Forgotten War Heroes Who Changed The World - The Fat Electrician - #1165

The Fat Electrician (aka Nic Freitas) is a military veteran, comedian and YouTuber. Expect to learn why we don’t promote war heroes anymore and what most heroes have in common, behind the stories of Logan Westin, Pappy Gun, and other not well-known heroes of past wars, what the most hardcore animals in military history were, whether it is possible to have war heroes anymore, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Timestamps: (00:00) What Does the Fat Electrician Actually Do? (01:50) Where Have America’s War Heroes Gone? (09:46) What Do History’s Greatest Heroes Have in Common? (13:57) The Forgotten Heroism of Logan Weston (33:49) How Logan Weston Became a Green Beret (37:07) Does Modern Warfare Have Room for Heroes? (41:39) Why Did WWII Veterans Stay Silent? (53:12) The Rebellious Pappy Gunn (01:07:52) Why WWII Heroes Were Built Different (01:10:48) Why Britain Refuses to Embrace Air Conditioning (01:18:20) Britain’s Craziest Military Inventions (01:22:48) Did the Allies Try to Feminise Hitler? (01:28:06) The Most Hardcore Animals Ever Used in Warfare (01:39:12) Why the Battle of Trenton Changed America (01:44:25) What Everyone Gets Wrong About Bravery (01:47:42) Why America Really Wants Greenland (01:51:32) The Forgotten Jobs That Win Wars (01:55:55) The Incredible Story of Sniper Ed Eaton (02:11:32) Is It Intimidating to Cover Someone Who’s Still Alive? (02:18:42) Why the Fat Electrician Is Writing Kids’ Books (02:26:38) The Journey Behind Neutonic (02:34:49) The Genius of Lunchables (02:46:43) Where to Find the Fat Electrician Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  How do you describe what you do? Someone asks you at a dinner party.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  I tell stories. I make, I make videos on the internet is usually my, my go-to. I, I, it's a weird job. Thirty-two-year-old man. Don't really enjoy calling myself an influencer or, uh, I guess a YouTuber is the one I'll say. I used to say content creator, then all the OnlyFans girls took that title, so I don't want people assuming I do OnlyFans.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  It would be a very interesting kind of OnlyFans. Everybody getting blown up, limbs being lost, stories from history.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, I guess it is, it is historian, content creator. I mean, I came across your stuff when I was first researching, uh, Sir Adrian Paul Giselaïn Carton de Wart.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  Um, obviously, you know, flagging for British, although I think he was Belgian parents, maybe Belgian-French parents. Um, and I was like, this is, this stuff absolutely rules. Just finding hardcore people from history.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Main characters.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, main character energy.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  Historical main character energy and then retelling their stories in a way. It'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 from history that's interesting. It's the B-side songs that you should have listened to that you don't know about that are awesome.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, you see it, the more and more, the more time that goes on, the more selective the US government, at least I don't know about British, but the more selective the US 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.

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Making him famous. Now we're gonna get into conspiracy theories. Uh, I would say the main reason is fractional reserve banking, if I had to guess.

• 2:07Chris Williamson?

  For war heroes. War heroes and fractional reserve banking.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's why we quit doing it.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay, go on.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Uh, World War II. How did, how did America pay for the war? Cost a lot of money. How do we do it?

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  I don't know.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  We collected taxes. What happens when we didn't have enough taxes?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 US government of like, hey, give us 50 bucks and in five years, we're gonna give you 60 bucks back. That's how we did it. Cause 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 10, they're immediately shipped back home to America and put on a war bonds tour.

• 3:09Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  From war hero to fundraiser.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  War hero to 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 gotta buy more bullets, we gotta buy more tanks, we gotta buy everything, and this guy's gonna 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 US government doesn't need to raise money from people, they can just print more money whenever they feel like it.

• 3:45Chris Williamson?

  Is patriotism not a goal in itself?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Not utilizing war heroes.

• 3:50Chris Williamson?

  There are more effective, cheaper, easier ways to do it.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  I think the US government specifically, this is kinda, 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 US 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.

• 4:22Chris Williamson?

  Dakota Meyer starts tweeting the N-word.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  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

• 4:31Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  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?

• 4:43Chris Williamson?

  How optics safe are you? How narrative aligned are you?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  There's a humongous portion of that now, much bigger than there ever was.

• 4:48Chris Williamson?

  Can you bring up the, uh, US list of Medal of Honors in chronological order? Can we see who's been issued it most recently? I bet this, I bet this is one's happened this year and we don't even know about it.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 5:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Um, but that is, I, I, I guess I just assume that having people like your own country is a, an, 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 kinda screwed.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's also, uh, 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 kinda 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 and saying, hey.

• 6:08Chris Williamson?

  Highly skilled, highly dangerous, very well reputed.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  It, 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 values should be, then they have to stick to that, you know? And you kinda see this back in between World War I and World War II, like the World War I 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.

• 6:41Chris Williamson?

  The old guard versus the new guard, kind of.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. But like, they don't want veterans to be able to organize like that and influence politics in that way anymore either.

• 6:48Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Let's have a look at this list. You got it, Mark?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that was the, the pilot that, um,

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  Chinook helicopter pilot, whose legs were torn by machine gun fire, but safely landed the helicopter, allowing the mission to continue. This was the guy that did, this was

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Maduro. Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  He is getting pinned that Medal of Honor while holding a walker, I believe.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can see he's holding the walker.

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  Because his legs have been just torn.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  He's fresh out of the hospital, yeah.

• 7:18Chris Williamson?

  Torn to pieces.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:19Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that's a quick turnaround. I don't know, what does it say when he got it?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  It was like, it was real quick. It was like a month or two. It was

• 7:25Chris Williamson?

  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

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Man, I'm not gonna comment on the political ramifications, but it's definitely one of the coolest things any military's ever done, ever. It's actually my favorite post on Reddit that I've ever seen.

• 7:45Chris Williamson?

  Explaining the Maduro raid?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  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 sent 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, that was wrong. I don't know what else to say.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  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 was serving with me and said, you can do this, but you need to cut off a finger. And he was like, we're going.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Done.

• 8:42Chris Williamson?

  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 Stumpf 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.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:59Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know. You spend your entire life building a really fast race car. You want to drive it, right?

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  Straight into Venezuela.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  You want to take it out of the garage and see what it can do, you know?

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's a common thread between most of the people, most of the heroes that you cover?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  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. It's boring. 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 I and how that led into the Treaty of Versailles.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  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, that, that, that, nobody cares. Like, pick a war hero and be like, hey, here's Richard Bong. He's a P thirty eight 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.

• 10:52Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen those studies done on if you tell a story for a charitable 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. Cause there's twice as much. And then a whole village of people, that's, you know, like 50 times or a hundred times as effective. But it's not that 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.

• 11:34Chris Williamson?

  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 you, I think you're totally right.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. You gotta give them something to actually relate to, like give them a situation they could see themselves in. And then they're asking themselves a 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?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  What a better way to learn it.

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

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• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. You said that 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, a personal favorite that you don't think enough people paid attention to?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  I'll be honest, my audience, like, once I do a video on somebody, I think they do become very, very popular. 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.

• 14:15Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Uh, Logan Weston is probably the coolest one that I think I've covered that didn't have a Wikipedia page, which is incredible. Cause 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.

• 14:37Chris Williamson?

  What's his name?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Logan Weston, the Fighting Preacher.

• 14:40Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What did he do?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  His nickname?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  That, that's his medals.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  He got shafted for the Medal of Honor, but he has everything else.

• 14:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Yeah, that's insane.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  So.

• 14:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're right. He's from the floor to above his nipples is just different medals.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely crazy. Um, so Logan Weston 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 in. It'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. Cause 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. A 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.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  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 the 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, uh,

• 16:30Speaker 01

  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. Cause 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 and 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.

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  You just get to choose?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  He gets to choose.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  Take your own adventure for military.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  But he doesn't even know what the words are. You know what I mean? Cause like today, we kind of have a general idea of like, oh, this is that, that's, I've watched 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 A I T 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 launch some type of other attack through this major waterway.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  That, that was.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  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, no, spread them out, I guess. Stop them somewhere if they show up.

• 18:07Chris Williamson?

  Put some over there, put some over here.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  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 gunfire. 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 is like, enemy is not shooting at us. What's going on?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  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 him 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 that gets lost or whatever.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  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 and showing them what plants were edible. And they were having like cooking competitions to see who can make the best food out of the surrounding vegetation and whatever MREs they had.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  So like they had a much better time the second time they were surrounded.

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just like the, you know, I, 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 gunfire. They dive into a ditch, they hide in a swamp, they get away.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  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. Cause remember he's the fighting preacher, very religious guy.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  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 is going to miss me with bullets. So Logan spends the rest of, I'm like, dude, shut the fuck up. It doesn't work that way. Be quiet. Like wasn't buying it. So like, and it's just, that's the funny shit that happens in these stories where it's like, yeah, that's awesome.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  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. They're 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 fiance saying that she's leaving him. And he's got another letter from mom and dad saying they're getting divorced.

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  Sick.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  And their mission was to, from India, march into China. Because China's having the war during World War Two at the same time, right? So you've got the people that are friendly with the US 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.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  Advertising your position each time you need to eat.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  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, cause 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 Two for him. He decides he's going to stay in the military, goes, finds a wife, gets married. And, uh, 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.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  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 they're like, 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.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  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 gotta go to Korea real quick. In and out, no big deal. They literally tell him, it's going to be like a, 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 pushed 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 Weston 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.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  You shouldn't see anybody coming. And they're hanging out there. They're basically camping for a couple of 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 them 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 Two era Japanese rifles. I know, cause I fought those guys and that's what the North Koreans carry. Go tell them I've got a bunch of enemies coming.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Sends the runner running, comes back. They said it's friendlies. You're overreacting, blah, 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 Pusan 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 300 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 Pusan perimeter and South Korea might not exist. So like, he literally changed history with this action.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  So Logan Weston gets all jacked up. He's in the hospital for like weeks and weeks and weeks. I forget the exact 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 Incheon. 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 the way up 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.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  He's there and he fights all the way back down with them. And 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 him first and they fire on their position, kills the entire anti-tank crew. Three guys, Logan Weston'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.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  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 the distinguished service cross or the silver star for that action. And then when they're basically doing a tactical retreat back down south,

• 31:38Speaker 01

  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 Captain Lewis Mallett 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 Mallett, and you could pull a picture of him up. He's got a big mustache with bayonets. He looks like he's a total character. I've done a video on him too. He's a badass. So he had heard that the communists who were famously running low on ammunition because they can't manufacture anything,

• 32:24Speaker 01

  were kind of psyopping 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.

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  I've got a man with a mustache that says otherwise.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  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 Weston at the time, who was there when it happened also. So it's like, look at that guy.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  I do.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Holding, holding two bayonets.

• 32:51Chris Williamson?

  I do not want to be stabbed in the neck by a man with a mustache like that.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Look at that womb broom.

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  Dude. And what is that? A Medal of Honor around his neck as well?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the Medal of Honor. He got the Medal of Honor for that action.

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  For the bayonet charge?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  For leading the last bayonet charge in US military history. Yeah.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Or sorry, last company sized bayonet charge.

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Yeah. Probably some bloke had a crack.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's probably a couple of guy, 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.

• 33:22Chris Williamson?

  Sick.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  So yeah, so yeah, Logan Weston is actually, I think he's book number nine in the, my new book series I got coming out. So should be pretty good.

• 33:31Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. Okay. So then he gets through the Korean incursion.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yep. So he gets through the Korean war and by this time he is, you know, he's, he's been there, done that. He's done all of it. He is in his mid 40s by the end of the Korean war. And after the Korean war, they come to him and they're like, hey,

• 33:49Speaker 01

  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 could be, 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 counter insurgency tactics from his experience with Merrill's Marauders. He then goes on to

• 34:23Speaker 01

  be an advisor on behalf of the US government in Laos during the Vietnam war. If you don't know, Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam war is where MacV 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 Laos and Cambodia, run down, run over, drop the supplies off, run back. So we were sending in MacV Sog, special operators to go in and basically conduct a shadow war

• 35:04Speaker 01

  that didn't happen for another 40 years, the entire time. And he was a advisor in Laos while that was going on.

• 35:13Chris Williamson?

  So this guy is 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.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  He's the main character for sure.

• 35:22Chris Williamson?

  He's got, he's got, yeah, it on, on both sides. Holy shit.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Uh, his last day in Korea, day before his last day in Korea, gets hit with a, gets hit by an enemy sniper right in the chest. Bullet gets stopped by the Bible in his breast pocket.

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  No fucking way.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

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• 36:33Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get up to $350 off the Pod 6 by going to the link in the description below. Heading to eightsleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. These, so I've, I've, 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 What was the first one that got me into it. Um, Alistair Urquhart, uh, the Forgotten Highlander.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So that was one of the first stories that got me into this. Uh, and then I guess a similar one like John Boyd, fighter pilot guy. Like, okay, I'm, 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

• 37:32Speaker 01

  My theory.

• 37:33Chris Williamson?

  Your theory behind that. Yeah. Well, I don't, it's, we know way more about it than me, but there is this sense, I think that like,

• 37:42Chris Williamson?

  first off, wars now, 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, I don't even know if we have room for war heroes in the same way anymore.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  We do.

• 37:56Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Every,

• 37:59Speaker 01

  again, me being a conspiracy theorist, I think they portray it that way on purpose. I, 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. Right? And the analogy that I'll give you is you always hear, one of the big criticisms of like the second amendment is 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. Right?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, the government does have a lot of rear, 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 fairy tale 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.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  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? It's, so it's just kind of the concept of like,

• 39:44Speaker 01

  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. You're going to, 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 guided by wire. As somebody, it's all going to, it's always going to come down to dudes on the ground getting shit done.

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  Do you think this, does society suffer if there's no outlet for heroism?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  I don't know that it needs an outlet for heroism, but I think society suffers when you quit glorifying heroism.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  For example.

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  You don't give people someone to strive for, someone to.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 Weston, 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 wanna, people don't wanna share the stories.

• 41:21Chris Williamson?

  How many of the stories that you cover end with Alistair Ercard living in his family's country estate until 80 or?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  An outrageous amount.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  Like, lots and lots of the heroes actually make it home and just become a chaplain, UT, or whatever the fuck.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  A significant portion. And like, that's the coolest part to me is you take somebody like Logan Weston that was able to do what he did. And like, that dude objectively killed a lot of people.

• 41:48Chris Williamson?

  Across three wars?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  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, 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, uns- I mean, they don't look like they're a pansy ass or anything, but you're not sitting there being like,

• 42:32Speaker 01

  yeah, that's that level of badass. They're unassuming. They're just normal dudes for the most part.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  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. But that, that is a, I don't know. Do you think that these, are, 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? 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, and people that don't, that aren't?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's interesting. Um, obviously, like PTSD is a relatively new discovery or like, understanding. Um, but I.

• 43:19Chris Williamson?

  Shell shock in World War I.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  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 II, specifically World War II, all those guys came back home and the story's the same. I hear it from, I get emails and everything. My grandpa was in World War II. 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 medals.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  V-Device?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  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 badass 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 badass. 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 II veteran. Grew up in the 1920s, 1930s, no TV.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Everybody thinks like 1920s and they picture New York in their head, like Model Ts running around, the stock market, mobsters, Tommy guns, all this cool shit. That was New York. That 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 II. 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,

• 45:29Speaker 01

  flying in a fucking plane bigger than the house you grew up in, jumping into combat with a magical gun that can shoot 100 rounds 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 asks 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, too. 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, with a gun, like.

• 46:09Chris Williamson?

  It's like Space War.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  It's like some Star Wars shit.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  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. And that's why they hit out at the VFW with the people that could understand.

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  So do you think that that is a form of PTSD? What do you, what do you think's going on there?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't think that that in its, in that of itself is a form of PTSD, but I think that that's like the reason they didn't wanna 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.

• 46:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think a lot of the guys, uh, like Zamparini, he had a ton of, uh, odd ways of re-acclimatizing when he came back, alcohol problems, stuff like that. Alistair Ercard, uh, 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, like, cars would backfire and he'd jump and have these sort of strange responses. But I don't know.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Well, that's the other thing, like, with, and what I mean with like, technology affecting us so differently is, World War II, these guys got done with the war. And it was like, okay, war's over. Pack everything up. What's that take? A couple of months? All right, you're still with your boys that have been through the shit with you for a couple of months. And you get to like, decompress of 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 of weeks to get across the ocean on the boat, still with my boys. Then we gotta get back to camp. We gotta unload everything. Then we gotta 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.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  And I get that acclimation phase.

• 48:02Chris Williamson?

  Almost, you know?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, decompressing. And then I got released back into the public. Whereas now, if you fought in 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 II, 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.

• 48:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's, you're saying that the, the, the high definition or the high, uh, uh, resolution contrast between my civilian life, my love, uh, my connection, and where I am, it's less immersive and faster. So the contrast is greater both, like, across time and during the experience.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's emotional multitasking.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Could you, could you imagine trying to get a good, hard workout in while also FaceTiming your child and wife in between sets?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  I mean, that'd be pretty hard. Now 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 afterward? Like 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 wars fought so much. It's insane.

• 49:35Chris Williamson?

  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 they were such a savant, you know, they clinically uh they were unbelievable at what they needed to do on stage. But what 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 aura.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  It was unworkable and you can put up with it for long enough, but then you get to this stage. 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 their 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

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  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, 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.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  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 is 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 what I mean? This isn't some 30 year old.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  That's a farm boy.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  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 Schmo. That's your average infantry guy that got drafted into being here or just showed up. You know what I mean?

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

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• 52:35Chris Williamson?

  You get 30 days of free returns globally with global shipping and a 10% discount site wide. So get that 10% discount by going to the link in the description below or heading to jim.sh slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 at checkout. That's jim.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 at 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 putting a cigar out on the tie of his commanding officer. Or Kat Onowak 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?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  I I think 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.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  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'd have 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.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  High conviction. Who are, who comes to mind when you think about a sort of rebellious singular?

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Pappy Gunn.

• 54:19Chris Williamson?

  Who's that?

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Pappy Gunn, Paul Irvin Gunn. Uh, 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. Uh, when he was still in the Navy, being basically a stunt pilot and fighter pilot, pioneering modern fighter piloting, uh, 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 and is just like, just fuck, pull all my teeth out. And the

• 55:01Chris Williamson?

  All of them.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  All of them. Give me dentures. I'm sick of this shit. And he goes to the uh, 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. Uh, 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 his life. He's got a wife, two kids, and he's living out in the Philippines, having a great time and World War Two is going on.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  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 or 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 uh, 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.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  While he's on this flight to Australia, MacArthur declares Malta an open city, which basically just means to the Japanese, hey, Malta's 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.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  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 12 B B 25 Mitchells. Is that what it is? Hold on, sorry. B 25 Mitchells? Yeah, so.

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, look at that.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  So

• 57:24Speaker 01

  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? And it's just bureaucratic government bullshit. He asks the Dutch, like, what are you guys doing with them? Oh, we don't really know what we're doing with them yet. So he was like, fuck this. He goes back to his unit, grabs a bunch of pilots, they roll up, forge documents and fucking steal them. Steals a fleet of medium bombers and flies them back to his, from the Dutch and flies them 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

• 58:05Speaker 01

  and then robs the supply sergeant with a fucking gun and takes the bomb sites and leaves.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  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 gotta 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, A20 Havocs. He gets a bunch of A20 Havocs and he's like, he's also like a genius mechanic and engineer. So he rips up these A20 Havocs and he mounts six 50 caliber machine guns in the nose.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  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 this.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  Vibration from that.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:17Chris Williamson?

  The balance is all over the place.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  The, 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 where basically, all right, we're gonna send the A20s 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, 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 strafe for themselves while they fly in.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  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 of movies that I want made, but this is just like the ultimate Hollywood movie because this is a dad that's just MacGyvering new planes and going out on experimental missions.

• 1:00:08Chris Williamson?

  Cellar tape and cable ties.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  To save his wife and kids because they're in an internment camp for the Japanese. Like, name a better.

• 1:00:14Chris Williamson?

  Does he know that they're alive?

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  He finds out that they're alive.

• 1:00:17Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  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 them and everything else. So he ends up putting eight 50 caliber machine guns in the nose of the B25s.

• 1:00:36Chris Williamson?

  That must've been what that was, four of the front and then two and two?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  No, no, I think that, yeah, so that was a different one. I'm gonna get there.

• 1:00:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  That, that one's different. Save that picture.

• 1:00:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Um. So he mounts eight 50 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.

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  And he keeps re-breaking it and it's just getting in his fucking way. He's turning wrenches all day.

• 1:01:12Chris Williamson?

  I can see why this is going, the man that got his teeth ripped out.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  He goes to the medic and is 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 and he's like, this pinky's coming off one way or the other. So the medic and Pappy go to the surgeon and the surgeon's 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 or you're gonna clean it off your wall. What do you wanna 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, uh, war in the Pacific, everybody's fighting over New Guinea at this point in time.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  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 gotta stop them. So he takes his fleet out. He's got A20s, he's got B, B25s. They take him out and what ends up happening at this battle is the Japanese Navy sees the A20s coming in really low. Well, the A20s coming in low, 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 boat's coming this way.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  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 well, 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 B25s come in, they skip bombs right into the side of them. They sink all eight troop carriers at once.

• 1:03:22Chris Williamson?

  How many people is that?

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Uh, a division.

• 1:03:25Chris Williamson?

  Is this, oh, the Battle of the Bismarck Sea?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Eight to 12,000.

• 1:03:28Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fuck, this is it.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Fun fact about this footage is taken from Pappy's planes.

• 1:03:39Chris Williamson?

  So. Sorry, who, just one, one point on that while you're going. Who the fuck is the guy with the video camera? Generally, in these, you know, when you see.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Combat cam, combat cameraman.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  And you're just like, hey, we're gonna go do this thing. We might get shot down, but it would be real cool if people can watch this.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Combat camera.

• 1:03:56Chris Williamson?

  A hundred years' time.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  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 the Bismarck Sea 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 B25s that you've figured out how to make.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  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 B25 straffer. 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, well, the engineers with their funding and their degrees, they outdid him. Pappy figured out how to get eight 50 cal's in this B25. Engineers figured out how to get 12. They one-upped him.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  What's Pappy Gun, Gun gotta do? He's gotta one-up him back. So go back to that original picture I told you to save.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  So what Pappy Gun does is he figures out how to mount four 50 cal's in the nose of the B25. And you see that hole? That's a 75 millimeter cannon from a Sherman tank.

• 1:05:46Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:05:48Chris Williamson?

  It's like.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  And that also went on to become an official variant.

• 1:06:12Chris Williamson?

  I mean, flying something that's in the air when that much force goes that way, it must slow the plane down.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Chris Williamson?

  Like briefly, the plane will go, hmm.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  I would assume, I wouldn't look forward to it.

• 1:06:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, go on.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I, yeah, and then, uh, he, he winds up, uh, they send him out on some crazy ass mission on the beach. He gets wounded, he gets hospitalized and, um, 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 legend 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, 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 beelined to the hospital and he basically gets reunited with his wife and kids who all survived.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  Just engineered some new war, war machines.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Took him into combat himself on multiple missions, like just to save you, like.

• 1:07:34Chris Williamson?

  The number of people, the number of heroes in World War II that were gangster as fuck.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Oh, it's insane.

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  Is, I, I don't know whether there is another period, again, maybe it's the right distance from time, fractional reserve, da, da, da, da. But it really does feel like there was something in the water.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  It's volume. It's volume.

• 1:07:50Chris Williamson?

  There's just so many people that are in the war that have surface area.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  World War, uh, America specifically, not that, you know, Great Britain and other nations didn't have their badasses also. They certainly did, like Patty Mayne, incredible. But, um, it's just the American military, when World War II 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, um,

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  I don't know, the respect for that, that culture doesn't really permeate that much, but.

• 1:08:33Chris Williamson?

  Why is, why does that make fertile ground?

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Because you got, oh, we can't, we can't not follow orders. We're supposed to, uh, the commander's down. We're supposed to bed down and be defensive and wait for, wait for orders to come down. No, fuck that. Shoot that guy. You know what I mean? Like, they're just gonna get default aggressive. What else do you do?

• 1:08:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, some farm boy from fucking Iowa or whatever.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Going in, man.

• 1:09:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no, I, I, it's interesting, the, the British versus American sort of insight for this. Cause at least my experience, British people are very orderly. We have, we, I mean, there was even a, a video recently. Did you see our, uh, Foreign Secretary said, British people love a queue. You see, have you got the, um, I'd like a fruity vegan flapjack, please video?

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Like a line?

• 1:09:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We love queuing. Just search fruity vegan flapjack video. So this is the guy currently for the, I mean, this is why the rest of the world, including this nation is terrified, right? Of Britain, uh, we're a hard nation, we're filled with hard people, specifically the man that is basically in charge of ensuring that globally to other countries, we are feared. And, um, he's talking about how, uh, 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, uh, an advert. And then at the very end, he says, I'd like a fruity vegan flapjack, please. And it is, here it is.

• 1:10:11Chris Williamson?

  That, just that, so just go back to the beginning, go back to the beginning of the man that's supposed to be.

• 1:10:17Chris Williamson?

  Are you not terrified? Are you not terrified of the man that wants a fruity vegan flapjack, please?

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  That, that meme around the UK was like, one of the fucking biggest.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Oh, I've got, I've got questions for you about the UK.

• 1:10:32Chris Williamson?

  Go ahead.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  What's going on with the air conditioning situation?

• 1:10:34Chris Williamson?

  More people died from.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Hundred and seventy-five, hundred and seventy-four thousand Europeans died last year from heat related illnesses.

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  More people than died from gun deaths in America.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  By a lot.

• 1:10:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, by like factor of three.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Significantly more.

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it fifty thousand per year, I think in America, including suicides?

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:10:56Chris Williamson?

  How many people, how many people die from gun related deaths in America last year? Mr. Chad.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  If you don't include suicides, I believe it's like a couple thousand.

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think with including suicides, there's, there's a lot of, uh, lots, lots, lots, lots. Okay. So I mean, look, what, what would I say about this?

• 1:11:16Chris Williamson?

  In defense of a country I no longer live in, it's not that hot most of the time. It's quite cold.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Hear me out.

• 1:11:24Chris Williamson?

  Go ahead.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:29Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  They got, they got floor units.

• 1:11:39Chris Williamson?

  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 one 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? Forty-four thousand? I said fifty thousand. That's not far off. That's not far off. 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.

• 1:12:18Chris Williamson?

  Just Paris, just this summer versus every mass shooting in American history since records began in like the fifties, fifties or sixties. Yeah, it's, it's, it's not good. It's not great. Uh, 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 life. One of those ones where you're 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. Like how you'd blow heat off you in an attempt.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  Did the thing.

• 1:13:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes, it was the most soggy, horrible solution to.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  And they had some crazy environmentalists on there giving you alternatives instead of AC. Cause you know, AC is bad for the environment.

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay, go on.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Her first tip was to sleep under a wet sheet.

• 1:13:22Chris Williamson?

  I wasn't doing it through choice. I was doing it through necessity. Okay?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  They get worse though.

• 1:13:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay, go on.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Her next recommendation was to just soak your feet in a bucket of water while you're working at home the whole time.

• 1:13:33Chris Williamson?

  Does that help?

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  I, I guess, I don't know.

• 1:13:35Chris Williamson?

  You've got wet feet.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  But then it, it kind of climaxes with her final solution of smearing yogurt on all the windows of your house.

• 1:13:45Chris Williamson?

  What will that do?

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  I'd block the sun out, I guess. I don't know. Like, you can pull it up on my video. I, 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 there.

• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  Full of insane people and not in a cool way, you know, they're not, they're not building a new B52.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Stubborn.

• 1:14:07Chris Williamson?

  Uh, there's definitely a stubbornness, but this is, look, 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 it 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 four percent of the world's population, but had 50% of its new millionaires last year.

• 1:14:45Chris Williamson?

  The UK, 0.8% of the world's population and had, uh, it was second highest. 10% of the world's millionaire exits came from it in 2024. So, look, that's on the leaderboard so far, not great. But, but the pomp and the circumstance, it is stabilizing in a way where stuff doesn'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.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 1:15:23Chris Williamson?

  It does also mean, like when I, 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.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:15:39Chris Williamson?

  And the guy's at the front of it. It's like, it's a, a, a, how do you say, like a, uh, ornamental, yeah, 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'd, it's the hierarchy of the thing and he doths his cap to this person and you're, and you're looking in 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 guard or whatever the fuck it, all of that stuff.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Chris Williamson?

  This is nice. This is some, this is a, a little battle of the, battle of Hastings, Game of Thrones-y type thing that's going on. Whereas I do it here and everyone's fucking twerking at their high school graduation.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 1:16:14Chris Williamson?

  I, 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 nation, I think things would be improved. And I think if we were a more agile nation, things would be improved. That's my.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  I, 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?

• 1:16:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  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, no, not popular.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  The world brings its best ideas to America.

• 1:16:58Chris Williamson?

  Survival of the most insane. It's a battle of the bottom of the brain stem for all of American people. A quick aside, you've 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 Element in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mixed 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 notice 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, the good sniper teams, not the bad ones. Also, they have a no questions asked refund policy.

• 1:17:42Chris Williamson?

  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 US. Right now you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. Heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash.

• 1:18:00Chris Williamson?

  Bottom wisdom. Going back to, to, uh, you've given us a couple of stories that are to do with Americans. Is there a favorite that you have that's from somebody outside of your home nation? Or do you refuse to feel as patriotic around?

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  No, I don't, 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 Maine, 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.

• 1:18:37Chris Williamson?

  That's pretty exciting. Yeah. I, I, I mean, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was a little bit of a shame.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  The movie?

• 1:18:44Chris Williamson?

  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 has 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 it. Well, you know, what was very interesting about Churchill's War? And you're like, oh, I'm there. I'm fucking there, dude. Right? Like, give me the Enigma machine. Like, we're gonna rip this thing.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Chris Williamson?

  And, um, I loved that era of what I think British people are particularly good at, which is the, um, it is the MacGyver-ing. 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 mine, the limpet mine, that was invented as a, 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, well, with the saline and the salt water. And sometimes it changes at different depths. It's going to be different parts of the ocean. What are we going to use?

• 1:19:53Chris Williamson?

  And then it turned out that an aniseed ball, sweet, like a little sweet, that would be perfect to keep the two firing pins apart. And when you drop it, I, it's very reliable of how long it takes to dissolve in salt water over time. And then it goes up, but in order to protect the ball so that it didn't degrade, uh, humidity that was in the air, they needed to use condoms. They were like, well, we're gonna, we'll wrap it in a condom and 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.

• 1:20:36Chris Williamson?

  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, it is unclear whether or not nine months later, the 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 depth charges.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Exactly the cause and effect you'd look for though, which is hilarious.

• 1:21:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  You guys also were famous for, uh, putting chickens inside of nuclear landmines, if I've, if I recall.

• 1:21:08Chris Williamson?

  Chickens in nuclear landmines? Why would you do that?

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how you kept them warm.

• 1:21:13Chris Williamson?

  The chickens?

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  No, the mines.

• 1:21:15Chris Williamson?

  Why would we need the mines to be warm?

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  The electronics inside of them.

• 1:21:19Chris Williamson?

  If they get too cold, they're gonna stop working.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like basically during the Cold War, they had the, um, ah, shit, what's a, what's it called? The gap, something gap. The, the main gap, they were worried the Russians were gonna pour through with tanks.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  That was like, everybody had battle plans drawn up for this. And one of the things the 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 gonna 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 or something.

• 1:22:14Chris Williamson?

  This is so much more impressive than a fucking aniseed ball. Holy shit.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:22:24Chris Williamson?

  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 of 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, they were, the perhaps somebody 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 had determined.

• 1:23:03Chris Williamson?

  So there, 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?

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Eagle's nest?

• 1:23:33Chris Williamson?

  Eagle's nest. Thank you. They found the gardener that grew the vegetables for it. And they, um, uh, did the bring you onboard slowly, slowly, 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 estrogen would go up and his massage would fall out and his hair would go and his voice would go soprano. And, 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.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Did they go through it?

• 1:24:06Chris Williamson?

  They, they gave him the sex hormones. They don't know if the gardener, the 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.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  That's fucking insane. I love it. I love everything about it.

• 1:24:21Chris Williamson?

  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. They're seen as 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. But it turns out that they couldn't find enough foxes, like the total number of foxes that they could get a hold of wasn't big enough. So they decided instead to paint raccoons, because they could get tons of raccoons.

• 1:25:02Chris Williamson?

  So they're like, well, we can paint the raccoons and actually, fuck it, we might as well paint them with luminous paint. Cause this would be, that, that would be scary. Like if they were all glowing in the dark, that would be great. 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'm like, right, okay, that, that didn't fucking work. Okay. So this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna get a massive loudspeaker with a pre-recorded message in a scary voice, talking in Japanese.

• 1:25:45Chris Williamson?

  And we're gonna get like an animatronic fox head and stick it on the side of a boat and just broadcast messages as if this fox, fox is like speaking bad. It's like, this is, you've gone backward to what, from, you know, advanced military technology to like medieval feudal, like God, 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.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  Also trying to demoralize the Japanese is an uphill battle. Those guys were fun addicts. I mean, I think the last guy surrendered in 76.

• 1:26:20Chris Williamson?

  Still fighting in the jungle?

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hiro Inoda in the Philippines. He didn't surrender till 30 years after the fact.

• 1:26:25Chris Williamson?

  And what, he heard people walking around, right? And assumed that it was enemy troops. It's a lie.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  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. They had to go out in the jungle and get him and tell him like it was over.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Like those guys weren't believing shit, but also crazy military. Have you seen, uh, do you know about the bat bombs?

• 1:26:55Chris Williamson?

  Oh, they tried to put bombs on bats?

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  No, they did put bombs on bats.

• 1:26:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. The giant colander bomb. Looks like a, 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.

• 1:27:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So it's a, it's a bomb that contains bats with bombs attached.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:27:24Chris Williamson?

  To them.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:24Chris Williamson?

  Inside of it.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  Yes. And it was, uh, three times more effective than a normal incendiary bomb.

• 1:27:31Chris Williamson?

  Cause they were going to the, the, uh, under the eaves.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Chris Williamson?

  Shit like.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  They were gonna fly up into the attics and everything.

• 1:27:37Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  Right before it was time to roost for daylight and then incendiary device goes off is gonna light all of Japan on fire. That was legitimately the backup plan for the atomic bomb.

• 1:27:47Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the other most surprisingly hardcore animals from history that have been used?

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  Uh, you got Voitek, the Polish artillery bear. You've got.

• 1:27:57Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  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. Name, they named it Voitek and, uh.

• 1:28:14Chris Williamson?

  Pretty sick name for a bear.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  That was like their pet bear and, uh.

• 1:28:17Chris Williamson?

  Are you fucking kidding me? That's a man in a bear suit.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  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. Well, the bear was smart. It liked them and it kinda 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.

• 1:28:44Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna help.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  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 gonna feed you to the pet bear.

• 1:28:55Chris Williamson?

  Bring Voitek in.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, uh, so you got that Sergeant Reckless is probably my favorite. Um.

• 1:29:01Chris Williamson?

  Sergeant Reckless.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Horse.

• 1:29:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  America's warhorse, man.

• 1:29:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Um, during the Korean war, again, um.

• 1:29:10Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, they were still using horses during the Korean?

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  No. No, the Marines acquired one.

• 1:29:15Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean? Were the quiets doing a lot of heavy lifting?

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  They 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 wanna punch through because they only have like 15, 16 miles to get to Seoul. And if they can take over Seoul, negotiations are gonna 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.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  And the only way they're gonna 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.

• 1:30:18Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:30:45Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  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 trained 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 wanna 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. Cause it's a gamble whether or not we could hold them.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  And the army or the military is like, no, you're not. She's gotta 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 wanna kill her.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  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, uh, he's like, well, maybe we can just take a blood sample. He goes, huh, 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, I'm sorry, not San, 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, horses jaw like go off to the side when they chew. She'll actually offset her jaw and let the Marines pour straight whiskey and soda and stuff into her mouth.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  They're mixing drinks for the horse. So they, they get fucked up with this horse and then.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  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 warhorse is blah, blah, blah. And they're like, oh, oh, this is good PR for the military. So now the military is 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 ex, how do you do PT with a horse?

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  You can't ride it cause 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 kinda come to the conclusion that like, all right, well, we need Sergeant Reckless to have some kids. So the plan is to bring in some high end racehorse that's famous to have kids with Sergeant Reckless and create the ultimate warhorses. 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 hor- horse pens with the other normal marine horses.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  And, uh, let, 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.

• 1:35:20Chris Williamson?

  They're not sergeants.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:35:33Chris Williamson?

  I hope he doesn't.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:35:57Chris Williamson?

  And now he's cock blocking the next.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yep. So then, like a couple of weeks later or whatever, he shows up to work and there's like all these news people in generals and they're like Sergeant Reckless is pregnant. He's like, oh, fuck, I'm in trouble. 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 mare with this, you know, super stud racehorse. So that was like, you killed the whole PR campaign.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37:05Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  So, yeah, no Sergeant Reckless, probably my favorite war animal.

• 1:37:13Chris Williamson?

  I watched, I watched a video recently of, I think the, maybe bomb sniffed the dogs. There's some sort of a parade happening and there's a bunch of Alsatians there. And 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 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 psyop me into getting a Golden Retriever. And it's working. So I'm currently sort of in the market looking and like 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.

• 1:37:59Chris Williamson?

  And all of these dogs are just so locked in. And there's a couple of watched.

• 1:38:07Chris Williamson?

  He's just, I mean, I want that. Like, that's the level of dog that I think is important to have. I want one that is single digit IQ, ideally.

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  My, uh, my wife made me get a golden doodle eight years ago.

• 1:38:21Chris Williamson?

  Sick.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't think she grasped how big a purebred golden doodle was. And he's like,

• 1:38:28Chris Williamson?

  70 pounds, 80 pounds?

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Bro, he's like 110. He's a fucking horse. He is 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.

• 1:38:47Chris Williamson?

  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 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's, right? 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 the kind of characters that have been around that that era of history?

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Oh, God. 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 you ask it specifically about the Battle of Trenton or just Revolutionary War?

• 1:39:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the Trenton one is particularly good because it's like on, whatever, midnight on December 31st was like a uniquely important.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  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 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

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  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's 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, 10, 12 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.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  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

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  against the tyrannical government. We're here to steal your shit.

• 1:42:09Chris Williamson?

  Give me your stuff.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  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, we're fucking taking it. Sorry. And 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 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.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  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, no, 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, canister shot is instead of one big cannonball, imagine a burlap sack of pool ball sized cannonballs.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  Boom. Just 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. 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.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  And then after that, I believe they went into Valley Forge.

• 1:44:06Chris Williamson?

  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, et cetera, et cetera. What do people get wrong about bravery?

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  I think they underestimate themselves for sure. I mean, I think that there's a lot of people that if you put,

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  So I don't know, but I think that kind of bleeds into like,

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:44:59Chris Williamson?

  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. Uh, anyway, he told me a story about when he 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, 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.

• 1:45:41Chris Williamson?

  They had just like, you know, taken a broom handle and cleared the rest of the 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, uh, 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, or 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 that 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 tumor or the streak in them.

• 1:46:26Chris Williamson?

  Normal people doing what seemed to be extraordinary things.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  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 think it's, 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.

• 1:46:58Chris Williamson?

  What else would you do?

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  You wake up one day and you're like, my favorite coffee shop just got blown up. I guess I gotta 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 gonna 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.

• 1:47:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the Greenland thing? Uh, 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, uh, deep ports, right? Meaning that you've got, um, better access to Navy, better ships, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:47:46Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  It's not, uh, I have a video on it. Um, it's not one of the videos I brushed up on before coming here. But, um, basically Greenland, what?

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  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 a hundred years. We have tried to buy Greenland multiple times. We've had bases there since World War II. We've had, uh, we had a secret underground ice base there at one point. Uh, 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. Um, 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 like a major naval

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  campaign or the fastest way for them to do it. Like, it's extremely important. It has been for hundreds of years. Um, it's not new that we want control of it at all.

• 1:49:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting thinking about, I, I 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 like in perpetuity for now and forever, in sickness and in health, like we get to.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Unless you can make us move, America's not moving. And it doesn't matter if it's a Republican or a Democrat in office. America will not give up military control of Greenland. And I understand like, oh, Greenland belongs to these blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  It really belongs to whoever the fuck has the most guns there.

• 1:49:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  That's America. You can say whatever you want. America has control of that island. They have for since World War II. They're not giving it up for anybody. That's just the way it is.

• 1:49:53Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's the likelihood that, um, Canada, uh, has, uh, America tries to make a bigger push toward Canada?

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  Well, very, very small. Like try to take over Canada?

• 1:50:05Chris Williamson?

  Uh, maybe not try to take over it, but tries to do something diplomatic to subsume it as best they can.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Um, I could see, uh, what is it? Alberta that kind of already has a political movement to join America? I mean, I could see America allowing it. Um, I don't know that they're like overly interested in taking it. Um, Canada is just, from what I know of it, which granted is not a lot. It's a very, 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. It's.

• 1:50:44Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever seen the, uh, population distribution of Iceland? It's like, it's like a, 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 then a little bit more. And then there's like some other stuff up here.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Australia is kind of the same. Yeah.

• 1:51:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:03Chris Williamson?

  You got like Perth on one side and then that coast. And then like the middle is just a big empty donut. And that's kind of it.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  It's me. I'll be in the middle.

• 1:51:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  That's where I want to be at.

• 1:51:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. What, um, 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. 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.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's all of them to a large degree, you know, like everybody glamorizes, you know, the dude on the front lines with the gun actually, you know, 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, it's, it's like a hundred and 150 people per guy on the front line, working on the backend 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. Um, and yeah, nobody, nobody gets all the credit they deserve when they're just like, I was, I was just a cook. I was just a that. I was, but you know what I mean? Like, how far do we get without all of those people? Not very far.

• 1:52:23Chris Williamson?

  The guy with the gun can't shoot, can't shoot much if he hasn't had a meal for a week.

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I mean, uh, to give you like a very specific answer, if I had to pick one, it would be truck drivers. Like military truck drivers are like the unsung heroes of, you know, during World War II, you had like the Red Ball Express, uh, during GWAT, you had all the 88 mics that were out there doing missions. Like, everybody's like, oh, what do you do? I'm, I'm just a truck driver. It's like, oh, what's your job? Oh, I drive through IED infested roads to get food and water to the guys that are actually fighting these guys.

• 1:52:50Chris Williamson?

  In a massive target, a massive moving target that can be seen for miles.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:53:20Chris Williamson?

  What's that on top?

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  That's a fucking 50 cal. It's a giant antenna and two 50 cal's.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  Uh, look up the Vietnam, the Eye of Destruction gun truck.

• 1:53:32Chris Williamson?

  The Eye of Destruction. You know what I want to know? I want to know who the guy is that gets to cut the copyrighting 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. Oh, what was your job during the war, Chris? Oh, um, I came up as the sick names. I came up with the scary, sick names.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  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 III breaks out? Cause you know, like, World War II, we were having like, like, now you can't do it because we're not in like, big, you know, big wartime. You can't be painting shit all over your planes. But like, World War II, people were painting pinups and shit on all their planes and stuff. And it's like, now, like, dude, if we have World War III, a hundred percent, they're gonna be painting anime chicks with massive tits on the side of a bomber.

• 1:54:25Chris Williamson?

  Hentai.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  A thousand percent that's happening.

• 1:54:27Chris Williamson?

  The big natural bomber.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Chris Williamson?

  See, that's why you should be employed. What's this? What's this big scary thing?

• 1:54:38Chris Williamson?

  Is this it?

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  Uh, that's not it. That's the Eve of Destruction. The Eye of Destruction. You ever seen a?

• 1:54:42Chris Williamson?

  The Eve of Destruction. Sorry. Uh, sorry that we got confused between the Eve of Destruction and the Eye of Destruction.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  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 fifty cals? And you like, sit in it and it's just got fifty cals here and fifty cals here. They mounted one of those in the beds of these trucks.

• 1:55:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Just to fight off the people that were attacking them so they can deliver supplies.

• 1:55:05Chris Williamson?

  It's like a gyroscope thing, right?

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 that would help, like.

• 1:55:23Chris Williamson?

  To protect them.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:55:36Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  Dude, there's so many.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  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 with 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.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  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 Mekong Delta, gets hit with, uh, 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 portholes in a boat are like this and there's like this much space? It's already past the door.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  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 because they were soaked in diesel fuel. Just getting sunburnt to shit. That was like, his first day. He was there. And then he winds out going on a mission and, uh, they make him the RTO, the radio guy. Would kind of common to have the new guy be the RTO because the RTO sticks right next to the, the squad leader. Because the squad leader needs to have access to the radio.

• 1:58:08Chris Williamson?

  Sounds kind of like an assistant?

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Right. So like, that was his job initially.

• 1:58:21Chris Williamson?

  Trainee, kind of.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And his first mission, you know, he is 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 in a medevac for these guys, they're like, bring more water. We don't have water. 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 are just, it's brutal. Just trying to adapt to the climate and the heat and the mosquitoes eating him 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.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  And sniper school was brand new at this point in time. It was just getting stood up. It was, 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.

• 1:59:29Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's nothing like learning on the job.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  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 10 that actually made it to do all of 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.

• 2:00:12Speaker 01

  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, then a platoon leader. He learns every job. He's a grenadier for a while. He's, he does it all. He, he goes from being, you know, the fucking new guy that doesn't know anything to being 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 intel that there's enemies in this village.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  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

• 2:01:32Speaker 01

  a sniper rifle with a starlight scope, which is like an early version of a night vision scope.

• 2:01:38Chris Williamson?

  Again, acquired's doing a lot of heavy lifting.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  Acquired. Yeah, he acquired it. Don't worry about it. Um, so he's like, fuck, fuck. 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 paddy 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, 10 minutes in and out, we gotta 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.

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Kind of the tip of like, there's a lot bigger military presence here than we're ready to handle with two helicopters full of guys. So like, we gotta go right now. So they high tail it back out to this rice paddy. 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.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  Helicopters get in, they load the helicopters and they fucking take off. The Cobras come in with the Hueys, the Cobras light up the wood line with a bunch of machine gun fire, rockets, give them covering fire. They load the Hueys, they, they dip. As they're taking off, they do a head count. They're fucking missing a guy.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  And by this point, the mission's over as far as each individual helicopter is concerned. So the Cobras have already changed radio frequency and they're headed to their next spot. Captain Perkins in the Hilo with Ed, basically like, turn around, we gotta 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 paddy. And Captain Perkins said he did the, 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

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  the helicopters take off again.

• 2:03:59Chris Williamson?

  So you've exchanged one dude on the ground for another dude on the ground?

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  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 is 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

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 2:05:06Chris Williamson?

  On top of the helicopter?

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:05:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  And they're just trying to find Ed magazines and everything else while they finally find his sniper rifle. The sniper rifle's buttstock is cracked lengthwise, so his gun's 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 with a 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, they're, 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 at a zero. He puts the crosshairs, that's not where the bullets going. So he just keeps doing what he

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  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 hits 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

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  seen crazy estimates that were like as high as 150 guys were 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 with 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. There's 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

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  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. And Captain Perkins is like, I'm not gonna make it because that helicopter's 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 is 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

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  he can't hang on to shit. So it's just Ed and 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 Ed and this Vietnamese Tiger Scout there still. And Ed's 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 a 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

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  that his chin is flapping in the breeze. Uh, 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, it's pitch blackout, 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 canopy, he's like, fucking get off my helicopter, I gotta go. And Ed's like, okay. So he jumps, it was only like a four foot drop. It's

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  So friendlies, and they basically waited there for a real medevac to show up. And Ed, Ed gets saved. And, uh, yeah, did all that with a broken back.

• 2:11:07Chris Williamson?

  And you got to meet this guy and talk to him?

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  Got to meet him, talk to him, text him all the time. He's good shit.

• 2:11:14Chris Williamson?

  How does it feel doing a story about someone that you know is gonna get to see it?

• 2:11:18Speaker 01

  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, and also the scariest thing I've ever done. Uh, obviously, it takes way more work. I gotta do, you know, not, I don't ever want anybody to, uh, 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.

• 2:11:41Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you do one on Colonel Sanders and his nephew was like, yeah, that's sick. Like, here's a couple of amendments, but pretty much you nailed it.

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like Colonel Sanders, like distant relative was happy with my video. I've had,

• 2:11:52Chris Williamson?

  You don't wanna piss off the KFC guys?

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:11:54Chris Williamson?

  The KFC mafia, that's somebody you don't wanna get on the wrong side of.

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  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, I usually pin the comment and then I usually reach out to the family and like, talk to them. 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

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  these things than they really were. And I go, of course you feel that way. Like, you get it, like,

• 2:12:44Chris Williamson?

  Classic war hero minimization.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, you, you did, 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 shit's fucking incredible.

• 2:12:56Chris Williamson?

  I think that if, if you were doing more videos about people that were still alive, or if more of the people that you were doing videos about were alive, I think that would be one of the most common responses. It would be this sense of like, ah, well, come on, like, if, I mean, factually, it happened like that.

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:13Chris Williamson?

  But like, symbolically, it's not, you're making it a bit more of, 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 over 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,

• 2:13:55Chris Williamson?

  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 gonna be able to walk. We need to come and get in all this thing. It's all this stress. After, 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 do good, but bad memories fade more. And it's part of what we call the psychological immune system, which is minimization, distancing, disassociation, stuff like that. So.

• 2:14:23Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 2:14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:36Chris Williamson?

  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 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 is like, I can't deal with this fucking relationship anymore. I can't deal with the arguments.

• 2:15:21Chris Williamson?

  I can't deal with the whatever the fuck that you're going through. And you, a year later, when you bump into her on a walk around the lake, is that maybe things weren't that bad?

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:29Chris Williamson?

  Bingo, right? Bingo, bingo, bingo, bingo. Same thing with people that are recovering from health problems, like they're, I can't believe how much I let myself get burned out by that job. Never again. I'm gonna be present and I'm gonna sleep and I'm gonna take care of my health. And then 12 months later, they're like, well, you know, I quite like 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.

• 2:16:14Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  Time heals all wounds.

• 2:16:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it does.

• 2:16:33Chris Williamson?

  It does certainly to some degree, or it causes you to minimize your heroic escapades.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  Well, I always describe the military as the best shitty time you'll ever have.

• 2:16:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  Seems to be everybody's recollection of it.

• 2:16:45Chris Williamson?

  There was an interesting story from Edward Slingeland as well. He wrote this book, The History of Alcohol Throughout Time. And what?

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  Just alcohol.

• 2:16:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. He's talking about how one of the bonding procedures, one of the bonding rituals that used to happen to some 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 are a better liar detector and a worse liar. It's an interesting 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 sized truth serum in a way.

• 2:17:36Chris Williamson?

  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 fistfight and then we clear up the issues that we've had. It's a suffering the next day. Everyone wakes up, stinking hangover, and you have had a little titrated dose of some suffering. It's fucking hell.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Trauma bonding.

• 2:17:56Chris Williamson?

  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 to go through something difficult together, I think that really sort of cemented.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  I mean, that's 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.

• 2:18:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems to be effective.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  It does.

• 2:18:24Chris Williamson?

  What is next for you? What's on the agenda? By the way, I do like, everyone needs to go and subscribe to the Fat Electrician. Your stuff fucking rips. You are one of the best storytellers I've ever seen.

• 2:18:32Speaker 01

  Can one of you guys grab my backpack for me, right on the couch out there?

• 2:18:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  Sorry. I'll show you. I brought you one.

• 2:18:37Chris Williamson?

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  For what's next.

• 2:18:38Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. What, I mean, I'm just, I think what you do is it's this weird blend of like morbid curiosity, masculine heroism, fantasy porn, and like tribute to stuff that's great. So everyone needs to go and subscribe to you because as big as you are, you need to be even bigger.

• 2:19:05Chris Williamson?

  Nick Flood, AKA The Fat Electrician, Heroes Erased, Book One, The Flight of Richard Bong.

• 2:19:14Speaker 01

  That's what I'm up to next.

• 2:19:16Chris Williamson?

  Brave Books.

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  10 book series.

• 2:19:18Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 2:19:27Chris Williamson?

  Is this a kid's book?

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:29Chris Williamson?

  This is sick. And who's Brave Books?

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  Uh, this is a publisher that I worked with.

• 2:19:34Chris Williamson?

  Unreal.

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  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 too graphic, you say fuck too much, yada, yada, yada. And I originally tried to do.

• 2:19:49Chris Williamson?

  You don't say fuck enough.

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  I tried to, I tried to do censored videos and those just didn't work out. So this was my, my next swing at trying to get war hero stories to kids. So I basically impregnated a fictional story with the nonfiction story of these real, real life war heroes.

• 2:20:07Chris Williamson?

  Is that a plane?

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  That is, that is a P-38 shooting an alligator, which actually happened.

• 2:20:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay, is that an important, well, alligator is an important enemy?

• 2:20:16Speaker 01

  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 guy's in the water swimming, and it's for you, you can keep it.

• 2:20:39Chris Williamson?

  It's in your shot, that's why.

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I got you. And he basically is, has this giant alligator swimming towards him. And Dick Bong, Richard Bong, swoops down in his P-38 and strays an alligator.

• 2:20:54Chris Williamson?

  In the book.

• 2:20:55Speaker 01

  I don't in the book because it's a kid's book, but that's his, that's his name.

• 2:20:58Chris Williamson?

  Dad, what's Dick Bong? Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:01Speaker 01

  Dude is awesome.

• 2:21:02Chris Williamson?

  And this is a 10 book series?

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  Yep, 10 book series. Everyone's a different hero. So basically I took.

• 2:21:06Chris Williamson?

  Why do it for kids? Why don't do it for adults?

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  Because the adults have my videos and I want the kids to have something to get them excited about history. I feel like history's boring. I feel like most people don't like history because it's top boring. And this is my attempt at making history fun for kids. So I basically took, it basically takes place in modern time. The two characters are my sons, 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.

• 2:21:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  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 II and allowing them to win.

• 2:21:57Chris Williamson?

  So this is how pivotal individual heroes can be?

• 2:22:00Speaker 01

  Change the entire course of the world, yeah. And I'm gonna 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.

• 2:22:16Chris Williamson?

  And that's why they're glowing green, because that's the teleportation.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:20Chris Williamson?

  Technology that's.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  So they basically, they initially, the, the tape recorder that they have, their time travel device, is a recording of me and it's basically a montage of this real war hero's 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

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  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, one of the questions that we asked them after they had read the book was like, everybody liked them, they were fun. We asked them 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 them, take 10 minutes on your phone or we can get you a computer if you need.

• 2:23:48Speaker 01

  Google Richard Bong and just read about him. And then they came back and re answered. They felt like they learned a shit ton because they didn't even, they were 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.

• 2:24:03Chris Williamson?

  Because it sounds so fantastical.

• 2:24:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's just, it's just not the stuffy, on, on April 17th, in 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. Like, 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.

• 2:24:24Chris Williamson?

  Is that available now?

• 2:24:26Speaker 01

  Uh, it's available for preorder now and then it's officially released, I believe, November 24th is when we're gonna start shipping them out.

• 2:24:32Chris Williamson?

  Bro.

• 2:24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:33Chris Williamson?

  That's so cool.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  It's good.

• 2:24:35Chris Williamson?

  To do the kid thing as well, I was with Jocko, fuck, Beverage Forum in May or something this year. We, I've got New Tonic, he's got Jocko Go. And we were in, this was a particularly, I mean, he's a good friend, but like, it's an intimidating thing to be around him at the best of times, just the size of his head. But other than that, he's lethal. And we had concurrent meetings with the buyer from Walmart or something. It's like, you said Shark Tank. It's kind of a little bit like that. So there's this weird, it's all Bonnie Blues, like cue up the stairs, whichever one.

• 2:25:11Chris Williamson?

  Whichever you prefer.

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  Let me in.

• 2:25:13Chris Williamson?

  There is, there's a room where action is going on and you have to wait outside until it's your turn. 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 early cut trailer for Way of the Warrior Kid, which is Chris Pratt. And he's doing something which is a cinematic or 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, I think 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.

• 2:25:58Chris Williamson?

  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 the 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 will 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, is sick.

• 2:26:20Speaker 01

  Tell me about, this is your drink? Tell me about it.

• 2:26:22Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 2:26:33Speaker 01

  I, I also have my own energy drink.

• 2:26:35Chris Williamson?

  Do you really?

• 2:26:36Speaker 01

  Acelon.

• 2:26:37Chris Williamson?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I have, I have, I have Acelon energy drink. So it's cool. I feel like we're all, we're all copying each other.

• 2:26:43Chris Williamson?

  That's true. Yeah. So we launched this three years ago. We have just completed our series A, which is very exciting. So that'll get announced pretty soon. And yeah, we've been working on this hard. So it's in Australia. We're going in 7-Eleven and Ready Mart in Australia. I hope I haven't got that wrong. We're in Sainsbury's. We're currently the like best selling drink on the meal deal side behind Red Bull. In all of Sainsbury's at the moment, we're about to go into a ton of retail. I mean, you know, there's.

• 2:27:13Speaker 01

  Isn't it, isn't it weird how like predefined the route of a beverage has to go business model wise? It's crazy. It's like.

• 2:27:21Chris Williamson?

  The most formulaic thing that I've ever seen.

• 2:27:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:27:31Chris Williamson?

  No, before you go there, you have to go to Cahy and you have to go to Kroger. And you can get into HEB, but the only way that you can get is by going through central market. And once you performed at central market for 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 go, 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.

• 2:28:09Speaker 01

  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 specialty. So we're in vitamin shop right now.

• 2:28:21Chris Williamson?

  Unreal.

• 2:28:22Speaker 01

  So like, that's where we're at with it. And, uh, yeah. So that you're a little bit further down that path than us. But even, 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.

• 2:28:36Chris Williamson?

  You're on the side 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 shelves and we're going to eat her alive. There's a bunch of other products that are great, but different and in terms of functionality and, 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.

• 2:29:20Chris Williamson?

  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 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 got Jocko's stuff, we got all of the new tonics.

• 2:29:42Speaker 01

  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 Zynomite in an energy drink.

• 2:29:48Chris Williamson?

  Zynamine is what Zynomite is built off the back of, right?

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah.

• 2:29:52Chris Williamson?

  Zyn, that's the equivalent of going paroxanthine, uh, and adding that in. So we looked at Zynamine, uh, as part of the literature review for this. Tell me about it.

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  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 that 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.

• 2:30:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:30:21Speaker 01

  If you look up Pew View wedding ring, it'll pop right up.

• 2:30:23Chris Williamson?

  Pew View.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Craziest trick shot I've ever seen in my life. Um, anyways, we, we worked with him. He takes Zynomite supplement. It's apparently it's what they give like fighter pilots before mission. It's like extreme focus. So he's been taking it for a while and he has actually done like his own research, whatever. He's done his split times, see how fast you can pull the trigger, how fast you can hit targets, reaction times, all that stuff. Cause he's doing, you know, a 10th of a second to him is a big deal.

• 2:30:50Chris Williamson?

  What's he shooting?

• 2:30:51Speaker 01

  It's a Terran tactical.

• 2:30:59Chris Williamson?

  Dude, eat shit.

• 2:31:01Speaker 02

  What are you guys doing?

• 2:31:03Speaker 01

  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 going to be a total dude, perfect situation. Like I'm going to 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 him.

• 2:31:27Chris Williamson?

  What's his background?

• 2:31:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:31:41Chris Williamson?

  No military.

• 2:31:41Speaker 01

  No military training, nothing. Heavy equipment operator until he started doing YouTube full time. Absolutely crazy. 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. Tang, shoot at the target. And 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,

• 2:32:26Speaker 01

  fires and shoots my brass in midair on the first try, unprompted.

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  What the fuck?

• 2:32:38Chris Williamson?

  Dude, perfect.

• 2:32:39Speaker 01

  I, bro, it's the most insane shit I've ever seen in my life.

• 2:32:45Speaker 01

  First try.

• 2:32:48Chris Williamson?

  Is he doing it? Is he shooting competitively as well?

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  No, he just doesn't care to shoot competitively.

• 2:32:52Chris Williamson?

  Wants to do tricks.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:53Chris Williamson?

  And cool shit.

• 2:32:54Speaker 01

  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 at Call of Duty, shooting digital fucking guns.

• 2:33:10Chris Williamson?

  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, Zynomite for me and Zynamine?

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:33:28Chris Williamson?

  Like an LTO custom drop.

• 2:33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's why we put it in there for him.

• 2:33:32Chris Williamson?

  But you put it in, okay, Zynomite.

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  It might be Zynamines, Zynomite 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.

• 2:33:48Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the, the problem that we have with this is, uh, there's fucking panic, ginseng and rhodiola in that. And they are active compounds, right? Like that, that 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, then 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. But the Zynomite stuff was the, the active version of that previous, it's like Cognizin. Cognizin is an activated alpha GPC. Alpha GPC is like the classic version of that Cognizin, which is what we've got half a gram up in there is.

• 2:34:31Speaker 01

  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. Some of the product history is insane. Like Lunchables, absolutely wild.

• 2:34:46Chris Williamson?

  Why? What, what, what's the story behind Lunchables? I didn't realize there was a law.

• 2:34:50Speaker 01

  Lunchables is genius, right? Think, 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 Sawyer'd your ass into painting the fence for him.

• 2:35:08Chris Williamson?

  It's called the IKEA effect.

• 2:35:10Speaker 01

  Is that what it is?

• 2:35:11Chris Williamson?

  The, 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.

• 2:35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:24Chris Williamson?

  A greater way. So yeah, okay. That's, that makes sense with Lunchables.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  That's why I started looking into it. You know who fucking came up with the marketing for, give, give it a guess.

• 2:35:34Chris Williamson?

  For Lunchables?

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:35Chris Williamson?

  How old are they?

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Started in 83, 84, I think.

• 2:35:41Chris Williamson?

  Don't tell me it's like the cigarette fucking.

• 2:35:44Speaker 01

  Philip Morris.

• 2:35:44Chris Williamson?

  Ah, come on. It's always them. Why is it always them?

• 2:35:49Speaker 01

  Bro, it's dude, there's the reason I, my theory is there the reason the obesity epidemic started.

• 2:35:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Processed foods.

• 2:35:56Speaker 01

  Well, they, so they bought lunch. They were buying all kinds of stuff. So it was R G Reynolds started it in the sixties. Basically, once people were figuring out the cigarettes were 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 R J, R J Reynolds bought Hawaiian Pacific Fruit Company. Hawaiian Pacific Fruit Company is a company that makes Hawaiian fruit punch.

• 2:36:16Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  Hawaiian fruit punch at that point in time was a cocktail mixer. And then they remarketed it as a kids, as a kid's fruit juice. So they were buying into all these companies and they bought, Oscar Mayer got bought out by Kraft. And then Kraft got bought out by Philip Morris.

• 2:36:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:36:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:36:46Speaker 01

  And they said, nah, nah, bro.

• 2:36:49Chris Williamson?

  Kids.

• 2:36:49Speaker 01

  This is for kids. And then the way they went through the marketing for it is gee, cause they have all this, all this consumer data from decades of getting people to smoke. They know what people want.

• 2:36:58Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:36:59Speaker 01

  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 gotta 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.

• 2:37:37Chris Williamson?

  You can see.

• 2:37:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:37:48Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Yeah. Look at how complete this is.

• 2:37:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. You can see the meat, the cheese, the grain. Oh, that's like half them. That's like half the My Food Pyramid.

• 2:37:56Chris Williamson?

  Hawking for some Lunchables right now.

• 2:37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, so yeah, the, 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 Kraft, they owned all, it's a massive food conglomerate. They owned 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.

• 2:38:27Chris Williamson?

  This is what, uh, Ryan and the guys from Ghost are able to do because they're run by Kigig Dr. Pepper. So they can do an A and W root beer collab. They can do a Sprite flavor. 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, um, inventory and goodwill that's now being used in a slightly different market than like, no one's making a caffeinated version of seven up in any case. So it's like, well, just you have the caffeine thing. We'll make this flavor, this brand in this new delivery format.

• 2:39:01Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. So then, uh, yeah, so they do reputational laundry. That leads to Lunchables, but then I started looking into all the other stuff that, cigarette companies basically.

• 2:39:11Chris Williamson?

  I can see why the conspiracy rabbit hole has been, uh, one that you've tumbled down a bunch of times.

• 2:39:16Speaker 01

  Well, then it's like Teddy grams.

• 2:39:19Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 2:39:19Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a little tiny cookie that looks like a teddy bear.

• 2:39:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:39:24Speaker 01

  Teddy grams developed under, I believe RJ Reynolds did Teddy grams. So Teddy grams, what's healthier that, what's the health, healthy version of a cookie?

• 2:39:33Chris Williamson?

  Like a granola bar?

• 2:39:34Speaker 01

  A cracker.

• 2:39:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:35Speaker 01

  Right? So Teddy grams 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?

• 2:39:47Chris Williamson?

  Make it into a teddy bear.

• 2:39:48Speaker 01

  You make it look like a teddy bear. They're the ones that came up with, uh, lifesavers. They, when they lifesavers was the mint brand, the little circular mints.

• 2:39:57Chris Williamson?

  Like polos?

• 2:39:58Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:40:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:40:01Speaker 01

  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% more likely to be hyper palatable.

• 2:40:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:40:54Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen, have you ever seen when hunter gatherer tribes are given cheesecake for the first time?

• 2:40:59Speaker 01

  No, but I would, can I, can I?

• 2:41:02Chris Williamson?

  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. 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, uh, 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? When well done, nicely done french fries. The same thing is also true of cheesecake.

• 2:41:45Chris Williamson?

  And you have all of the different flavor receptors. 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? Uh, 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, dude, like you've got crunchy wafer, whatever, 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.

• 2:42:21Chris Williamson?

  Tribal people try.

• 2:42:28Speaker 01

  Bro, bro.

• 2:42:33Chris Williamson?

  What's that owl doing?

• 2:42:39Chris Williamson?

  He sleeps with his eyes open, believe me.

• 2:42:43Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 2:42:53Speaker 01

  You know what this remind, you know what this reminds me of? Have you ever seen the videos of the, uh, the people that worship American GIs?

• 2:43:02Chris Williamson?

  Worship? Like, like deities?

• 2:43:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:43:05Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 2:43:05Speaker 01

  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. 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 and some dude 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 firsthand witnesses are now deceased.

• 2:43:49Chris Williamson?

  We can't convince you.

• 2:43:50Speaker 01

  We can't convince you that it, what, that's what this was.

• 2:43:53Chris Williamson?

  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 Cognizin, which you'll know is cytocholine. 50 milligrams of, of, uh, caffeine, uh, 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

• 2:44:37Chris Williamson?

  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 are like, ah, 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 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 my nicotine. And people are titrating themselves down. So that's been something else, which is interesting, uh, to think about from like a cognitive health perspective.

• 2:45:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I just, that's.

• 2:45:17Speaker 01

  I 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.

• 2:45:47Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 2:45:48Speaker 01

  After the fact, and then you just stay using that new one.

• 2:45:51Chris Williamson?

  Hilarious.

• 2:45:51Speaker 01

  The oral fixation, whatever else.

• 2:45:53Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of that, the Phillips, Philip Morris's 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.

• 2:46:14Speaker 01

  You're the hot girl thinking you can change the bad boy right now. That's what you are.

• 2:46:17Chris Williamson?

  I can fix it.

• 2:46:18Speaker 01

  I can fix it.

• 2:46:19Chris Williamson?

  I can fix it dude. Watch me. Philip Morris. I can fix you.

• 2:46:22Speaker 01

  Good for everybody.

• 2:46:23Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 2:46:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. YouTube, Fat Electrician. You Google it, it pops up everywhere. Fat Electrician on all my socia's and yeah.

• 2:46:40Chris Williamson?

  And what's the other, what's the one about business?

• 2:46:42Speaker 01

  Uh, that one's called the fat files. Yeah.

• 2:46:44Chris Williamson?

  You're not fat.

• 2:46:45Speaker 01

  It's a long story.

• 2:46:46Chris Williamson?

  Were you fat?

• 2:46:47Speaker 01

  Originally a joke to my wife. My, my whole content story started because I tore my peck.

• 2:46:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:46:53Speaker 01

  And, uh, was off work in a sling and my wife finally bullied me into making a TikTok account and you have to have a username just so I could watch the TikTok 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 gonna get fat now. And then I got a wild hair up my ass. My first TikTok I ever made got 12.5 million views and now I'm here.

• 2:47:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. You've got to be careful what you register social media.

• 2:47:16Speaker 01

  It could have been so much worse.

• 2:47:18Chris Williamson?

  I know. In the grand scheme of things, something that can go on the front of a children's book, it really could have been.

• 2:47:24Speaker 01

  It could have been way worse.

• 2:47:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Dude, you're the best. I appreciate you so much. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Till next time.

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  Goodbye, dude.

• 2:47:35Speaker 03

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