The Good Ol’ Days Were Way Worse - Fin Taylor & Horatio Gould

Fin Taylor is an English comedian, writer and podcaster. Horatio Gould is also an English comedian, writer, and podcaster. History is basically one long reminder that no matter how bad your day is, someone in the past was probably getting catapulted off a castle wall. Feel better? Good. Humanity may be a litany of disasters, but the past is packed with lessons, even some dark humor, if you look closely enough. Expect to learn what makes the Japanese unique and why so many Japanese people practiced Seppuku, why post-war Europe was the funniest time in modern history, whether life was better in the past or just way, way worse than we imagined, why there is a rise of pro-Hitler media across social media, if too much irony is a bad thing, why racism is so ingrained in modern science, if fertility and embryo science has gone too far and much more… - 0:00 What Makes Japanese Culture So Distinct? 9:44 Was Post-War Britain the Funniest Time in History? 18:15 The Unlikely Heroes of Post-War Britain 22:30 Life Has Been Much Worse 27:12 How Would Historical Leaders Cope in Today’s World? 32:10 The Shocking Rise of Pro-Hilter Media 42:01 Were the Aztecs as Brutal as We Think? 46:33 Will Bryan Johnson Actually Live to 120? 53:58 Is Too Much Irony a Bad Thing? 01:07:38 Why Was Racism So Ingrained in Science? 01:21:08 When Does Embryo Selection Go Too Far? 01:31:12 What’s Next for Fin and Horatio? - Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You are historians now.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Yes, very much so.

• 0:03Speaker 02

  Big pivot.

• 0:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, hard pivot.

• 0:05Speaker 02

  Into academia.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  I mean, this is what the manosphere's come to.

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  If you're speaking to historians, you'll get us on to talk. It doesn't matter. We can say what we want and then people are going to be like, what, really?

• 0:16Speaker 02

  Podcasts that need academic guests, they use all of them.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  This is how low the barrel is that I'm scraping.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  This is how your business model works, is once you've had whatever, what's his name, Graham?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Graham Hancock.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  You've had it on four times.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Graham Hancock.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  You have to get, you have to get a new guy.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  The legitimacy has declined so much that it's got to you guys. Yeah, I agree.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not clicky enough. Graham Hancock is just not.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, people are used to it. They need to get these guys on.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  They need someone who's really pushing the boundaries.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  Have you been any more capable of predicting the future now with all of your illustrious studying of the past? Has it given you any insights about what's going on in the modern world?

• 0:49Speaker 02

  It's made me calmer about it.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  I was just always fucked.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  That's true. That's a gen- history for me has always been quite like a soothing thing. It's been a lot worse and it was going to carry on being like this and.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  It's like ASMR.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Because people keep saying like, you know, back in the day, back in, what do you mean back in the day?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  It was awful.

• 1:07Chris Williamson?

  It was always awful.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  This is, this is the best it's ever been.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  The 90s was slightly better.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  A bit, yeah, there was four years.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  It's, it's, Hugh has gone like this, it's gone like this and now it's like that.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  No, I reckon it went like that and then it was like in between Diana and 9/11 and then it's just been.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's been going down, but people, it's, it is still like, step back, it's unreal.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Coffee's, coffee's good.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  You've got new tonic now.

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  Agreed. Thank you for.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  You don't have this in the Middle Ages.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  People didn't even have that 10 years ago.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  We're living in the new tonic age.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  This is, this is the new tonic age. To place this, to place this for anyone listening.

• 1:42Chris Williamson?

  That, that is true. That is very true indeed. No, it's an interesting one. I think the, the fact that both America and maybe the UK as well had such a little golden era, 80s, 90s ish, where everybody felt like living standards, stuff's getting better.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  End of history.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  And, but just that you have this felt pullback from then until now.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  But you had probably steady incline, careful doing that.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're on the wrong set.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  You're in a safe space, brother.

• 2:13Chris Williamson?

  Kind of up until then. So when you compare, when you compare us between that, I think everyone looks at the golden era that parents had and thinks, oh, well, wouldn't it have been lovely to have grown up in the eighties and the nineties?

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, I think it's before social media and stuff. And I guess that there's just a little sweet spot. But I guess if you just do history a lot, you just look at it much broader. And so you just feel, you take a much bigger step back and it's just like, yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we're like, we're more likely to die naturally now than ever before.

• 2:38Chris Williamson?

  What's, what do you mean?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Well, as in like not die, I mean, I mean, obviously there are people in Europe who don't want to die. And that's the new, that's the new frontier to conquer.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  People won't die.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  People won't die?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Good on them.

• 2:50Chris Williamson?

  They refuse to.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm, I'm looking forward to it, frankly. I would like to die at some point. It's not before my time, but I do think there's a time to die.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  There's a time and a place.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  A time, a place. Um, but isn't, but normally the amount, the way you would die up until about a hundred years ago was probably very bad compared to now.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  We just did a Japan series and they couldn't stop. They love committing suicide, seppuku.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Ritually. And it's because it's like, life's so rubbish, you just want to do something big and then kill yourself is like a brilliant life.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  The best thing about your life would be the, the committing suicide. Yeah. In sixteenth century Japan.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  What caused them to do that? There had to be an incident.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  They didn't have modern wisdom to listen to, to help with their mental health.

• 3:31Chris Williamson?

  That's true.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  There was, there was a severe lack of mental health.

• 3:34Chris Williamson?

  To get them up at four thirty a.m.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  So young, young Japanese men were committing seppuku en masse.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  And it would be the slightest faux pas. You'd fart at the dinner table. I can't live with this.

• 3:45Chris Williamson?

  But was it, was it?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Guts everywhere.

• 3:46Chris Williamson?

  Was it some kind of like weird honor culture?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was still like that. But yeah, they absolutely fucking loved it. Cause I thought it was just like a racist trope. But when we went and studied it for the, these episodes, you can't believe everyone ends with seppuku.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  And if they don't, I'm immediately thinking like, well, you're, that's a bit dishonest.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, their death is treated as suspicious if it's not suicide.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Suspicious circumstances. He didn't seem to do it himself.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  What's happened?

• 4:14Chris Williamson?

  What um, what made Japan such an odd country? Cause even now, it's about as close to kind of an alien planet as you can get to, I suppose.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Well, it's an autistic culture, right? Culturally, on the autism spectrum.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  It's up there with Scotland, yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Scotland, yeah, uh, Germany, that's an autistic culture. Uh, I think Japan.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  It shut its doors for 300 years and had no internal wars, which is very rare in history.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  It was playing World of Warcraft in the basement for a thousand years.

• 4:42Chris Williamson?

  And what does that cause if you shut the doors for 300 years?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  What it causes is, it's like, um, I don't know, it's like homeschooled kids.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Oh, is this weird? Oh, yeah, we shit with the door open, right?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, cause there's no, there's no outside influence, but it's very moderated. And then they, that's why they're so, and they never, they were never colonized, but they always took stuff and made it Japanese.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Which is why like.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Oh, so you put a squid in, fuck it, no, that's not.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Actually, we did find that the first octopus porn was in like the.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Eighteen hundreds, yeah.

• 5:13Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  It was like a wood carved octopus porn.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Because they had obscenity laws about showing, so the, the blurring blurred porn, that's been going on for a while. To get around the obscenity laws, but to still get the rocks off, they'd show, they'd carve, someone would carve it, that's fucking hilarious, they have the job.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Quite beautifully carved, actually, yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Octopus, fucking a woman.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Octopussy.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Or in eighteen, whatever, eighteen forty or something.

• 5:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay, don't they have those handjob on TV things? I've seen that.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  What's this?

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  So Japan, Japanese TV has these weird, like, I don't know, competitions where girls.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Handjob competitions?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Milking competitions.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  On TV?

• 5:52Chris Williamson?

  Or maybe it's not, well, it's certainly like.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Maybe it's on Pornhub, I don't know if that's.

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Honestly, I'm not kidding, I, I feel like this has been broadcast outside of X-rated.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Takes his prime minister.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Whoever comes last becomes prime minister, yeah.

• 6:06Chris Williamson?

  Like the, the most diplomatic game of soggy biscuit ever.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  High stakes soggy biscuit, yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Elite level.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so Japan closes its doors for a long time and becomes weird. That's basically how you make a culture odd?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say it's odd, it's just unique, very unique culture, very distinct in a way that, uh, other cultures maybe merge more.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very selectively globalized, right? Hmm. Most cultures don't get to choose how they get globalized, right? It's just this kind of permeable wall and it just blends all together. Japan is like, we'll take that, we won't take that. So it's like very structured how their cultures developed. Hmm. Does that play, does that sapuku heritage play into kamikaze stuff when it comes to? Yeah, yeah. That's just the technologically. Who wants to kill themselves? Me, please. Yeah, it's the easiest to find. My granddad did, his granddad did. And everyone's like so jealous when it's like, he gets the fucking flowers, doing what he loves. Oh.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  But there's a.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Taking meth and.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  The whole thing about their belief system, it's like Shinto and Confucianism and Buddhism, it's like a whole mix of it where all of it is like, it's so detached from the everyday. Life is so, you're such an observer of your own life that killing yourself for a greater cause is like, to our heads, acceptable.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Whereas with the West, we're like, the individual, the freedom, life, that's the most important thing.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  But the Japanese honor.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  And it's wearing no shoes in the house.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  And your life is subservient to wearing, not wearing shoes in the house.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  They're not Chris Evans.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  But that, that leads to what we would call the night night bomb, which is the, the night night, the big bang. Go to bed.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Night, Nagasaki night.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Night, yeah, Roshi man night, night night is Nagasaki. That leads to a culture where you just will not surrender because you're, you know, you're so, you're so Buddhist, you're so detached from your own life. You're so in the moment, you're so mental health, perfect score, that you're just, will kill yourself because you're above it almost.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  They sound like modern wisdom, isn't it?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Well, I don't wanna.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  But you know that Japanese soldier was found on that island in nineteen seventy four.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Still fighting the war.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Still fighting the war.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  So in one of the islands in the Pacific, I think he got stranded during World War Two. And they found him in nineteen seventy six, I think.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And he was like, he still came out, he was still with the knife. Ah!

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Still going.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  He thought the war was going on, that's how fucking mental they are, but God love them.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  God love them.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  God love them.

• 8:30Chris Williamson?

  What was the name of the operation where America thought we're gonna have to do a land invasion if the atomic bombs don't work? And they were getting ready and they had a million body bags, they were ready for the most.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Well, that's one of the reasons, in deciding to use it, one of the, I can't remember the name of the operation, but they were basically, and I don't know how you'd ever actually do this, they were tallying up the potential deaths from the Night Night Bomb and the potential deaths from a land invasion.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Of American souls.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  And they said that actually it was, again, I think maybe just they just wanted to use it. They just said, I think, we've got this new thing.

• 9:02Chris Williamson?

  Cool toy.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's good for Christmas. Looks fucking sick, look at it. Anyway.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  And it's the ultimate dad toy, isn't it? As your president, when you've got like, yeah, when you've looked online, you've looked at all the reviews and you've got like the right fucking hedge trimmer, you really wanna use that.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Anyway, they said in their calculations that the less deaths would be used from the atomic bomb than a ground invasion.

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh, presumably less American deaths.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, obviously.

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. But also, I guess maybe less Japanese deaths because it's that slow encroachment that makes you think, well, we can push them back, we might be able to win as opposed to, okay, that was a big mess and we didn't really seem to be able to do anything about it.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  I mean, we're not historians, that's the thing to say, so.

• 9:41Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, so can you just, what, what level of credentials do you have?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  I've got none.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  I have, I have a degree from Bristol in history.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  And if you were a comedian, you'd probably end up being a history teacher, probably.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, everyone in my family is a teacher and a lot of them are history teachers.

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  And my aunt ran the photography at the Imperial War Museum my whole career, so.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  That's your credentials.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  And like, you know, the obsession with Nazis, I'm realising it comes from Christmas every year.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  So your aunt takes, your aunt takes photos of guns, that's sort of your credentials.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  She collects photos of guns. And she, um, yeah, but that's my whole family is, is history teachers, actually, thinking about it. And then you just, you just.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  I just like it.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  You're just autistic, I think.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, spent too much time on chat G P T. Yeah, something, something like that.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  So we don't have any credentials.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  But we are, we are comedians.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  And it's a, it's, it's a comedy podcast before it's a history podcast.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  I'm worried that we've been called on here as historians. It's, it's. Not at all. Though the West has fallen.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Well, but this is the, the podcast is legitimizing.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. As we said, this is how low the barrel is being scraped in any case. Also, the part of the, the bit as well is how much you get away with having a posh accent in suits.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  It's amazing. It carries you a long way. We're just talking out of our fucking arse and people are like, oh, I don't know.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  People keep saying, you know, I do learn things.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  You really read.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I really wanna hit America because that they, they can't, they're so vulnerable to Brits in suits.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  They are, yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Like, they, they just think you're.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  If you put a suit on, it would be absolute murder over there.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Vector for weakness. Yeah. I mean, the, the amount of havoc you can run with a British accent in America, I mean, you're doing it right now, but.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  But it's crazy. Add the tweed suit in. Russell Brand, Graham Hancock.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Uh, I saw Graham Hancock. James Corden. James Corden, yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  I mean, it was mad, isn't it?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Jimmy Carr going on those podcasts, I mean, they can't believe it. He's a, is a smart guy in a suit. It's like, they'll believe anything he says, even if it's absolute bollocks. I saw Graham Hancock on a, like, one of those, I think it was fucking, not Huberman, it was one of those podcasts, uh, saying that he believes every candidate for US presidency should have to have taken ayahuasca. Yeah, that's as a rule.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And it's, and hi- him saying it in a suit, being British.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  It's like, that is quite a good idea, you know? It's a terrible idea. You have to take psychedelic drugs to be the president.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, cause that's, well, that's who you want in charge of the night night bomb. It's someone who's at any moment could have a flashback.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Americans are like, maybe I'm wrong, because he's got, he does have a posh accent.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's wearing a suit.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  So that's the dream. We really, I do wanna hit America. I'd love to try and see how far we can push it.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Do universities talk?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like how far can we be intellectuals over there?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  I think that you'd be very well respected, uh, and they would, they, you probably could actually reshape what Americans think about their own history. I'm sure you'd be able to psyop them into believing something else with.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Well, you're trying to re-colonize the curriculum at the moment.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  I am writing a book called that, yeah.

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

  Re-colonize the curriculum?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's re-colonizing it.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Re-colonizing it.

• 12:44Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  I don't know. I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about it, yeah.

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  But, um, yeah, I am writing a pseudo-historical book.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay. Well, it seems like you've kind of specialized in obscure bits of history as well. There's like a 24-year period of, or 34-year period of post-war British prime ministers, which I didn't even know was a period of history. And you did.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Well, it's Bri- British history after the war until Thatcher is that the political consensus is very, very, very funny.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Like the.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  And also, if the podcast is defined by anything, it probably, that's the period.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  It's a sort of, if the podcast aesthetic is anything, it's British people broke in the seventies, nostalgizing the fifties or the war.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  That's sort of the vibe that we're going for.

• 13:29Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  So the, us doing that massive series on post-war prime ministers, even though it did lose a lot of viewers, but yeah, people like, you're still going on. This has been a month.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  And then also there are now people this week, when we started talking about Japan, going, what do you mean you're not doing Thatcher?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  We've been here for 10 episodes and you're not doing the interesting one.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Douglas Alec Yu, Alec Douglas Yu.

• 13:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so it's like watching, being forced to watch a really boring prequel in the hopes that you were about to get the main series.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  And now you've just.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  You just don't give it to them.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  But we do, we do a test cricket approach though. It's like we're doing every inch of the pros, no matter how boring they are, we will cover them.

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  Blue balls.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, millions of people.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  But the, the section we just, the 10-part series, that was more the Atlee consensus and how it broke, right? So after the war, Atlee's post-war socialist consensus, building the NHS, welfare state, all of that sort of stuff. And basically how that slowly broke down to the point that mummy came in.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  They, they got so desperate that they elected a woman as prime minister to come in and clean up the mess. That's the sort of, that was the reach of the theory.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Post-war Britain, cuck dad, bitch mum. That's how, that's defined this country.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Cause exactly, and Atlee and Thatcher is who we all are. That's the world we're living in, really.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  We're living in Thatcher's world, but there's still remnants of Atlee. What's defined this country is Clement Atlee and Margaret Thatcher. For sure.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  I'd never heard that name before.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Clement Attlee?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  So he was the prime minister who was in the war cabinet for Labour with Churchill, served well in the war. Um, and then afterwards, in kind of a shock, he was voted in over Churchill straight away. Cause even though Churchill's a war hero, everyone wanted a change, the country was on its knees.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  But but also, this happened at Potsdam, at the post-war conference. Churchill's there one day, goes home to the election results, and then Attlee comes to Potsdam with, uh, whoever, is it Truman?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yes, it'd be Truman, Truman and Stalin.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Eisenhower and all these people, and Attlee looks like a fucking competition winner.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  So Potsdam was the conference when they're divvying up, it's not, it's the one after Yalta where they're all divvying up, uh.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Germany.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Germany after the war.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  And they're on the, on the plane, Attlee finds out he's prime minister and no one thought he was gonna win.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  You can see photos and he's like, fuck it, oh, Stalin, was he doing it?

• 15:34Speaker 01

  It's like fucker fam with Stalin.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy. Um. But he, when he comes to power, in the space of about a year and a half, he builds the entirety of the welfare state. And then from that moment onwards, until Thatcher comes in, the, the state is just creaking because you start to live in a globalized. Economy, the Middle East kicks off, turns our lights off. And so, but no, but everyone, everyone in politics has fought in the war. No one feels they can disrupt the consensus until Thatcher, a woman comes in.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Why can't they just, why can't they disrupt the consensus?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Cause it's all the, the money they're paying for the unions, and this is where the union power gets too big in the seventies.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Also the blitz spirit, these guys all fought together, so there was just a much more communal, uh, attitude for rebuilding Britain.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  As Thatcher releases this kind of free market, and also this sort of psychological individualism.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Where it's like all about making money suddenly, about the individual, and it's not tied to.

• 16:28Chris Williamson?

  That, that's the, the tension, the conflict is this sort of very socialist beginning to a very sort of capitalist.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  It snaps, it snaps back hard.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  You know, we've still got the NHS, we've still got the welfare, welfare state, they're still like, Attlee's.

• 16:42Chris Williamson?

  We didn't have the NHS before.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  No, no, that was Attlee and Ventra, and also he was basically a one-term prime ministership, you know, he was only in for six years.

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  But did a lot.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Did so much, in the first two years, pretty much, did so much, it's like the most productive, uh, prime, and revolutionary prime ministership.

• 16:59Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  But I do think it, it was only possible because of the complete blank slate, the end of World War Two.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I mean, your view is that we didn't get bombed enough.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  You you cause it was one or the other. We got bombed annoying.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, if you look at Ger- Germany.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  If like all of our rails were were bombed, then we could rebuild them.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Cause that's like, they're they're actually paying to do the the breaking down.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Well, what wait, if you want, if you want to get into it.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Uh, Germany and Japan arguably win the peace.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Because they were so devastated, defeated, and then they were basically funded by the Americans.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  To rebuild. So they they their economy start growing very quickly after the war. They have a massive fifties boom. Britain is bankrupt, uh, and yet not completely destroyed. And yet we spend all our money.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Cause we're pretending we're not bankrupt.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  No, but also we spend all the money the Americans give us. The condition of them giving the money is that we have to have a nuclear bomb.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  And so we start arming ourselves because we're in the Cold War era.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  And so that's why we have no money from the off.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  That's why so many houses from that period are so hideous.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Still there. They built these temporary three five houses that were meant to be like last three years.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  That's that's Welsh housing stock still.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  It's crazy.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Anyway, there's a whole, yeah, there's a whole ten hour symphony, uh, of of that.

• 18:15Chris Williamson?

  Were there other, uh, any other unlikely heroes that you sort of fell in love with post-war?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  How, I mean, Howard Wilson's second term.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Wilson's a beast.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  The episode is called Stop Pegging Grandad.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  That, he was being sexually dominated by his private secretary.

• 18:30Chris Williamson?

  Actually, this isn't one of your euphemisms.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  No, you can, you can, you can look at the rest of history. They talk about it, so it's real.

• 18:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay. Hang on. So the litmus test for Finn versus history.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:41Chris Williamson?

  Is the rest is history.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I ran into Tom Holland at a historical exhibition. I said, by the way, I'm about to start a podcast which is misremembering your podcast.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  And, you know, so that's basically what the premise of this podcast is.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  In many ways.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Is us trying to remember some of their episodes and getting it wrong. That's sort of the shtick.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. But but there's a brilliant, probably my favorite is, um, cause Sam Brook is a very, that's one of his specialist topics is political history in the seventies.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  There's an episode, there's a series on nineteen seventy four, the crisis year.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  That is fucking hilarious.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  It's the best one, probably.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, and that's where, that's where we, why we wanted to do this, cause like Heath as well. Heath is such a funny.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Basically Marcia, he, Wilson on his second term, his first term was pretty revolutionary, it was like repealing gay rights, it was the sixties.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Repealing gay rights?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Uh, introducing gay rights.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry. Repealing gay rights was what's about to happen.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Um, and by his second term, he was completely exhausted, they're all exhausted.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  He had early onset, uh, outside.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  And then his assistant, he had this sort of psychosexual thing, wasn't his wife, his assistant Marcia. For example, he was at, I think in Downing Street this happened, that Marcia said, come here, you little cunt. To the prime minister.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  In front of all of his aides and then he went.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he just went with her.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so she was just like this, uh, she, uh, when he won, when he won his record fourth election, uh, he, uh, she told him the wrong address for, um. The celebration parties, there was no one there.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  She cancelled it.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  Because she just liked to dominate him.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she was there and he right turned up and then she started bollocking him.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  They had an affair in the fifties and she told his wife, she said, I went to your, I went to bed with your husband six times in nineteen fifty six and it was less than satisfactory.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And, and, but she's his private secretary.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  So through the whole of his political career, he has these two wives and one of them is pegging him in Downing Street. Whilst the coun- the country's completely crumbling.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Wilson's great, Ted Heath, cause it flipped between Wilson and Heath.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Heath to go.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Over the seventies, they, they.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  The rudest man there's ever.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he maybe is a paedophile, uh.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Who knows?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Who knows, you couldn't possibly know, but he absolutely hated women so much that they were invisible, he transcended misogyny.

• 20:54Chris Williamson?

  So you had one person whose life was run by a woman that was pegging him and another one who didn't see him at all.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  And they would flip between Downing Street, cause, cause the country kept going to state of emergencies, there had to be so many elections, it was like Brexit. But it was worse than Brexit.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  But then the great irony is the man who, who literally didn't, didn't see women, he got so annoyed by them. Then gets usurped by Thatcher.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  And he hates Thatcher.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  And he, he hates Thatcher and he goes into what's called the longest sulk in history.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Where he's still in the Commons.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  And he becomes the, um, uh, father of the house, he's, he's there till like the nineties or whatever he dies. And whenever Thatcher speaks, you can see him turning his nose up.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Like that, oh, love Heath.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Heath and Wilson are two other favourites, probably.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

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• 22:17Chris Williamson?

  it's only 400 bucks. To get the exact same blood panel that I use, just go to the link in the description below, or head to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's so good. I didn't realize that there was so much bullshit going on that we needed to have these snap elections just back to back to back like-

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Well, one thing I found quite therapeutic, which I've always found therapeutic about history, is realizing how fucked things were to put some perspective. Because certainly, if you're on Twitter, it feels like everything's growing to a halt, everything's awful. But you just look 20 years, 30 years backwards and you're like, it could be a lot worse. 1974, comparing it to British political history now, you remember, it's a lot of the same things we're going through now, but worse. Energy crisis, economy-

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Three-day week.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of that sort of stuff.

• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  What's a three-day week?

• 23:08Speaker 02

  They didn't have the energy, because the miners were demanding so much money and the Prime Minister was going to standoff with them. And then the OPEC crisis kicks off with the Middle East wars. So suddenly, energy is insanely expensive, and the miners realize that they actually, what, they've got all the leverage to demand what they need. The country can't afford to pay them what they want. So Ted Heath doesn't give them what they want. He says, "Everyone can only use electricity for three days a week." So rationed electricity, TV ends at 10pm. That's when football starts getting played on Sundays, because they can't afford to use floodlights.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  So football, which was always on Saturdays.

• 23:44Chris Williamson?

  Has to be in the daytime.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, has to be in the daytime.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  I mean, it got so bleak.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  And apparently, that's when kinky stuff starts.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Because one of the government's advice was, you can only work for three days. So to pass the time, why don't you experiment with your sex lives?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  So butt stuffed starts because the lights go off.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  You've got to pass the time somehow.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  You can only do it with the lights off.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  That pegging guy could have been perfectly timed.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Probably when you start getting pegged.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Two day week.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  But it got so bleak, Idi Amin was gonna, was trying to send an airplane full of vegetables to feed the starving Brits. He said, we're so heartbroken to see the way that, you know, our former colonial masters are suffering.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Great bit.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  All of the people, we've gathered round and everyone's like done a whip around to help Britain.

• 24:28Chris Williamson?

  Reverse reparations.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  And Britain, obviously.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Comic relief in reverse.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  It's Idi Amin, Ugandan dictator, sending charitable donations to Britain. It's exquisite, it's absolutely exquisite.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  The point is though, when people say this country's in the toilet, there's a feeling that it's like we're in terminal decline. It's like, it's been far worse.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  Do you realise how much worse it's been?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  And within our parents' lifetime, and we've gotten out of it. So I do think it's good to have a bit of framing sometimes.

• 24:54Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of the vegetables thing, I had John Lyle on. He wrote The Dirty Tricks Department, which was about the founding of the OSS.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Mind control. Yeah, we did a series on the CIA.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Oh, MKUltra.

• 25:06Chris Williamson?

  His second book was on MKUltra. His first book was The Founding of the OSS, Stanley Lovell, William.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Fellow historian.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  Fucking, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, there was a story that he looked at, because he's in the archives in Texas and he's reading these original documents. The vegetables thing reminded me of a story where a psychological assessment had been done of Hitler. And they'd found out he had a very fragile hold on his masculinity.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  No, I won't, I won't take it.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  That was the most secure man I've ever seen.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:36Chris Williamson?

  So their, their attempt was they found the gardener who grew the vegetables that went to the, what was it? The bird's nest?

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Eagle's nest.

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  Eagle's nest.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Berth's garden, yeah. I know that one. Yep, bang.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Didn't even finish the question.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  Um, the found the gardener who grew the vegetables that went to the eagle's nest.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:07Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, they.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Hands, I believe it's called. I don't know that. I don't know that. I met him once. Shook his hands.

• 26:15Chris Williamson?

  Tried to inject the vegetables that were going to the eagle's nest with female sex hormones.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  In an attempt to try and trans Hitler. They said his moustache would fall off.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  And his voice would go high. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this, yeah.

• 26:26Chris Williamson?

  You do know your history. That's incredible. What an obscure bit of history.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Incredibly well.

• 26:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What an obscure story to know. I thought I was gonna be able to teach you something new.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  No, I knew that.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Don't try, you can't get anything about Hitler past Finn. Nothing goes past.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay, you're a world expert on Hitler.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Let's say that, yeah. That's what I'd like you to say.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  The world expert.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Expert on Hitler.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Or Hitler's biggest fan, I think is a better word.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Biggest empath.

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  Cosplayer.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  No, I'm an empath, I'm an empath.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a selective empath. He's only an empath for one man.

• 26:57Chris Williamson?

  Reverse empath.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  He has no empathy for anyone else.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 27:00Chris Williamson?

  Uh, but yeah, that, um, that idea of injecting vegetables with female sex hormones.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, trans Hitler, I mean, that opens up a world of possibilities.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Imagine.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Powerful.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  The things we never got to see.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  Interesting for the worst crimes of the 20th century, uh, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, all terrible relationships to their fathers. Imagine if they'd had modern wisdom back in the day.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  In that period, who had a good relationship with their father? Like, I feel it was before, it was pre-good relationships with fathers, right?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  This was handshakes, fathers.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  I mean, as a father myself, I do.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  I'd like to, I'd like to see, who, did Churchill have a good relationship with his father?

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  No, horrendous, fucking awful.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, I don't think you could say that was the cause of them because it was like, everyone.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  We're the first generation to, to, to be dads that are trying.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:48Chris Williamson?

  That are actually invested. That's a really good point.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Cause if you look at them, you look at their life, you know, it was clearly this, but then you look at anyone on their street, you look at anyone in the village.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  Why did, why did he not become Mao? Why did he not become Stalin?

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Churchill, how do you think he would get on in the modern world of TikTok with?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  He'd be a body positivity influencer.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  He knows, he's like that guy. He's my drink of the day, that guy. The Welsh.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  What's his name?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Sandro.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  We've got to shout him out. Sandro, he does the problematic pub podcast. You've got to watch this. This is great for your listeners.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  He's like the opposite of you.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  In that your health, your health, you know, you're a bit biohacky, right?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, biohack light.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. This guy is the, what's the opposite of a biohack?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  It's a biofuck.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  This guy.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Biofuck.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  This guy.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  What are you drinking today?

• 28:35Speaker 02

  He's my drinking today.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And then he'll go on holiday to Magaluf with his friends and then he will proceed to video every drink he drinks and it will be, you know, 25 beers.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Highlights.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  He'll go through the cocktail menu at his hotel, 14 cocktails.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Yep. Strawberry daiquiri, lovely.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Lovely.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  I just tell her, lovely.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  So that would be, if we can get any of that up, if you can do some research, put it up, please. I'd love to shout him out.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  He doesn't have long left.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Can't have long.

• 29:03Chris Williamson?

  Is it a YouTube channel or Instagram or what?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  It's on TikTok.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay, brilliant.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Um.

• 29:08Chris Williamson?

  But anyway, Churchill, day drinking, booming speeches. How do you reckon he'd get on, modern world? Can you get away with that? I guess it's kind of like, um.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  The culture's shifted, certainly.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  But then we have, there has been a dearth of political charisma and I think that's not politicians' fault. I think it's as, as trust has gone, not trust.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  As trust has gone.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Trust has gone. But. As trust. Love you, love you, Les.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Charisma's gone because trust is gone.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Charisma left when trust did. Yeah. No, um, we've got to stop electing people because they're fit.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  But the, uh, yeah, the charismatic politicians, they haven't, we haven't really, I guess, I guess Farage is probably the last successful.

• 29:49Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Is that because to be statesman like is not to be sort of gregarious in that way?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  I guess statesmanship is, is old fashioned if we're living in the era of Trump and Farage and Vance and stuff.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  But is there a link between the success of the country and the success of the politicians? Because if you look at the politicians during the Victorian age, when Britain was the predominant power in the world, they, they did seem more charismatic, but just by the nature of what they were dealing with, right? Do you feel like?

• 30:15Speaker 02

  They also didn't have to deal with the public in the way that they did.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  I guess so, yeah.

• 30:19Chris Williamson?

  I guess Trump is kind of like a sober Churchill, at least.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:22Chris Williamson?

  And that he's like, it's very gregarious, the booming speeches, he just doesn't do the drinking bit.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  And maybe it's just Churchill's accent and, and like dress sense that lends a sense of charm to the outrageousness.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Was he outrageous? Well, by today's standards, I guess, but then at the time, maybe he wasn't.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's more impressive, I think, is the, it is extraordinary that level of, I don't know anyone who has that level of productivity drinking that much.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  It's quite, I don't know how cultural that is. I think people drink less now. People are much more health conscious now. But singers are so normalized to drink and smoke that much. If I started drinking or smoking, I wouldn't get any.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  The more interesting question is how would Brian Johnson get on in the war cabinet?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that would be wonderful.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Because Churchill, who the fuck's this nonce?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Have a beer, would you, mate?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  I mean, you want to live forever. It's the 40s.

• 31:13Chris Williamson?

  Going to bed at 10pm.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, come on, fucking wake up.

• 31:15Chris Williamson?

  He also did deal with depression his whole life, though, right? Really aggressive depression.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's get serious. Let's get serious, Chris.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

  Churchill?

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Churchill. Churchill was depressed.

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  I thought he was, was he not? Was he not, did it not the black dog thing that was following him around? Is that not his whole thing?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  I mean, you look at what he was drinking.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:31Chris Williamson?

  Is it possible to be not depressed, being that hungover all the time?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, because Churchill would depress. It's one, he wouldn't even know what depression is.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  I don't think depression existed until like the 70s.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  He was just a British bloke, which is like, sometimes he was a grump, but he didn't know what that was.

• 31:43Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  So I don't know.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Drinking red whiskey on the nightstand. You're drinking whiskey when you wake up.

• 31:48Chris Williamson?

  He had a, he, he made, is it Paul Roger?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Champagne.

• 31:52Chris Williamson?

  Champagne, and he had a custom sized bottle made because he said a half bottle was not sufficient and a full bottle was too much to have with lunch.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  A schooner, sort of.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  So he, he's sort of a two thirds.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  What are they drinking today?

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  That could have been it.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Chris Williamson?

  It's weird, like, World War Two stuff is kind of ASMR for white guys in their 30s.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Dodger, it comes for us all.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and that is, I imagine that there's just an infinite amount of stuff that you can keep going back over with regards to that.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Well, we're trying to stretch it out on our pod because it is, it is the, it's real just nitroglycerin for the listeners. They love it.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Because it is, it's probably, it's the most exciting thing that's, that's.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Well, it's like all of history, right, was leading to the night night bomb and everything's been going out. It's like an hourglass, I say. It's like, history is like a pyramid, leading towards the big atomic explosion. So that's like the, and then everything's been a fallout since then, right? That's how, so I think World War Two is just, if you like history, it's the, it's the big, it's the season finale, right?

• 32:54Chris Williamson?

  It's the perfect amount of, long enough ago that it's interesting to research, but close enough to us that there was sufficient information captured about it to be able to.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  But also the kind of the biblical nature of the light and dark, good and evil.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, the sides are more fun.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  That doesn't really happen and the fucking aesthetics and so much of culture like Star Wars uh is built off that similar like evil dark sides with the great outfits, they look great. And this kind of iconic baddie and then the rebel, I know it's based on Vietnam Star Wars, but you know, the the um the rebels and stuff.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  That that that that doesn't really happen in conflicts since, I guess.

• 33:38Chris Williamson?

  You're saying sartorially World War Two was the sort of pinnacle?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to say that.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  And also, when you're looking at Hitler in the thirties, people didn't have a Hitler to compare him to.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  So the idea of evil is.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Hitler.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  It Hitler invented that really.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And also it didn't really come in until the videos from the camps came out.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  The kind of idea of this like everyone comparing everything to Hitler, there being this idea of true evil.

• 34:03Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  And stuff like that, that just didn't really exist in the same way. Obviously there was like religious things where it's like heretics and that sort of, but our modern sense of evil is all comes from Hitler.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  And the and the bad guy, you know, like James Bond, all the outfits that did it. Blofeld's a dictator.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Kind of cause you know, that that whole culturally we're so born out of World War Two.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  Like action films.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  But then have you seen, I don't know what your um algorithm's like, the amount of pro Hitler stuff is getting crazy.

• 34:31Chris Williamson?

  Pro Hitler stuff.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  You're not getting it.

• 34:33Chris Williamson?

  I haven't seen any of that.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  What's on your algorithm, Chris?

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  Like just dog videos and it's it's very fluffy mine, I don't tend to get much of that, like.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Boobs, boobs.

• 34:43Chris Williamson?

  Boobs, uh no, not really.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  What is going, I'm tits and Hitler, it's crazy, it's just, mine's just.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Not even Hitler, it's just it.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:51Chris Williamson?

  So what do you mean pro Hitler?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Oh, it's crazy, there's like a whole community of stuff.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Also the Pakistani guy with the moustache.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Who does pranks in a, oh, I love that guy, shout out, I don't know what his name is.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Uh, it's like, what's shocking is like, uh, there's like Hitler's speech has been translated into English. And it's not only like memes that are like, I guess, kind of quite like nihilistic, like being pro Hitler because it's edgy, whatever.

• 35:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  It's the comments. There's a whole

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  Is it ironic or not?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  No, it's broken past irony. It's genuinely pretty terrifying.

• 35:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  So it'd be like, we owe Germany apology. That would be a lot of the comments.

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  Is it just antisemitism repackaged as pro Hitlerism?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  It's, I, um, I've got a friend who sends me all of these because it's just.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's where the algorithm's going.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably, yeah.

• 35:33Chris Williamson?

  Considered it might just be him.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Uh, and on Twitter.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  It's not me, I should stress.

• 35:36Chris Williamson?

  I have a friend, he's sat next to me in the room.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, some, some, you've sent me some, but on, on Twitter, now that Elon's taken the handbrake off, it's just gone crazy, the Nazi stuff. I got sent, uh, like a three hour documentary with like a, quite a proper voiceover, well produced.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  You're talking about this, yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  It's like a pro Hitler one. It opens with a misunderstood artist. A man who changed the world. So like, there is definitely, I think when you're told someone's evil and that's like the most defined, kind of like,

• 36:09Speaker 01

  truth.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  The idea that you've been lied to is thrilling for a lot of people.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  Very seductive.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Very seductive, for sure. But it is, it is definitely crazy what's going online in the, in the Hitler space at the moment.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  The Hitler sphere. Are we in the Hitler sphere?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  We're in the Hitler sphere.

• 36:24Chris Williamson?

  You are orbiting the Hitler sphere.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  We're the sun, I think.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

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• 37:12Chris Williamson?

  They took my feedback on board, they were very receptive. Uh, and I actually think that they put some of my ideas, uh, into the product and the new marketing. So, uh, any success that you see going forward from now can be exclusively attributed, uh, to me, so. Hooray for me. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and use it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a year's free supply, vitamin D3, K2, and five free AG1 travel packs, plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  I would not have guessed that.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  There's videos of Hitler playing with his dog, trying to show his light side.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  They are, I mean, they're great videos. I really like them.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Happy Hitler. We told you something about the photo shoot he did in the, was it in the 20s? There's a photo shoot, or maybe it's the early 30s.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Well, when he's trying to work out his act.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  But no, it is like a comedian.

• 38:16Chris Williamson?

  Does he do early bits? Is there any of his early material? The work in progress shows of Hitler?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  There's very rare, these very rare photos, basically where Hitler's trying to work out his like, his shtick.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  You know, because it doesn't just come straight out.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  When does that?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  That's Chaplin. He's the biggest Chaplin fan in the world.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  And it's hard to get at Hitler, but he got every Chaplin film sent to him. And then in 1941, a great film, The Great Dictator, amazing Chaplin film, which is a parody of Hitler during the war, made in the middle of World War II. He gets everything sent to him and this got sent to him and it made fun of him and he was heartbroken.

• 38:55Chris Williamson?

  Because you're a hero, your biggest hero, the guy who's fucking facial hair. Wouldn't it have been a real middle finger if he just shaved it off?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Chaplin.

• 39:03Chris Williamson?

  No, if, yeah, oh, actually, that would have been even worse.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, Hitler doing the middle finger, I feel he's done a lot worse. I don't think. I feel the Holocaust was the middle.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that, that's worse than that.

• 39:13Chris Williamson?

  Was that aimed at Chaplin, the Holocaust?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  No, I guess not. I guess not.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Fuck you, Charlie.

• 39:19Chris Williamson?

  I'll teach you.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  No, I don't think, I don't think we can say that hot take.

• 39:24Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Chaplin calls the Holocaust. It's the thumbnail title of this.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Is that what you want now?

• 39:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that might work.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't know, they're trying to repurpose or trying to reinvent Hitler's position and what he stood for seems like.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Well, it's fringe now, but all these things that were fringe five years ago coming into the mainstream. So I wouldn't be surprised.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  It's more that niches are getting bigger.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  The niches are big now because of the fragmentation.

• 39:51Chris Williamson?

  Because the echo chambers actually start to grow.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  It's more that if the market digitally is everyone, then a niche of that market is a massive amount of people.

• 40:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's enough to hold a community together.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Exactly, totally.

• 40:05Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Yeah, I love that John Lyle book because all of the little obscure bits and pieces of stories that were in history. There was this thing I learned, you were talking about Japanese before. At some point, the CIA or the OSS tried to scare the Japanese by putting luminous paint. Foxes are a bad omen in Japan, apparently. So they tried to scare them with glow in the dark. What they thought would be foxes, but they couldn't get enough foxes. So I think they used something, and not skunks. They used some other type of creature and then they put them in water and found that they washed up both dead and the water, the stuff had been.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Washed off.

• 40:45Chris Williamson?

  Luminous paint, yeah, had been washed off them. So then they put a huge fox head out with a P A system and broadcast like sounds. It's crazy what they tried to do to, in a desperate attempt to just psyop, like the early versions of psyops. Really like it was wet clay that people were playing with.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Well, there was like, they tried everything and they're like, we're gonna have to put a nuclear bomb on them. And we, we've done the big screaming fox head.

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  That didn't work.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  Tried to trans Hitler.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Well, but that's like the.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  We tried everything.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  In the Aztecs, you remember in the Aztec series when the holding out against Cortez and conquistadors. Their version of the nuclear bomb is a guy dressed as a.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  This is the last, this is like the, but when the Aztecs doing their like final stand.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  The ultimate deterrent. You don't want to press the button, but you do. And it's a guy dressed as a massive owl.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Who comes out and goes, ooh, and they all just shoot.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  And they're like, we don't want to have to use this, but you forced our hands.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  And then just someone going like.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Ooh, and then Spanish just kill him. And they're like, okay, right. It's the same equivalent of dropping the nuclear bomb, but it bounces off and it's into the sea. It's like, oh, fuck.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  All the nuclear bomb, you drop out of plane, a guy dressed as an owl.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Drop on the Roshma.

• 42:01Chris Williamson?

  I know nothing about the Aztecs.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  The only thing I'll say about that is the misconception is it should be viewed more as a civil war than like a colonizing thing because it was like, everyone talks about there's like 600 conquistadors who took over all the Aztecs. It was actually two Aztecs who the Mexica was a rival clan with, who were fucking over loads of other.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Can you remember the name of the rival clan?

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Clatch. Clatch. Clarland.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Clatch Clarland.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Clarlands.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  And then they basically allied with the Spanish.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Uh, to, uh, take over the.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  Internal civil war assisted by someone from outside.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Missing is that it wasn't 600 conquistadors versus all the Aztecs. It was 600 conquistadors with thousands of other. Chats.

• 42:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Versus, versus a guy in a massive owl suit.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, yeah, with an owl suit. They had guns and.

• 42:51Chris Williamson?

  One guy in an owl suit.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:54Chris Williamson?

  Were the, were the Aztecs as brutal as?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  To be fair, it's pretty nuts.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Similar to the kind of you think, you know, the Tsukuku thing with Japan. That's a stereotype. Oh, no, it's not similar to the, oh, the human sacrifice. Oh, they fucking loved it.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  What was the festival of blood thing?

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  What was the timing of this? What, what?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  This was to be fair, because you always, when you think of Aztecs, it feels ancient.

• 43:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  It's medieval.

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Well, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a meeting, it's a meeting of worlds, the Aztecs. And it's basically an Iron Age civilization with a kind of early modern European one. That's the.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  So they had, was it, is it 1516 I must say, quarters?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  But they didn't have iron, they didn't have steel. They did sort of have wheels, but they didn't have wheels. They didn't have wheels that they'd actually use.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  They'd thought of a wheel, but they hadn't made a wheel.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  They made a, they liked, that was wheels on kids' toys, but they'd never thought to use that to carry stuff.

• 43:40Chris Williamson?

  Proto wheels.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's funny because they had, they would chop people's heads off the top of these pyramids and the human sacrifice, rip their heart out, chop their head off. And the head would roll down the steps. And they didn't quite link that rolling with, with.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was interesting. Like the physics was there.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  But they did invent slinkies.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  No, that's, that's a joke. That's not true. That's where our podcasts.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can't give them the credit for inventing slinkies.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  We don't know. We don't know who invented, do you know who invented the slinky?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  No, we can't know.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  I imagine it was an American in the seventies, was my feel, feeling. Um, but what was the festival of blood? That was like the crazy one.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Basically a bank holiday festival where they killed like eighty thousand people.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  So yeah, like a day off work, day off school. But what, like criminals? Uh, no, be right, it'd be the Clutch Clalins, these guys.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Prisoners from the Tushka. So if you got, if you got captured.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  They would not like killing you in battle. They'd like capture you and then chop you to death.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Sacrifice you to their gods.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Okay. Cause also their form of battle was more like a step up dance battle.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Like it was a bit more ritualistic. So that's why the Spanish, when they're just like shooting them, it's like, oh, I thought this was more like a.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  That's why the owl guy is the, the end thing.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Cause it's a dance off and you go, well, I can't compete.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Body popping.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  I can't compete with a guy body popping just as an owl. This dance off is over.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  There's one guy doing the world.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Uh, but yeah, they'd killed like eighty thousand people at once and they're like, just the, the stench of blood was just extraordinary. There was.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  But also they're, they're doing it. They don't have steel. So they're doing it with obsidian glass, like shards.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  It's like a rock that you, yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Volcanic sort of rock that is sort of like glass and it's very sharp.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Oh, and you chip. Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, you shave it.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  A flint type thing, but. But super sharp. Super sharp.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  They, so they're cutting into the breastbone and pulling it out.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  After the head?

• 45:20Speaker 02

  No. I, I, as you see that and then they.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Fucking owl!

• 45:24Speaker 02

  And they have a big axe, an obsidian axe, I think.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Do you, so if your heart gets taken out, do you get like a couple of free pumps? Where you get to see it for a second?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  No, I think the blood's still going round. Um, but it's like heads get cut off. There's still, there's still a bit of consciousness for a few seconds, isn't there? Or is that chickens?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  No, you can't, if your head's cut.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  You can, you.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. You're telling me if you chop my head off, my, my POV, like I'll see the carpet as I'm falling towards it?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, cause, cause there's a lag, right?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Again.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Can you get one of your science guys on?

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Do you have anyone Googling?

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  Brian Johnson, Brian Johnson will know this.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Get your fucking head guys on this.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  The real test of the Brian Johnson is if someone cuts his head off and he.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  How long does he stay alive?

• 46:06Speaker 02

  He'll stay alive. Cause if it's longer than if they cut my head off, then fair play.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Fair play.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Have you had Brian Johnson on this?

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  I have. Yeah. It was once a while ago. He's a sweetie. He's a really sweet guy.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  I tell you what, I did, I was, I did say it'd be funny if he got hit by a bus just cause like it comedically.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Comedic.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. If he died at 62 because he got run over, it is funny, but uh, it is nice to have someone nosing about in that sphere.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Someone's gotta be doing it.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  You know, it's nice to have just the person doing it. Cause people really don't like it.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  The way to think about Brian Johnson is that he is like a scout in an army and you don't want an army that's filled with scouts. And I also probably myself don't want to be the guy that tries to climb up to the top of that mountain to see if there's something interesting over the far side.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:47Chris Williamson?

  And I'm like, but I'll happily have him go up and come back and tell us, let me tell you what I found up there if he comes back.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  He's nosy as hell.

• 46:53Chris Williamson?

  But he did say.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Digging around. It's like, you shouldn't be digging around in there lad. What are you looking for?

• 46:56Chris Williamson?

  He did. Yeah. It's like trying to change the source code OS of your Windows computer, Windows XP. You're like, mate, you're gonna break something in there. But he did, he did tweet not long ago. He said, I guarantee I will die in the most hilarious and ironic way possible.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Well, it's just cosmically, you know, this just is, it would be too funny.

• 47:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  To just slip in a banana and hit his head.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Cause the oldest person in the world right now is British Ethel. Ethel.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  We're starting to come, Ethel Case from, we're starting a campaign. She has to overtake the record, which is held by a French woman.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  It was another campaign.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  I think she's been cooking the books though, the French woman.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's a campaign we're starting a podcast to get Ethel Case from passed.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  So Ethel Case was I think on 113?

• 47:34Speaker 02

  She's 127, I believe. No.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Is that the oldest?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  The, the, the French one is 119. That's the oldest. So Ethel is 113.

• 47:42Chris Williamson?

  French one's still alive?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  No, she died.

• 47:46Chris Williamson?

  Right, so that's the finish line.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  No, so like we got, we got to keep Ethel alive.

• 47:50Chris Williamson?

  Because if they were both racing at the same time, that would be, because you could just.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Well, take, take out.

• 47:55Chris Williamson?

  The old one.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  And that's an easy one. You can fucking.

• 47:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  One slap to the face and she's gone. Yeah. Um, no, no, so we, we, uh, any, if you see Ethel like a, like marathon runners on the 20th mile, you know, cheering.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Go on darling, you got this.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  You got this, come on.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Give us some fishing, some companionship. Fishing, mate.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Give us some blue zone stuff.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  All the blue zone stuff. What is funny though is you've got the Brian Johnson thing. It's going to be interesting to see if he outlives.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, the blue zone.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  An olive oil farmer in Sardinia.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  It'll be just some guy, you know.

• 48:25Chris Williamson?

  Smoking.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Giovanni.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Who's just like, this old Italian guy is going to outlive Brian Johnson. He's gonna.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  He's drinking olive oil and just smoking and having fish. He's got mates, supposedly his mates, that's what everyone says.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, on the blue zone things.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating. Brian, Brian's a good example of this. There's certain people who sort of capture a cultural niche. Cause he, when you're thinking about longevity, biohacking, kind of the modern world of that, you think Brian Johnson.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Empathy with Hitler, yeah. You think Finn Taylor.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:57Chris Williamson?

  But the, it kind of speaks to the fact that there was some subculture beneath the surface that needed a figurehead, not maybe too dissimilar to Hitler. Um, and.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  It's the health of Hitler.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  Whenever that person sort of comes up, think, look, for better or worse, like a Tate or a Dan Bilzerian or something, was, there was obviously some

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  story going on, some subculture thing happening. And then there's this person that's the tip of the spear.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 49:22Chris Williamson?

  That is like the epitome of this. They're like the distillation of all of this stuff. And I think Brian Johnson's kind of.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  He's emblematic.

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Bonnie Blue.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  Bonnie, Bonnie Blue, yeah. The end result of sort of the modern sexual liberation stuff.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then I, I tried to watch a bit of the Andrew Tate Bonnie Blue podcast for research because we had it on our other show. And I just thought this is like a fucking GTA cutscene.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Like neither of these people are real, like it's just not real. And, and I don't know if it's people, their followers are like, they, they're playing along with the not real of it. And, or they're actually taking it real.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  But cause if you.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  It's just, they're not, neither of them are real.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Cause you've grown up online, the lines between irony and sincerity has just become completely blurred. So it's sort of like.

• 50:08Chris Williamson?

  No one's, very few people are earnest now on the internet, right? The sincerity is basically like non-existent. Um, do you know the idea of kayfabe? Do you know this from professional wrestling?

• 50:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So it's just basically the.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  I have a, I have a mortgage, Chris. So any, any professional wrestling stuff I have.

• 50:24Chris Williamson?

  That's true.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  I will default if I engage with it.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  Um, basically the idea that sort of the hyper real, like the fake real, the sort of Trump, Trumpian. Like a, a meta story. People just sort of buy into that and they kind of don't care.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Hyper normalization, that Adam Curtis film. You seen that?

• 50:40Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  It's very good.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  You, you'd like, you'd like Adam Curtis.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  You'd love Adam Curtis. You should have him on.

• 50:44Chris Williamson?

  I, I don't think I'm super familiar with him.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  He makes these films.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  These documentaries.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  He's a documentary maker.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Where he says it all got a little bit strange.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he makes these, he's this guy that's allowed, yeah, British guy is allowed into the BBC archives and he just lives there like a hobbit for years. Going through all this archive footage.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Someone bring some food down to Adam Curtis, actually. We need to check on it. Cause he's been down there for about 15 years.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  And he builds these incredible films. They're all on the iPlayer and uh, it's all used with documentary foot, stock footage. And then he sort of void, tells this story of.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Thatcher thought she was unleashing British potential. She was actually unleashing something much darker.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Bonnie blow. Yeah. That would be it though. And it's.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  So he's like the British Ken Burns in that way.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Sort of.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's much more like.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Much more, it's kind of enchanting and.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  And like the music's more hypnotic. It's much more kind of like, in some ways emotional.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  A little bit psychedelic in that way.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Because Ken Burns Vietnam is totemic and amazing. Ken Burns Civil War, I can't, I can't.

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't get through it either.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  It's just the, the camera on the paintings.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Uh, I can't do it, but um.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  And I think Americans love that shit.

• 51:49Chris Williamson?

  I think that Vietnam series might be.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  That's as good as it gets.

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I think that might be the best.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  It's phenomenal.

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  And it goes on and on and this one's an hour and a half and this one's two hours and this one's.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  The key thing I've realised if you're a documentary maker like Adam Kurtz and Ken Burns, you've got to make the people who are watching it feel clever. And that's what Ken Burns and Adam Kurtz do really well. I watch it and I go like, well, I'm brilliant.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Particularly with Adam Kurtz, it's because he will always tell a story about history and politics that you haven't thought of.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  And you feel really smart and if someone asks you about it, you're like.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  It opens the door to like, here's what's really going on. There's a bit of that amongst his fanbase, definitely, but they are, they make you think about things in a way that no other documentary can do.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  But it makes you feel like you've come up with it.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  It makes you feel like you've drunk the world and you can see everything and you're like.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  And then if anyone asks you what it's about, uh, fucking music playing and Thatcher.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  There was a lake, there was a lake where they did a deal and then that's why Bin Laden exists. Bin Laden was born out of a lake.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  I'm fit.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:49Chris Williamson?

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• 53:32Chris Williamson?

  it completely risk free, use it and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/moderndwism using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I still don't know why Vietnam started and I've watched that Ken Burns documentary three times.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  You're watching, you're like, well, I'm brilliant.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Well, in many ways it starts, well, let's not get into it.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  No. It's a quagmire.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Uh, but it was interesting you saying how no one's. It's the French's fault. Uh, it's interesting you're saying that earnestness has gone. You'd, I'd consider you quite an earnest person.

• 54:18Chris Williamson?

  I think I am, yeah. I have a problem with ironic speech, too much ironic speech.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Oh, we don't have that problem.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  I imagine, well, comedians.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  We have the opposite problem.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  I need more honesty. I think, I think it's a syndrome now.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  Well, even that, I don't mind, like, it's, uh, the internet show that you guys do, Finvest the Internet. Like, the whole thing is, like, matter and there's jokes on jokes and it's, but it's.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  But you were one of the best guests, if not the best guest on the show, by the way.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  You just.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Your reactions.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  I think that.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  You came, you came into it with the.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  People laughed at how I laughed.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  It was a weird laugh.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  But I was trying to not interrupt too much, because you're still talking and if I'm.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:54Chris Williamson?

  Cackoring throughout the whole thing. I was like, okay, I'll try and be like.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  It looked like your soul had been pulled out of your body.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  I was trying to be like gracious about like not exploding all the time.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  You cared a lot about us getting a good show and that really helped, I think.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Really helps.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  So, and I think also this world's the funniest to write jokes about.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  The kind of manner.

• 55:11Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Because every guest we have on internet is to, is fundamentally, actually, is to open up a world of jokes.

• 55:18Chris Williamson?

  Distill down what's going on here.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  It's not about Bonnie Blue, it's about, let's do things about OnlyFans and stuff like that, you know, we have chefs on.

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  Wine culture or.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  But this is what I've been interested in for so long, this whole world, and it just opens up anything motivational, anything kind of, the kind of.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Well, I think part of the reason it works so well is that, uh, you could laugh at it all, and I think that punctures the sincerity and the earnestness and the control that comes through in, like, clips of this and your other clips. A friend of mine actually was like, oh, yeah, I love that episode because I'd, I'd got those guys' clips and I thought, oh, fuck off, who's that guy? And then I saw the show and was like, oh, fair play, he seems like a really nice bloke.

• 55:55Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't take himself too seriously.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  And that's where the show actually, Finvest the Internet, is best, is when we had it with M Dot as well.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  It's like when people went on X.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  People, people think they come to it thinking, oh, good, they're gonna tear this guy, I hate this guy. And then they see how they're laughing along and they're aware of the absurdity of what they do.

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  So you could humanize anybody.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Well, that's basically.

• 56:14Chris Williamson?

  Maybe it's dangerous.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think what was tough about Bonnie was that, like, I knew, I knew we weren't gonna get the same kind of reactions from her than we got from you or M Dot, but I also thought if there's even a chance. She submits to the silliness.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  And even just engages with the fact that like, all morals aside, the absurdity of what she's done, it is absurd. The numbers are hilarious. If she even submits to like laugh along with that, it would be amazing.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  And obviously it will get views because she's, she's very current.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Um, but I just thought, oh, there's a chance we get her to kind of laugh at it.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  I don't think she could because I think she's such a, she has these.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  She's done so many of these interviews.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  She has these shticks and she puts up a garden and she's, and she's allowed to.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  Does get.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:58Chris Williamson?

  That's her protection mechanism.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  I mean, she's got a soundboard of things she said.

• 57:02Chris Williamson?

  If you, if you were Bonnie.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  I'm not traumatised, I'm a feminist, I'm the real suffragette. That's her soundboard. She's blessing all the time. Um, but, but yeah, so i- i- it's always a, it's so, it's so funny for a show. That is so, like, it's expensive to make, it's so stressful to make, we write it for weeks before we film it.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  People think it's like a podcast.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  And we have these two, two hour window with a guest, we've got to get everything we think is funny about that guest.

• 57:27Chris Williamson?

  Uh, it is a real, I, I felt the pressure.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:30Chris Williamson?

  Me and I, there was no pressure on me.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  It's a high stakes thing.

• 57:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  And it all ultimately, if it's a good episode or not, rests on whether the guest is like up for it.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Cause if we've worked ages on a joke, like the, we have four of us, Paddy, Young, Vittorio and us two, we'll, we'll. If we really care about a joke, you're, you're in the room and sometimes the guest can trample it, doesn't get the right reaction and it's just.

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  You tried to get, you tried to get me to say the word men.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  Oh, fuck yeah, the barbershop quartet.

• 57:57Chris Williamson?

  That wasn't me trying to be awkward, I was just trying to.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  You're probably just really confused.

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was like, because you were waiting to.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  We had to get the joke out.

• 58:04Chris Williamson?

  Begin this thing and I didn't say the word men. I was like, well, it's guy, you know, guys, you know, it's like young dudes and you were like.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  What? It's the opposite of a one.

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it is that, it's like this, it's such a stupid show and so many, well, obviously it's a stupid show, but to make it, it's so stupid.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Because it, you know, it's part, not that I'd ever do it on TV because I don't think it would work, but the part of the reason it wouldn't work on TV is that. Um, it's just too high stakes.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:32Chris Williamson?

  It's too high risk that it's gonna.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Too high risk and it not, not just.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  It's too, too much of a noble medium compared to.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Well, it's not just that the guest might walk out, it's that really you have to get everything in one take, sort of.

• 58:43Chris Williamson?

  Have you had anyone walk out?

• 58:45Speaker 02

  M dot tried to and then there were so many cameras in the way that he couldn't get out. But then I also think he was sort of playing along.

• 58:51Chris Williamson?

  He seemed like a really good sport.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's great. I love him.

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I tell you what, he charmed us. He really charmed us. Did you do, because we were messaging about this, did you go and do some in America?

• 59:03Speaker 02

  No, so we've just come back after.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  I think you could get Brian John. I think we could easily get Brian John. Finn as well, I think Finn's character is built for America. I think Americans take themselves more seriously.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  And I just think. There's so many people that are right. Clash will be much. Do you know Aubrey Marcus, owner of Onnit? He founded Onnit with Joe Rogan.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  Recently revealed that he's in a, like a polyamorous marriage where he's having kids with both.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Christ.

• 59:31Chris Williamson?

  Partners kind of at the same time. There's, there's something there for sure. There's. Just a standard Mormon, right?

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Two family WhatsApp threads.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  I think it's all part of. Or one. Yeah, I think it's all part of one. There's just.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Can't be, can't be.

• 59:44Chris Williamson?

  Two women in it. Family unit.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  It'd be a group with different announcements.

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  Like the Slack channel would have a couple of different, yeah, different versions in the organisation.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Christ.

• 59:52Chris Williamson?

  But anyway, the earnestness thing is really cool. No, it's a really, really good point.

• 59:58Chris Williamson?

  Do I have a problem with that? I like ironic speech when it knows what it's doing. One of the problems with it only ever being irony is that you don't ever actually get to come into contact with reality or what someone thinks or what they feel about a thing. And that's kind of fine when there's a bit of self-awareness, but it feels like a lot of the stuff on the internet, if you look at most Twitter disputes, X disputes, whatever. It's someone going like, I know you are, but what am I? It's this very standoffish. It's very insincere. It's very sort of cutting and sardonic and at some point.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  I'm sorry to interrupt. I think the problem is that with that is that you separate. Although I certainly do. I mean, it's easier if you're a comic, but it's like, everything I do online. Is comedy, because it's online, it's not real life. I then have a family life and a personal life that is not, you know, I don't use Instagram like a millennial.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  You're not being ironic with your kid.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Here's me and my kids at a pumpkin patch at Halloween.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Oh, so many pumpkins. Who gives a fuck? That's not how I use it. I use it to make comedy, because I'm a comedian.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  Uh, I think that's how everyone actually treats online. It's not real. But then there are people who cross the streams, who are like comedians that then try and make actual points. Or maybe they interview like Trump genuinely.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  And it's like never clear whether it's jokey or you're just platforming a guy or, you know, that whole world.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you open for a Trump rally.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, well, what are you at this point?

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, Tony opening for Trump, it's like, well, you.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  If you're anti-Trump, that's a great place to be in as a comedian. But it's also. But if you're pro-Trump on a pro-Trump rally, then that.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  What's the point of this? You're just suddenly.

• 1:01:30Chris Williamson?

  The comedy doesn't get injected in the same way.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Certainly, I view a comedy.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  Well, that's the, I think you separate church and state. That's what I think you do.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  But also.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  You separate them.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  I do agree with you at the, you know, there's a danger with the irony and insincerity that nothing is.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Meaningful anymore.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Meaningful, but the, something is also symptomatic of that culture is I do think there's a lot of

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  bad sincerity out there. There's fake sincerity. The other side.

• 1:01:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, of course, it's performative sincerity and performative irony, right?

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Or like sincerity, it's like you don't know who you are and you're just, you're just sounding sincere. There's this, the music, let it all work out. Like there's that music playing underneath it. What you're saying is absolute bollocks. I would much rather be ironic and sarcastic if I have nothing meaningful to say in a sincere manner.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  There's also the, the, the curtains falling, right? In that people know that, you know, like a mum influencer is broadcasting her private life for followers, for money, for brand deals.

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  So how can you say that that's earnestness?

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not, it's not earnestness because you are privatized, you privatized your home life. And therefore you live in a state where you can't actually live earnestly because at any point you're thinking, well, this is a moment.

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  Always performative.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. So actually, I think. Online will always be sarcastic and ironic and dumb. And what people need to get better at doing is realising when people are real and when they're not.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  And take online less seriously.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it is.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  But I guess it is serious.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Well, that's the thing is that you know, things like Charlie Kirk and it all kind of bleeds in. Kirk was clearly doing, there was moments, things of what he said, where I think he would say it's like more of a shtick. It's rage bait. And does he end up getting killed for that? Who knows? Like, like, do you know what I mean? It's at what point did, would he separate his clips from him as a person? It all seems quite muddled.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, definitely.

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

  It's really, it's, it's something I think about a lot. And you're right, somebody that is,

• 1:03:20Chris Williamson?

  thinks they're being earnest and is just not self-aware. And that is their whole sort of persona online. Like the performance has like got inside of the person and is staring out through their eyes. And they, they haven't been able to separate out themselves from that anymore. That's cringe. That makes everybody like.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Or it's a grift or it's, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Or maybe they are aware or they're half aware or they've got whatever. But that, that is what, that's like catnip to the internet, right? Like pointing out this person who.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Snake, snake.

• 1:03:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Grifter, shill.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Peto.

• 1:03:53Chris Williamson?

  Whatever. Yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  You can do that in real life though.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. We've been doing it in real life. Peto.

• 1:03:59Chris Williamson?

  You know where nonce comes from? You know where the word nonce comes from?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Or is it not, is it, it stands like not.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  Not on.

• 1:04:05Chris Williamson?

  Normal courtyard exercise.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Prison stuff.

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  So good.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Chris Williamson?

  Uh, anyway, just, yeah, the, the earnestness, ironic speech thing is, I think it's dose dependent. It would be nice to have some people, Brian Johnson, for all that you can criticize. He, he is quite self-aware about how insane his life is. And to tweet something like, I, I can promise you I will die in the most ironic way possible.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  But that's why I'd love to have him on our show because I think actually, because people would go going, oh, it's this fucking guy. Because people judge, they hate him because it feels like he's telling them to live better. And then people always hate that. So they go, fuck this guy. And then if he could laugh at it with us, people would like, oh, fair, fair play. You know, and I think that's kind of what the show is. It's like a sense of humour test almost. Which is a very British thing. I think it's, it's a very British show.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you find the American British, British thing? Because obviously, you know, you grew up in Stockton, Britain, and I feel you.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Stockton is bad.

• 1:04:55Chris Williamson?

  Stockton's very British. It's a very Brit- it's like.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  It's the worst place I went on that tour last year.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  What was quite interesting is where you said where you lived and you, without a pause, said that's the worst place I've ever been.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  It's the worst place. Stockton.

• 1:05:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the escape velocity that you need to get out of there is quite high.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  And like the northeast.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Sydney was traumatised.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Newcastle, Northumberland's gorgeous part of the world. Stockton on Tees.

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  It's past.

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it had a.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  But you, the appeal of America, right, would be this attitude. It feels like even though you're, you're British, you are much more enamored with the American point of view.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  There's no ceiling.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Or it's the kind of, there's more sincerity in America?

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  To a degree, there's less self-awareness a lot of the time. The big thing for me is sort of enthusiasm or encouragement that I seem to thrive. Maybe it's low self-esteem. If the people around me are pretty enthused and encouraging, like, oh, I like, I can maybe go and do that thing. Like, isn't that great?

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  There's not any of that in Stockton.

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  No, whatever the opposite is, gravity's like five times heavier in Stockton than it, than it is anywhere else. So that, I know, I just like being around it. I had this debate with Piers Morgan and he said, I love when my, my friends sort of, piss-taking is sort of my favorite mode of bonding. And I'm like, yeah, I get that. And that you, every British working class guy grows up with that as like the mode of bonding between you and your friends.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Every class, I'd say.

• 1:06:15Chris Williamson?

  Ironic.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, every class.

• 1:06:16Chris Williamson?

  Ironic speech, lack of earnestness, sort of piss-taking. But after a while, if it never come, if you never come into contact with sincerity, it kind of feels a bit like, well, like where does the world exist? Is it all this like hyper world? Like what, where is something?

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  But also that, that, you know, when we go to, when I go to America, in the first day, I'm like, the, the, you know, the tipping and the service, I'm like, fuck off, they're a bit much, aren't they? Hi there, I'm gonna be your waiter, like all that. And then you get into it and you're like, this is really nice actually.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Because it's a holiday. And then I don't think I could live there.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Can live there.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Because it's too much.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  I'm cursed. I'm, yeah, I'll never not be.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  It's a sugar rush. Yeah.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  I'll never, I'll never shed my Englishness and I do think I'd find it.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  But I'm also very European. I like walking around. I can't.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  I like walking around and I like people being rude to me in shops. I just don't, you know, it feels like.

• 1:07:00Chris Williamson?

  New York might work.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Chris Williamson?

  New York's for the rude people that like walking around.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  New York feels European, the most European part of.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  The States.

• 1:07:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, I, I've enjoyed, I've enjoyed that, but you're right, it's dose dependent for America stuff. And there's a small contingent of British and Irish people in Austin. And I think that we sort of cling on to each other like life rafts.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  You must need a bit of a break, right?

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. But there's still a lot of people.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  A little bit less, a tiny bit more.

• 1:07:28Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, I think mercifully a lot of the team that I work with, they're still, I mean, British guys, like.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  Beautiful British boys. Platriots.

• 1:07:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, platriot. Uh, I wanted to, I wanted to ask you guys if you knew, I found a, I found an interesting snippet of history. Did you look at the dancing plague of 1518?

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  No, I don't, we haven't. Not yet. Not yet.

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  Can I tell you about it?

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  I'm aware of it, but, but yeah. Oh, yeah. People just couldn't stop dancing. Oh, yeah, we did talk about it, yeah.

• 1:07:53Chris Williamson?

  All right, well, maybe you did that.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  No, no, we didn't cover it properly.

• 1:07:55Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna do a bit on the dancing plague of 1518. We'll get back to talking in just a minute, but first, some things are built for summer. Sunburns, hot girl walks, your ex posting their Euro road trip, and now lemonade and salt. Uh, Element just dropped their brand new lemonade salt flavour, and it's everything that you want on a hot day. Tart, salty and stupidly refreshing. It's like a grown-up lemonade stand in a stick with actual function behind the flavour. Because, let's be real, if you're sweating through workouts, sauna sessions, or just walking to your car in July, then you are losing more than just water. Element replaces the electrolytes that your body actually needs. Sodium, potassium and magnesium with no sugar, no junk and no nonsense. I've been drinking it every single day for

• 1:08:37Chris Williamson?

  years, and in the Texas heat, this lemonade flavour in a cold glass of water is unbelievably good. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want, and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavours with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. Entire towns in Europe literally danced themselves to death, began in July in Strasbourg, when a woman named Frau Trophia stepped into the streets.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Beautiful language, beautiful people.

• 1:09:20Chris Williamson?

  Frau Trophia.

• 1:09:23Chris Williamson?

  Uh, began, uh, stepped into the street and began dancing uncontrollably. Within a week, dozens joined her and within a month, the number had grown to 400 people. Many danced for days without rest and some reportedly died from exhaustion, stroke or heart attack. Authorities were baffled, doctors ruled out supernatural causes, don't know how you do that, and blamed it on hot blood. Incredibly, they even hired musicians and built a stage, hoping that people would dance it out. That only made things worse. The cause remains a mystery, theories range from mass hysteria triggered by stress and famine to ergot poisoning, uh, but no explanation is universally accepted.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  I think it's not much to do.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  Isn't it always ergot? That's what, that's, that seems to be.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's not an egot, that's, what's an ergot?

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Ergot, no, we talked about, no, it's not, not an Emmy or Grammy and Oscar and Tony. No, it's the, it's the wheat, it's the wheat thing. When, when bread goes bad, supposedly it's, um, witch trials, witch grazers.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Because.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Moldy bread.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Moldy bread. A woman eats some moldy bread and she goes cuckoo.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  That's solved then.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  And blokes just like, oh, string her up.

• 1:10:21Chris Williamson?

  Witch.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Uh, yeah, but the dances stuff is, you know, I guess, how are you gonna get your dopamine rush? You need that somewhere.

• 1:10:30Chris Williamson?

  For a month.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  It's pre phone.

• 1:10:31Chris Williamson?

  400 people dancing for a month.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  Dancing for a month.

• 1:10:34Chris Williamson?

  It's like the worst version of the, uh, Burning Man in history. Uh, some did, many danced for days without rest and some, some reportedly died from exhaustion, stroke or heart attack.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  They could have just accidentally synthesized some kind of drug, couldn't they?

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Chris Williamson?

  And then, what, for a month, that lasts for a month?

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  They probably could just keep eating it, cause they're not aware of, you know, dosage.

• 1:10:55Chris Williamson?

  See.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  Pre dosage, isn't it?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  And also, you're a god fearing people, so, but if you get anything psychedelic, you think you're being possessed by a devil.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  We did this in the Greeks, you remember the wine, the Dionysian cult, they'd all drink wine.

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  Supposedly.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  And they, yeah, they'd, they'd eat, what's it called, the eating a goat, uh, with your bare hands, there's like a word for it. Um, we're eating an animal, tearing an animal apart.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  That was, that was wine culture, 2000 years ago. You drink a glass of wine, then you go.

• 1:11:21Chris Williamson?

  Like that bloke that you had on the show.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, Tom, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  That's where it's ended up now.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  Now it's, now it's a ponty guy walking around London going, oh, Chardonnay, like that's. That's how the story of wine has changed.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  Eating goat with your bare hand.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  To walk around.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  And that was beer culture. What I drink in a day.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  What I drink in a day.

• 1:11:39Chris Williamson?

  What I eat in a day.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  Uh, what about Darwin? You did Darwin.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of my, one of my favourites.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's great. Well, why was your favourite? Is the, the story of Darwin on the beagle, fine.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  Nah, of course.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  When we start getting into, I do think one of our best episodes is part two of that series, uh, where we look at the.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Birth of eugenics.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Basically Darwin was looking at bugs and writing it in his little notebook and everyone was like, brilliant, uh, let's rank races. This is, I love all of these theories. That's brilliant. Let's measure, uh, black people's skulls.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  And say how low their IQ is.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Phrenology was it? Physiognomy?

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  Phrenology. There's something so funny about the esteem of scientists when the science is completely wrong.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  That is.

• 1:12:20Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Hilarious.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Well, the smartest people in that age were the most racist.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  And it's been sort of flipped a little bit.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  We have a catchphrase on the podcast, which will, he's a scholar and a racist.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Because in the 19th century, it was scholarly to be racist.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  And also the idea of.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  Because of racial.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Cause racial science.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  A Victorian polymath, it will be people who have done extraordinary things in multiple fields, invented like, like the weather pain, invented like so many different forms of science history, but they also.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  So there was a man called Francis.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  It's the most racist thing you've ever read.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  Francis Galton.

• 1:12:48Chris Williamson?

  Galton.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Who, uh, in many invented the modern weather maps, meteorology, so many things, but he was also a massive eugenicist. And he literally invented the dog whistle.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  That was, we found out on the podcast and that was one of our big.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  So when you say dog whistle politics.

• 1:13:03Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  When you're talking about race, but you're using words like urban and inner city, when you're actually, what you mean is black people. And that's like a way of getting out a message.

• 1:13:10Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yeah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  That's why I call it a dog whistle, because I mean, if you're tuned to it, you can hear it.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  You can hide messages in speech that you can get away with.

• 1:13:16Chris Williamson?

  But he.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Invented the actual dog whistle.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  He invented.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  For dogs and was a eugenicist.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  But to be fair to him, he never did dog whistles, because he was just saying.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  No, he was shouting at dogs.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Chris Williamson?

  Well, you didn't need to dog whistle, so you would just.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  He was writing a book saying, you know.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  Black people are stupid. Yeah. It's not only a dog whistle. It's more calling your dog.

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  You know that Galton had.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Fenton! Fenton!

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  It's the opposite of dog whistle.

• 1:13:43Chris Williamson?

  He had a patent for how you could cut a cake so that it wouldn't go off. A circular cake.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  What, you weren't allowed to cut it like that?

• 1:13:51Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. It registered, I don't know, he'd registered it. It's in, I read an article by Adam Mastriani about Francis Galton.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Chris Williamson?

  It's fascinating. I mean, again, birthed some pretty dangerous ideas.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Scholar and racist.

• 1:14:04Chris Williamson?

  Scholar and racist. So you circular cake and you sort of cut a corridor out the middle of it and you push it together. That was apparently revolutionary in the early nineteen.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  But what, so you're always filling in the gaps?

• 1:14:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, as opposed to cutting a wedge and then how do you fill the wedge?

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:18Chris Williamson?

  It's exposed from the inside out. His, uh, his sister had some, uh, spinal problem.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:26Chris Williamson?

  So he taught her as she was laying, she would be laying facing the ceiling and he would read to her. I think she would read to him and that was, she would lay on a table and that was how they would, cause he was homeschooled. He also said in his, whatever biography or memoir, that when he started working in the doctor's office, or a pharmacist's office, that he decided he was just gonna try every, uh, different medicine from A to Z.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Chris Williamson?

  And he got to one that was, I think, C or D, I can't remember what it was that he took. And it caused him to shit himself so badly that he remembered it five decades later.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 1:14:58Chris Williamson?

  And then he stopped after that.

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  To be fair, I don't think you wanna ever be able to sort of brush off shitting yourself.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  But you remember it.

• 1:15:06Chris Williamson?

  All of them?

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  You, you don't want them to, to blur into one so much.

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  Past the point, I think.

• 1:15:10Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Past the age of, past the age of what, ten?

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think once you're an adult.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  I can remember, I can remember shitting myself.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want those to be memorable.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  You, you hold on to them, they're almost.

• 1:15:19Chris Williamson?

  They're formative.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  They're core memories.

• 1:15:20Chris Williamson?

  They're formative moments.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  You don't want it to be like, I'm shitting myself so much, I couldn't possibly.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what day it is, I just know that I've shat myself.

• 1:15:26Chris Williamson?

  Could be, could be a Tuesday.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  I remember when I didn't shit myself, that's, those are the.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  That was a memory. The day I didn't shit myself, now that's very distinct, cause normally I'm constantly covered in shit.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  But that, that episode was, there was crazy stuff, which because of, um, because of the Nazis, you can't even go back over it in the same way.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  But it's been so debunked.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  So we discovered so many things.

• 1:15:46Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  There was like, uh, because, uh, uh, of the kind of moral consensus that came after World War Two, saying that all of this stuff is.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Racial, racial science was debunked, was debunked.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Genocide.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  And the, and the Holocaust kind of was the full stop on that, where it goes, so.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  People would miss this eighty years that was leading up to that.

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  That had so much funny stuff, if you view the world like we do.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Um, but there was amazing stuff where there was like disabled people. Campaigning for themselves to be sterilised.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  Sterilised out of, yeah.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Saying, I cannot read, I shouldn't have kids in a misspelled sign.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, who wrote the sign? Well, there's an amazing photo of, of people and we don't know whether they're, they're genuinely meant to.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  They could be like.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  Table people holding the signs or they're people pretending.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Paid actors.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  False flag. False flag.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, crisis actors.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  And there was a, there was a.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're like the Sandy Hook victims.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a massive thing. What did we find out? It was like, so there's a big camp, there's in the twenties in America. America and interestingly, the America and Nazi Germany were like, they were the two people who were really going for eugenics. And, and there was a eugenics, um, office, I don't know where in America.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Race, race.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was the race for race, not like the race for life. And they were, and there was a, something about, cause in, in the build up to the thirties, like America, like Ford were, were basically militarising. Germany, like all the, the Nazi, um, industrialisation, re-industrialisation was a lot of American companies.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  And there was a, there was a fucking eugenics, this was when eugenics was a charity.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  It was like a eugenics charity in America who were writing, uh, or rather Hitler took, just copy and pasted their text and made it. Nazi policy on, uh, racial science. Um, but they influenced, uh, a lot of American states. And I think the most amount of forcible sterilisation, involuntary sterilisation, instill.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Instill.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  Call it, um, is, uh, California.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  Which coincidentally is where everyone looks the fittest.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  Quite funny. It's quite funny that the sunshine. Breeding actually was well. State was where the most selective breeding, uh, happened in America.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  There's also this amazing graph, which was, was it Victorian, uh, about the, when they were trying to categorise stupid people?

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  So you have, I think at the top, you have moron.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  Moron is the cleverest stupid person.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yes, the moron can do simple.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  This is scientific terms for what we'd now say mental health conditions. This is what the scientific term was in the nineteenth. Imbecile and stuff would be in. Morons at the top.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  You, you do moron, which I think means that you can do low thinking skills, I think is that, like low cerebral task.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Is cretin gonna be in here, I imagine.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  And then it's high grade imbecile, which means you can only do stuff with your hands. Then medium grade imbecile, low grade imbecile. And then at the bottom is idiot, which means you can't do anything.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't keep yourself alive as an idiot. That's where that word comes from.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  But I didn't realise that moron was ranked above idiot and imbecile was in between. I didn't really rank them.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  In your bio back in the day, you'd have like proud moron.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Right, okay, because you're the top of the bottom of the. Well, it's more, it's more the mental health labels nowadays. People like autistic queen or whatever.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  In nineteen ten, you'd say proud moron. You'd say imbecile ally. Whatever, you know. I'm imbecile adjacent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, medium grade imbecile. Oh my god. So how much, how much was Darwin at fault for his ideas?

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  More than we thought he was.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  Darwin's cousin. Darwin writes the book on the theory of natural selection, then there's another one. And then, but then a lot of people around him go, yeah, this explains, they bring in Malthusian concepts of like the poor and like, um. What's that thing where you?

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  I'm talking about lizards, guys. No, no, no, no.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  We get it, yeah, we get it, we get it. Chinese people are stupid. I know what you're saying. And so it's Darwin's cousin, who might actually, is Galton, maybe Galton was Darwin's cousin. I can't remember. Anyway. They take, they take the work and apply it to things like, you know, the empire, slavery, all these things are. They're trying to sort of retroactively justify things like colonisation and slavery. Imperialism. Yeah, it makes sense to them through that lens that these people are stupid because we've conquered them.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  And, and we have to paternalistically nurture them to our level of society.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  I mean Hitler's is very Darwin in the view of the world.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  And Hitler's, Hitler's the, yeah, the end point.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Natural selection, power of the will.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Hitler's the bonny blue of scientific racism. Taking it as far as it can go.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  As far as it can go. The numbers. Um, and I mean that for both. The numbers. Hmm. But like, you know, Hitler takes scientific racism to the end point and that's why there's, that's why everyone goes, well, we're not even touching this stuff. Hmm. Phrenology is debunked. All this stuff is, uh, you know, is not science.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  But we're bringing phrenology back, aren't we?

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, we are. Just because it's very funny to, to call ourselves academic.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Have you done it in the studio?

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  We're gonna start a thing where all guests are gonna get calipers out and we're gonna measure their heads. We're gonna have like a Top Gear leaderboard, so we're sort of like.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  And is it bigger head is better? No, thicker.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Thicker.

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Thicker head is better.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Bigger head's stupider.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, mentally thick. Smaller head, better.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a complicated science.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, you, you wouldn't get it.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  You wouldn't get it. You're not, you're not wearing a suit.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  You're not qualified.

• 1:20:57Chris Williamson?

  It's true.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm a shophrenologist.

• 1:20:59Chris Williamson?

  My head's too big.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  We should do branded merch, calipers.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  We should do branded calipers, yeah.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  It's a good idea.

• 1:21:06Chris Williamson?

  Do you think?

• 1:21:08Chris Williamson?

  We're about to go into a world with embryo selection for IDF.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Well, you know, yeah, it's not a million miles away from sort of, yeah, gene therapy, isn't it? And all that stuff. And is that, that's legal in the US, you can.

• 1:21:19Chris Williamson?

  Embryo selection is, embryo editing is not.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:21:22Chris Williamson?

  So you can do.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Editing means you could just be like, yeah, yeah, get rid of that. Oh, that's good. That's nice.

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  Because what about like the BRCA, the BRCA gene and all that, those genes that cause cancer? And it's a woman's thing, you wouldn't know what it is. But some women have this gene mutation called a BRCA, which means that they're very likely to get ovarian or breast cancer aged 40. And that's where it turns out most ovarian cancers from this one gene mutation that you can screen for. Supposedly you can screen for it in a, in a unborn baby or an embryo. I don't know. I don't know if that's legal or not. I don't know.

• 1:21:52Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I'm, I'm pretty sure you can screen for everything now. I mean, there's companies in America that will allow you to do a polygenic risk score. You do a little sample and then they'll say, well, here's a dashboard, 10 fertilized eggs.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Chris Williamson?

  And if you embryo one, like, wow, intelligence is high, but immune system's quite low. And autism risk's quite high. And then you go look at the second one, like, well, the intelligence is back a little bit.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  So you have like a sort of mixing board and can you, but you can't.

• 1:22:19Chris Williamson?

  You can't, that's it. So you can only choose, you can, it's like having, um, yeah, it is like Top Trumps. Well, FIFA, when you get the player stats.

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, but you can choose, you've got your, there's your harvest, there's.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Build a five side team, you know? Or you go and go, big hands. That's good.

• 1:22:37Chris Williamson?

  Literally like that.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  Big head at the back.

• 1:22:38Chris Williamson?

  But so I think what's, well, it's kind of weird about that is, um, everybody has some sort of understanding that traits are heritable, right? That's how dog breeding has occurred. That's why people have got the same eye color as their parents, et cetera. So there's some amount of heritability, but because eugenics was such bad branding for anything that was to do with behavioral genetics.

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Chris Williamson?

  That, it's like everyone's got this like. Oh, fucking hell.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  Squeamishness.

• 1:23:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's real ick, but this is gonna bring it back into front and centre, because as soon as parents realise that they can select their kids.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Don't have ugly kids. Brilliant.

• 1:23:14Chris Williamson?

  They're gonna have, they're more likely to go to Ivy League, they're more likely to do whatever.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  But what's gonna be interesting is if everyone is selected, it's gonna be like how middle-class families decorate their living room. It's gonna be a sign of taste.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Trends, yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  It's gonna be like, oh, that's embarrassing, you chose your kid to be like that. That was very trendy for the time, but now it's like.

• 1:23:32Chris Williamson?

  Gosh, it's very ghost, it's dated now.

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  It's new money, that kid.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, that's a new money, like.

• 1:23:37Chris Williamson?

  It's new genes. That's new genes, we're old genes.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  As the only parent here, the whole, the whole thing about parenthood is that you don't choose the card you're dealt. And you raise the kids, no matter what the kid is.

• 1:23:48Chris Williamson?

  You play the ball where it lies.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  You can only play the team in front of you. You're a parent to your kid, that's why you should never really take advice from any other parent, because they're dealing with another kid. And so.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  But wouldn't you say, what if you're cutting out like really severe, like the far end of it, what about cutting out severe disorders and stuff like that?

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  You can do, I guess, I guess we just where that line is.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's about finding that line.

• 1:24:06Chris Williamson?

  That's the, this is exactly.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  That's where the debate will be.

• 1:24:09Chris Williamson?

  It's the exact question, which is, okay, we say that selecting against Huntington's or like negative traits is good. But when it's just a single spectrum, the argument is it's just a single spectrum all the way up to, well, a more robust immune system means that they're gonna survive. So, and then, well, you know, intelligence is correlated with not going to jail, isn't correlated with life satisfaction.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  No, but all, all that, yeah, all that stuff, I mean, you have to have, surely it's a suffering line. Where all the, that's not predest, that's not predetermined, you can't predetermine whether someone's gonna go to jail. That's, that's, that's.

• 1:24:37Chris Williamson?

  But you can predict it, you can predict it at least a little bit, higher IQ is negatively correlated with likelihood of going to jail.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but again, that's like.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  But then there's those things, if you've got high IQ, you're being a safer, um, normally you're probably in a safer home environment, yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  I haven't, I haven't done the data.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  No, but what I mean is, I guess part of the thing about being a parent is that you just have to, you're dealing with the kid you get. And mentally, it's a much easier journey if you are like, well, this is the kid I've got, this is the kid I'm gonna.

• 1:25:08Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to, this is the kid I chose.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  That I would like to be.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Good point.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  Rather than going, well, I actually paid a sign for it.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  I should have picked differently, because the whole time, the choice paralysis you have when you're picking what your kid's gonna be, like Netflix is just too many things.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  No, exactly.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Fuck, no, I shouldn't have picked that. He's so fucking annoying.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  This is eighties China. There's no return.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, because also you probably love your kid less in many ways because the um.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  You feel like you're miss old.

• 1:25:32Chris Williamson?

  The magic.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Unrequitedness of the love for your child is this is no matter what, this is destiny, this is what's meant to happen. But if you're like, I fucked up.

• 1:25:38Chris Williamson?

  I knew I should have chosen three oh three.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's what you shout at them when you fall out with them when they're teenagers.

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, your whole point is you watch them grow and you don't have very much control over them.

• 1:25:48Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  So if you go into it thinking you have control, mentally, that is the worst place to be in when you have children is thinking you have control over it. You don't have any control. You're just trying to keep them alive.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  And and make sure that they are happy.

• 1:26:03Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  That's that's the mental, that's my advice.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  It's those.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  Surrender control.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  Because you're not in control of anything.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Chris Williamson?

  Have you found that hard?

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  No, that's great. It's liberating.

• 1:26:14Chris Williamson?

  Hands off the wheel, but you tried to take.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  Not hands off the wheel, but I'm driving the car. I just um.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  They're just shitty everywhere naked, you know, just hands off.

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  Whatever, man.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Whatever.

• 1:26:26Chris Williamson?

  It's not getting weird. You know, you're trying to drive a career forward and get the show and all of the prep and all the rest of the things that you do.

• 1:26:36Chris Williamson?

  Ring fencing that, partitioning that off and saying, oh, but I'll just, you know, hope for the best with. Finding the line, finding the line between control and not control.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  It's like at this stage, you know, they're four and two. They're like, if I'm around a lot, that's good. You know, because the alternative is to go, well, well, my career, I've, you know, but your career is a never end, like it's a never ending thing. And I don't think you look back on your life thinking, I wish I've worked more.

• 1:27:01Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  You know.

• 1:27:02Chris Williamson?

  An interesting situation that people are in now, at least some people that have the choice of whether they want to work or not work.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Chris Williamson?

  That we went very quickly from a world where the dad was five days a week up at five in the morning and then back on an evening trying to.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Chris Williamson?

  Single family income, single person income type thing to now.

• 1:27:23Chris Williamson?

  People have started to put that philosophy forward as it's self-generated. It's like, well, I'm going to push myself into my career because I want to validation, et cetera, et cetera. So, well, you've got the, there's someone who is pretty validating there, like next to you.

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  But I also think, I mean, I get a lot of these reels about like the science behind dads. But there is, there's a, there's a woman, you might have had her on, doctor, I think she's a doctor, sounds like one, who talks, says that, says that a child's mental health is linked to how available and present their dad is. Maybe it's, maybe it's girls, maybe daughter's mental health.

• 1:27:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  And I just think just being around is like, as a dad, you know, you can be, you can be hopeless, but if you're around, you're doing something.

• 1:28:07Chris Williamson?

  Do you feel like a bit of a spare part for the first few years? Like you, you're like a cheerleader from the side?

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  The first six months, you are, you are a spare part, but then you, you know, you need to prop up the wife.

• 1:28:19Chris Williamson?

  You're there as the pit crew.

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  Kind of, but also that's, I think that's something men tell themselves to, to be like, ah, I'm not really, it's not, it's not really my thing. You know, it's a, it's a defence, it's a comfort blanket, be like, oh, I don't know what I'm doing. You know, you, there's a lot you can do.

• 1:28:32Chris Williamson?

  I'm not even needed here.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  There's a lot you can do.

• 1:28:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, everything that isn't the kid.

• 1:28:35Speaker 02

  You can bottle feed the kid, like.

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  I saw a video.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  No, I couldn't bottle feed, no.

• 1:28:40Chris Williamson?

  I saw a video of a guy on a plane who must have been, maybe the wife wasn't there. He was travelling with just relative, like newborny type kid and tried to bottle feed, didn't want to, put a photo of the wife over his face.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:28:55Chris Williamson?

  And stuck the bottle through the hole in the T-shirt. Fine.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, they're idiots, you can trick them.

• 1:29:02Chris Williamson?

  Outwitted them.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:03Chris Williamson?

  Then he starts doing it without the kid and it's like, oh, you enjoyed it too much.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  Why, that's, that's a dog, that's a kid.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Badness.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, I get, I sort of, the old gene therapy thing, I think you're kind of ruining the surprise of parenthood. And I guess, you know, suffering is a legitimate debate as to how much suffering you can add out of someone. Yeah, I I just think it's it's a slippery slope because you will just start having these expectations.

• 1:29:31Chris Williamson?

  By his regret.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  That are like more foundational than your own neurosis in that you have bought and ordered your own child.

• 1:29:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  So you're gonna you're gonna go mad.

• 1:29:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you knew you should have got the new fucking Subaru in grey instead of in white or whatever.

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  When we were potty training, my daughter, because we have a dog and the dog shits outside, there was about six months my daughter would go outside to have a shit.

• 1:29:54Chris Williamson?

  What, because it learnt from the dog?

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  Because she learnt from the dog. And then you're like, well, how do I explain to a three year old that you're not a dog and the toilet is here? If I had bought a genius, I would be so livid. But because the fact that she's at least not pooing on the floor, I'm proud of her.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  I'm proud of her, you know?

• 1:30:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I uh, I don't know, maybe maybe we'll see the the new world of, I think that I should be present. Like, that's a, you know, revolutionary if you were to look back.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Fifty years.

• 1:30:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's like. I'll meet you when you're eighteen.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, mad man.

• 1:30:30Chris Williamson?

  Kind of.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  Handshaking a glass of scotch when you're eighteen, see you later, yeah.

• 1:30:33Chris Williamson?

  The Churchill thing, just going back to that, I remember I read a letter from him, he said to his father how proud he was to have finally got into this regiment.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:43Chris Williamson?

  And his dad responds with just the most fucking hurting. And it's this whole thing, like, you have, uh, cost me this much money, you have failed wanton and disrespect and all the rest of it. And then at the end of it, he signs off and he says, your mother sends her love.

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Chris Williamson?

  Fucking ruthless. Yeah, so being a rat, just being there.

• 1:31:06Speaker 02

  I think I think that does something, yeah.

• 1:31:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  Even if you're getting shouted at all the time.

• 1:31:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  Just being around.

• 1:31:12Chris Williamson?

  Gentlemen, what are you doing next? What can people expect over the next few? Well, I don't know when this is coming out. Uh, probably three weeks, something like that. Okay, so we'll be in the middle of our tour.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:23Chris Williamson?

  Which is sold out, so people can't get tickets for it anyway.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, there's stuff in the pipeline, there's lots of stuff, famous the internet, there's stuff that, there's famous history twice a week.

• 1:31:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  Uh, we're we're one of, we're. I checked this morning, we're like the 26th patron in the world.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  So join the Patreon.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Join the Patreon, join the army.

• 1:31:41Chris Williamson?

  What do you get for being in the Patreon?

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  You get a bonus episode every week, you get early access to the week's episodes, ad-free listening.

• 1:31:48Chris Williamson?

  And it's all the same, right? It's Finn vs. History and the inter-

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's several tiers, so you can pay for both shows, you can pay for just one.

• 1:31:55Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  I think the main thing people do to the Patreon is, especially with the history podcast, everyone wants the episodes immediately. Because if you just do one part, people don't like being forced to wait for the next part.

• 1:32:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  So the main thing you get is that you can get like-

• 1:32:07Chris Williamson?

  About the Prime Minister.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  If it's like two weeks, you get four immediately.

• 1:32:10Speaker 02

  They're like Labradors, they just don't stop eating.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  You just eat 10 hours of Hostel in a day.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're throwing up everywhere, bloated, it's, yeah.

• 1:32:19Chris Williamson?

  No, it's also, I really, I think that what you guys are doing is super cool.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  Thanks, man.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us on.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  No, my pleasure, my pleasure. Until next time, boys. Thanks, Chris.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Cheers.

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

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