fucking badass V device, V device. So you have a bronze star. And then if you have a bronze star with V device, V device means you did something with valor. So like you can have a bronze star for like being really good at organizing shit and doing paperwork for the company. But if you've got a bronze star with V device, you did some bad-ass shit on the battlefield. Right. So it's like, grandpa's got five of those and, uh, you know, expert infantry and like all this other stuff. Like grandpa was a bad-ass. I don't know what he did, but he did some shit. And I think the part with technology where it's like, these guys never talked about it because they couldn't talk about it. So think about the average world war two veteran grew up in the 1920s 1930s, no TV. Everybody thinks like 1920s and they picture New York in their head, like model T is running around the stock market, mobsters, Tommy guns, all this cool shit. That was New York. Was one small sliver the rest of the country was 30 years in the past living in log cabins still people didn't have power They didn't have indoor plumbing for the most part. They were poor and That's all the dudes that fought World War two So imagine you're some kid from Nebraska that grew up in a log cabin with no power No running water in your house, and there's one rich guy in town That's got a Model T You've never seen an airplane and you get drafted and you get sent and you wind up at fucking D-Day Flying in a fucking plane bigger than the house you grew up in jumping into combat with a magical gun that can shoot a hundred rounds of a minute or whatever and all this Technological advancement and radios and radars and all this shit and then you have to go back home five years later and your dad Asked you what was it like? How do you explain to a guy who doesn't have TV who can't fathom? It's sci-fi to them I'd have kept quiet to imagine trying to explain that to some dude who's seen a Model T one time being like There's a tank imagine a Model T, but a thousand times heavier with a gun Like it's like space war. Yeah, it's like some Star Wars shit. It's it's like trying to explain a color to a blind person Like what does it look like? Dude? I don't know how to explain this. You just had to be there So, you know no wonder they never talked about it. That's why they hit out at the VFW with the people that could understand Hmm, so do you think that that is a form of PTSD? What do you what do you think's going on there? I Don't think that that in it's in that of itself is a form of PTSD But I think that that's like the reason they didn't want to talk about it with people and then obviously not talking about it Just leads to you bottling it up feeling isolated, which obviously makes any mental illness from my understanding Infinitely worse. Yeah, I think a lot of the guys like Zamparini. He had a ton of odd ways of Re-acclimatizing when he came back alcohol problems stuff like that Alistair Ockhart for the rest of his life was unable to eat much more than a cup of white rice Every so often his entire digestion was ruined. He had a like cars would backfire He'd jump and have these sort of strange responses, but I don't know Well, that's the other thing like with and what I mean with like technology affecting us So differently is World War two these guys got done with the war and it was like, okay wars over Pack everything up. What's that take a couple months? All right you're still with your boys that have been through the shit with you for a couple months and you get to like Decompressive like okay. I'm with these guys that I was in the shit with but we're we're all gonna make it home Nobody's gonna die. We're not gonna get blown up We're not gonna get shot and then we load it all up on the boats and then it takes Another couple weeks to get across the ocean on the boat still with my boys. Then we got to get back to camp We got to unload everything then we got to go through all this paperwork bullshit I I'm spending three to six months with my homies still Acclimating to the fact that me and you aren't gonna die together. Hmm, and I get that act Almost, you know, yeah decompressing and then I got released back into the public Whereas now if you find the global war on terror, it's like hey You're going to Afghanistan pack your shit you're on a plane you're in Afghanistan 48 hours later and Then to make things even more complicated back in World War two. What were you getting from back home? You were getting letters and care packages now you're getting fucking I don't know how much harder would it be to fight a war and go out on patrol knowing I could get blown up tomorrow and I'm having a video FaceTime call with my wife and kids the night before. Oh, that's it You're saying that the high definition or the high Resolution contrast between my civilian life my love my connection and Where I am, you know, it's less immersive and faster I think the contrast is greater both like across time and during the experience exactly And like how much harder is it to do anything if you're trying to multitask at the same time? Like I don't know. It's emotional multitasking Could you imagine trying to get a good hard workout in while also FaceTiming your child and wife in between sets I Mean that'd be pretty hard now. I imagine fighting a fucking war doing it Like and I mean also not to discount it But like just the ability for your wife to call you and ask you stupid questions about like Do you know where you left the this thing after Alex sweetheart? I'm trying to fight a war right now I'm busy. You know what? I mean? It's just technology has changed how war is fought so much. It's insane you don't ever think about this I've been thinking about this to do with bands that um, you hear about this drummer has Left a particular band or that one member of maybe even a founding member of a group has gone Yeah, oh my god, but there was such a savant, you know, they clinically there were Unbelievable at what they needed to do on stage, but you don't see is what happens behind the scenes You don't see what it's like to try and live on a bus with this person for four or six months of the year And I'm friends with enough people in bands who've been through this to go. Yeah, man unbelievable skill and a fucking nightmare to live with like just a straight-up nightmare I and we just a vibe kill bad or It was unworkable and you can put up with it for long enough And it's kind of the same with this that you think about well, how what's this person's precision with shooting? Like what's their ability to follow orders? Like what's their planning? What's their contingency? How brave are they? Can they listen to? Go, yeah, okay but also How capable are they when the site when they put the gun down when they're out of their ready position and they're back for? 12 hours and they've got the opportunity to pick up some text messages or to find out some stuff that's going on at home or to Do the basically like Batman Bruce Wayne swing from I'm kind of normal for a bit So I'm not I'm not fully immersed in where I am and then I need to be able to turn that off I I mean, maybe there's a case I have to assume that like the seals when they're on super duper secret deployment It's like hey, you don't you know, give me your phone You're not facetiming home or whatever, but that might be a good strategy for more guys to make them more immersed Well, you know, I mean you look at like, you know special forces and stuff like Navy SEALs There's there's also the additional level of understanding both with them and I would assume at their family level with their spouses or whatever It's like hey This is what dad does whereas like World War two and stuff like that. These guys were drafted. These are 18 year old kids You know, I mean this isn't some 30 year old farm boy. Yeah This isn't some 30 year old man That's like been actively working towards this his whole life that wants to be doing this Necessarily and I think that also plays a big factor too of like yeah, could the Navy SEAL handle it probably a lot better than Joe Schmoe that's your average infantry guy that got drafted into being here or just showed up You know what? I mean if you're gonna spend an hour in the gym You might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it And honestly who wants to be in the background of a tick-tock is highlight reel dressed like a chump Gymshark make some of the best men's and women's training gear on the planet and Something that I realized a few years ago is that when you actually like what you're wearing in the gym you show up differently you train harder you stay longer and Get way more high-fives. The hybrid shorts are my go-to They are the perfect length super lightweight easy to wash and dry and their sleeveless t-shirts What I've trained in every day for basically the last decade. They're the ideal fit. They're breathable. They hold their shape perfectly No more looking like Adam Sandler's your stylist. Basically, everything they make is unbelievably well designed You already know about them. They're high quality You get 30 days of free returns globally with global shipping and a 10% discount sitewide So get that 10% discount by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh Slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 a checkout. That's gym.sh slash modern wisdom a modern wisdom 10 a checkout What do you think it is about military's sort of worst behaved soldiers? So often being its best fighters I think about John Boyd's putting a cigar out on the tie of his commanding officer or Cut on to what got promoted for 24 hours and then I think he got demoted for punching his sergeant in the throat What's is that rebellious mutinous solo guy thing? Is that more common less common? I I think it in everything in life there anybody that's highly successful that you look up to has a Delusional self-confidence that they are right in their belief and I think you see that everywhere. It's not just the military Everybody that accomplishes anything is going up against Whatever's in their way, whether that be the government the market, whatever, whatever, whatever They have to have this self-confidence like they're telling me this is wrong. I know it's right. Fuck you. I'm gonna do it Anyways, I mean what's uh, one of my favorite quotes was Henry Ford and he said if I to gave the people what they wanted I would have been breeding faster horses like fuck you. I'm making a car. You don't know it yet but this is what we need and you see that over and over and over again with these war heroes like No, this isn't the this isn't the way we need to be doing this. This is what needs to happen And I think that's what it is high conviction who are Who comes to mind when you think about a sort of rebellious singular happy gun? Who's that? Pappy gun Paul Irvin gun He was a fighter pilot between World War one and World War two he was part of the top hatters some of the guys that pioneered like carrier landings and stuff with planes and By the time World War two rolled around he had already been long since retired But the dude was a flight fanatic incredible pilot when he was still in the Navy Being basically a stunt pilot and a fighter pilot pioneering modern fighter Piloting he kept having cavities and he kept going to the dentist to get root canals and shit And he finally got fed up because it was taking up too much of his time So he goes to the dentist is just like just fucking pull all my teeth out and the nail of them all of them Give me dentures. I'm sick of this shit, and he goes to the Goes to the Navy dentist. They're like no we're not doing that so he goes to the civilian dentist and pays them and gets it done gets dentures After he retires. He's in his 40s He moves to the Philippines because he was stationed there fell in love with it knows that his money goes a lot further there He moves out to the Philippines and he starts he buys a plane and just starts being a pilot in the Philippines and like that's life, he's got a wife two kids, and he's living out the Philippines having a great time and World War two is going on Pearl Harbor gets attacked He's been in the Navy for 20 years He's like the only reason they would attack Pearl Harbor first is because they want to attack everywhere else with impunity So he knows that they're coming to the Philippines, so he's trying to get his wife and kids off the island He can't the American forces in the Philippines are trying to scramble around They're basically commandeering all the planes military or not like US government's confiscating this you're working for us now We need you to fly these high-ranking generals here. We need you to fly these people there do this do that and He winds up basically getting assured that you know the Japanese aren't coming Malta's defended where his family is and He gets ordered to take his personal plane and fly I think it's MacArthur's like right-hand man to Australia While he's on this flight to Australia MacArthur declares Malta an open city, which basically just means to the Japanese Hey, Malta is a historic city. There's a lot of civilians. We're not gonna fight you for it Don't carpet bomb this fucking place. You can just have it So they basically turned it over to the Japanese his wife and kids get captured He flies off the fucking handle and Basically gets recommissioned in the military because he was an officer beforehand gets recommissioned and just starts Commandeering planes trying to fly back to the Philippines to rescue his family has multiple rescue attempts fails on all of them keeps getting it back to Australia and then eventually he links up with some fighter squad unit that's like trying to actually win the war and He's at the airstrip one day and there's a like I think it's nine or twelve B B 25 Mitchells, is that what it is? Hold on. Sorry B 25 Mitchells Yeah, so oh look at that So they belong to the Dutch and He's like why the fuck does the Dutch have brand-new bombers when America is struggling to get our own planes here Why do they have American planes? It's just bureaucratic government bullshit. He asked the Dutch like what are you guys doing with him? Oh, we don't really know what we're doing with him yet. So he's like fuck this He goes back to his unit grabs a bunch of pilots. They roll up forged documents and fucking steal them Steals a fleet of medium bombers and flies them back to his from the Dutch and flies him back to our airfield They get back to the airfield and they're like bad news There's no bomb sites The Dutch must have taken the bomb sites out and put them in the supply sergeant's armory and Pappy's like got it Pappy flies back and Then robs the supply sergeant with a fucking gun and takes the bomb sites and leaves Yeah So he gets all these bomb sites He continues flying missions And then eventually he comes to the realization that at the time when they were trying to launch this air battle against the Japanese Navy Medium bomber you're flying, you know tens of thousands of feet up in the air and they're basically just flying really high Dropping bombs from really high hoping they hit this small moving target. He's like that shit's not effective We need we got to fly right over the top of them and just drop it right on their fucking forehead That's the only way we're gonna sink these fuckers. He's like, but we need cover So he gets a bunch of light bombers. I believe they're a to a 20 Havoc's He gets a bunch of a 20 Havoc's and he's like He's also like a genius mechanic and engineer So he rips up these a 20 Havoc's and he mounts 650 caliber machine guns in the nose which The it's not like you can just I'm just gonna throw some guns in the nose of a plane. There's aerodynamics. There's weight distributions There's all kinds of shit going on with vibration from vibration from the guns everything The amount of weight you actually lose just from the ammunition getting expended is a huge factor The plane is losing balance is all over The plane is losing hundreds of pounds of weight just by you opening up with the guns like it's a nightmare Figures it out Gets a fleet of these things gets a fleet of the bombers and develops a new tactic We're basically all right We're gonna send the a 20s in they're gonna strafe the deck of the gun to drive everybody off the anti-aircraft guns And that's gonna clear it so the Mitchells can fly low and drop the bombs right on top of them Okay, who he does that? Well, then he comes to the realization Why don't I just fucking put guns in the Mitchells too, then they can stray for themselves while they fly in Fuck yeah, just some dude MacGyvering this shit and bear in mind. This is like if I could pick one like there's a lot Movies that I want made but this is just like the ultimate Hollywood movie because this is a dad That's just MacGyver in new planes and going out on Experimental missions sellotape and cable to save his wife and kids because they're in an internment camp for the Japanese Like name a better know that they're alive. He finds out that they're alive, right? There's a period of time that he doesn't but he does find out that they are alive and he is the most motivated man On the planet to get back. He's working like 70 hours a week like insane They said he was just sleeping in planes on the flight line working on these things and he's still going out on all the missions With him and everything else So he ends up putting 850 caliber machine guns in the nose of the b-25 so that must have been what that was for the front and then two and Two no. No, I think that yeah, so that was a different one. I'm gonna get there. Okay, that one's different save that picture Okay So he mounts 850 calibers in the Mitchell's nose cone and You know they go out on missions they work exactly how he wanted and this you know, he goes out on all these missions but it ultimately oh I forgot about his pinky during this period of time where he's going out on these missions developing these planes Building these planes for the US Navy. He breaks his pinky Okay, and he keeps rebreaking it and it's just getting in his fucking way. He's turning wrenches all day I can see why this is going the man that got his teeth ripped out he goes to the medic and it's like cut my pinky off and The medic is like I'm not cutting your pinky off and he's like, let's go to the doctor and see if the surgeon will cut It off The medic is homeboys with him like they're buddies. He gets it He's like this pinkies coming off one way or the other so the medic and Pappy go to the surgeon and the surgeons like I'm not taking your pinky off. I can't ethically remove a good finger Just splint it and heal at which point Pappy pulls out his 1911 and says you're gonna cut it off You're gonna clean it off your wall What do you want to do? He cut the pinky off so he gets his pinky removed so he can keep working and Then this whole thing boils to a head at a place called the Battle of the Bismarck Sea so basically War in the Pacific everybody's fighting over New Guinea at this point in time The Japanese are about to reinforce New Guinea to fight the Americans with an entire division of Japanese infantry They're get they're coming in on I believe eight eight troop carriers and those are being escorted by destroyers and everything else We got to stop them so he takes his fleet out. He's got a 20s. He's got B B 25s They take him out and what ends up happening at this battle is The Japanese Navy sees the a 20s coming in really low Well the a 20s coming in low For they don't know that these things exist they were just mad maxed by this fucking crazy guy trying to get his kids back They don't know about this technology So what they assume it is is they assume it's torpedo bombers Right so the boats coming this way The planes are coming this way. This is a broad side of the boat the planes are coming this way Naval doctrine for a torpedo bomber is to turn into the bombers Because a torpedo would land in the water and you want the big broad side of the ship you want the bigger target So they turn into the formation Because that would minimize the surface area to get hit by torpedoes not realizing that their goal is to actually strafe the decks So they go in and pull that lined it up perfect to be able to clear the whole thing They strafe all the decks of these ships that are covered in enemy infantry They strafe the decks the b-25s come in they skip bombs right into the side of them They sink all eight troop carriers at once how many people is that? A division is this between the battle of the Bismarck eight to twelve thousand. Oh fuck. This is it You've got probably enough temporarily anyway, let's find a clean skin fun fact about this footage is taken from Pappy's plans Sorry who just at what one point in that world you're going who the fuck is the guy with the video camera The generally in these that you know when you see combat camp combat cameraman, and you're just like hey, we're gonna go do this thing We might get shot down, but it would be real cool People can watch this combat camera a hundred years time combat camera dudes are badasses You're gonna go into combat with a camera and document this for mankind And this is why I said it pissed me off earlier when these companies go in and try to copyright this footage like some dude With balls so big that he had to lug them around in a wheelbarrow got this footage for us We paid for it, and now you're gonna. Tell me that we can't use it fuck off So the Battle of Bismarck see happens They sink all eight troop carriers basically wins New Guinea changes helps change the course of the Pacific War big deal The guy that he's taking orders from at this point is General Kenny the guy running the air war for the entire Pacific theater, and he's like dude that was outrageously effective We need to start mass-producing these b-25s that you've figured out how to make They send all the drawings that Pappy made back to whoever the fuck made the Mitchell You know the engineers back in America, and they're like it won't work And they're like yes, it will I've seen it fucking work like it has worked, and they're like can't be done So they end up sending Pappy back to America to show the engineers how he did it He does it and it becomes like an official model of the plane is the b-25 strafer That was mass-produced that this guy just MacGyvered on a whim to accomplish the mission So Pappy gets back and he finds out that while the engineers with their funding and their degrees they outdid him Pappy figured out how to get 850 cows in this b-25 engineers Figured out how to get 12 they one-upped him What's Pappy gun gun got to do? He's got a one up him back so go back to that original picture. I told you to save So what Pappy gun does is he figures out how to mount 450 cows in the nose of the b-25 and you see that hole Mm-hmm, that's a 75 millimeter cannon from a Sherman tank What's that mean? You know I was like it's a fucking tank gun It's the fucking gun from a tank He took the head of a tank and stuck it in the front of his fucking nose on his plane And that also went on to become an official very I I Mean flying something that's in the air when that much force goes that way it must slow the plane down Yeah, but briefly the plane will go. I would assume I wouldn't look forward to it Okay So yeah, I yeah, and then He winds up they send him out on some crazy-ass mission on the beach. He gets wounded. He gets hospitalized and While he's in the hospital recovering Malta gets liberated and his wife and son and daughter all get recovered and It's by this point Pappy gun is like a legend within the military like a living legends within the military everybody knows about this dad That's in his 40s. That's working like a madman to save his wife and kids and you know I like to imagine When they were getting sorted through they're like hold on sorry what your last name's gun Holy shit So they get like beeline to the hospital and he basically gets Reunited with his wife and kids who all surviving from while he's recovering in the hospital And it's like name a better Hollywood movie ending than like knowing your dad Went to war for three years straight and helped change the entire path of the war designed new planes Just engineered some new warfare war machines took him into combat himself on multiple missions like Just to save you like the number of people the number of heroes in World War two that were gangster as fuck Oh, it's insane is I don't know whether there is another peer again. Maybe it's the right distance from time Fractional reserve that that that that but it really does feel like there was something in the water volume It's volume. There's just so many people that are in the war. Yeah, I mean surface area World War America specifically not that you know Great Britain and other nations didn't have their badass is also They certainly did like Patti Mayne incredible but um, it's just the American military when World War two kicked off had like 300,000 people and Those ranks swelled to 16 million So it's like you you've got 300,000 people That are a culture and you're trying to multiply that culture out to 16 million people it's just the rules and regulations and guidelines and I Don't know the respect for that that culture doesn't really permeate that much but why is why does that make fertile ground? Because you got so we can't we can't not follow orders. We're supposed to the commanders down We're supposed to bed down and be defensive and wait for wait for orders to come down not fuck that shoot that guy You know what? I mean? Like they're just gonna get default aggressive What else do you do? Yeah some farm boy from fucking Iowa or whatever. Yeah hundred percent. Yeah Going in man. Yeah. No, I It's interesting the the British versus American sort of Insight for this because at least my experience British people are very orderly We have we I mean there was even a video recently. Did you see our Foreign Secretary said British people love a cue you see have you got the I'd like a fruity vegan flapjack like a video like a line Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we love queuing and just such fruity vegan flapjack video So this is the guy currently for the economy This is why the rest of the world including this nation is terrified right of Britain We're a hard nation were filled with hard people Specifically the man that is basically in charge of ensuring that globally to other countries. We are feared and He's talking about how the the way that like tax is put together and it's fair when you stand in a queue for a bakery and then at the very very it's a semi scripted video, it's almost like a An advert and then at the very end he says I'd like a fruity vegan flapjack, please and it is here it is please That just that so just go back to the beginning go back to the beginning of the man. That's supposed to be Are you not terrified are you not terrified of the man that wants a fruity vegan flapjack, please? That meme around the UK was like one of the fucking biggest thing I've got I've got questions for you about the UK. Go ahead. What's going on with the air-conditioning situation? more people died from 175 174,000 Europeans died last year from heat-related illnesses more people than died from gun deaths in America by a lot Yeah, but like factor three Significantly more Is it 50,000 per year? I think in America including suicides. No How many people die from gun-related deaths in America last year? Mr. Chad If you don't include suicides, I believe it's like a couple thousand. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but I think we're including suicides Okay, so I mean look what would I say about this in Defense of a country. I no longer live in It's not that hot most of the time. It's quite cold. Hear me out. Go ahead I've had a spare tire in every car I've ever owned. I've never had to use it. I still fucking got it it's true the difference between trying to add a spare tire to a car that has a room for a spare tire or Retrofit a Victorian era building. They got they got floor units As you should put it in the wall But again, that would be unused for I'm from Newcastle, which is as North as North goes that would be unused for 11 months and Two weeks of the year it would be what for the for the fortnight that I require it the 14 days that I need it Would be great. But how many people died mark? 44,000 I said 50,000 that's not far off That's not far anyway lot but three times as many more than three times as many four times as many people died From heat related illness. I think more people died in Paris this summer Than in all of American recorded history from mass shootings Just Paris just this summer versus every mass shooting in American history since records began in like the 50s 50s or 60s Yeah, it's it's it's Not good. It's not great. I once stayed in a hotel in London about three years ago and Bigger buildings newer buildings. They'll maybe been retrofitted or they'll have had them built built with AC and AC wasn't working The only way that I could get to sleep two in the morning three in the morning I've got this thing this event to do the next day I'm fucking hating my one of those ones who you like this is gonna suck and I've got all this pressure tomorrow and it's gonna Be horrible and I put a wet I put a bath towel in the bath ran cold water on the towel And then slept under a wet towel about how you'd blow heat off you and it attempted the thing Yes, it was the most soggy horrible Solution to I did I did a video on this On on British people refusing to use air conditioning and it went like viral all the British reactors watched it Okay, and they had some crazy environmentalists on there giving you alternatives instead of AC because you know AC is bad for the environment Okay, go on. Her first tip was to sleep under a wet sheet. I Wasn't doing it through choice. I was doing it through necessity. Okay, they get worse though. Okay, go on Her next recommendation was to just soak your feet in a bucket of water while you're working at home the whole time Does that help? I I guess I don't know It's got wet feet But then it it kind of climaxes with her final solution of smearing yogurt on all the windows of your house What will that do I block the Sun out I guess I don't know You can pull it up on my video I Clipped her out of it, but she's like, yeah smearing yogurt on the windows of your house will actually help lower the temperature in your in Your house. It's just like just getting all of insane people and not in a cool way, you know, they're not they're not Building a new b-52 stubborn. Ah, there's definitely a stubbornness, but this is luck in Defense you we were talking about this this morning America is a country which is essentially a teenager. It's like just about starting to find its feet a little bit thought he knew who it was in its childhood years thought it was gonna grow up to Become a postman or like an astronaut or whatever and now it's like, ah, I'm not really too Sure, sort of what's going on like who I where I thought I was and where I'm going like I'm gonna be rebellious What if we just like turn the table over? What if we like do something crazy man? It's like, okay Lots of great innovation comes America is 4% of the world's population But had 50% of its new millionaires last year the UK 0.8% of the world's population and had It was second highest 10% of the world's millionaire exits came from it in 2024. So look, yeah, that's on the leaderboard so far, not great, but, but the pump and the circumstance, it is stabilizing in a way where stuff didn't change that much. Right. And that's not always great because it means that you don't get air conditioning when it's sometimes very, very hot, but it's also great because it means that like, hopefully insane stuff doesn't happen at quite the same velocity. Um, it does also mean like when I graduated university, there's some odd customs that happen, like there's a series and I was reading it in the pamphlet thing that explained what was going on and there's a mace bearer that walks out with a literal medieval weapon and the guys at the front of it, it's like, it's a, uh, uh, uh, how do you say like a, uh, ceremonial mace, it's not like he hasn't got spikes on it or whatever, um, but he walks out and then they all doth their caps in different orders, like you, it's the hierarchy of the thing and he dots his cap to this person and you're, and you're looking and the, the color, the fact that this has got a blue stripe on it, that means that he's, you know, the, the Kingsman of the God or whatever the fuck it is. All of that stuff. This is nice. This is some, this is a, a little battle of the battle of Hastings game of Thrones, the type thing that's going on, whereas I do it here and everyone's fucking twerking at the high school graduation, I don't think I want more dust, I want more dust on everything. And there's not enough dust in America. I think if you were a dusty a nation, I think things would be improved. And I think if we were a more agile nation, things would be improved. That's why I like that. I can respect that. I always describe America as like the shark tank of cultures. Cause that's always the biggest criticism of America is like, you, you guys don't have any cultures. No, no, no, we do. We are quite literally the shark tank of the world's cultures. Like you come here for opportunity. What do you got Mexicans tacos? Fantastic. That's ours. Now we're keeping that Italians pizza. That's ours. Now we're keeping it like, you know, whatever's bad. We know not popular. The world brings its best ideas to America. Survival of the most insane. It's a battle of the bottom of the brainstem for all of American people. A quick aside. You probably heard me talk about element before, and that's because I've started every single morning, the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with elements in it. Element is an electrolyte drink makes with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue supports brain function and helps to regulate your appetite throughout the day. I genuinely noticed the difference when I take it versus when I don't, which is why I don't shut up about it. And also why it's used by everyone from Dr. Andrew Huberman to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams, the good sniper teams, not the bad ones. Also, they have a no questions asked refund policy. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they offer free shipping in the U S right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements, most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to link in the description below, heading to drink lmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drink lmnt.com slash. Modern wisdom going back to, to, uh, you've given us a couple of stories that had to do with Americans. Is there a favorite that you have that's from somebody outside of your home nation, but you refuse to, uh, feel as patriotic or I don't, I don't refuse. I can appreciate, um, I can appreciate a hero. You know, fighting for his own nation. I've covered some British people before I've covered, um, some French people. Uh, I still am in the works for doing a video on Patty main British. Um, so yeah, no, there I've done them before. I'll do them again. But, uh, Patty Maine's probably the next one I'll do. That's not an American. That's pretty exciting. Yeah. I, I, I mean, the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare was a little bit of a shame. Uh, the movie, no, the book, because I was such a fan of the book first. And I don't know whether you ever listened to the audio book that's behind it, but the guy that did the audio book, it's just got the most brilliant classic sort of 1940s. Posh British accent. It's so one, it's so immersive to like have somebody speak. Well, you know, what was very interesting about Churchill's war? And you're like, oh, I'm there. I'm fucking that dude. Right. Like, give me the Enigma machine. Like we're going to rip this thing. Yeah. And, um, I loved that era of what I think British people are particularly good at, which is the, um, it is the MacGyver ring. It's the sort of spit and sawdust and sellotape and cable ties of coming up with relatively innovative solutions. And one of the ones, you know, the, uh, the depth charge mind, the limpet mind that was invented as a part of this in, in the UK and what they needed to do is they needed to find something that would reliably dissolve at the same rate. And they're trying all of these different complex, uh, chemical interactions between the saline and the saltwater, and sometimes it changes at different depths. It's going to be different parts of the ocean. What are we going to use? And then it turned out that an aniseed ball, a sweet, like a little sweet, that would be perfect to keep the two firing pins apart. And when you drop it, it's very reliable of how long it takes to dissolve in saltwater over time. And then it goes up, but in order to protect the ball so that it didn't degrade, uh, uh, humidity that was in the, uh, they needed to use condoms. They were like, well, we're going to, we'll wrap it in a condom. Um, we'll keep, we'll keep it dry by having, by having the condom around it. And in the book, the guy says, um, so in an effort to not be found out about what it was that they were using, they covered their tracks by going to each of the different pharmacies in the local village and they were buying all of the condoms, but different people were going and they weren't going at the same time. And they were going for overtime and distributing themselves around. And he just had this little parentheses and he said, um, it is unclear whether or not nine months later, the, uh, births in little Higgington had increased due to the shortage of condoms that were available because they'd all been taken to create these fucking limpet mines or these debts charges. Exactly. The cause and effect you'd look for though, which is hilarious. Yes. Yes. You guys also were famous for putting chickens inside a nuclear landmines. If I've, if I recall chickens in nuclear landmines, why would you do that? Yeah. That's how you kept them warm. The chickens. No, the mines. Why would we need the mines to be warm? The electronics inside of them. If they get too cold, they're going to, yeah. So like basically during the cold war, they had the, um, Oh shit. What's a, what's it called? The gap, something gap, the main gap. They were worried the Russians were going to pour through with tanks. Um, that was like, everybody had battle plans drawn up for this. And one of the things that UK had was a nuclear powered landmine. Well, you didn't want to bury the landmines because you know, they, you didn't want to just have a nuclear bomb buried under the ground. So the plan was to have the holes pre dug, have the mines there. And if the Russians were coming, we're going to bury the mines real quick and dip out. Well, then it was a question of how do we rely reliably fire this thing? Keep it warm, keep it dry, yada, yada, yada. They tried heaters. They tried all kinds of different things. And ultimately what they decided worked best was they did the math on how long three chickens could survive with the air inside of this bomb when they were sealed in and then how long it took for their bodies to cool off. And then that would be the detonation for the nuclear landmine, because it was like eight hours, so much more impressive than a fucking aniseed bowl. That was your guys' plan was to put chickens inside the nuclear landmines, bury them, and then when the chickens died, their bodies went cold. It would set off the mines. This is the sort of innovation that we're missing. This is the sort of shit that I really wish that we were doing more of. One of my favorite ones. I had John Lyle on the dirty tricks department. He's here in Austin. And what I love about him is he's got access to the archives and he goes and does so much of the research, like a source, source, source material in the archives, dusting shit off. Have you heard the story about how there was a psychological assessment done of Hitler? And in an attempt that, perhaps unsurprisingly, you didn't need to do a psychological assessment of it to work this out, Hitler had a fragile hold on his masculinity. That was one of the things that the psychometric evaluation, the psychological evaluation determined. So their, the allies attempt was if we can somehow disrupt Hitler's relationship with his own masculinity, then he will begin to go so insane that he won't be able to maintain the control that he needs. So their plan was to literally trans Hitler. They found the gardener that grew the vegetables for the crow's nest. What was, what was the Eagle's nest? Eagle's nest. Thank you. They found the gardener that grew the vegetables for it. And they, um, uh, did the bring you on board slowly, slowly, uh, uh, recruitment process, and they gave him female sex hormones that the plan was to inject the female sex hormones into the vegetables, and then Hitler would eat the vegetables, but his Eastridge would go up and his mustache would fall out and his hair would go and his voice would go soprano and, and, and, and he would lose his mind and his masculinity would be destroyed and we'd win the war. And like, that was one of the plans that the dirty tricks, they gave him the sex hormones, they don't know if the gardener vegetable grow man ended up putting it in, whether or not Hitler ate it, et cetera, et cetera, but that was one of the plans that was one of the attempts. That's fucking insane. I love everything about it. Uh, there was another one. One of my favorite stories from the dirty tricks department by John is. I think foxes are a bad omen for Japanese people. That seems a horrible omen. So one of the plans that they had was, well, if we can get a bunch of foxes and we can dump them on the shore, that will, uh, the dead foxes on the shore of, of Japan, that will demoralize the Japanese. They will see it as this horrible omen and, and it'll mean that they're not going to fight back and we'll get to win the war. Um, but it turns out that they couldn't find enough foxes, like the total number of foxes that they could get ahold of wasn't big enough. So they decided instead to paint raccoons because they could get tons of raccoons. So we're like, well, we can paint the raccoons and actually fuck it. We might as well paint them with a luminous paint. Cause this would be, that would be scary. Or like if they were all glowing in the dark, that would be great. Um, but we can't get close enough without being detected. So what we'll do is we'll work out where the tides are going, get them at low tide, dump them off the coast, and then they'll get like swept in and they'll be left on the shoreline and then everyone will be really worried. Well, first off they got the tides wrong. Secondly, the water washed all of the paint off them. So there was just some dead raccoons that appeared. So I wrote, okay, that, that didn't fucking work. Okay. So this is what we're going to do. We're going to get a massive loud speaker with a prerecorded message in a scary voice talking in Japanese, and we're going to get like an animatronic fox head. And stick it on the side of a boat and just broadcast messages as if this fox is like speaking about them. It's like, this is, you've gone backward to what, from, you know, advanced military technology to like medieval feudal, like gods, we're just going to sow seeds of discord by saying that like Zeus is mad at you type thing. That was what they assumed. Also trying to demoralize the Japanese as an uphill battle. Those guys were fanatics. I mean, I think the last guy surrendered in 76. It's still fighting in the jungle. Hiro Inoda in the Philippines. He didn't surrender till 30 years after the fact. And what did he heard people walking around, right. And assume that it was enemy troops. It's a lie. Oh, they sent, they sent his, uh, I think they sent his wife over at one point to try to talk to him and he's like, not buying it. They finally got him to quit by finding his old commander. Like 30 years after the fact that had to go out in the jungle and get him and tell him like it was over. Like those guys weren't believing shit, but also crazy military. Have you seen, uh, do you know about the bat bombs? Oh, they tried to put bombs on bats. No, they did put bombs on bats. Yes. Yeah. Giant colander bomb. Looks like it. They took a, a bombshell that would like open up after it with a parachute and like let all these bats out and the bats were strapped with incendiary, uh, incendiary devices. So the theory was, yeah. So that's when it's closed and then it opens up and releases all these bats. Okay. It's a, it's a bomb that contains bats with bombs attached to them. Yes. Inside of it. Yes. And it was three times more effective than a normal incendiary bomb. And as it would go into the, the, uh, under the eaves of shit, like they were going to fly up into the attics and everything right before it was time to roost for daylight. And then incendiary device goes off. It's going to light all of Japan on fire. That was legitimately the backup plan for the atomic bomb. What are some of the other most surprisingly hardcore animals from history that have been used? Uh, you got Voightek, the Polish artillery bear. You've got the Polish, uh, the Polish were held POWs for a period of time, I think by the Russians, and then they got released to go fight back at the battle of Monte Casino. And like, while they were on their way there, they picked up a, I believe it was a Siberian brown bear named, they named it Voightek and, uh, that was like their pet bear and, uh, are you fucking kidding me? That's a man in a bath suit. No, that's, that's not a real picture, but like it's, there's a lot of mockups of it, but like it really happened. They had a, they had a pet bear that they were using to help just like carry ammunition and shit, like loading it on its back while the bear was smart. It liked them. And it kind of like figured out like, Oh, during the battle, when it's really loud and the guns were going off, all the guys are picking up these big artillery shells and carrying them to the guns. So it, it learned it and it started doing that too. Walking artillery to the gun. Yeah. And then, uh, there was another story where they like used it during an interrogation to scare the shit out of some guy, like, I'm going to feed you to the pet bear. Yeah. Like, uh, so you got that sergeant reckless is probably my favorite. Um, Sergeant reckless. Yeah. Horse. Okay. America's war horse, man. Okay. Um, during the Korean war again, um, hang on. They were still using horses during the Korean war. No, the Marines acquired one. What's that mean? What acquired heavy lifting acquired it. Okay. Um, basically at the ass end of the Korean war at the, you know, the 32nd parallel, basically where the border is today, it's very mountainous hilly terrain. So what was happening at this point in time is like diplomatic relations are going on and Americans are basically up on, on high points on hills all across the peninsula, and they're just trying to hold this line long enough to get this peace treaty signed, whereas the Chinese and the North Koreans want to punch through because they only have like 15, 16 miles to get to Seoul. And if they can take over Seoul negotiations are going to go much better in their favor. So America's just trying to hold the line. And up top, these hills are like. You know it's not a terrain you can drive a truck up and the only way they're going to be able to hold these hills From these massive meat walls that communists are willing to throw is artillery, but they can't get artillery up there So the best thing they have is this thing called a recoilless rifle It's basically a big bazooka on a tripod a 75 millimeter recoilless rifle They can walk these up there and then walk the ammunition up and that's what they're having to do they're just running ammunition up these hills to fire this big bazooka and and uh eventually that gets tiring so they're like They go down to seoul. They go to the racetrack and they're like we're buying a fucking horse So they buy this horse. It's a mongolian mare and um, they bring the horse back The marines put it through hoof camp boot camp hoof camp. See what they did there. That's clever Yeah, so they they train the horse They get it acclimated to like hearing gunshots and stuff and like get it Get it, so it's immune to that and they basically train this horse To just walk ammunition up and down these hills um during firefights and stuff and she's awesome, like the marines love her and during the battle of outpost vegas Um, there's basically three hills that form a triangle called the iron triangle and it's like right there It's like the spot they would really want to punch through to get to seoul and it's called um The three hills are reno nevada and carson the three las vegas gambling cities because it's a gamble whether or not we could hold them And the battle of outpost vegas is what it's called and they throw everything they have at these marines and this horse sergeant reckless Is carries I forget in the video. It's it's hundreds of tons of ammunition this horse carries up and down the battlefield getting new ammo to the guns during this fight and she's like Arguably the reason they were able to get through was this horse delivered so much ammunition She covered like it was like a ridiculous amount of mileage just going up and down these hills She was carrying wounded soldiers back down like this one horse was this humongous game changer They wind up holding the hill and then the story gets even like the the cool part of the story is When the marines go to go home, they're like, all right. Well, we're bringing sergeant reckless with us And the army or the military is like no, you're not she's got to stay here That we're gonna sell her to make glue or give her away And they're like no you're not so the marines in her unit actually coordinate with other lower enlisted guys in the military And get this horse on a plane to japan and then coordinate a civilian ship to pick up the horse and get her sent over To san diego and then the marines pick her up. They smuggle this horse into the united states of america From south korea And then they get held up at the dock because you can't just bring livestock into the country because it could have diseases or whatever whatever So they want to kill her And the marines are down there with this guy from I forget the government agency they sent in there, but they're like No, you're not And they basically like these marines are ready to kill this guy over it and he's like well Maybe we can just take a blood sample. He goes. It's a good fucking idea So they take a blood sample of the horse and then as soon as that guy leaves they take her out and they smuggle her Uh, sorry, not san diego san francisco. They then smuggle her into the building They're having the marine corps ball and they bring the horse in for the marine corps ball She's like eating the flowers and like they've already taught this horse how to drink beer and shit And like the horse, you know a horse's jaw like go off to the side when they chew Uh-huh She'll actually offset her jaw and let the marines pour Straight whiskey and soda and stuff into her mouth. They're mixing drinks for the horse. So they they get fucked up with this horse and then Uh, they don't know what to do with it So they've got like they've like got her hiding on this farm and then the pr comes out that oh this war horse This is blah blah blah and they're like, oh, oh, this is good pr for the military. So now the military's back on board So they bring her onto the actual marine base and she you know gets a home there She spends the rest of her life there. She's actually given the rank of sergeant like not not ceremonial she's legitimately a sergeant in the marine corps and Privates and anybody lower enlisted has to address her as such they have to treat her as such Nobody was allowed to ride her and they would always pick some farm kid that knew how to take care of animals to be her Liaison that had to exercise her every morning. Well, how do you how do you do pt with a horse? You can't ride it because it's a higher rank than you So he just had to run next to this horse every morning for like 10 miles And it was a running joke in the marine corps that he was the most in shape marine and uh the story keeps going and you know sergeant reckless becomes famous. She's an icon in the marine corps and She's getting old and they kind of come to the conclusion. They're like, all right Well, we need sergeant reckless to have some kids So the plan is to bring in some high-end race horse That's famous to have kids with sergeant reckless and create the ultimate war horses Nobody tells this to the kid that's in charge of looking after sergeant reckless This kid just gets orders one day like hey take sergeant reckless to the normal the normal horse pens with the other normal marine horses and uh Let her go in there and he's like that's weird. She has her own pen. She's not a normal horse We don't she doesn't associate with these horses So no sergeants. Yeah So he goes and puts her in the pen and he like goes and gets breakfast and he comes back Well, she's getting mounted by one of these ordinary garden variety marine horses He freaks out beats the horse off the off of her like, yeah, I hope he doesn't yeah for sure so He's freaking out a little while later truck pulls up big fancy, you know horse carriage or whatever and they unload some big fancy racehorse And they they leave well again Nobody told him he was supposed to breed sergeant reckless So he doesn't let he just cock blocks that horse from having sex with sergeant reckless the entire time cock blocking the next exactly Yeah, so then Like a couple weeks later or whatever he shows up to work and there's like all these news people and generals and they're like Sergeant reckless is pregnant. He's like, oh fuck i'm in trouble Like and he's like, uh, okay, that that's a good thing and they're like, yeah. No, that's a great thing and he's okay Okay, that's weird. And then one of the reporters asked the kid What's the name of the racehorse that bred sergeant reckless? What's the name of the thoroughbred? That's the dad and he's like, I don't know. It was just one of the bucking horses from the pen Gets yanked around the side of the pen by the general. What the fuck did you just say? what is going on and he explains what happened and so like she didn't have a Mayor studs with this in a super stud racehorse so that was like you killed the whole pr campaign So then the way they recovered for the pr was All they did was they had a big sign Outside of the marine base and it said it's a dot dot dot And then basically when they found out if it was a boy or a girl They promoted it and then like that was the big pr push for the marine corps Which is funny because the marine corps inadvertently created gender reveals Uh So, yeah now sergeant reckless probably my favorite war animal I watched I watched a video recently of I think the Maybe bomb sniffer dogs. There's some sort of a parade happening and there's a bunch of alsatians there And uh, i'm currently in I I you know the truman show seen the truman show and like the entire world's kind of curated for that I have a working theory that um big golden Which is the company behind golden retrievers the large industry? Body that is behind golden retrievers That they are seeding very cute golden retrievers into my life at a higher frequency than normal To try and sigh up me into getting a golden retriever and it's working So i'm currently sort of in the market looking and learning about golden retrievers and shit like that and I saw this video Can you try and find it mark? There's like a video. Oh, here it is. This is it. Look at this And all of these dogs are just so locked in and there's a couple of watched He's just I mean I want that like that's the level of dog that I think is important to I want one that is single digit iq Ideally my uh, my wife made me get a golden doodle eight years ago sick Uh, I don't think she grasped how big a purebred golden doodle was and he's like 70 pounds 80 pounds, bro He's like 110. He's a fucking horse He's a fucking horse and when I let his hair grow out, he looks like a giant chicken tender. It's fucking hilarious I love this dog so much. It's so funny. She's like he's too big. I wanted a little cute dog I was like, no, he's fucking awesome. Yeah, he's perfect. He's perfect. I'm feeding him more. He's on protein shakes now Yeah, fuck me. Um going a little bit further back. You looked at uh, washington before trenton stuff, right like Obviously, it's kind of weird. I guess american people Don't realize how little british people learn about the revolution and about You don't you don't tend to talk about your losses in the same way that you talk about your w yeah, right Um, but what what did you because that seems like a really fascinating story that not many people know about like that period of sort of washington's existence what Like what have you learned from sort of looking at that and and the kind of characters that have been around that that era of history Oh god, uh again. I mean, it's it's all the same dudes man war war changes the men that fight it never do It's always just some dude that is too stupid to quit with a never say die attitude That's willing to tell you to go fuck yourself that changes the world every single time. Um I guess are you asking specifically about the battle of trend or just revolutionary war? Yeah, the trenson one is is particularly good because it's like on whatever midnight on december 31st was like a uniquely important. Yeah, so I mean Basically what had happened up until this point in the war is washington, you know, we had initial success and then it's just been Washington has basically done the textbook Right thing and we talked about how you're supposed to do the the right thing not the you know, the bold rebellious thing uh For the rest of the war, you know through new york and everything He basically fights a very conservative defensive war trying to basically nickel and dime the british and make it too expensive for you guys to want to keep going and by this point in the war his back is up against the wall and he's like Fuck it. I need a w I'm gonna cross a frozen river and kill a bunch of you guys in your sleep To inspire people to keep going and the reason it was really important is because at this point in time A lot of the colonials are just volunteers or they signed like a one-year contract And their contracts are about to expire winter is about to hit and if that contract expires and everybody goes home and we End this fighting season so to speak because you don't really fight in winter at this point if we end the fighting season of this war After I just racked up, you know, eight ten twelve losses and we've done nothing but get our asses kicked the entire time When summer and springtime comes back around nobody's showing up to fight and this is this is over So it was basically his back was up against the wall and he needed a w and he found a way to make it fucking happen Um, he Hold on. Sorry the um So battle of trenton, he basically coordinates with three separate units They have to go and they're like we have to cross this river. We have to do it at night And they go and they commandeer all these boats that are on the river This part of the river is used for like a lot of commerce and everything else. So they have these I don't know They're like big fucking canoes basically that you can put like iron ore and crops and shit in and ship them down the river So at first they try to buy them They're like because you know, you don't want to upset all the local people like it's hard to be like Hey, we're we're fighting a rebellion against the tyrannical government. We're here to steal your shit. Give me your stuff Yeah, so they try to buy them at first and if they can't buy them they try to rent them And then finally if they can't rent them, they're like, oh We're fucking taking it. Sorry and uh, they take it and they wind up getting Only two of the three groups actually wind up making it across the river and where they're supposed to get they launched this ambush on trenton and the the coolest part about this battle for me is Henry knox who is fort knox the military base. He's kind of like the godfather of american artillery Like he's the man. He's a 24 year old Built like a brick everybody always portrays him as fat But he was like he was taller and he was like 220 like i'm pretty sure he was just a built fucking dude But uh, he was he ran a bookstore And he was just a huge nerd and he just read everything about military tactics that he could and he just became our artillery guy So henry knox is on this mission and Artillery cannons. It's usually like put them up on the hill and we're gonna rain hell down on the enemy He's like now we're trying to take a town. I'm gonna bring the fucking artillery with me so he actually when they go into trenton, they basically wheel the artillery in into crossroads and are like All right, this road's ours anybody anybody tries to come down this road They're fucking getting it with canister shot, which is basically a giant fucking shotgun So can't canister shot is instead of one big cannonball. Imagine a burlap sack of pool ball sized cannonballs Boom no, thank you clears everything in that direction Um, but yeah, I mean they ransack it a bunch of civilians actually start helping them out with the battle Uh, most of them were hessians. They weren't actually um British regulars hessians were the german mercenaries more or less loyal to the british But yeah, they took over trenton chased them all the way back up got that victory And then after that I believe they went into valley forge After researching all of these people. What do you think? most normal humans misunderstand about bravery because it sounds from the outside like Everybody involved in this incredibly courageous single-minded mission, etc, etc What do people get wrong about bravery? I think they underestimate themselves for sure, I mean I think that there's a lot of people that if you put If you put them in the same exact circumstance That they would have done something or tried to do something similar at the very least um so, I don't know, but I think that kind of bleeds into like If you can't imagine yourself in that circumstance, you can't imagine how you would react so then you just avoid putting yourself in that circumstance, so like I don't think I don't know. I just think it's uh, I think the average person is capable of a lot more than they want to believe They are craig Jones, who is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy, spent a good bit of time in different war zones, now appears to be on this weird, like, child predator sting thing. Like, he's now a private investigator tracking this dude down around Australia. It's kind of strange. Anyway, he told me a story about when he'd gone to Ukraine. He spent a good bit of time in Ukraine, and he was, like, near to where the core bombing was happening, and there was this lady who had a bakery. It's like, older, nice lady, and he'd been eating there, and then the windows of her bakery had been blown out by the aftershock of some bomb at some point. And the next day, she'd got up and was serving baked goods through the newly broken window. They had just, like, you know, taken a broom handle and cleared the rest of... Jason Bourne film was like, oh, I've got a new hatch to serve through. And I think that point, to me, is, like, you don't know what situation... you don't know your reaction until you're in a situation like that. And I think what's interesting, at least, about the Ukraine war, there was only one going on, right, when Ukraine and Russia happened. There was only one, like, kinetic incursion, so we were able to watch it. Now, it's like having cable, as opposed to, like, you know, five channels. There's so many conflicts, like, which one do I want to watch? And I get confused. But with that, you got to see this thing firsthand, and he was telling me these stories. And I saw this, too. I saw how many people that, from the outside, you wouldn't assume would have this bit of this heroic tumour or the streak in them, normal people doing what seemed to be extraordinary things. Well, I think it's very hard for both of us to relate to it, just because you're UK, I'm American. Both of our countries have pretty much been hosting away games the entire time. You know what I mean? I don't think the average person realizes that, like, in these war zones that are urban areas, and, like, when shit happens, people literally do just pick up and continue on with their lives, by and large, a lot of the time. Like, why? Because there's nothing else to do. What else would you do? You wake up one day, and you're like, my favourite coffee shop just got blown up. I guess I got to find somewhere else to get coffee? Like, and it's weird, and it's horrible, but, like, what else do you do? Like, it's going to keep going on, and people just live through that, and I think Americans and British people are very disconnected, because, again, like, when was the last time either of those nations had a war on their soil and had to even remotely experience that? Like, nobody alive today. What do you make of the Greenland thing? You know, I'm kind of fascinated by how different periods of history have been facilitated by tactical advantages that maybe weren't so visible at the time, like Europe having deep ports, meaning that you've got better access for navy, better ships, et cetera, et cetera. It seems like Greenland, from a tactical perspective, potentially quite keystone-y. You know, it's an area that's very, very important. What do you make of that? Presumably, you've been tracking it, thinking about it from a military perspective. It's not. I have a video on it. It's not one of the videos I brushed up on before coming here, but basically, Greenland, a lot of it is just backlash because people just don't like Trump, and they won't like anything that he does. But America wanting control of Greenland is not new, and we've wanted it for over 100 years. We have tried to buy Greenland multiple times. We've had bases there since World War II. We had a secret underground ice base there at one point. You can look up Operation—I believe it's called Operation Ice Worm. We had a secret underground nuclear facility that we built there without telling anybody. America has always wanted access to Greenland because it controls that North Sea, and it's the only way that the USSR is going to be able to actually launch a major naval campaign or the fastest way for them to do it. It's extremely important. It has been for hundreds of years. It's not new that we want control of it at all. It's interesting thinking about it. I've looked at a breakdown of the specifics of the deal, and I think that there's something in it that even if Greenland was to separate from the Dutch with regards to its relationship, that the American deal would still hold. It's in perpetuity for now and forever, in sickness and in health. Unless you can make us move, America is not moving. It doesn't matter if it's a Republican or a Democrat in office. America will not give up military control of Greenland. It really belongs to whoever the fuck has the most guns there. That's America. You can say whatever you want. America has control of that island. They have since World War II. They're not giving it up for anybody. That's just the way it is. What do you think's the likelihood that America tries to make a bigger push toward Canada? Very, very small. Try to take over Canada? Maybe not try to take over it, but tries to do something diplomatic to subsume it as best they can. I could see, what is it, Alberta that already has a political movement to join America? I mean, I could see America allowing it. I don't know that they're overly interested in taking it. Canada is just, from what I know of it, which granted is not a lot, it's a very weird country just because the majority of their population, it's like 80% or more is localized within 60 miles of the US border. I mean, it's right there and the rest of it's just uncharted tundra. You know what I mean? So I don't know. Have you ever seen the population distribution of Iceland? It's like a donut, but like a really, really, really fucking thin donut. And almost the entire middle of this thing is like sweet fuck all, and then you've got Reykjavik down here and a little bit more. And then there's like some other stuff over here. Australia is kind of the same, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You got like Perth on one side and then that coast, and then the middle is just a big empty donut. And that's kind of it. It's me. I'll be in the middle. Yeah. That's where I want to be at. What are some of the more unglamorous jobs that, during the research that you've done looking at wars, people maybe don't think about giving enough credit to? I mean, a horse that carries artillery up and down hills is maybe one of them, but I have to assume that not all of the most obvious positions are perhaps the ones that are the most pivotal or like highly contributing, or they're a little bit less glamorous, but it's still very important. I mean, it's all of them to a large degree. Everybody glamorizes the dude on the front lines with the gun actually doing the work or whatever, but the amount of logistics and people that you have to have working behind you to get you on the front line with ammunition, with food and water, it's like 100 and 150 people per guy on the front line working on the back end to actually get everything done. I mean, that's where the saying war is won by logistics comes from. So, I mean, everybody's job is super important, and yeah, nobody gets all the credit that they deserve when they're just like, oh, I was just a cook. I was just a that. But you know what I mean? How far do we get without all of those people? Not very far. The guy with the gun can't shoot much if he hasn't had a meal for a week. Yeah, but I mean, to give you a very specific answer, if I had to pick one, it would be truck drivers. Military truck drivers are the unsung heroes of, you know, during World War Two, you had like the Red Ball Express during GWAT. You had all the 88 Mike's that were out there doing missions like everybody's like, oh, what do you do? I'm just a truck driver. It's like, oh, what's your job? I drive through IED infested roads to get food and water to the guys that are actually fighting these guys in a massive target, a massive moving target that can be seen from miles. Exactly. And like you see the truck drivers in all the wars having to improvise and adapt and do a bunch of gangster shit just to survive. This is the same thing where it's like enemy knows logistics wins wars. And if we can stop their logistics, we win the war. During Vietnam, the truck drivers were literally doing this shit. They were turning their trucks for supplies into heavily armored gunships. What's that on top? That's a fucking 50 cal. It's a giant antenna and two 50 cals. Look up the Vietnam, the eye of destruction, gun truck. The eye of destruction. You know what I want to know? I want to know who the guy is that gets to cut the copywriting department that comes up with the nomenclature for this. That's what I want. That's my job. Hey, what was your job? You're just as important. The cook, very important. Apparently I spoke to a historian who's very, very influential in this. What was your job during the war? Chris? Oh, um, I came up as the sick names. I came up with the scary, that's just the guys that run the crew, bro. Like tank tanks always have funny names. Like, you know what I think about if world war three breaks out? Cause you know, like world war two, we were having like, like now you can't do it because we're not in like big, you know, big war time. You can't be painting shit all over your planes. But like world war two, people were painting pinups and shit on all their planes and stuff. And it's like now, like dude, if we have world war three, a hundred percent, they're going to be painting anime chicks with massive pits on the side of a bomber. A thousand percent that's happening. Yeah. See, that's why you should be employed. What's this, what's this big scary thing. Is this it? Oh, that's not it. That's the Eve of destruction. The eye of destruction. You ever seen a Eve of distress? Sorry. Sorry that we got confused. Eve of destruction and the eye of destruction. Uh, one of these trucks had a, have you ever seen like the anti-aircraft thing that you sit in and it's got four mini guns or four 50 cows and you like sit in it and it's just got 50 cows here and 50 cows here. They mounted one of those in the beds of these trucks just to fight off the people that were attacking them. So they can deliver a surprise. It's like a gyroscope thing, right? But I mean, and that's just like what it, and you know, like during the global war on terror, you had truckers that were lining the bottoms of their beds and their, you know, the inside of their cabs with sandbags because they were getting blown up by IEDs and having those sandbags there would help like to protect them. It's just like, these guys aren't held up as you know, the dudes on the front line doing the fighting, but like they're constantly getting attacked and putting themselves in harm's way to get those dudes the shit they need to do their job. And it's just like super underappreciated. If you could go back, if I could transport you back to any place in history, time in history battle, what do you think you'd want to be a spectator of? What are some of the ones that something that comes to mind where you're like, Oh God, it would be fucking sick to just watch that thing unfold. Is there something that comes to mind? Dude, there's so many. I just did a video on my friend, Ed, first time I've ever done a video on somebody that's still alive. Seeing his, his battle would be pretty cool. He, uh, so Ed, Ed Eaton was a sniper in Vietnam and, um, he's, he's still around. He was on my podcast over on unsubscribe and, uh, met him, talked to him. So it worked really hard on the video because it was the first time I actually had the real source. Like I could call him and ask him questions and he got to watch the video before I uploaded it and be like, yep, send it. So like that meant a lot to me. Um, and basically his story is. He joins Vietnam fairly late into Vietnam, just because he's a young kid, just graduated high school, wanted to go off, see what he was made of. And, uh, he volunteers to go. He wanted to be a medic, but they made him infantry instead and they send him out on infantry. And immediately he's just, he's in over his head. He, uh, you know, the boat before he even gets to his military base of operations in the main Kong Delta gets hit with a, like a sabotage attack. And he wakes up at the belly of this ship on his first day in country getting transported there. And he wakes up and the room that he's in is filling up with diesel fuel, like up to the fucking ceiling. And it's up past, you know, how the port holes in a boat are like this, and there's like this much space it's already past the door. So he's like treading diesel fuel and he fucking has to duck and swim under through diesel fuel to get up a ladder, to get on top of the ship. And, uh, by the time he gets up top, he's soaked in diesel fuel and they're stuck there for like a day waiting for somebody to come rescue him. So he's sitting there in the sun of the Mekong Delta. Everybody's naked. They took their clothes off cause they were soaked in diesel fuel, just getting sunburned to shit. That was like his first day he was there. And then he winds up going on a mission and, uh, they make him the RTO, the radio guy, which kind of common to have the new guy be the RTO cause the RTO sticks right next to the squad leader because the squad leader needs to have access to the radio. So it's kind of like an assistant. Uh, I mean, his job is to carry the radio and do whatever, but his job necessitates him being right there next to the head guy in charge. So the head guy in charge kind of gets to keep an eye on him. Oh, right. So like that was his job initially trainee kind of, yeah. And his first mission, you know, he has multiple people get heat stroke. Uh, four of them wind up getting brain damage. They have heat stroke so bad. And every time they call on a medevac for these guys, they're like, bring more water. We don't have water and nobody has water. They never bring the fucking water. He almost falls out with heat stroke, um, winds up surviving like the first couple of missions that he walks you through. And I go over them in the video and in his book or just it's brutal, just trying to adapt to the climate and the heat and the mosquitoes eating them alive and everything else. And, um, it's kind of a story of how he goes from this kid that just got in way over his head to. Becoming the guy that can survive this environment. And then eventually he gets the opportunity to go to sniper school and sniper school was brand new. At this point in time, it was just getting stood up. It was a, it was a new thing. Usually military schools are like trained or taught at this base in America and whatever. They were literally teaching these guys in Vietnam. So he goes back to a base in Vietnam and he talks about like. Enemy snipers taking pop shots at him while he's at sniper school, learning how to be a sniper. Well, there's nothing like learning on the job, right? Like it's just crazy. Like, and you know, sniper school has a super high attrition rate. A lot of people flunk out. And basically what, what they did was the first week they were there, they had some initial training and then they had a competition and they only kept the top 10 guys. Everybody else got kicked out. He was the top shot out of those 10 guys. So he stayed, goes all the way through sniper school, uh, goes to do his final and then misses the 900 meter target on his final. And he's the out of the out of the ten that actually made it to do all the sniper school He's the first guy to ever fail He was the third iteration of sniper school ever so there's only 20 dudes that are snipers at this point And he was supposed to be 30 and he failed so now there's only 29 So he just gets sent back to his unit to be an infantryman And he goes and does that I mean he winds up being a squad leader than a platoon leader He learns every job. He's a grenadier for a while He's he does it all he goes from being you know the fucking new guy that doesn't know Anything to be in the experienced guy that is trying to get himself and other people through this and Eventually they start running these missions that are basically Checker boarding strategy like instead of like moving troops into an area and like controlling that area They're just gonna be like we got to Intel that there's enemies in this village And they're like we're gonna fly in at night with helicopters Insert hit the village in 10 minutes, and then get back on the helicopters and dip out and that's what they're doing and on April 3rd he winds up you know he's been in the field for three days doing normal missions, and they're doing this volunteer only mission and Him and all of his more experienced guys are all smoked, and they're like I'm not gonna go and his commander captain Perkins Basically you know asked him like all I've got is fucking new guys for this volunteer only mission Ed. Can you come with me and By this point in time Ed has already. He's not a sniper but he's friends with all the snipers, so he has acquired a Sniper rifle with a starlight scope which is like an early version of a night-vision scope again acquired doing a lot of heavy lifting acquired Yeah, he acquired it. Don't worry about it So he's like fuck fight. He's been in the field for three days like fuck fine I'll go so he goes out on this mission, and they land in this rice patty And he said the mud was just like peanut butter He said it was like trying to walk through two feet of peanut butter and like the whole scope of these missions are Get on the ground clear the village ten minutes in and out we got a fucking dip So they go in and they clear this village. They don't really find anything, but they find a cave network that has concrete That's not normal in Vietnam especially in the Mekong Delta tunnel networks weren't common in the Mekong Delta But having a concrete reinforced structure definitely not fucking normal kind of the tip of like there's a lot bigger military Presence here, then we're ready to handle with two helicopters full of guys so like we got to go right now so they hightail it back out to this rice patty and They're waiting for the helicopters and like the meme the trees start speaking Vietnamese and Captain Perkins and Ed can both like kind of speak Vietnamese at this point They know enough to hear them talking about machine guns and rockets and helicopters, which basically tells them They've got the big guns, and they're waiting for the helicopters to show up to try to shoot the helicopters down on their way out Helicopters get in they load the helicopters And they fucking take off the Cobras come in with the Huey is the Cobras light up the wood line with a bunch of machine Gunfire rockets give them covering fire. They load the Huey's they they dip As they're taken off they do a headcount. They're fucking missing a guy And by this point the missions over as far as each individual helicopters concerned so the Cobras have already changed radio frequency And they're headed to their next spot Captain Perkins in the helo with Ed Basically like turn around we got to see if we can fucking find this new guy that's not on the helicopter and they turn around they see him in the fucking rice patty and Captain Perkins said he did the Sound like he knew he was gonna die so Captain Perkins is like fucking we're gonna go get him so they land down They touch down this guy jumps on the helicopter on the left side or the right side whatever and then apparently they didn't fucking Everybody wasn't on the same page as to what we were fucking doing because as he hops in the helicopter on one side one of The other fucking new guys hops out on the other side and the helicopters take off again So you've exchanged one dude on the ground for another dude on the ground well now they start taking fire They go to loop back around again to pick this guy up and the helicopter gets shot down With Ed and Captain Perkins and the other guys in it Helicopter gets shot down smashes does a fucking barrel roll Ed wakes up with Literally pinned underneath the helicopter with like his face Above the waterline breathing, and he's like able to finally wiggle himself out from underneath this fucking helicopter And he starts helping get all the other guys out of the helicopter and Everybody else is just fucked up Ed's fucked up, but everybody else's combat ineffective. They can't do shit They're still taking small arms fire from the wood line. It's dark out So Ed climbs up on the helicopter and just throw me a gun all the guns got thrown fucking everywhere When the helicopter crashed so one of the pilots finds an m16 they throw it to Ed Ed just starts mag dumping Towards the enemy fire like what else do you can't fucking see anything like I see the muzzle flash over there I'm gonna shoot over there. I guess tell him to not come get me at least So he's on top of this helicopter on fire on top of the helicopter. He's on top of the helicopter. That's on its side He smells fuel like this could go up at any minute. He's returning fire with an m16 Yeah, and they're just trying to find Ed magazines and everything else well They finally find his sniper rifle the sniper rifles buttstock is cracked lengthwise, so his guns broken But he can still kind of shoulder it and fire it so now he's rotating back and forth between this m16 and the sniper rifle The starlight scope it's got night vision so he can actually see now, so that's a big advantage So he's lining up his shots, and he's firing at these guys as they're you know firing at him And they're he can see through the starlight scope They've split up into two groups, and they're trying to close in on his position if they come and get him there They're fucked. They're done. They're gonna get tortured to death So Ed is firing at these guys, but the bullets aren't hitting the scope got all fucked up during the crash Like it's all out of zero he puts the crosshairs. That's not where the bullets going So he just keeps doing what he can do he's basically using the starlight scope to kind of see where they're at Fire rounds just suppressing fire to keep them down switch back to the m16 fire at the same spot. Hope he fucking hit somebody and Eventually when he's firing his sniper rifle He catches a glint of where the bullet landed like crosshairs are here the bullet landed over here So then he just Kentucky windages and adjusts fire and instead of putting you know the crosshair on the enemy He just puts them in that spot and he starts dropping dudes The estimates are seven to eight that he kills doing that and the estimates The conservative estimate that Ed believes is probably most accurate from what I've talked to him is somewhere around 30 But I've seen crazy estimates that were like as high as 150 guys. We're out there fighting him So he gets in this firefight, and he manages to hold him off until the fucking helicopters show back up The first helicopter shows up Shows up at the Cobra gunships. They lay down suppressing fire, and it's his colonel this crazy dude named pistol Pete who in character runs out of his helicopter with a fucking pistol and starts firing at the enemy and They go to get captain they get the first group of guys loaded up It's not enough is there still some guys on the ground and it's ed captain Perkins and a couple other guys and captain Perkins is He's completely out of the fight at this point both his hips are broken it's not good they they get another helicopter in there and They get pistol Pete's helicopter and Captain Perkins at this point. It's ed captain Perkins and one guy The one guy goes to help load captain Perkins onto the helicopter Then captain Perkins is like I'm not gonna make it because that helicopters full they're gonna have to sit on the skids To get out of there and captain Perkins has two broken hips He's not gonna be able to hang on so he's like just leave me so that guy gives him a grenade and it's like Okay, and goes to leave him well ed doesn't realize this is happening at the time So that guy goes hops on the skids ed goes hops on the skids and the helicopter goes to take off and then ed realizes the fuck is captain Perkins doing down there and so ed hops back off and Captain Perkins you can pull up the interview captain Perkins says it himself He says, you know, he was laying there and he with a grenade like this is it. I'm the last one This is how I go out and through this firefight. He heard ed say I'm not gonna let the old man die alone and Ed comes in and lays down next to captain Perkins and continues to repel the enemy Long enough for more helicopters to show up another Huey with another Cobra shows up and you know Cobra You can't fit anybody in it. It's just the two pilots. It's an attack helicopter. The Huey's full the Huey's uh, and Captain Perkins has to lay down. He can't sit up. He can't hang on to shit So it's just adding captain Perkins at this point This helicopter lands the dude in the helicopter orders one of the Vietnamese Tiger Scouts friendly Vietnamese Get off the helicopter stay with ed. They load captain Perkins on that helicopter and it takes off so now it's just add in this Vietnamese Tiger Scout there still and adds like Fuck I'm gonna die and then the Cobra attack helicopter pulls up next to him and opens the canopy and is like sit on the fucking skids we're leaving the only spot to sit on the skids on the Cobra attack helicopter is with your back to the fucking rocket pod and Ed said there was still a rocket in it So but what are you gonna do? So ed hops on the skid of this fucking Cobra attack helicopter and they take off into the night And it's at this point that ed realizes that his chin is flapping in the breeze When he was on top of the helicopter They'd fired a rocket and he caught shrapnel that skinned all the flesh off of his chin And it's now just dangling in the breeze as he's sitting on the skid of an attack helicopter That uh, yeah going through its pitch black out He can't see shit doesn't know how high off the ground he is doesn't know anything and after a while of flying It slows down to a hover and the attack helicopter guy like signals jump off. He can't see he can't see the ground So he's like fuck you, I'm not jumping off this thing and Finally the dude opens can be like fucking get off my helicopter. I gotta go and Ed's like, okay So he jumps that it was only like a four-foot drop. It's just so dark. He couldn't see it and Once he drops that was like the final the straw that kind of breaks the camel's back During the helicopter crash ed had actually broken his back. So he's done all of this with a broken back So now ed is ed can't walk. He can't get up. He's fucking stuck there And the Tiger Scout that was on the other skid comes crawling up to Ed. He speaks Vietnamese and American and He's like, where are we and Ed's like I have no fucking idea, dude I don't know and then they start hearing Vietnamese from the fucking bushes again And he's like fuck and then the Tiger Scout eventually is like it's okay. They're Republican Army. They're the friendly Vietnamese They dropped him outside of the Republican Vietnamese army base so friendlies and they basically waited there for a real medevac to show up and Ed Ed gets saved and Yeah did all that with a broken back And you got to meet this guy and talk to him got to meet him talk to him text him all the time He's good shit How does it feel doing a story about someone that you know, he's gonna get to see it Intimidating. It's the first time I've ever done it. It was uh Yeah, it was it was scary. It's probably the the coolest thing I've ever done. Also the scariest thing I've ever done Obviously it takes way more work I gotta do you know, no, I don't ever want anybody to like my biggest fear when I do these videos is for somebody's fan like Somebody's kid to come out of the woodwork and be like I hated your video Didn't you want him Colonel Sanders and it's like nephew was like, yeah, that's sick Like here's a couple of yeah, but pretty much you nailed it Yeah, so like Colonel Sanders like distant relative was happy with my video. I've had I don't piss off the KFC guys Yeah, the KFC mafia. That's someone you don't get on the wrong side But I've had I've had a lot of videos where family members reach out where they love the videos and like that's always the coolest Part for me like yeah Yeah, I usually pin the comment and then I usually reach out to the family and like talk to him but I mean that's happened multiple times but to be able to do it with the guy that actually that actually did it and The cool part for me is you know, I hey, here's the rough draft of this video What do you think and he's like, you know, and I went through and I refilmed a lot of that video I made corrections because he didn't like the way I portrayed this or he didn't my verbiage was wrong here and I so there was a lot more work, but that's completely fine and the the cool part for me is the you know the other criticism was like I feel like you're kind of making a bigger deal about some of these things than they really were and I go of course you feel That way like you get it like classic war hero Exactly like you you did it like dude that's fucking crazy to the rest of us that you managed to accomplish that I like it It's cool that you don't think it's a big deal or that big of a deal but like that shits fucking incredible I think that if you were doing more videos about people that was still alive or if more of the people that you're doing videos About were alive. I think that would be one of the most common responses. It would be this sense of like, yeah Well, come on, like I mean Factually it happened like that. Yeah, but like symbolically it's not you're making it a bit more of it And you know, maybe that is this is really interesting i'm kind of obsessed with this Psychological bias and it's called the fading affect bias. So fading affect bias Is our psychological immune system? So, uh good memories and bad memories both fade with time But bad memories fade more and they often can become good memories rarely do good memories become bad ones But quite often bad ones can become less bad or maybe even funnier humorous of a time, right? Um, Uh, fuck who was I talking to some sas guy from a few years ago, and he was telling me this story about when one of his teammates shot accidentally shot another one of his teammates in the ass while they were being like, uh there was attack coming in from all sides in the middle of somewhere in the middle east and at the time it's like Fuck like we need to now this guy's not going to be able to walk. We need to come and get in all this thing It's all this stress afterward like that's one of the best ongoing jokes that they have in the entire friend group. So Bad memories fade with time and so to good but bad memories fade more and it's part of what we call a psychological immune system which is uh minimization distancing disassociation stuff like that, so It's good that you and me and everyone that's listening isn't Pinned underneath the challenge that we went through when we were 10 Right because that would be highly maladaptive like you need to be able to get over bad things Yeah, um, one of the problems of that is that it can cause you to forget the lessons that you learned from negative experiences This is why people go back to their toxic ex. This is why people relapse into a drug that they swore They would never take again This is why people get back into debt after they worked very hard to get out of it not just because there's this temptation this sort of gravitational pull that was the reason they got in there first, but also that distance from the information doesn't I mean, typically we assume us in the future learns more. So we're more wise, right? Wisdom tends to come with age. You get older, you got more information, but distance from emotion actually means that you are less accurate in your ability to understand how important that thing was than you were at the time. That's why you at the time was like, I can't deal with this fucking relationship anymore. I can't deal with the arguments. I can't deal with whatever the fuck that you're going through. And you, uh, you later, when you bump into her on a walk around the lake, is that maybe things wasn't that bad? Yeah. Bingo. Right. Bingo, bingo, bingo, bingo. Same thing with people that are recovering from health problems. Like, uh, the, I can't believe how much I let myself get burned out by that job. Never again, I'm going to be present and I'm going to sleep and I'm going to take care of my health. And then 12 months later, they're like, well, you know, I quite liked the rush and the adrenaline and all the rest of it, because fading affect bias doesn't work equally on all of our memories, it's selective and it seems to get away the bad ones. So not only are these guys classically heroic, which means that they want to kind of focus on everybody else. They make the hero of the story, all of the other people, but also you have this weird sort of selective reduction of the grandness of things that were challenging and difficult. Well, you know, it wasn't that hard because if they did realize just how hard it was overcoming PTSD, no matter how hard that already is for a lot of guys that come back from difficult situations would be so much more without this discriminating evaporation of particular painful memories. Time heals all wounds. Yeah. Yeah. Well it does, it does certainly to some degree, or it minim causes you to minimize your heroic ex escapades. Well, I always described the military as the best shitty time you'll ever have. It seems to be everybody's recollection of it. There was a, an interesting story from Edward Slingeland as well. He wrote this book, the history of alcohol, uh, throughout time. And what, what just alcohol? Yeah. He's talking about how one of the, um, bonding procedures, one of the bonding, uh, rituals that used to happen to some, uh, armies a few nights before battle. When they first came together is that the generals would encourage all of the guys to get drunk together. One of the reasons is not just that when you're drunk, you were a better liar detector and a worse liar. It's an interesting like asymmetry in terms of alcohol. So if we're both drunk, I can work out when you're lying better than I could when I'm sober, even if you were or were not drunk, and also you're worse at lying because your prefrontal cortex is tuned down so you can't deceive and you can detect deception better. So it's like a truth serum. It's kind of like a weird sort of group size truth serum in a way. But the main reason they did it beyond, Hey, this is us, you know, our inhibitions are lowered and we get to put our arm around each other and maybe we clear up some issues that we've had, or we have a fist fight and then we clear up the issues that we've had. It's a suffering the next day. Everyone wakes up together, stinking hangover, and you have had a little titrated dose of some suffering. It's fucking hell. Trauma bonding. Nick, I can't believe that you did that. You shot in the tent in the tent last night. Like that's unbelievable. Whatever. And then, okay. Now that we've got that, when we go into battle together, we've already gone through something difficult and it's going through something difficult together, I think that really sort of cement. I mean, that's all, all military training too. I mean, they make you go through the gas chamber together. They make you do this together, that together. Like that's all. It's just government funded trauma bonding. That it seems to be effective. It does. What is next for you? What's on the agenda? I, by the way, I do like to, everyone needs to go and subscribe to the Fat Love Edition. Your stuff fucking rips. You are one of the best storytellers I've ever seen. Can one of you guys grab my backpack for me right on the couch out there? Yeah. Sorry. Uh, I'll show you. I brought you one. Oh, thank you. So what's next? Unreal. What do, I mean, I, I'm just. I think what you do is this, this weird blend of like morbid curiosity, uh, masculine heroism, fantasy porn, and, uh, like tribute to stuff that's great. Uh, so I, everyone needs to go and subscribe to you because as big as you are, you need to be even bigger. Nick flood, AKA the fat electrician. Heroes are raised book one, the flight of Richard Bong. That's what I'm up to next. Brave books, 10 book series. What if an ultra tech tape player could blast you back in time to save history's greatest heroes to save history's greatest heroes? Is this a kid's book? Yeah, this is sick. And who's brave books? Uh, this is a publisher that I worked with. Unreal. So basically my biggest thing that I always get for comments and requests is, Hey, I love your videos. I want my kids to hear these stories, but you know, you're, you're, you're too graphic, you say fuck too much, yada, yada, yada. And I originally tried to do, I tried to, I tried to do censored videos and, uh, those just didn't work out. So this was my, my next swing at trying to get war hero stories to kids. Uh, so I basically impregnated a fictional story with the nonfiction story of these real, real life war heroes. Is that a plane? That is, that is a P 38 shooting an alligator, which actually happened. Okay. Is that an input? Well, alligator is an important enemy. Uh, no. So the book one, the hero that they save is Richard Bong. America's ace of aces, the greatest fighter pilot America's ever had during world war II. And part of his story is one of his guys gets shot down and crash lands into a pond or a lake and he's running patrol overhead and when he's running patrol overhead and his guys in the water swimming and, uh, as for you, he can keep it in your shots, that's funny. Oh, I got you. And, uh, he basically is, has this giant alligator swimming towards him. And Dick Bong, Richard Bong swoops down in his P 38 and you can't call him Dick Bong in the book. I don't in the book. Cause it's a kid's book, but that's his, that's his name. That's what Dick Bong. Yeah. Yeah. Dude is awesome. And this is a 10 book series. Yep. 10 book series. Everyone's a different hero. So basically I do it for kids. Why not do it for adults? Uh, cause the adults have my videos and I want the kids to have something to get them excited about history. I feel like history is boring. I feel like most people don't like history cause it's top boring. And this is my attempt at making history fun for kids. So I basically took, um, it basically takes place in modern time. The two characters are my son's cutter and cash. And then I am a museum curator slash electrician, and we're living in an alternate reality where the Nazis won world war II. Okay. And I basically figure out that Germany managed to accomplish this by using time travel to do something to the timeline, to get rid of America's 10 greatest war heroes and prevent them from becoming the heroes they were supposed to be thus changing the entire outcome of world war two and allowing them to win. So this is how pivotal individual heroes can be changed the entire course of the world. Yeah. And I'm going to go back and fix it myself, but I get kidnapped and my sons find all my notes and they find the device that I've recreated that I managed to track down and they have to go back and fix the timeline to save me. And that's why they're glowing green because that's the teleportation technology. So they basically, they initially, the tape recorder that they have, their time travel device, um, is a recording of me. And it's basically a montage of this real war heroes, real life. And that's all real information. It's a fictional story, but all the acts and everything are real things that happened from my videos. And it's a montage of me walking the boys through like what this guy did, what he accomplished, how he did it, how pivotal he was supposed to be in the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But Germany did something to change it. They, they prevented him from becoming this guy somehow. And then they have to go in and they can hit the record. And while they're in this montage, they're like ghosts, they're witnessing it in first person, but nobody can see them, they can't interact with the environment, but then when they go to do the record function, they actually travel back in time and they have to correct whatever the Nazi time travelers. Fucked up to make sure that that guy becomes who he's supposed to be. And every time the timeline gets a little bit more and a little bit more correct, but it's just a fun way to actually expose these kids to like, here's a bunch of history about America's greatest fighter pilot. All that's true. All that's accurate. And the cool part for me is we, we put the books through like beta testing. We had parents and kids read the books. And in the beta testing, uh, one of the questions that we asked them after they had read the book was like, everybody liked them. They were fun. We asked him if they felt like they learned anything about history. It was no across the board. They didn't feel like they learned anything. And then we told him take 10 minutes on your phone, or we can get you a computer if you need Google Richard Bong. And just read about them. And then they came back and re-answered. They felt like they learned a shit ton because they didn't even, they're having so much fun reading the book. They didn't realize that the entire character of Richard Bong in this book, that was a real person and all that shit actually happened. Because it sounds so fantastical. Exactly. And it's just, it's just not the stuffy on, uh, on April 17th and this date at this time at the battle of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just like, oh, it's fun. Oh, he actually shot an alligator with his plane. That's awesome. That really happened. So then they, after looking at it, they're like, oh shit, I did learn a lot. So that was really cool to see. Is that available now? Uh, it's available for pre-order now. And then it's officially released. I believe November 24th is when we're going to start shipping them out. Bro. Yeah. That's so cool. It's good to do the kid thing as well. I was with Jocko fuck at beverage forum in May or something this year. He we've I've got new tonic. He's got a Jocko go. And, um, we were in, this was a particularly, I mean, he's a good friend, but like, it's a intimidating thing to be around him at the best of times, just the size of his head. Um, but other than that, he's lethal. And. Uh, we had a concurrent meetings with the buyer from Walmart or something. It's like you said, uh, shark tank. Yeah. It's kind of a little bit like that. So there's this weird, it's all Bonnie blues. You'd like queue up to says whichever you prefer. Let me in. There's a room where action is going on and you have to wait outside until it's your turn. Um, Jocko was going and we were talking about how this is going to happen with Walmart and all the rest of it. And he showed me the, um, early cut trailer for way of the warrior kid, which is Chris Pratt. And, um, he's doing something which is a cinematic movie equivalent. I think of what you're trying to do with this book, which is, I can't remember what it's called. It's called a, like an all ages movie or something. I think, um, uh, inside from Pixar was somewhat similar. The, the movie sort of occurs at multiple levels that the kid can watch it and it's not sufficiently graphic. It's like PG 13 or maybe even less than that. Um, and there's a story that, but also the parents can go and they take something away and maybe different things away and the kids sort of get to do that thing too. And it's not too dissimilar as this, like the co-reading thing of if it's sufficiently engaging that both parents and kids like it, and we'll go through it at the same time. But that's his whole pivot too. And to see you doing the same thing, but in book form is fucking tell me about this is your drink. Tell me about it. Yeah. So this, I founded this, we started four years ago and launched it three years ago. I see that you're a fan of cold, frosty beverages. So I'll be able to turn you into a, an acolyte very soon. I also have my own energy. It would be really well, uh, echelon. Oh, cool. Yeah. So I have a, I have a echelon energy drink, so it's cool. I feel like we're all, we're all copying each other. That's true. Yeah. So we launched this three years ago. Uh, we have just. Completed a series a, which is very exciting. So that'll get announced pretty soon. And, uh, yeah, we've been working on this hard. So it's in Australia, we're going into seven 11 and, uh, ready Mart in Australia. I hope I haven't got that wrong. We're in Sainsbury's. Like best-selling drink on the, uh, meal deal side behind red bowl in all of Sainsbury's at the moment. We're about to go into a ton of, uh, retail. I mean, you know, there's, isn't it, isn't it weird how like. Predefined the route of a beverage has to go business model. Why it's crazy. It's like the most formulaic thing that I've ever seen. I've done a lot of businesses. This is by far the most like, no, this is the trail you have to go on. There is no other way. No, you, before you go there, you have to go to Cahey and you have to go to Kroger and you can get into H-E-B, but the only way that you can get is by going through central market and once you performed at central market for. Uh, whatever it is, rate of sale needs to be four per SKU per store per week. And then once we've hit that, if you can get yourself up to seven, then we can unlock these next few stores. And then from there you get, it's actually for someone like, if you've just got that, like a, you know, a dash of autism, it's the right process because you go, okay, well, I understand if you give me a spreadsheet, I can work my way through the projections for this, I know when I'm going to run out of money, I know when I need to get a new injection of cash, I know what my burn rate is, I know all the rest of this stuff. It's like a video game as far as like, this is the objective. You need four of these things to continue. And then you like, yeah, so like right now we just got into, uh, we just got into the specialty, so we're in vitamin shop right now, so that's where we're at with it and, uh, yeah, so that you're a little bit further down that path than us. Even so far, it's been like, I've had it explained to me and I've looked at it. And it's like, this is very much like, it's, this is the only way you're on a set of train tracks and you know, product market fit is kind of a very sexy word that gets used a lot in, in, in everything. But I really do think, especially with the world of energy, generally at the moment, smarter energy, which was like halfway between like functional and energy, which is good because it means that we can, when we want to play in a relatively small pond, we can, and when we want to play in a big pond, we can as well, we can get put next to Red Bull if needs be, but we can also get put on something that's more functional. Like, well, I'm going to eat Kim Kardashian's lunch with update. Like we're about to go in, we're about to sit next to her on a bunch of shells and we're going to eat her alive. Um, there's a bunch of other products that are great, but different in terms of functionality and offering and stuff like that and taste, but if you've got the right product market fit and you can hit the right price point, it is just, okay, you start to pour more like gas into the top of the tank and out the bottom creates growth, and then you just make sure that you don't fuck it. Like if you, it is yours to lose. So it's a really interesting, really interesting beverage, like, uh, industry to be in and, uh, it's sick. I'll have to, I want to be on rotation for your thing. You've seen in there, we've got like everything. We've got bloom energy. We've got Jocko stuff. We've got all the, all the new tonics. I'll send you, I'll send you some of our new one. We're the first energy drink that I'm aware of to put Zinamite in an energy drink. Zinamine is what Zinamite is built off the backup, right? So that's the equivalent of going Parazanthine, uh, and adding that in. So we looked at Zinamine, uh, as part of the literature review for. Tell me about it. Uh, basically we we collabed with my friend pew view who I don't know if you've ever seen him He's probably the best trick shot guy with guns right now So he can he you could pull up videos at shorts of him He can take his wedding ring and throw it in the air and then shoot a bullet through the wedding ring He's got like a big ultra high speed camera. Okay, if you look up pew view wedding ring, it'll pop right up view. Yeah Um craziest trick shot i've ever seen in my life. Um Anyways, we we worked with him. He takes zinamite supplement. Um, it's apparently it's what they give like fighter pilots before mission extreme focus So he's been taking it for a while and he has actually done like his own research Whatever he's done is split times see how fast you can pull the trigger how fast you can hit targets reaction times all that stuff Because he's doing you know a tenth of a second to him's a big deal What's he shooting? It's a terran tactical Dude Dude eat shit What are you guys doing? He did he does that stuff on the first try he's crazy First time I ever met him. He he lives like 30 minutes from me So we're like the there's like four youtubers in iowa So like we've gotten a hold of he's like come out and film with me. I'm into guns, too All right. I had no idea what I was getting into I thought it was gonna be a total dude perfect situation Like i'm gonna sit out here for eight hours while this asshole tries to shoot through a wedding ring Not the case He's a freak of nature. I've never seen any background. He's a farm kid that grew up in iowa and he Dad gave him money for bullets. He's been shooting 10 000 rounds a month since he was like 11 No military no military training nothing heavy equipment operator until he started doing youtube full-time Absolutely. Great dude shoots insane first time. I met him. We're there's like a White fold-out table in front of us with all the guns and like 15 yards down range as the targets I'm standing at the white table. He's standing next to me And he's like, all right, pull your concealed carry out and shoot at a target. I'm like, okay Ting shoot at the target. He goes. Okay shoot at the same target in the same spot I had no idea what the fuck he was doing. I go. Okay He wanted to see where my brass was ejecting I fire again. He steps back Kicks my brass into the air Waits for my brass to arc downward so the bullet doesn't shoot over the berm and then once it's low enough that the bullet will Go into the berm fires and shoots my brass in midair on the first try unprompted What the fuck Dude perfect. I bro. It's the most insane shit i've ever seen in my life. Yeah First try Is he doing it is he shooting competitively as well? No, he just doesn't care to shoot competitively wants to do tricks Yeah, and cool. He wants to make it fun. He he he entertained the dude is obsessed with guns And then he'll he'll go out and shoot guns for eight hours a day and film it because it's his full-time job And then he'll go home and to decompress he's ungodly good call of duty shooting digital fucking guns. Okay? Yeah Okay. Yeah Well, look if you can't if it's too late to shoot you might as well just do it in virtual reality I guess can you mark? Can you look up? Um, Uh zinamite for me and zinami. Oh, yeah, but sorry that's uh, so he's been taking it for years for his reaction time So we did a collaboration with him for his favorite flavor like an lto custom drop Yeah, that's why we put it in there for him, but you put it in. Okay zinamite It might be zinamines zinamite might be the commercialized one because I know it just became water-soluble And that's why we were finally able to do it yeah, so that's why we were actually able to pull it off and put it in a drink without it all just getting granular and Floating to the bottom interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean the the problem that we have with this is uh, there's Fucking panics ginseng and rhodiola in there and they are active compounds, right? Like they're fucking adapted They're from a herb. They're from a shrub. So you put that in and if this Season had more sun on it than the entire uh, like the actives can increase more and you go Okay, so we now in order to hit what we say is dosages and to keep the bitterness profile the same. It's a fucking nightmare Um, but the the zinamite stuff was the uh, the active version of that previous It's like cognizant cognizant is an activated alpha gpc alpha gpc is like the classic version of that cognizant Which is what we've got half a gram up in there is dude Ever since I got into like the energy drinks and different businesses I do I basically do fat electrician videos, but I do them on businesses too on my other channel. It's called fat files. Okay some of the product history is insane like Lunchables Absolutely wild why what's the story behind lunchables? I didn't realize there was a law lunchables is genius, right? Think about lunchables from a marketing perspective, right? They're not putting the sandwiches together at the factory you're putting the sandwiches together at the factory And then you're paying extra because the kids have fun doing it They basically tom sawyered your ass into painting the fence for them. It's called the ikea effect Is that what it is? The psychological bias is referred to the difference between pick your own strawberries and cheap strawberries Pick your own strawberries sounds like an experience and you love things that have had effort applied to them in Yeah a great way so yeah, okay, that's that makes sense with lunchable that's why I started looking into it you know who fucking Came up with the marketing for give it give it a guess the lunchables. Yeah, how old are they? Uh started in 83 84, I think Don't tell me it's like the cigarette fucking in philip morris. Ah, come on It's always them. Why is it always them bro? It's dude, there's the reason I my theory is they're the reason the obesity epidemic started yeah processed foods Well, they so they bought lunch they were buying all kinds of stuff So it was rg reynolds started it in the 60s. Basically once people were figuring out the cigarettes are bad for you They diversified into the food market So the first product I was able to track down that they did this with was rj rj reynolds bought hawaiian pacific fruit company Hawaiian pacific fruit company is a company that makes hawaiian fruit punch Okay, hawaiian fruit punch at that point in time was a cocktail mixer And then they re-marketed it as a kid juice as a kid's fruit juice So they were buying into all these uh companies and they bought oscar meyer got bought out by craft And then craft got bought out by philip morris. Yeah, and they were in product development for lunchables And the working theory for lunchables at the time was it's quick and easy So a working parent can grab it throw it in the lunchbox and take it to work Yep, and they said nah, nah, bro kids. This is for kids And then the way they went through the marketing for it is g because they have all this all this consumer data From decades of getting people to smoke. They know what people want. Yep, right So when a mom is the issue with marketing to kids is kids aren't buyers so it's like the one product industry where there's a goalie in between so you have to You have to convince the buyer that the the End user that they want it But you also have to convince the goalie in the middle mom and dad that they should buy it for them So you got to convince them it's good for them So when a mom is looking at food philip morris realized Moms want to give their kids fresh healthy stuff. How do you portray the image of being fresh and healthy? You put it in clear wrapping like they just picked it up from the deli And that's why lunchables you can see have the clear and they have the cutouts so you can see the ingredients through the thing And then they made it look like a school lunch tray to portray the image of being a full meal Yep. Yep. Look at how complete this is. Exactly. You can see the meat the cheese the grain. Oh, that's like That's like half of my food pyramid hawking for some lunchables right now. Yeah And uh, so yeah All this marketing just went into like convincing mom that it was good for the kids and to buy it So then they also used uh, what's the term? Uh reputation laundering I think is the term so because they owned craft they owned all it's a massive food conglomerate They own all these brands, right? So then when they like unveil the pizza lunchable They're gonna put branded tombstone pizza sauce with it because mom has already given the kids tombstone pizza This is just a tombstone pizza. They can build for themselves. This is what uh, Ryan and the guys from ghost are able to do because they're run by key gig dr Pepper so they can do an a and w root beer collab. They can do a sprite flavor Uh, they've got oreos and like reese's pieces in their protein powder they're ripping it at the moment because they've got access to this big body of Inventory and goodwill that's now being used in a slightly different market Then like no one's making a caffeinated version of seven up in any case So it's like we'll just give you have the caffeine thing we'll make this flavor this brand in this new delivery format. Yeah so then uh yeah, so they do reputational laundry that leads to lunchables, but then I started looking in to all the other stuff that Um cigarette companies basically I can see why the conspiracy rabbit hole has been One that you've tumbled down a bunch of times. Well, then it's like teddy grahams What's that? It's a it's a little tiny cookie that looks like a teddy bear. Okay Teddy grahams developed under I believe rj reynolds did teddy grahams. So teddy grahams. What's healthier that what's the health healthy version of a cookie Like a granola bar a cracker. Yeah, right Yeah, so teddy grahams are designed to be cookies taste like cookies They're designed to look like crackers, but then the kids won't want to eat them So how do you convince a kid that eating crackers is as fun as eating a cookie make it into a teddy bear? You make it look like a teddy bear They're the ones that came up with With uh lifesavers They when they lifesavers was the mint brand the little circular mints like polos. Uh Yeah, okay. So we call them lifesavers and um Basically, they had already owned those well kids don't like mints because they're spicy so they came up with gummy lifesavers the little gummy versions like And they they came up with all these different food like processed food products That were just like specifically designed to target kids and then I found a study from I think 91 That or no that that study is from 2003 that basically Showed that during the time period where rj Reynolds and philip morris owned these huge food conglomerates the processed food that they were Manufacturing was 80 percent more likely to be hyper palatable Which is like the scientific Right ratio of salt to carbs or salt to fat to make it so you can just sit there and eat the whole box So they like basically used all their flavor engineering and everything to just make food that you just could not stop eating Have you seen have you ever seen when hunter gatherer tribes are given cheesecake for the first time? No, but I would Can I it's fine. I might be able to find it. It was a bit of a niche video. Um and cheesecake, I think is From a flavor design perspective if you're on the sweet side of the spectrum, I think on the savory side of the spectrum probably french fries Um, but on the sweet side of the spectrum fat carbs and then I learned about this stuff called orification So that's the design of the texture of food. So Ancestrally, it's very novel to have multiple textures within the same food stuff is slimy or it's crunchy or it's whatevery But if you think about oreos, right you have both sort of smooth soft fluffy with crunchy Uh, the same thing is true of uh french fries, right? Well done nicely done french fries The same thing is also true of cheesecake and you have all of the different flavor except like okay humans like sugar Well, why is it that I don't just like want to take a spoonful of sugar and put it in my mouth? Why is that not? Interesting to me humans like fat. Okay. Well, why don't I just like Pour olive oil in my mouth or something? It's like well No, it's like in specific combinations with specific kind of packagings and flavorings and textures as well And uh, yeah when you think about like even with fucking lunchables dudes, like you've got crunchy wafer Whatever the whatever that cracker thing is on the outside and then you've got it's smooth on the inside and you've got something That's a bit more satisfying and chewy in the meat Tribal people try Bro bro Thank you He sleeps with his eyes open believe me Bro if you put cheesecake in front of me i'm not thinking about any this is shows that he hasn't ever had it before because He's not thinking about doing anything else Happy birthday, you know what this reminds me of have you ever seen the videos of the uh, The people that worship american gi's Worship like like deities. Yes No, oh my god, pull this up. Uh, so during world war ii there was like obviously american forces came in contact with like Isolated tribes on islands in different places. Okay, there's some of these tribes that are still around today and they literally worship A deity that was the american paratrooper and they like dress up and try to look like american paratroopers because like to them at the time They were tribes people living in the stone age Parachuted out of the fucking sky with a magical wand this big that could blow a hole in a water buffalo from a mile away and there's all kinds of footage and like there's been people that have tried to like reach out and be like hey this is what was going on, but because it's 40 years removed and all the people that were first-hand witnesses are Now deceased we can't convince you we can't convince you that it was that's what this was Well, I mean if you imagine if you tried to do that to people with religion nowadays speaking of the philip morris thing So this is an interesting, uh pivot that we're doing at the moment So we're doing focus pouches, which which are nicotine free. So cognizant, which you'll know is cytokine 50 milligrams of of uh caffeine full spectrum b vitamins all the rest of the stuff. What's really fascinating about that Is the focus pouches that we've gone for they sit? Basically what i've realized this wasn't the intention. It sounds like much more of a genius thing before I actually Saying in retrospect um A lot of people now have got really hardcore on using nicotine, especially in pouches But a lot of people feel a little bit bad about maybe what their usage is So we are now with those slip streaming behind a new delivery mechanism That people some people want to dilute down some people just want to use the focus pouches. They're good It's an easier way than to drink It's easier to carry you can take it on a plane you can do whatever but a lot of people like fuck man I probably should just push the brakes a little bit On the zins or the alps or the whatever like lucy's or whatever i'm using. So i'm gonna go like i'm gonna alternate between In something that is like a better for you pouch and something that is, you know, really what I'm sort of clamoring for, which is nicotine and people are titrating themselves down. So that's been something else, which is interesting to think about from like a cognitive health perspective. Uh, yeah, I just saw, I saw another brand doing something, same concept, except their thing was you, you bought it and it was like a kit. And it had like, I don't know if it was like 10 or 20 cans, but it basically started out at like six milligrams nicotine, just like everything else. And then like, all right, here's your two cans of sixes and then your next two cans are like five and then the next two cans are four and then the next two cans are three. And it basically like works you down till you're down to just the blank ones that have this type of stuff in it after the fact. And then you just stay using that one. Hilarious. The oral fixation, whatever else. Speaking of that, the Phillips, Philip Morris is of the world. Uh, the guys have been on a fuck ton of calls with them because they're now looking at, okay, like, where is legislation going to come to? What can we do that is better for you? And there's a bit of me that's like, fuck, like these guys know what they're doing. And it's sick to be in conversations with people that understand human nature, maybe better than any. You're the hot girl thinking you can change the bad boy right now. That's what you are. I can fix it. I can fix it. I can fix it. I can fix it. Watch me, Philip Morris. I can make them good for everybody. Come on, come on. We can do it. Uh, dude, you fucking rule. Like all of this stuff's great. The book's fantastic. I think your, your YouTube channel is just fantastic as well. Where should people go to check out everything? Uh, yeah, YouTube fat electrician. You Google it. It pops up everywhere. Fat electrician on all my socials and yeah. And what's the other, what's the one about business? Uh, that one's called the fat files. Yeah. So you're not fat. It's a long story. Well, it was originally a joke to my wife. My, my whole content story started because I tore my pack and was off work in a sling. And my wife finally bullied me into making a tech talk account and you have to have a username just so I could watch the tech talk. She'd send me. So I just said the fat electrician as a joke to my wife, because I can't work out. I'm going to get fat now. And then I got a wild hair up my ass. My first tech talk I ever made got 12.5 million views. And now I'm here. You've got to be careful what you register social media. It could have been so much worse. I know a new grand scheme of things, something that can go on the front of a children's book. It really could have been, it could have been way worse. Yeah. Dude, you're the best. I appreciate you so much. All right. Goodbye. My beauties. Till next time. Okay. Bye dude. Yes.