Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 406 - Project Habakkuk ft. Josh Boerman

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

PREORDER JOE'S NEW BOOK https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GSG5CNXX?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tkin_0&storeType=ebooks&qid=1773423127&sr=8-3 SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys CHECK OUT THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS: https://www.worstpossible.world/ Josh Boerman, of the Worst of All Possible Worlds and Ill Conceived, joins Joe in the studio to talk about the time that an absolute madman attempted to build the largest aircraft carrier in the world out of ice. sources: Perutz, M. F. "A Description of the Iceberg Aircraft Carrier and the Bearing of the Mechanical Properties of Frozen Wood Pulp upon Some Problems of Glacier Flow". The Journal of Glaciology. Lutz, Stephen. Project Habakkuk’s Iceberg Aircraft Carrier. WWII History. Vol 10, No. 8 Hemming, Henry. Churchill's Iceman: The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy. Gold, L W. The Canadian Habbakuk Project: a Project of the National Research Council of Canada. Cambridge, UK Cross, L D. Habbakuk: A Secret Ship Made of Ice.

The Highlands Burn. My debut fantasy novel releases May 19th and is now available for digital pre-order. You can find the link in the show notes wherever it is you're listening to this. Just like this show, this book is a completely independent production. To the crack of rifles in the acrid stench of sorcery, a sudden invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation. Inside its peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amid the smoking ruins of all that he held. dear, Sia must make a choice. Is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him worth becoming one himself? As escape pushes him to the gruff embrace of the foundling brigade,

he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibilities of his soldier's life. Even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible cost of his oath, before long the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems as clear as day. And Syatt finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict that he could possibly imagine. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early.

Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hey everybody and welcome to the Lions led by Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire world. I'm Joe and with me live in the Dutch studio here. This is so austere, man. I'm just like looking around,

you have really tapped into the spirit of Dutch austerity with this studio. That's right. Josh Borman, Howdy. Host of Worstful Possible Worlds and Ill Conceived. I think it was Tom that said I have created the studio version of the peak male living space. Mm-hmm. Because the way I look at it, right.

Yeah. As you've seen in my home. Since it's all rentals, I don't like maybe it's the an American like germ I have in my brain like well I don't own it why am I going to decorate it sure I mean I will say your home at least has the woman's touch

yeah this not at all I'll have you know I bought this actually I didn't Nate bought this carpet from eBay so really brought their whole room together it's time the rug is really tying the room together you got that going for you for sure so you've done a Dutch birthright

and you're in the Netherlands I made it I finally made it to the motherland after 34 years on this earth, just before, on the eve of my 35th birthday, I finally made it back to the motherland. Yeah, people don't know this, but like if Dutch people don't make it back to the Netherlands before the 35th birthday, they'll just turn into a block of like cheese. That's right. Yeah. How you like in the Netherlands so far?

I mean, I feel like I haven't really gotten a taste for it all that much because it's mostly just been us hanging out, but we biked over to the studio, so I got to do a little bit proper cycling. And when we were going through downtown the Hague and I was like looking around on the main street, it was like, oh my God, this is, so that's why Holland, Michigan looks like that. They literally like just took the standard Dutch high street and set that shit up in Michigan too. Yeah, the only difference between Holland, Michigan and the city that we're currently in is we have a really good kebab place and Holland Michigan certainly does not. No, I don't think so. Pretty good little chocolate store there, though.

I don't remember what it's called, but, and I was telling you as well, no longer will they have the focus on the family bookstore in downtown Holland. By the grace of God, that will be going under within the next three months. That makes me so happy. Yeah, me too. I wonder what's going to replace it. That's a great question. Like a normal bookstore, perhaps? Maybe it's finally time for me to return to my homeland and set up a bookstore of my own.

Yeah. I will never fucking do that. You will not catch my ass moving to Holland. No, I could see myself maybe moving back to Michigan for some reason, but never Holland, Michigan. No, God, no. It's a cursed place. You don't want to be there. This is officially the Michigan podcast. Well, it was the last time I was on, too. We just kind of talked about Detroit for like 15 minutes. So this time around, we're talking about the west side of the state.

Yeah, the state that have the least experience in other than like the UP, the Upper Peninsula for people who aren't from Michigan. Yes, De Upe. Yeah, West Michigan is, I wouldn't say that's hill. The Hitler particles in Michigan are out in the booties. Yeah. It's where the Jesus particles are. They're the same particles most of the time. Sometimes there's a fair bit of overlap, Jesus and Hitler, but... I'm trying to think of how much time I've spent in Western Michigan.

I think it's got to be like not that much of trouble. Okay, first of all, it's called West Michigan, not Western Michigan. What are my cousins with the university there? Well, Western Michigan is a university. If you're saying Western Michigan, you're talking about the fucking Broncos. Yeah. But if we're talking about the area, it's West Michigan. I'm like 50%

she may have gone to Central I might be all fucked up here Well Central's not in West Michigan at all No Central Michigan No Go Chippewas or whatever

Yeah I think that the Chippewas They are Yeah They probably shouldn't be No they are They almost certainly shouldn't be Just like In like

non offensive reasons But Michigan State should also Not be the Spartans What are the Spartans Have anything to do At the state of Michigan Neither do Wolverines technically

There are no Wolverines In Michigan No they're not No I think they're more of a Wisconsin thing No you got to go further north.

Oh, okay. Maybe we just wanted to be Canada a little bit more. I think so. I don't know. Actually, we are talking about Canada's today in a very interesting way. Wow. So pretty much Michigan. It almost works.

Yeah. Josh, you're American. So that means you love aircraft carriers, right? Absolutely. We all know them. We love them. And as Americans, we've all collectively decided that we'd rather have more than them than anyone else in the world instead of having any government-funded services whatsoever.

Yeah, of course. And we haven't really talked about aircraft carriers very. much on the show. Mostly because there's only a few cases of them being show worthy, being like, you know, fucked up or badly designed because there's not that many of them in the world. They're a prestige item in the modern day. How many do we have now? Like 15 or something? At least a dozen. Yeah.

Obviously, like, the caveat to that being the Kuznetsov, which is one of my favorite bad ships ever constructed. And, you know, obviously there's a lot of stuff involving carriers in World War II. And we will talk about those at some point. most of those generally have to be a series. But the good news is if I want to keep my job, I eventually have to talk about everything that's ever happened in history until I die. Okay. So we'll get there at some point. So when are we doing the episode on the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? Is my question. I feel like I need to tangentially connect that to the military somehow, and I probably can. Yeah, was Gordon Lightfoot like in the Army or something? I feel like the captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald probably was.

Well, there we go. I'll see what I can do. All right. Everybody from the Midwest that's currently listening is started shaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. I love that lake they call get your goomey. But today's topic is different. Today is more of a story of a madman than an aircraft carrier. But it's a madman with a dream.

Oh. A very stupid dream. A dream that was, what if we could build one of the largest man-made things ever out of ice? Okay. already seeing a few issues with this idea, but go off. This is because we're talking about Project Habakkuk during World War II. Okay. Under-remembered book of the Bible, for sure.

That is how it was named. And fun facts, the guy who came up with that, the man behind the ice monster, Jeffrey Pike, he couldn't necessarily figure out how to spell Habakkuk. All of his notes spelled it differently. He just did his best. That will be the least weirdest thing that he does, is not be able to spell. So Jeffrey Nathaniel Pike. was born in London on November 9th, 1893 to an Orthodox Jewish family.

His family was decently well off. His father was a lawyer working for both the government and public sector, wearing the dual hats of, you know, Admiralty Law and divorce court, which is normally you only get into Admiralty Law once you've already traveled through divorce court. You know what I mean? But that isn't the weirdest part about his family, though. Jeff's cousin, Magnus, very normal name for a British man to have,

would eventually go on to be in the Thomas Dolby song. She Blinded Me with Science. No way. Yeah. So somehow that's connected to this episode. He's the guy who goes, science. Yes. That's incredible.

That isn't important, but when you come across the detail like that, you kind of have to bring it out. Yeah. Maybe I'll see if I can do, she blinded me with science at karaoke later tonight. There you go. But that life of upper middle class,

comfort, you know, the family that would probably own at least one golden retriever would vanish when Jeff was five years old because his dad died. This old breadwinner, his mother was left to handle everything else and the pressures of sudden poverty, grief,

and she always had something of an underlying mental illness that nobody could entirely, I mean, think of the era we're talking about here, probably just called it hysteria. This all got rapidly amplified. She would talk to herself, claim to see ghosts,

and fly into what were simply called the bouts of rage, and savagely beat the shit up for kids. Oh, geez. Yeah. Not a great house that grew up in. And Jeff publicly and openly declared to his family one day at dinner that he was an avowed atheist now, which is generally a bit of a taboo in any hardline religious family, like the Orthodox Jewish people or evangelical Americans or Mormons.

I was going to say I love that he's doing like the Reddit edge lord thing of being like, I've got some news for you. God? Turns out he's not real. deal with it. Puts out his Trilby hat and walks out. I guess a Trilby would actually have been in style for him, whichever. And it did not take long for word of his newfound atheism to travel around their Orthodox neighborhood, which leads to pretty severe levels of bullying from his neighbors.

And if that wasn't rough enough, his mother packs him away to attend what was called the Wellington School. It's a classic British boarding school. Okay. And all of the abuse that comes with it. But when she sends him away, he's given strict instructions that he must maintain his traditional orthodox clothing while in boarding school. At British boarding school? Yeah.

Good luck. Yeah. This leads to even more bullying. This goes on for two years before he pretty much has a mental breakdown in school and he's allowed to come back home to finish at a normal school. Then he graduates and he goes to law school at Pembroke. But it's now 1914. And we all know what that means. The whole of Europe explodes

thanks to a bunch of inbred guys beef and overturf. Unlike a lot of other men his age, though, he doesn't go running towards a recruitment office looking for adventure and daring dude or any of that shit. Rather, he gets a job with The Daily Chronicle, wanting to become a war correspondent. In an era where that meant, you know, a little bit more than it does today,

and by that, I mean a YouTuber buying a ticket to document human misery with the mandatory accompanying AI-generated thumbnail for ad revenue. Yeah, yeah. I saw five war crimes. and you won't believe what happened next. Don't forget to partner with Kalshi to bet on which one of them I saw.

That's right. I was writing this at home as my YouTube page came up and that is a shot literally fired at one very specific YouTuber who I won't name. Like the front line is horrific and he's literally doing the like

both hands on side of face AI like blackened makeup to look like soot or maybe he's just Dutch. He's got like, you know, a Photoshopped helmet on, and like he's very obviously like A-Ied himself in front of like a Ukrainian trench line. I like, you're fucking horrible. Yeah. I hate this so much.

Now, what happens next is kind of up for debate, but Pike really wanted to be sent to Berlin to report on the war, to which his daily chronicle bosses said absolutely fucking not. The German empire had almost no press freedom before the war, thanks to some laws from the late 1800s. For example, editors, journalists, whoever, were liable to be prosecuted for their work, depending on the subject. And there was a government office in charge of being notified before publication, and that was subject to approval. That was before the war started. But when the war started, the office of censorship was given to the military, which is never a good sign. The Chronicle News sending some idiot over there was effectively sending his death warrant because he would almost certainly be arrested as a spy. Sure.

But Jeff was not a man to take no for an answer. So at the age of 21, he becomes a foreign correspondent for The Chronicle and manages to get his way into an assignment in Denmark. There, he meets an American merchant Marine and simply purchases his passport from him. Oh, yeah. You could just do that back then. Yeah. Like, there was no security for a passport. It was a little more than a piece of paper.

It kind of reminds me of another famous Jeff, Jeffrey Epstein, and his fake Austrian passport. Did you see that shit? No, I didn't. Yeah, yeah, it turns out that that was one of the things that they found when they raided his, I want to say the house in Palm Beach, or maybe it was the one in New Mexico. But yeah, he was like traveling around under an assumed name using a fake Austrian passport. Jesus. This worked because America wasn't in World War I yet. They were a neutral nation. So they technically could travel to Germany. And again, it's not like anybody's looking at these things very hard. He gets over the border. And once there, he wanted to go around. talk to everyday Germans and see how they honestly felt about the war. Fun fact, Jeff did not speak German. This is reminding me of the one that we talked about with the guy on the boat who didn't speak any Korean, but nevertheless sailed up into Korea.

Yep. Yeah, it was a Christian missionary. And he thought because he spoke very, very bad Chinese, it would be good enough. I don't think there's a better way to make people more nervous. than go around in a country with strict, you know, restrictions on their freedom during a war and ask them in very broken German. It's like a checklist of, yes, I am a spy. Right. You know what I mean?

He did this for six days until someone finally called the police. He was arrested with copious amounts of notes detailing his interviews, all in English. And might remember, he's British. Yeah. Britain is at war with Germany. Right. So he's quickly chucked into solitary confinement. been investigated for espionage.

Conditions in this person camp were, surprise, not great. Because nothing good comes to mind when you think of German prison camp, whether it be imperial or otherwise. He nearly dies from a combination of double pneumonia and food poisoning. But he recovers, and eventually

he's led out of solitary confinement. He's allowed to go meet other prisoners and socialize. Before long, he begins making friends. And this is about the only time in his life where Jeff makes any friends at all. Is in prison? Yeah, that goes to show like the kind of friendships

you make in hardship. Yeah. It's like when I was in the military, I hated 99% the people I was around but I hung out with them all the time. Right. Because like, well,

I can't, I don't have a choice in the matter. I have to be friends with you. You know, maybe our other Jeff, Mr. Epstein, could have learned a thing or two by making some friends in jail. Maybe that would have kept him

from, you know, killing himself. I'm doing air quotes. You can't hear them, but Joe can see them. Yeah, this really would have been solved through the power of friendship like most Japanese RPGs. Jeffrey Epstein and the power of friendship is going to be the name of my new provocative

punk band. Jeff and a few others began to plot their escape and began to like prepare themselves for what they thought was going to be like an obstacle core slash foot race out of the camp. Like there's barbed wire and stuff. They thought they're going to have to outrun guards. So they begin doing cardio and working out, right? Instead, when the time came to break out of the camp, they pretty much just walked out with no issues whatsoever. It's July of 1915, and now once out of the camp, they get on a train to Berlin.

And once there, they buy some street clothes, they get as much food as they can, and they begin hiking towards the Dutch border, because the Dutch are neutral in World War I. Like in most neutral countries, things were quite complicated at the time for the Netherlands. Dutch society politically could go either way. And weirdly, a lot of this had to do with leftover tensions from the Boer War between the Dutch and the British. Oh, my war. Yeah, yeah, that's right. The Boer Man War. The Josh Borman War.

Yeah. So, like, you know, obviously Dutch Calvinist spirit at the time was certainly a lot stronger than it is today. Right. And culturally, they believe that the people in the Orange Free State and other seller groups in South Africa were very culturally Dutch. and they saw that the British going to war against their cousins in a way, despite the fact that Dutch did not help them. Right. I'm just having a thought now.

Do you think that maybe if Donald Trump were to repatriate some more of those boars to Holland, Michigan, they might be able to keep the focus on the family bookstore open? If anything, it's going to create a new kind of breakthrough racism against white Afrikaners. Because I don't know if you've ever met many of them. I try not to. They're not nice people. I mean, I've heard this. I've heard this by reputation.

I haven't met one yet. And I hope to never meet one, to be clear. There is a South African grocery store down the street from the studio that Tom and I discovered. It's ran by like a young black lady. And we went in there looking around. We just wanted snacks. We didn't even know it was a South African grocery store. There's not even a sign outside of it, right?

It very much has like the vibe of like a British off license where it's a whole bunch of shit that's falling off the back of the shelf. And me and Tom were in there. And the lady asked like, oh. Are you guys from South Africa? Because she didn't hear his talk of them. And we're like, no, God, no. No, God, no. And she literally looked us dead in the eye.

She's like, oh, thank God. Those guys are all cunts. And then she's like, and now for some stuff that fell off the back of the truck, I've got a six pack of Fago Moon messed. That's how she gets me to work for the store. Of course. Like, things were complicated in the Netherlands at the time. Like, the Dutch queen was very pro-British, very pro-Beldrum.

But her husband, Prince Consort, Henri, was German. openly pro-German politically, and members of his family fought in the German Imperial Army. So it was thought that was like, you know, rather than like really, really poke in this too hard, let's just stay out of it. But the Dutch Army stayed mobilized throughout the entire war. They built defenses along the border, trenches, fighting positions, barbed wire, all that stuff, assuming that the war could and almost certainly would spill over at any moment. And that's where Jeff and his friends were walking into.

All of which had been churned into mud because it's literally, any time of the year in the Netherlands and it never stopped fucking raining here unless apparently if you come to visit. Yeah, it's beautiful today. It's like 65 and sunny out there.

I can't believe it. This is not happened in months. That's lovely. Somehow the two men manage just just walk past German border guards and stumble upon a lone soldier and promptly started explaining to them in very bad German.

Oh, you know, we just escaped from a German POW camp like blah, blah, blah, blah. And the soldier had to slow them down and point out of like, I'm done. like, I'm Dutch, you're three miles over the Dutch border. Also, please don't tell my boss, I'm so bad at my job that you made it this far. So they made it to freedom. And from there, Jeff becomes something of a journalism darling, because he's the first British guy to get into and out of Germany during

the war. Oh, sure. The Chronicle offered him huge amounts of money to write about everything that had happened. However, he just turned it down. Really? Why? He lost interest in being a reporter. But like, why would you not just write it to get the bag, you know? I don't know. Huh. That's one thing that's going to be weird here is that Jeff does become incredibly rich later in in life, mostly through crimes, but we'll get there. He doesn't really seem to be a very apt businessman, though.

Sure. At no point of his life. And since legally the British considered him a prisoner of war, a former prisoner of war, it means he could not be conscripted. So he was scot-free out of the war effort. And this is where things get kind of strange. And somehow our shows end up connected via Jeff. Oh.

After the war, he gets married to a woman named Margaret Chubb. Are you familiar with Margaret Chubb? No, but I'm rotating her in mine and she's giving me one. So she was one of the founders of family planning within the UK and one of the founders of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Okay, so it's her and Sanger basically. Pretty much. Okay. And due to the era we're talking about-

She's a eugenicist? Yeah, yeah. It comes with a lot of the baggage that early family planning at. Chubb seems to not be as bad as her peers when it comes to that. However, she mostly believed in family planning for married people. Okay. Because non-married people, obviously, they just shouldn't have sex. Right.

That's a sin. Okay. Jeff also starts coming up with his own model of economics and stock training, which really boils down. You know who else did that? Jeffrey Epstein Well and much like the other Jeff This Jeff does mostly crimes That make him fantastically wealthy

His new form of economics Really just boil down to a combination Of insider training, money laundering And pump a dump scheme Much like Jeffrey Epstein Despite pretty much everyone Telling him what he was doing Was at best unethical

And at worst illegal He manages to finaggle his way Into becoming one of the world's largest traders In tin within a matter of years Wow. He has so much money, he does not know what to do with it. He builds a school, though he does not run it. He leaves it to his wife.

And this is specifically a school made for infants run under the philosophy of John Dewey, who, to make a very long story short, believed in the concepts of democracy in all things, including education. Which there's some arguments I believe could be made for that with adults, university education, stuff like that. But we're talking about literally infants. Oh, so you wouldn't send your kid to baby school? Well, when they're that younger, really doesn't matter. They're not learning anything. They're mostly just learning how to socialize.

I would say is, I'm not someone who has children. So I don't feel comfortable saying what children should be doing at that age. And I taught high schoolers when I was a teacher. Oh, fun fact about John Dewey. You know where he went? The University of Michigan. Yeah. See, this is why you go to Michigan State.

John Dewey's philosophy has, I think, a lot of good things behind it. but in the context of using it for infants and child development, we know nowadays that that is real bad. They believe that there should only be a teacher to answer questions that children might have, and children innately can educate themselves with loose guidance. This is exactly like those weird unschooling TikTok parents. Yes, well, so this was ringing a bell because I just remembered,

I'm pretty sure John Dewey's name came up when we talked a little bit about homeschooling. ill-conceived. Yeah. That a lot of these people draw back to these ideas which just haven't really been born out in the world

of actual honest-to-goodness learning theory. Yeah. In the modern era, I see mostly these, they call it unschooling now. Yes. Because, of course,

there has to be a new word for it. And they use a lot of the John Dewey's stuff of like, well, you know, kids will innately educate themselves and when they're curious about something, they'll ask you. Right.

And then you teach them under their own parameters. as it's like, okay, but they're five years old. Right. They have not been taught what parameters of education are. Right. And, you know, there are countless examples of these kids being functionally illiterate. I was going to say, this is a great, great way to make sure that your kids can't read and can't do math.

Yes. Yeah, that's exactly what that is. Yeah. These people are insane. So it kind of goes without saying that thanks for the time we're talking about here from, you know, World War I into the 20s and then into, the 30s. Jeff eventually goes completely bankrupt thanks to the stock market crash and resulting great depression.

Should have charged more tuition at baby school. Yeah. The babies can only pay him so much. They didn't think to ask their parents for more money. His wife also leaves him, though never legally divorces. No, he's entirely sure why she left him other than

Jeff's not doing so hot mentally. He completely withdraws from public life, effectively becoming a hermit, and only really surviving things to donations from some of his friends who pool their money to pay a woman to come over once every couple of weeks to drop off food. Oh, wow.

He stopped bathing or taking care of himself or shaving. Okay, that's relatable, if I'm being honest. He lives in this weird little house in Surrey, and it eventually looks like something straight out of the TLC show, hoarders. Yeah. Because she's not taking the trash away, because he won't let her. Oh, okay. Yeah. So this is from the article,

Project Habakkuk, the iceberg aircraft carrier, which is a sentence I've just had to say. He, quote, acquired many bumps and bruises from running into his furniture and tripping over piles of trash. So he's just like wilding out inside of his weird hovel full of garbage and beating himself up. He lives in almost complete and total isolation other than that woman coming by to feed him until the mid-1930s. So it's for years. A lot of people just think he died. He's not working. He's not doing anything, all of his friends are keeping him alive by making sure this woman feeds him and paying his rent. He also has another

problem and had been there his entire life but now it's really spinning into overdrive because that does tend to happen if you go through a crisis. Hypergraphia that is the compulsive need to be writing something at all times. Jeff has it to a nearly crippling

degree. It's too bad he didn't use that as an opportunity to work on his book but I suppose by then the opportunity had already come and gone right. Who wants to read a World War I memoir in 1930, whatever. It'll be like 10,000 pages long because he never stops writing. His editor is going to commit suicide. So he's wallowing in filth in a pile of his own doodles and writings, right?

Like some people have said like literally knee deep in random bits of paper. Oh, geez. Then the Spanish Civil War starts. And suddenly he appears back into public life, writing for the first time in years in support of the Republicans, brackets, the good ones. But he wasn't actually going out there. He was still doing all of this from his... He wasn't leaving his house.

Yeah, okay. He hadn't quite overcome quite a bit of gorophobia that he required. He did a lot of things in support of the war effort, like trying to organize to raise money. But most importantly for the context of purpose of today, he kind of became a DIY inventor, something he had no education. Remember, he went to law school and was a journalist.

But he just starts inventing random shit to help the war effort. Was any of it useful? Surprisingly, yes. He jotted down plans to create a heated border motorcycle side car to deliver hot meals to the front line. Okay. By rerouting the motorcycles exhaust into the side car itself. Oh.

So it will certainly make the food warm and give it a very interesting additional flavor. Yeah, no kidding. There was also a critical short of fumes. Tastes like Harley. He also came up because there was a big shortage of medical supplies for the Republican cause, namely like cotton. So he came up with a way to get around that by. Why don't you just use like moss and sew it into like muslin wrappings and made thousands of them?

And it works. I mean, is it the most sterile thing on earth? It's better than nothing. Right. By 1939 and before World War II kicks off, he thought it would be important to understand once again what the common German person, the, you know, the German people were thinking about the Nazis. To do that, he decided he should conduct an opinion poll of the German public with a team of spies that he was. would train himself, disguised as a group of what else, but a Turing group of golfers. Yes.

Yes. Now, this is some LLPD shit right here. Let's go. This is the kind of ideas that you could only think of if you're in the fucking garbage house all by yourself. Looking like a chaos hobbit. I mean, in fairness, this isn't not what the live golf tour is. Yeah, RIP, Jeffrey Pike, you would have loved Saudi Arabian funding. He would infiltrate Nazi Germany without ever consulting the British government.

And then his idea was to take the completed opinion poll, present it personally to Adolf Hitler, who, of course, after seeing the true opinions of his people, would see the heirs of his ways. Fuck yes, dude. I had never really thought about it that way before. I didn't know what I was doing was so harmful. I'm so sorry. Oh, Jews aren't the problem. problem? What? I don't believe this. Is this opinion pull true? Yes, mine, pure. I have miscalibrated

everything. Oh, no. This is like how the West Wing would defeat fascism. Yes. Oh my God. Yes. Aaron Sorkin-ass idea. That's so funny. And this sounds like a plane that would absolutely never get off the ground. Like, it sounds like an idea that he would write on one of his manic pieces of paper and never touch. Incidentally, also how Aaron Sorkin writes his material. Manic piece of paper, also semi-decent band name. But this actually worked. Well, Hitler never got his homework, but you know what I mean? He went around and found 10 golfers that were totally okay with this idea. Again, only some spoke German most badly and got them into Frankfurt for multiple days before the British foreign office got wind of what he was doing and told them all to

go the fuck home. How much of the actual poll were they able to complete? Do you know? They did interview several dozen people. Really? Yeah. And Jeff, despite being Jeff,

he was smart enough to not like keep their information. Uh-huh. He's like, you, I've done this once before and ended up in prison and they took my notes. Yeah.

Don't write it down, guys. Yeah. Don't write down their addresses and names of who talked to us. So I guess, you know, good obsec to Jeff. Yeah. Do you know what the actual result?

were from the poll? Were they on board with Hitler or? Unknown. Okay. Since Jeff kind of dropped the idea, I feel like the opinion poll didn't go the way he thought it was. That's kind of my thought too.

Yeah. Because it turns out quite a bit of the German population on board with Nazism. Yeah, they really started turning against it when the sky started to fall. But also remember, these are in 1939, like getting still good then.

You know, that would change quite rapidly. And once the war starts, Jeff turns back to his inventions, pitching ideas to the British government. like hundreds of them. And they're almost all shot down. That was until October of 1941

when Louis Mountbatten took over as chief of combined operations. Mountbatten is a lot of things. A pedophile is one. A guy who the IRA blew into a million little pieces of two. Wait, sorry, a pedophile named Mountbatten? Where have I heard this one before?

Couldn't happen twice. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Just for the protection of our production staff. Mountain Batten, he's also a man who is woefully unqualified for his job. But he was also a guy who just kind of accepted any crazy idea someone pitched to him in the hopes that it might work.

He was fully in the camp of throw enough shit to the wall, see what sticks. So when Jeff pitched the idea for a small purpose-built vehicle with screws for tracks that move over frozen ground, rather than like the traditional tracks of a tank, with the main idea behind it being because of the changing ideas of warfare, we need special vehicles to get over special terrain. And he's not wrong. Mountbatten and Winston Churchill both loved it, though eventually due to manufacturing purposes,

the project was kicked over to the United States to work on, and Jeff traveled to the U.S. to help. The Americans hated Jeff immediately. He hadn't changed much. He still never bathed, cut his hair, or shaved. They called him, quote, repulsive and, quote, incredibly offensive. And if anybody had any questions about his design or ideas behind it, he would just launch into a rage, screaming and swearing and throwing things.

He was eventually kicked out of the United States. Oh, wow. And the U.S. just kept working without him. Through this, the U.S. produced the M26 Weasel, which, you know, despite being born of Jeff's plans, like they drop the screws for tracks for a special kind of rubberized track. And they never used it in the snow. But it was really good for getting over muddy terrain, especially in France. Like, the vehicle works.

So Mountbatten's weird friendship kind of with the strange man was only like reinforced because his idea worked. By the way, I did just search for M26 Weasel on Duck. Go Go images. And I don't know why this showed up, but I'm going to show this to you right now. That's just the weasel in the snow. That's lovely. It says weasels in Michigan. And I felt it was very important to show you this adorable little white weasel in Michigan. That's way nicer than the actual vehicle.

I love Weasels in Michigan. after this Mount Bent seemed to be just about the only guy in Earth who could put up with Jeff other people even people who respected his ideas

just fucking hated him because he was you know he's surrounded by a cloud of dust like pig pen he's constantly generating meaningless paperwork because he's always writing

always right right and had a tendency to fly into fits of rage for no reason whatsoever he was impossible to work with but Mount Benton loved him because I guess when you're an absolute freak

game recognized game and Jeff seeing a guy who would actually pay attention to him. Send Mountbant a never-ending diluge of memos, most of which were hundreds of pages long. These were inventions, ideas, but most of them were just streams

of consciousness nonsense until he got to where he was getting. But they were whole novels each time, like 200, 300 pages. I mean, I guess this doesn't really surprise me given what the mental condition was that he was in. It must have been really frustrating, though, because, like, you know that this guy

occasionally has a good idea, but it's like, how the hell? It's like, got to be like finding a needle in a haystack with this. Like... Yeah. And Mountain Badden had like two or three AIDS work on just sifting through his paperwork. Sure. Until he's like, did he get to the idea yet?

Okay, let me see it. One of these memos ran for over 200 pages and concluded with Jeff pitching a new construction material he called Pichrete. He named after himself, of course. Pichreate was in essence ice reinforced with pulped wood. It was 85% water, 15% wood pulp. Which could be poured into any shape and frozen. With the wood adding insulation, strength, and then, like, it could be reinforced with bits of steel.

But the vast majority of it is literally just ice and wood. But Jeff didn't invent Pichre. That was mostly thanks to the work of Austrian molecular biologist Max Perouse and Herman Franz Mark, who specialized in polymers. Peru's left school with Mark being his professor. He ends up linking up with Jeff. They work together in the basement of a meatpacking plant surrounded by an extra layer of frozen carcasses. to make sure the room stayed cold enough to make the pie greet, Jeff then became a tireless champion of this stuff

who couldn't stop writing literally thousands of pages about it to Mountbatten. Peruse wasn't much of a pitch guy. He left all of that to Jeff. So Jeff is just cranking out endless amounts of paperwork and mailing it all as soon as he's done to the government. You know who else would hear one idea and then immediately recycle it in their brain

and spit it back out over and over again in constant applications? What's that? Jeffrey Epstein. also coming up with constant stupid ideas to send to a man named Mountbatten. Yeah, yeah. History. It rhymes.

It's now late 1942 and things are really not going well for the British, right? U-boats are making the constant stream of allied shipping that was going to prop up the home islands, like massive losses as the convoy system continued to struggle to be bored and work. Churchill was suitably desperate. For example, he had heard a pitch of a different guy who wanted to ground down icebergs and the landing strips for planes. Another.

That's awesome. Yeah, it's like pure super villain hours. We want to put a cannon on the iceberg. Yeah. Other people circulated the ideas of man-made floating islands going back to the 1930s. But virtually all these were rejected outright for being just ridiculous, right? But that's when Jeff pitched the idea of like, well, we have Pyecrete. You need boats.

Why don't we build a boat out of Pye Crete? Virtually any material needed to build boats was in short supply. Steel, you know, all the things that come with it. but water and wood, easy to source. So he sent the idea to Mountbatten, who of course thought it was brilliant. I can see one issue already, right? Which is what happens if it melts?

That will become a problem. Oh, okay. Big issues. Once water gets above the freezing point, even with insulation, eventually it's going to start melting. Pichreid is remarkably good at holding its shape in warm water,

warmer above freezing anyway, but there's other issues that play. Mountbatten then had to be. convinced Churchill. So in order to do so, he took a block of Pichre, filled the Prime Minister's tub up with hot water, and dropped the block inside to show that it wouldn't melt. And it lasted unchanged for hours. So of course, Churchill loves this shit, and he creates the Project Habakkuk committee out of a collection of naval officers, scientists, engineers, all to decide what exactly should this be made? Like, what should we build at the end? Is it,

are we building an ice battleship? Are we building a aircraft carrier transport ships, what are we doing? Real missed opportunity to call it the project have a committee. Got to give him another chance. So it's eventually decided that an aircraft carrier would be made on the Pye Creek. The name of the project itself was pitched by Jeff, of course, naming after the Bible verse, which, as I said, he repeatedly misspelled. In fairness, it is not the easiest to spell off the top of my head.

H-A-B-A. Is it K-K-U-K-K-K? Or is it K-U-K-K. I can't actually remember it. I'm pretty good at spelling. K-K-U-K. Okay. From what, everything that I've seen,

There's only one B, right? Yeah. Okay. I think. Are you, see this? Okay. Not so easy. Credit to Jeff.

Credit to Jeff. There were a lot of questions left unanswered. As you can imagine, I'm talking about building an aircraft carrier out of ice and wood chips. For example, how are we going to power it? How are we going to control it? How would the crew survive living inside this thing? Churchill left all that up to the committee and Greenlit a prototype for them to just try to work things out. And then the project was moved to Lake Patricia, Alberta, Canada.

obvious reasons, right? It's cold famously in Canada. Also, it's a little bit safer. Nobody's bombing Canada. There's not going to be that many spies tooling around. And most importantly, they can facilitate American assistance with the plan because they want Americans to be involved. But that brings us to a problem.

The Americans hate Jeff. Right. They hate him so much. The Brits become legitimately worried that if they know that Jeff's working on the program, they just won't help. So they keep his ass in the UK. And another, like the team of scientists, Perrudes and another one, J.D. Bernal. They just kind of only work with him via correspondence.

But he wrote so much that he quickly overwhelms the local post office. And they just stopped taking his mail after a while. Oh, wow. At first was the prototype. This is something that was actually built. 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, 20 feet high, and weigh 1,000 tons. It is not small. That's a serious ship.

Yeah. And the team using that would have to figure out a cooling system to obviously keep it cold on the inside, how to power it, how to control it, and fire live munitions at it to see what would happen. Sure. Mountbatten, it turned out, wanted to figure out that last part about live munitions himself in the funniest way possible. In 1943, while the planning for D-Day is going on, he takes a block of ice and a block of Piscrete into a meeting with a gathering of general officers to show off his pet project. He puts a two blocks on the ground, unholsters his sidearm and just starts shooting at them. Yes. Yes.

The ice block, of course, shatters, but the bullet bounces off the Pichre. Goes straight through a guy's pants and, like, blast, like, little piece of Pyecrete out and showers them all shrapnel. I'm just picturing the scene from Robocop. Yeah. You know, where they get just ethered by the... It's such a great idea that someone almost got, like, kneecap via ricochet from the ice block. impressed by all this U.S. Army Air Force chief, Hap Arnold, then decides like,

well, it can't be that tough. He takes a hatchet from nearby and begins just hacking at it so hard he dislocates his shoulders. Sweet. Fucking brilliant. These people are so stupid. You're telling him his man's name was Hap? That is correct.

Nice. Back with the prototype, things were not going great. One of the big reasons for this was the actual construction work that was being done was being done by a group of guys who had never built a ship before out of a material that nobody ever used to build anything out of.

The labor itself was, well, effectively, slave labor. Work crews were made up of conscience and subjectors were forced to work as a form of service because they wouldn't serve in the military.

And they were never told what they were building. It's like, yeah, just keep pouring all this water and wood chips together. Don't ask with too many questions. So I guess my question is just thinking about

the way that shipbuilding works, obviously, normally the way that it is, you know, you're hammering out pieces of wood, fiberglass, whatever, you're fixing them together. What does the construction process look like for this? Is it kind of like woodworking except it's this ice wood, basically? I think, yeah, I mean, it can be cut with like a wood saw, like a band saw, like Mythbusters. I don't know if you've ever watched MythBusters, attempted to do stuff with Pycrete. Oh no, I haven't watched that. They could just use a woodsaw. Sure. Okay. But it looks more like building a building than building a ship because they're making big blocks of

Pycrete and then just kind of stacking them together. As they were working, and before they'd figured out just about anything else, Churchill ordered them to move forward with building the actual aircraft carrier, planning and building it, like ironing out the actual details of how big this thing is going to be, when we can start working on it. And we want it done in a fucking year, from conception to completion, one year. And never have they built something like this before, but it's like, you're going to get it done in a year, good luck.

Yep. Okay. Let me guess. this didn't work out the way they'd plant. It's probably for the best that didn't. The problem was the prototype was not a success. Sure. As the prototype grew, engineers ran into a little problem that we've already touched on.

This concept known as cold flow or creep. And that is the idea that solid materials, when put under continued stress, slowly start to deform. Right. This is not a new scientific idea or anything, but certainly the properties of cold flow or creep on ice under load like this has never been studied before. So the ice ship began deforming under the weight of itself, but also melting. And they weren't sure how to fix that. And meanwhile, Churchill was like, okay, but you know, just build it bigger. So they figured that, okay, if we are going to build this thing, it needs to be reinforced. What do we reinforce things with? It's a ship, so we use steel. Sure. And insulation.

But they would need literally tons more of it to keep the ice ship's shape. That's hard to say. Soon the budget of the overall prototype went from 700,000 pounds to several million. But people still love the idea. People in the committee, along with Mountbatten and Churchill, consider this prototype to be a proof of concept. So they went on to finish Churchill's request, planning the Habuk aircraft carrier. This is not something Peru's, Bernal, or Jeff had ever made plans for. And instead, this would be more of like a planning by committee, which as we know, always works out great. Always.

The first demand was for the ship to be torpedo and bomb proof. Then the request was that, well, if the carrier is going to be big, we wanted to be big enough to launch heavy bombers, which is not something that any aircraft carrier could do back then. They not only needed to be able to take off, but also land. It also need to be able to withstand the heaviest seas on Earth and the North Sea. And soon the Royal Navy was going to try to figure out of control something that would be this big, right?

I also should just say, I was curious and I love. looked up what Pye Crete looks like. Yeah. It looks like MDF. And it probably, I would imagine, resembles MDF in terms of how it works as well, because it's the same thing, right? It's wood chips and a bonding agent.

Yeah. It's just that you're using ice as the bonding agent rather than, you know, glue. And it's majority ice. Right. Yeah. And, you know, the idea is like, the bonding agent, if it's not bonding correctly,

just let more of water on there. It'll freeze. Sure. Yeah. By the time the committee was done, yes, anding their way into an aircraft carrier design, Project Habakkuk had become a monstrosity, the likes of which the world has never seen before or since or ever. This is just impossible. So following the various demands they were given, the Navy, the Air Force, and Naval Engineers, Project Habakkuk would require the following. And I'm going

to use as a comparison the current largest aircraft carrier in the world, which is the USS Gerald Ford. So the Habakkuk would require a 2,000 foot runway because the bombers, for a comparison sake, that is double the size of the Gerald Ford. That's 50 feet wider than the Ford. They require a draft or the distance between the waterline and its lowest point of 150 feet. Yeah, I was wondering about the draft. The Gerald Ford's draft, 40 feet. Yeah. Because that was my thought was, if you're talking about something that is largely made of ice, it needs to be really deep underneath.

Yeah, it's quite literally, it's going to, they're going to have to conclude. instruct an iceberg with people inside. The top of the ship is the tip of the iceberg, actually. It would carry 200 planes and all of the crews, the pilots, and supplies would require. So the record for the most planes ever carried by any aircraft carrier ever is 137. And that was during World War II. The proposed ship would need to have a range of 7,000 miles at a full speed of 8 miles per hour and would require due to those various dimensions and the mathematics that play,

conservatively the smallest rudder that they could have in order to control was 100 feet tall. Holy shit. And mind you, they have no idea how to power this thing. Well, that was my other question is the propulsion, right? How? How? How? The only way was using the current aircraft carrier power plants with a single propeller. It was the best thing they had come up with. This thing would not move. No. Never in a million fucking years. This ship would have been massive. 40 foot thick blocks of pipe. With the idea would make it completely impervious to every weapon system on Earth

minus like a nuke being dropped directly on top of it. Why don't they just build the whole plane out of the black box type thinking, right?

Come on. I will say this is probably true. This probably would have been impervious to every weapon design.

There would be a frame holding it together and made it out of steel, but the majority of the ship was pite with the idea

that the ship would be able to fix itself. It was damaged in combat, slather some Pyacrete mix over the top.

But because this thing is made of ice would also need to stay cool and it would require the largest refrigeration system that had ever been conceived by man at this point to run through the entire ship. And as for the comfort of the men inside, they didn't really come up with a fix for that.

No, I can't imagine. No, good luck, bud. The entire thing, when complete, would weigh a minimum of 2.2 million tons. What is the tonnage of an aircraft carrier normally? The Gerald Ford weighs 100,000 tons. The Habakkuk... That's awesome.

Yeah, it is cartoonish. The Habakkuk would not only be the heaviest ship ever built, to this day, by several degrees. It would be one of, if not the heaviest, man-made object ever created. Yeah, so they're wanting to basically build the tower of Babel here. Out of ice. Out of ice. This is sort of, again, thinking, like, how heavy is the... Empire State Building, right? These are the kinds of comparables that we're working. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

The heaviest thing I found to compare it to was a very specific offshore oil rig. Okay. This is still much, much heavier. You said it was 2.2 million tons, right? Yeah. So the Empire State Building, only 365,000 tons. Yep. This is the kind of shit we're dealing with here. And by the time the design by committee was done and the cost of the prototype was tabulated, peruse, Burnall and everyone else involved in the project, other than Jeff, of course. Of course. Came to the conclusion that, you know what, boys? I feel like this shit is impossible.

Jeff, meanwhile, it's going to work. Just trust me. Have you read my notes? If you haven't, great news. I can spit out another 300 pages for you real quick. Jeff, we've been meaning to talk to you about that. Please stop sending us notes. Most of the Piedcrete is now just made out of your notes.

Due to the cost of the entire project, because remember the whole idea, behind a Pai Crete ship was you can make it out of resources you're not otherwise using and therefore it is cheap. But due to all the additional steel that this thing would need, all the insulation, all the extra stuff that it would need to make it even work on their like drawing, the cost would cost more in cash and steel than the entire Royal Navy combined and with an equal size fleet of conventional aircraft carriers altogether. Okay, but in fairness, right? It's way cooler. It's way cooler. And how would you know this for sure until you built it?

Am I right? Yeah. If you built the giant supervillain ice aircraft carrier, I mean, I feel like you get to rule the world. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. That's the final dungeon of many an RPG. Yeah. Churchill still love the plan, though.

He's like, no, this is fucking nuts. I want one. Give me the ice fortress. Yeah. Give me the British Forer. Porteous of Solitude. And the designers and everything were a little bit worried knowing Winston Churchill's personality that if they just told him that, sir, this is literally impossible for man to build,

it would only make him double down. And this is a classic thing when you're dealing with dumb, powerful guys. Yeah. Where you just have to, you have to figure out exactly how to present the thing. And you can't really give them reality. You have to find a way to appeal to their ego. and I'm assuming that's what they did. They kind of talked around him

until like the date passed for when he wanted the aircraft carrier done and they had done nothing but the prototype and as the price kept going up they finally like, hey, if you look over here, you see now, Mr. Churchill, we can actually build normal aircraft carriers for like way cheaper than we used to be able to

thanks to like all the American supplies and using their shipyards and whatnot. So like we really don't need like the flat nose geyser fortress of solitude in Canada. and we can just not do that. And so finally he killed it. In December of 1943, the project was officially killed

and the prototype was abandoned in the lake where its steel skeleton can still be seen today. Really? Yep. So if you go to that lake in Canada, you can see the guts of Project Habakkuk. Oh, that's actually kind of cool. If I ever find myself in Alberta

for some unfortunate reason, maybe I'll go check it out. Yeah, go to an Alberta independent. rally and go check out the dead iceberg ship. Peruse would go on to win a Nobel Prize for something entirely unrelated. All of the actual scientists involved in this program

incredibly accomplished. But then there's Jeff. Well, Jeff would continue being Jeff. In the aftermath of World War II, he pitched a solution to a chronic energy shortage that Europe was having due to reconstruction, war damages,

things like that. And he did Jeff arithmetic, let's call it. He's like, You know what Europe does have, a lot of sugar and a lot of people. So when you eat sugar, you get full of energy. That's true. Why don't we feed people sugar? Okay. And then tie them to railroad cars and they can power our trains.

Okay. You lost me on the last bit. I was so on board right up until the end. Why don't you harness the six-year-old energy after eating too many candy bars and have them pull trains. People really didn't like this idea on the kind of like human powered vehicles and just being ridiculous.

He also worked on other ideas. One was there's like an offloading system for ships and trains that involved pipes feeding supplies through the pipes. Occasionally those pipes would get fucked up and you have to send workers down them and those humans would have to be inside these pipes for a very long period of time.

And they often dealt with claustrophobia. He decided that you know we should fix this way. give them all barbiturates Okay, so what I'm hearing here is that all of this guy's plans other than the ice aircraft carrier just involved drugs of some sort or chemicals, I guess I should say.

We should just get gacked out of our mind and solve all these problems. I mean, I guess he's not wrong. That's true, you'll probably be less claustrophobic if you're on barbiturates. It's just like... There are the other, you know, effects. I'm more surprised.

he fell on sugar to pull train? Because like, you know, a lot of militaries were using meth in World War II. Yeah. Like, do a lot of meth and pull trains. It'll be the only train that starts from the station by the time it gets to the end, all the copper is gone. I mean, at that point,

I mean, at that point, still, like, Coke was largely available as a pharmaceutical, right? Like... I mean, anything's available. They're manufacturing shit left, right, and center. And there's plenty of experienced meth heads in Germany that survived the war. Like, sugar, come on, my guy. can do better than that.

That's like just being an edgy industrialist, but also Mormon. Whatever do something dangerous, like sugar. As you can imagine, none of his post-war ideas got a lot of traction. He stays in his house in Surrey and just kind of further descends into madness and isolation. And wouldn't you know it, a crippling addiction to barbiturates. Of course. Which it might be where his idea comes from. It wouldn't surprise me.

And it's just, this is also where it's really kind of a bummer, right? because obviously a lot of this stuff is just objectively funny, but there's also the question of, oh, like, this is a man who is not well. He's very much unwell. And it's really a bummer that they weren't able to find a way to help him, you know? But it is like the 50s at this point, the 40s. Right. It's still like the mid to late 40s.

Their idea of like taking care of some with mental health issues is like, have we tried electrifying him? Yeah. Or we put him in the association. asylum. But that's kind of what I mean, right? Put him in the warehouse to die or do we run strong amounts of current through his system or give you barbiturates? Or just scoop out part of your brain. Yeah. One would just stick this ice pick in there and swizzle it around a bit. Right. No good options here. Again, he has enough money to have someone

to continue to combine and give him food. But one day eventually he saves his entire body balled with a straight razor. Oh dear. It's like that scene from the pink Floyd's the wall. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He, uh, yeah. There's something. really gross going on here. And then he takes hundreds of barbiturate pills and dies. Oh, God. His home was found overflowing with mad scribblings of all kinds

and it took a team of people several days that cleaned it all out. And that is the story of how a madman teamed up with a pedophile to convince Winston Churchill to build the dumbest ship of all time. The end. The story of Mountbatten and Jeff. Yeah, thankfully that story

will never happen again. We'll have to ask the alive one how he feels about barbiturates. I love Jeff as a character. Yeah. Because this is the last real war where this kind of guy could flourish. And, you know, like... Well, and I know how much you love that kind of guy on this show specifically. Yeah.

Military history in general, but also military history, just replete with this type of guy. Yeah. A madman with an idea that just has to convince like two people tops and suddenly his millions of pounds at his disposal. Right. and an entire team of Nobel Prize winning, like, physicists and shit, who all have to listen to him scream and yell and draw things on the wall. But, I mean, you think about, too, this period of history and how everything sort of was all to play for.

And, like, what is the fundamental difference between, you know, an ice aircraft carrier and splitting the atom? You know what I mean? Like, at the end of the day, there was no idea too ridiculous and too out there because we were still figuring out very fundamental things about what could or could not be done given the physical limitations of the planet itself.

I mean, I fully believe if there was like a Canadian Manhattan project to build a giant ice aircraft barrier. They figured out eventually. They would pull it off. I mean, if you employed thousands of people like the Manhattan Project did in infinity dollars, you could do it.

And arguably, just like the Manhattan Project at the day, should you have done that? Probably not. Probably not. I feel like it's less of a, sin against man and God to build a giant ice sculpture. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

So what I'm saying is we should have given Jeff Pike all of Oppenheimer's money. Definitely. Yeah. The world would be a better place. It's really hard to oppress that many people with a ice aircraft carrier powered by a tiny little engine that could have to go like one mile per hour. That has to sit in a lake in Canada. Yeah.

But that is the story of Project Habukukuk. Like I said, MythBusters did an episode on this and they fucked around with Pye Crete. And they kind of came to the same conclusion to like, sure, it works. But like- But why? Why? Josh, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. Yes. If you like to ask us questions, support the show on Patreon.

You can ask us in our Patreon DMs. You can ask us in our Discord where you will also have access to as a Patreon supporter. Or you can build a ship out of Pye Crete and sail it across the Atlantic to the shore. of the Netherlands and I will answer it on the show. Today's question is I feel like this is a great one to have you on here for. What is a piece of media you recently consumed that you really enjoyed? Normally we end up talking about shit that we hate whenever we talk about media on the show. All right.

Well, I will admit that this is being a little bit cheeky for reasons that will become clear in a moment. But the answer is Claire Obscure Expedition 33. Yeah, 100%. I've been talking about how much I love that game on this show. for several months now. To the point that, and I think I went into this on a lines led by robot show,

but it's kind of fucked up video games for me for a while. Yeah. Like, I haven't been playing anything since then. It's one of those things. For me, it's like my game

that I will never shut the fuck up about is Deus X. Yeah. Because that game came out in 2000 and it has still ruined all other video games for me. Where, I mean,

it's certainly not the narrative tour force that Expedition 33 is, but mechanically, that game still has yet to be matched in terms of just the sheer amount of things that you are able to do in the world. And I feel like for Expedition

33, that's the case with the narrative. It is hard for me to imagine a game narrative that works as well as Expedition 33. And even the mechanics are really good. They're really cool. Obviously, everybody knows I love turn-based combat, but even that can be done wrong. You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah. Like a good example of turn-based combat kind of done wrong is another game I love narratively of Lost Odyssey where there's a lot of good things you could say about that game

but like it's battle system it's shit from a butt but if I'm going to talk about a piece of media that I recently consumed that I have loved I guess I could say the expanse again

I finished all the books a short time ago and since then it's been kind of hard to get me to glom onto a new book that I've liked nearly a much

kind of like Exhibition 33 did it kind of ruin books for me for a little bit because you know it's so many books long, you get so entrenched with the characters, and now it's all over. But I tried to read like five or six other books and nothing was fucking sticking. So I went back to read something written by one of the two people who write The Expans, because S.A. Corey is a pen name of two different guys, Daniel Abraham's, the Coin and Dagger

series. Fucking incredible. It's scratching the itch. You can definitely tell that he is doing a I'll say a fair amount of heavy lifting on the expanse because you can get a lot of that flavor of his world building and his character definitely his fucking characters, sure, in a dagger and coin. Really liking it. I think it's five books long.

I'm on book two. So unfortunately I'll probably be out of those in like, let's say three months. I'll be fucked again. I'll be right back at square one. But yeah, I'm really liking that. Cool. Video games, I got nothing, man.

Ever since 33, I literally have not played another game to completion. I'm trying to break it. I got a little handheld for emulating. In case the cops are listening, emulating legally of games I already know. That's right. Legal backups that you yourself pulled off of the...

Right, because that's what the thing everybody emulates for. That's right. We all do it. And I've been playing a lot of older PS2 games, like the old Sweetodins are really good, the older Tales games. I think I'm probably going to play Xeno Gears here again because that shit's just like

Evangelion in the 90s JRP. But we'll see if I break out of my funk when it comes to video games. I might just have to retire my PS5 after 33. I don't know. So I've been playing also a little bit of this game called Skin Deep. Have you heard of this one? I haven't.

It is a immersive sim, basically, where you are running around this. Like, it is your mission to go on to various spacecraft and free cats that have been imprisoned there. Okay. And it's very goofy. The game's sense of humor is, it's either going to hit for you or it's not. For me personally, I just find it very. fun. So I would say that's, I haven't finished it yet, but it is a good time. I will also say while I was in London, I went to the bridge theater production of Into the Woods, which is a musical

that I would not say is one of my favorites, but it is one that I appreciate a lot. And I had a pretty good time with that production as well. I went with Devin who, Devin of podcasting fame, you know, Kill James Bond. The only Devin. And they were also telling me they've been on a Dostoevsky kick lately, reading Brothers Karamazov again. And apparently that's a real banger of a book, too. If you're into Dostoevsky, more power to you. That's all I'll say. You know, it's funny because, like, obviously, famed theater guy.

Yeah. I have to admit the last time I went and saw a play, I went to a theater and a musical was Fun Home. Yeah. Where did you see Fun Home? Austin, Texas. And it was really good. It's a good musical.

I think that was the musical that got me to be like, yeah, these are actually pretty good. Because like, this might surprise you, Josh, dear listeners, not much of a theater guy. What? But, you know, occasionally, I feel like that's like, you know, I did drama in high school because I kind of had to. But for someone who doesn't, like, have an in in the, like,

the medium, you kind of need something to get you in. And that definitely did that for me. It's like, recently, like, I watched The Expans, the TV show with our producer, Ani, who is not really into science fiction. And she liked it almost as much as I did, which I was inexperienced. Like, you just kind of need to give someone an in somewhere,

and that was my in for musicals. Well, and I mean, Joe, and I want you to understand that I don't mean this as an insult. You are at the end of the day kind of a theater kid, even if you don't want to admit it. I'm fine with that. Like, no title could offend me. I mean, the gusto with which you deliver

the lines of cloud strife. I think I was listening to Worstful POS Worlds, like, year-in-review episode that you guys got. And I don't know why it didn't dawn on me that are, clips from the episode that I was on was going to be on there. Oh, yeah. And I normally listened to podcasts while either commuting on my bicycle or doing cardio in the gym.

And I was on the stairmaster listening to the part of us coming up and you were playing the part of Barrett and it cut into like, when you're walking, make sure to hit up. upper down. And the fact that you're like, your tenor never changed to the Barrett voice, I fucking lost it.

Because that's exactly how it is in the game, you know? I'm just trying to deliver verisimilitude to the source text. I fucking lost it to the point that people were staring at me. I had to stop the stairmaster

and like climb off because I almost fell. That makes me very happy to hear. The only other time a podcast has done that to me was also your podcast when during the episode of, moneyball with the whole bit of Mr. Met finding out his wife was cheating on it. Thank you. I wrote that.

So I'm very happy that you enjoyed, enjoyed the writing there. And that was my friend Ben who played Mr. Met. It was fucking incredible. Wonderful performance from him, I thought. Now that I've been gushing over your podcast, why don't you plug your podcast? Why have you? Why you set me up so nicely? Thank you.

Uh, yeah. Well, first of all, uh, I must say thanks again for having me on a blast as always. I co-host a podcast called the worst of all possible worlds. and we talk about media and pop culture. We do, as our tagline puts it, case studies in the pop culture of a dying empire. So what we're trying to do every week is look at a different piece of media

and see the way that the narratives in that piece of media sort of reflect or subvert the decline of our world at large. We talk about video games, we talk about movies, we talk about TV shows, we talk about Christian children's radio drama.

And, of course, we have had all three of the co-hosts of this very show on our show. Most recently, we had Tom on to talk about said Christian Children's Radio Drama, Adventures and Odyssey, but of course, we also had you on Joe talk about Final Fantasy 7, which is a very good two-parter. And by the time you are listening to this, I think our two-parter on Claire Obscure Expedition 33 with Joe Kasabian will be available in its entirety. So something to look at. I'm really happy that when I was either when I was playing the game or after I beat it, I texted you. And I said, you have to do an episode on Expedition 33.

And I don't think you'd played it yet. And I think I just sent 10 unbroken text messages without response to you about how much I liked this game. That sounds right. I think you bombarded me. This is one way to successfully sell me on doing something. It's just bombard me into submission. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it works with me most of the time. Yeah. You can take the boy out of Michigan, but you can't take the Michigan out of the boy, you know. Love to get love bombed by Expedition 33. Absolutely. And I love to get love bombed by my good friend, Joe Casabian. But yeah, please go check that out if it sounds like it's up your alley, because, again, we haven't even recorded the Expedition 33 episode yet, but I know that it's going to be good. And I know that you, dear listener, are going to enjoy it. It's mostly what we've been talking about since you've been at my house. Pretty much, yeah. I should also say I co-host another show called Ill-Conceived. And we talk about natalism, which is the ideology and project that sees declining birth rates as the most important issue facing the world today. Every other week we just talk about like a different figure or a different organization

that's kind of trying to advance these narratives. We're trying to unpack what it is that they really are getting at. And it might not surprise you to learn that a lot of it just comes down to racism and patriarchal control. So if listening to something that's a little bit more expressly politically oriented is relevant to your interest. Check it out. I will say the format of that show is a bit more similar to this show where one of us will lead and the other will just kind of like put in observations and bits and jokes. So, you know, hopefully a pretty comfortable off-ramp from this show. Again, ill-conceived is the name of that show. The worst of all possible worlds is the name of the other show. You can also follow me around on social media at bosh.wstpossible.world on blue sky or just my website,

Joshborm.com, where I post whatever it is that I'm. up to. And this is the only show that I got to plug and you're already listening to it. So thanks for that. Consider supporting us on Patreon for years and years and years bonus content. Side series. Discord access. Every regular episode early. First, divs on live show tickets and merch. And possibly a big garbage bag full of Jeffrey Pike scribbles. Until next time, take a whole bunch of sugar. Pull the train with your teeth.