Painkiller Already - PKN 593

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

P.K.N. 593. How are you guys doing? Doing solid. You sound better. You were sick the other day. I am sick right now, but I'm faking it. I just took a Motrin, too Sudafed, and washed it down with cough syrup. Oh my. That's my, uh, it sucks. Are you throwing up or is it like a regular flu? Ah, it's just, it's not. It's a wet cough, respiratory. I'm coughing a lot, which means I'm not sleeping well. And I'll be fine. I don't want to be a baby about it. Yeah, my girlfriend has the same shit. It's real frustrating. It's like, get over it.

I'm like, get over it, you big baby. They love that. It throws not that sore. Are you, it's not strap. So you're not like, that's good. No, it's not strip. It's just a cold that's hanging on for too long. It sucks.

That's nice. Everybody's talking about an influenza strain that's been going, going around that's super virulent but you know it's it's over in five days six days something like that also my cardio is terrible I like run up the stairs and want to lay down and rest like my cardio is not so hot in the first place like I'll have to carry a dog somewhere and be like god damn I am wiped out from the tiniest thing well but you say the tiniest thing but you carrying those dogs is sisyphian like that's that's so much especially when like I know that feeling where like your nose isn't working at all and so you have to mouth breathe

but also there's like a partial phlegm blockage in the throat and so even the mouth breathing you're like like sucking air and it doesn't work right I wonder if what is in your lungs it's not ariola that's on your boobs cilia I wonder if they're less productive when there's like mucus on them or something like if they just transfer oxygen less efficiently but yeah and And my dog grows so, like, you carry him up the stairs. You're like, did you get bigger on the trip? I think you got bigger on the trip. 13 steps, a lot of time for a great day.

Anyway, I'm fussing. I'm fine. That sucks. I mean, cold and flus no fun, but I find myself when I haven't had a flu or strep in a long time, I start to allow those two to meld together where I'm like, oh, strep throat. That's kind of like the flu. And then when you get strep again, you're like, this is how much worse than a flu? It's just horrible.

I remember my little brother. They're both bad. They're bad once. That like he had to miss like a whole week of school. He couldn't swallow. And so he had a cup of spit on his bedside table because it hurt so much to swallow the spit. He was like, just like spitting his. I've been so disgustingly mucusy where I'm like hacking up like green chunky stuff.

Like the mucus has chunks in it. I've never had that. Like if you were to bite it, it's like the bad. It's like, oh, that's like the. some gristle in a steak. So I'm just like creating this cup of the most putrid flim you can imagine. It's like something at a Warhammer. I don't know if you noticed, Scott.

We've done the show together for well over a decade now. That was the first time ever that I've had a gag response to saying something. We get the cup. You really, you really sure. That like got me. I hit me too. I wonder how many listeners are like, fast forwarding right now.

Oh, hell yeah, baby. And Woody's sick, a little empathy, please. Right? He had sick to his stomach. That's true. Yeah, I mean, if I'm in for the flu, I would almost prefer the stomach flu. I know I've said it before, but like, lose me six months. Vomiting is the worst.

Diarrhea, it's just like, again, it's again. You get raw. I get some Vaseline back there if you have to. I'll pucker up, but vomiting and an incessant cough, like, what he seems to have will give you a headache after a day of coughing you coughed yourself into this really terrible headache um i hate all that but that last thing i had came with chills and uh and nights and sweats yeah you had the flu that was that's almost scary because that that you know that the inflammation has gotten to that part of your brain that controls those two things

and it's just back and forth back and forth it's it's i i hate that i end up sweating the bed which is always gross. That is the worst, where you wake up and, you know, it's even worse than that is you are sick, you sweat while you're sleeping, you get up to, like, pee in the middle of the night, and you're freezing, and then you come back and you flip the pillow over it and you go back to bed, you sweat through that side of the pillow, and then you get up to pee or whatever later, just because you're feeling terrible, and now both sides of your pillow are, like, cold and wet. I'm a pillow flipper.

I wish that that thing had like a little digital readout about how many times I flip it per night, no less than 15 times constantly constantly so you're up at night flipping your pillow like you're not getting like as I'm laying on it I like like every like every few minutes of consciousness flip it again flip it again flip it again I don't even you're not doing it throughout the night where you wake up to a flip and go back to sleep I'm constantly flipping if I'm just laying on it like trying to go to sleep I might flip it five six times it's it's a really good gel pillow or something and it's so stiff that you can can flip it with one hand, and the underside is always so cold, and I love it. It's my favorite

thing in the world. So it's already a gel pillow? I thought the selling point on those is that they never got hot. No, they always stay cold. It's always a chilly, chilly pillow. So you're flipping it like out of instinct, even though it's still a little cool. Oh, I'm warming it up. I'm warming it up. You're warming up the pillow that's not supposed to warm up, right? I mean, I don't think they're like warm up proof or anything. I never thought we got that from the advertising, but they do get colder than normal pillows and I like them a lot. But yeah, I flip that thing all night. I'm glad I'm not sick. He looks awful. You look fine. You look like you're all better. Thank you. I'm, I just showered and faking it, putting on a brave face for the show.

This is your Normandy. This is like when FDR stood up out of the chair to inspire his men. that was a scary it's impossible we don't have enough fuel and he shakily stands through his polio anything is possible and shut your mind to it and he's like like collapses it back into the chair

that was a real like did inspire me yeah everybody was like holy shit they hadn't seen the old man stand up in like five years or something that is kind of neat they kept it under wraps for a while they were like don't let people know he's crippled

let him think he's like all lazy. He plays tennis a lot. He's got a lot of ankle problems. Did you see they found wreckage of one of the ships we blew up? Which one, when? I don't know exactly what.

Oh, you mean the Caribbean? The Venezuelan ships? Yeah. Oh, okay. It washed up on the shore. The first physical evidence washed up on the shore. No fentanyl, no cocaine. It was marijuana.

Well, we don't want their shitty Venezuelan weed anyway. We don't. This is why we have a legal process. This is why, like, you collect evidence, have a trial before you just capital punishment. I don't think they were, so they're saying they were sending huge amounts of marijuana to Florida, or through an intermediary into Florida, I guess. No, you think it was headed to America. Apparently where it was going, they go to Europe after that.

They were sending marijuana to, it's just not about drugs. No. No, it's mostly about him trying to get Maduro-en-posed. I wish instead of invading Iraq and killing a million people and spend a trillion dollars, we had just blown up some speedboats for a few weeks. Oh, Kyle, you're out of date. You didn't see the new study. It was $8 trillion. There's no way it was $8 trillion. You're right. Our economy isn't entirely fraud-based.

I've been trying to get all that. All I'm saying is at a Brown University. Look, I hate a lot of the things that Trump's doing. And, man, his makeup looks bad these days. and it was embarrassing that he's naming him stuff. It shows a sort of, it makes him look small. He thinks it makes him look big, but it makes him look so small that he actually cares to like, he's tried to put himself on coinage.

He's renamed the Kennedy Center. He's got that, he's going to go on boats. He named the fighter after himself, on and on with this stuff. It makes him look small. But I'm fine with him blowing up the boats in the Caribbean, if I'm being honest.

I'm not. I'm not. I don't like to. He's lying us into a war. When Clinton did the air support in Yugoslavia, Kosovo, yeah, same place. Then I don't know if it was just Kosovo. It was like what, Croatia, Kosovo in Serbia. So when he did the Yugoslavian sort of air support thing, he said, we're doing this for these reasons. And those were the actual reasons. When Obama, his take was, look, I don't think the Iraq is war is the good one. I think the Afghanistan war is the good one and we're going to double down there was he right no was he lying also no those were his

moves but w he goes to war he says it's about 9-11 and weapons of mass destruction and that was a lie trump he goes to war and he says it's about fentanyl that was the original line that it was about fentanyl coming from venezuel and i'm like stop lying us into wars stop it yeah down i don't think he was lying i think he's wrong i think he was misled Like, like, because what, what came out was that, was there was the whole, I mean, that whole thing about the CIA and, and the intelligence agencies literally lying in the yellow cake uranium and all that stuff. Like they, whoever did it put enough evidence in front of, but it was the DOD, the Office of Special Plans headed by Richard Feath, or was the CIA, Paul, Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, a number of like pro-Israel people. Yeah, who put false information. There was that administration.

There was just lies. If there was evidence, then there would have been a crime. There were inspectors going from site to site, and they never found anything. And they dismissed them as bureaucrats. That was the slur they used. These are just bureaucrats looking for weapons of mass destruction. Bureaucrats can never find weapons because they're bureaucrats, of course. So we're going to go to war.

And we're going to spend possibly $8 trillion on this. war and it was all bullshit. If you're going to kill one person, you need to have pretty good evidence that that person deserves to die. I'm not against capital punishment, but I'm not a big fan of just lying your way into it. And here we are. Yeah. It's called lying war is just constant. The really good movie with Adam Driver called The Report and it's all about that. Don't go by movies. Go by like actually what happened. It's not a fabrication. Who is in the who was in the DOD in 1996 that wrote the clean break memo in the Office of Special Plans, and then that was laundered as misinformation into the Bush administration, which encouraged them into those words.

Like, it's, this is all about the, this is more about the 9-11 detention interrogation program, but the beginning of it has a lot to do with how the war began. And there was a, you know, they had a, they had witnesses and that, that then disappeared. These, these informants who were claiming, um, it was the, it was. the yellow cake uranium and the aluminum pipes or whatever that were being moved through like Africa or something to the same way they were like hey Bashar al-Assad in Syria we're doing a UN inspection next week to look for chemical weapons and then Bashar al-Assad the democratically elected leader of Syria was like okay and then they came in and apparently

at the same time Bashar al-Assad was like muha ha ha I shout gas people in a non-strategically important location while the inspectors are here and then the Western media ran with that and was like look guys people are sad like they're crying don't you want to invade again don't you want to have more war and it's like no that was that was fibbery that was not true he was not gassing his own people for no strategic gain people tend not to do that

everyone's still like okay with World War II because we weren't lied into it but I kind of remember Pearl Harbor being a real thing what am I missing Pearl Harbor, they knew it was coming, and they allowed to have defunment. Okay. I've heard that before. I don't know what's true, but we antagonized Japan into attacking us in many ways, too, by a big part of why they, like, upped their game into Indonesia and Manchuria was because we cut off their oil supply, because we didn't like their imperialistic ways, which is, you know, horse before the chicken and the egg, I suppose, a little bit, but we definitely antagonize them quite a bit. and it's interesting about Pearl Harbor

that all of our good boats weren't parked there that day just all of our old junk you know and all the kids not of the carriers were there enough to counterpoint he's right no carriers were there that's all of our new stuff was surprisingly gone

yeah they sunk so we lost like battleships that at the time were the way people did war like aircraft carriers became a new idea out of necessity but I don't You guys know more about World War II than me. It was the thing. It was going to be the thing going forward anyway.

Although Japan had sunk a ton of money into these two enormous battleships called the Yamoto. And I don't remember the other one's names. But they talked about how much manpower, material, and time, one of these two battleships. And I think they got one kill the whole war or something like that. Like they sunk one thing. They had gear fear. It was, they didn't, they had diverse. They put their money in their own place.

Like you said, aircraft carriers became the new way to fight. Definitely in the Pacific it was, you know, and the island hopping strategy. But there are stories about the U.S. ignoring early radar reports and signaling intelligence that were suggesting that Japan was coming to do a first strike. And that is their way of war. Every war that Japan's ever gotten into in the modern era has begun with a sneak attack. They snuck back to Russians, they snuck back to the Chinese. they're sneaky

which is exactly how you would want to begin a war although that's not what we do we give you a fucking week or two we talk about it on CNN before we start it would be like sometime between Wednesday and Friday there will be a shock in awe and then sure enough we do it yeah and then it's like well at this point

maybe it'll be in awe like the shock and all was for real I remember that shock and awe the first couple days and literally being in high school and watching that on TV with our in shop

and being like holy fuck because it was just like that building and then that building and then that building and then this building and you were watching them go off like firecrackers and the anti-aircraft fire was going and the sirens were going and then all of a sudden the power goes off to different grids of the city you're like you're watching

a country's capital be dismantled like a child picking the legs off a fly and they can't do anything about it What was new to me about that war was the accuracy of our bombs and missiles. Prior to that, like, if you're in World War II, you don't stand on an apartment building and watch the show. Like, you don't know where those bombs are landing. They're just carpet bombing. They're going for the ballbearing refinery or whatever it is.

But you can't be sure that that's the place they're going to hit. These guys felt pretty confident. Like, this is an apartment building. No, no. They're going for the chemical plant over there. They're going to go for the airport over there. And I feel safe on my porch watching, which is what they did. Unless they're like deliberately not doing that.

Like, you know. I understand. Like we have the most high tech technology to take out by building. So we will destroy the entire cost. So we didn't miss a building. We didn't miss a single building. All buildings destroyed. You were talking about like Trump doing gay shit, like naming stuff after himself.

like a Roman emperor would, except the thing, like all the cool Roman emperors, like achieved really awesome stuff and then built things or building things was their thing. Like they were a construction emperor. Maybe we could lessen stuff like this for like the glory hungry presidents if we bring back like marble busts and statues. Because then you allow Trump, he can commission a marble statue for himself. that Nancy Pelosi. You get that. Yes. And for female politicians, it has to be a 21-year-old rendition of them.

Yeah. And they have to be naked. Everyone's shirtless and they're bust. This is making a lot of sense. Yeah. It has to be like those statues of dogs that are polished and they're gleaming. Yeah. When you walk past them, Pelosi's honkers would just.

Oh, yeah. It'd be good luck. You'd go like that, like a lot of statues. There was a statue on the zoo's campus. The greatest and best of all time, boys. Hong Kong. Yeah. Like the college camp.

campuses. Like that's common. Like there was a statue of some dude I don't fucking know at the Mizzou campus, some founder who it was superstitioned to like rub his nose before an exam. Okay. The oldest statue you've ever seen and then an innate insanely clean nose that just glistened in the summer. Kind of fun. But yeah, Kyle, there's a lot of the, the Warhammer grind recently. And I've been listening to videos like Warhammer lore as I fall asleep at night, but I've been doing Roman Republic, Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire stuff. I like the bad impers. You seem to like the good ones.

Well, no, no, the bad ones are interesting, but the good ones like, like we were texting about this today. Like, I was watching a video about Hadrian being the number one best emperor of all time. And I was like, well, I don't know about number one. You know, he's solid, top three for sure. I liked that he was a consolidation-focused emperor. because prior to him, Trajan and a couple others had expanded the borders so wildly that now there were riots everywhere. And then when he got in control, he was like, we are building walls and we're solidifying our position and we're suppressing all this.

We're the Roman Empire near our peak. We have so much land, so much power. But we can't continue to expand as long as we have this. And so he was like a big infrastructure guy. Built tons of beautiful temples, built Hadrian's wall, which kept all those savage. Northern Europeans, those Picts, those Celts, from fighting back too hard, savages, thousands, a thousand years behind. Do they use projectiles in the Roman time? Yeah, javelin.

Yeah, they were very big on, they were the first large civilization to employ ballistas incredibly effectively outside of siege defense. Okay. So the question, Robin, is why did Romans have archers? And they leaned on specific ethnic groups that were. archers occasionally they were and then they would have slingers and stuff like that but the roman is a slinger and that one dude that's the stone oh okay i know it yeah yeah so it would um i watched the whole thing about that but like why didn't the romans have arches and it's like well they kind of did it was just their way it just wasn't their culture the way it was for the

britons like and they would have people under their flag you know because the the the way the roman machine worked is you would come in and you would conquer a city state and what had always been done historically was you killed all the men and you enslaved the women and children and you stole everything of value and maybe even just kill all the animals just for the fuck of it. But what the Romans would do, they wouldn't kill anybody. They would say, all right, we've conquered you. We're going to leave you alone now. Actually, don't even worry about paying us any money or anything. No taxes. Don't worry about that. And rule yourselves. We don't want the responsibility. But every year, you'll give us X amount of young men for our army.

that's what we want and when you join the roman army you become a half citizen and after 25 years of serving may have been 30 it's a long time you become a full citizen and your children become full citizens thereafter you and so you basically have this machine that turns barbarians and ignorant savages into rome proud roman citizens who have fully embraced the culture fully embraced um you know buying into the thing and paying back into it and it just rolls. And so it doesn't matter when Hannibal defeats one Roman army and then another Roman army. The Romans say, all right, well, we'll race two Roman armies then and send them at the same time. And Hennell was like, what the fuck? There's a lot of these guys. They did. That's what they did.

They really fucked up those elephants and they were such a bitch to get here. They won that war. When they came over the Alps and everything, when Hannibal came over the Alps. Annable. Yeah, but, you know, they pushed it back. Eventually, they reconquered that. Because they came with two Roman armies. But in any case, I like the bad Roman emperors. I like the guys who like made the senator's wives prostitutes because he thought it was funny. Or like the guy who was the worst. I would assume like Caligula and near, Caligula is the horse guy. Yeah. And what they all have in common, the worst emperors, except for Octavian, was that they came into power very young, unformed.

Octavian is not a bad emperor. I said, except for Octavian. He became emperor at 18 years old. He was the first true emperor after Caesar was killed. He's the, the, the aberration. The rest of them, you could argue that it was lead poisoning, or they had a brain injury or a fever, like, caused their, their mania, whatever, or who knows what sort of mental illnesses they had. But they all also came into power at like 13, 16, shit like that. And you can imagine an all-powerful, 13 year old who can kill you at his whim. I can't remember. I might have been Caligula. It was one of this Roman emperts who was like burst out raucously laughing at some like big shindig. And they're

like, what amuses you so, sire? He's like, I was just thinking, I could murder you right here in front of everyone and no one would do anything. Isn't that hilarious? I could just kill you and there'd be no recompense. What's so awesome. I wonder how true that story is and how much is like a historian who was unfavorable to him in the in the subsequent dynasty writing poorly you know this is a power dynamic that I think is really interesting right so I'm going to make a guess and say that at 13 he wasn't really running the show somebody else was when you become a new officer in the army um I think you're called butter bars and there's like some master chief who's actually running the show even though you outrank him you're not in charge and then at some point in your

experience curve, you become in charge. You are the officer and you're this. And I think it's interesting and socially complicated to navigate that power change. You know, you used to be my boss, but I was always your boss, but I really wasn't your boss. But now I really am exerting myself as your boss because I outrank you and it's time for me to be an officer. This king had that times 10, right? He's 13 years old. He doesn't know what the heck's going on. His judgment is awful. But at some point, he's 21 years old. And he really is starting to exert. himself as the actual leader. People who were used to leading have to step back and led him.

No excuses for Caligula. I think it's interesting when people grow power like that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the whole like emperor at 12 doing something wild. You can like watch as the Romans evolve different ways to handle that. If you just like click through the subsequent emperors and look around because they start adding co-emperors.

for very young emperor where it's like okay this guy's the rightful emperor but he's 11 and his uncle's 41 and so we're going to let the uncle kind of run shit with the 11 year old's approval but you know that's how it's going to go and then then the uncle dies at 58 and he's kind of the emperor's learned enough and now he's in his mid 20s and he's like all right I got the gist I can roll it's fascinating and like the amount of Nero. So we were doing our hangout the other day and somebody was, I don't know, railing against trans people or femboys or something. And I'm like, this is a new thing. This is a new thing. And I'm like, Emperor Nero literally made a castrated femboy like dress up and be his wife. He took the boy to Greece and wed him and kept him in a wig and called him his wife's name. This is making the opposite of the point you think he's making. that the most ghastly awful perverted Roman emperor of all time also engaged in this well it's not new is this point

oh sure nothing it's nothing new and there is nothing new under the sun and also the Greeks were all about it the Greeks loved their femme boys well Kyle you know the saying the Greeks invented sex and then the Romans found out you can do it with women that's exactly it and like Greek culture was like the superior culture to to the Romans. Not true at all. Absolutely. Romans would, when rich Roman guys were like shooting the shit, like they would,

they would go back and forth quoting as much Greek literature as they could back and forth. The Romans were a warrior village that ended up being like the Alpha Roman village and then grew from there. I mean, we still read like the Stoicism and stuff like that. We still read stuff from the Greeks. Yeah. Well, I mean, like, I mean, even then, who is like the largest stoic philosopher?

It's Marcus Aurelius. Well, yeah, you got published. He got published. You got published, you got published, bro. Do you have that book? Yeah. Yeah, me too. It's good.

Yeah, I agree. I like it. Like Plato's Republic too. Those guys, it's so easy to be haughty and looking back in history and being like, these guys are probably like dumb, fat, hairy, stupid retards. And then you read that. I'm thinking to try and get smarter. These guys were like smarter than anyone.

I think I'm less educated on this. Like Plato's Republic. Is it a good read? Is it something that you could read to be entertained by? It's read the Stoicism by Marcus Aurelius. It's more about how to conduct yourself and how to deal with outside influences and just kind of how to live your life. It's mostly about just going with the flow and not being affected by outside influences.

And all that. And it's a translation that flows well and reads okay? Yeah. It's called Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It's really interesting. So I would, I would get that in Plato's Republic. And then... It's like $14 on Amazon. If you start reading these old antiquity books, Woody, and you get into it. Let me know because I got a bunch. I got a bunch of... Okay. Okay. But it's fascinating. Like, you realize how much more rigorous the thinking back then was. Like, how much more they were, if anything, less ideologically constrained at times. And because they... they were, quote-unquote, thinkers, they were able to, like, just do their thing. It wasn't until it was kind of that fusion of philosopher-ruler that it became more, like with Aurelius, where it became more politicized. I think you had an upper class of people who were competitive about how intelligent and well-read they were at that time.

That was the cool thing to do. But, you know, the average guy was a fucking imbecile who probably drank piss medicinally. Okay, so it's the same as today. Exactly. People do that, too. Sometimes the romance would sit under red light. I think that stupidity and ignorance is almost like a plus today. Like there's this sort of like I don't care kind of attitude that's looked upon fondly almost in our society.

Like the smartest people aren't the coolest people. That's true. But you were talking about Nero. Did you know that Nero started his rule extremely popular? I don't remember much about Nero's rule. I get them all mixed up because they all did similar ridiculous things with their power

lots of Caligula did a lot of stuff and I'm not sure there was the thing about there's a thing about making his horse a senator and then there was the thing about like

I think they were like stabbing the water or something because like like to see and that's that I think I I think you're right the like punishing like his wife drowned and he was stabbing the ocean for taking her or something like we're going to declare war on the god of the sea and he sends his men to go stab the wake

I don't maybe that was near I don't I don't think though I don't remember who it was at all but he so like the reason that he was so um so popular at first is because the previous emperor Claudius was seen as like a fuddy-duddy like yeah this guy's given us like pretty good times he's fixing a lot of things but he's kind of bleh he's like a he was like a Nixon type very smart and capable but

not that enthusiastic nobody was like wow this guy's the fucking best and then Nero gets in and he's like young hyper fit athletic apparently a physical specimen and and all the people were like this guy rules this guy's awesome he's cool he's a strong leader and then public opinion started turning on him when he insisted that he also be allowed to compete in the gladiatorial games because he was obsessed with the gladiatorial games and at that

time it was pretty new because i i think it was only like 50 years prior that or like a hundred years or something like that vespasian had the coliseum built so it was still a novelty and he would like have elephants brought in all these things and he would murder them and the crowd would cheer but the public opinion started souring and being like this is so beneath an emperor what the fuck is he doing why is he killing lions he should be out there like the rest of our successful emperors using his battle skills on the field fighting the gauls fighting the visigoths and these groups that are that are causing problems to us fighting the normans whoever it is like And he's doing this glibly in the capital at an arena as though like this is serious.

And so over time, sentiment turned on him. And I don't think, I think it was more because of his antics and weirdness than his actual policies. Because he seemed to be someone who became less interested in policy, economic development, expansionism, more interested in, like celebrity style glory. Man, I wish we could, that would be the place to go back to if you could go back and, time to an ancient place. I would love to see Rome at its height. Yeah. And peak of power and see that was all about. That would be sick. I don't remember which emperor oversaw the absolute height. Maybe it was the five good emperors are like from like 96 BC or to like zero. It's like it's like a 90 year stretch or something. It's 96 to 180. Yeah. Okay. So it's like a 90 year stretch

between 96 and 180. Is that where you go with the time machine? Yes. Would you go to Nerva or Trajan or Hadrian or Pius or Aurelius? I wouldn't care. Although maybe Marcus Aurelius because I want to be born in Trajan's time and then get to enjoy all the rest and then die before the Aurelius end of that period. You get there.

You're immediately enslaved because you don't have papers. Fuck. or get or be born like 15 to 20 years before Constantine the first took power I think see I think if you get to be born there

and get to be some sort of like Roman like noble boy that would be that would be the best I bet they lived a great life but if I'm time traveling back with my DeLorean then I don't know I don't know if I want to go there the Romans seems scary I could see the Romans. Yeah, they were absolutely scary.

That's why they were like a world presence for 1,500 years. Like you don't get that much. It's being a keychain garage door opener so you can zap out of there if things get tough. They always break though once you get there. Like first thing that happens. Oh, no. Well, we've got to spend, make sure we find enough chrono power before so we get back. Does anyone have a triple A?

What if you were going back and you're like, I can't wait to see what the ancient Italians were like? and then you flash back and it's just some guy in a Centurian helmet like oh what the fuck's going on here this guy just fucking popped up out of nowhere he's just looking at third

not a fan we don't fucking do that here what are you digging tunnels on the Rome huh busy as Italian but yeah I like those stories where would you go with the time machine uh ancient Rome 100%

that's both of you ancient Rome yeah it would I don't I don't know if I would if I can zap out of there if we only get one then it's probably that because all right they spoke Latin we know that right so so like in

preparation for this I think I could learn at least there is a language to learn there are some places you go back and you don't know what dialect of fucking Cantonese they were speaking back then you're not going to be able to communicate there's going to fucking kill you if you give me a year or two I could probably learn enough Latin to

actually go back and order like a biscuit at a while or something you know Latin is a very difficult language I took it for a couple years in high school It's tough. You know. But the thing about Latin is phonetically it is so similar to what we do now that unlike Italian, the romantic languages, you can read phonetically what you see in Latin as an English

speaker in 2020. It feels like a metric language. And you're going to get it right for the most part. There's so much Latin in my Warhammer books because like they draw upon all sorts of cultures from, you know, the real world. And so everybody's got Roman names. We're going to like the librarian. We're going to the cognitrarium and shit like that.

Like everything is Latin. The guys that, I told you, I had, I dropped out of that last book because they got a new narrator. And all of a sudden, this main character has like Western anime voice. He's like, well, Constantine, I think we need to get out of here now. And I'm like, what the fuck is this guy? Everybody else. Everybody else is like, my lord, the orcs, they're fleeing through the canyon. We must get in our Skyhawks now.

Okay, fuck, I'm into this. I'm seeing that old wizard guy. He's 800 years old, but he's strong as fuck. All right, I got his picture. But this guy, out of nowhere, is talking to Dante, the leader of the blood angels. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? And it's grating in my ear. And I'm like, is this guy going to be a main character?

Like, if this guy doesn't die soon, I'm quitting the book. And that's what happened. I got two hours in a book. That sounded like a joke. Like that clip, like the way you're just. it sounds like a joke because it would pull me out of it instantly it's like no anime character he sounds what you told me and what you showed me makes it sound like he's saying this sunday sunday sunday sunday sunday sunday sunday for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge

like that that level of but um uh yeah i would definitely go back to ancient rome uh something else that's interesting if you just spend time like going through the emper's as you can like see the societal leans and moves and of course like it's less salient than looking at like America because we're a pure democracy for the most part we're republic but they weren't and so you can see at different times where they chose emperors for different reasons and which emperors were chosen by like the public because of public just outcry that this guy rules and which ones were chosen by the senate who were always just insular senator. and which ones were chosen by the military.

And there's this one guy, I don't know if you've heard of him, Kyle, probably because you're into Rome, too. I think his name is Maximus Thrakes, Maximus Thrax. And he was an emperor, I think, in like the 200s or early 300s. And the previous emperor had been murdered, and the army picked the next one. And the reason they picked him is because he was the absolute biggest person in the ancient world. Like he was apparently a Goliath-level freak, like over seven feet tall.

They said over eight feet tall But he was probably like I don't believe it Fucking six ten or something Whenever they say that I think they're lying I think that the tallest ancient man Was probably

High sixes I don't believe there were seven footers That's why I said like Modern fucking nutrition That would be huge And I believe this guy was genuinely gigantic Because a big reason The Roman Army liked him

Is because he was a competent general And he was also fucking huge Like just a giant giant man. Did you do a good job? Not great, but not terrible, honestly. Like he seemed based on what I read about him, he seemed

like a guy who tried to do his best but was a pure military guy and didn't have the feel for the economic side, the social side, more of an expansionist in idea other than, rather than like what, why I like Hadrian

so much, which was like a, pause the expansion, let's solidify the gains. real quick. I got a picture of the guy you're talking about. Maximus Thrax. Yeah, that's his name. Yeah. The, look how, this is how you know we had an advanced fucking society here. That bust is so well done. You'd, like, you'd pick him out from a crowd.

Like, if you studied this bust and then you went back, you'd like, all right, there's Thrax. There he is. Like, that's incredibly well done. What helps that he's 6'10? I was like, fuck, too, he was right. What are they feeding that guy? and at the time people gave him shit because they were like he's a thracian we're gonna let a thracian be a fucking emperor really and people were not a fan of

i don't know where the thracians are from other than in spartacus spartacus was a thracian and they seemed to be like a warlike tribe yes although everybody was a warlike tribe in the ancient world so modern day i'm trying to pick i think modern day thrace would have encompassed, like, current, like, Croatia, Serbia, that area, maybe? I'm looking it up. Because it's north of the Black Sea. Bulgaria, Greece has been European Turkey. Oh.

So Bulgaria, which there's also, there's a really interesting story, and this is relevant to this day in both Greece and Bulgaria. There was an emperor in much, much later, called Basil the First. And Basil the First, this was Byzantine, I believe. Once it had transitioned to Byzantine, Eastern Roman Empire. I was about to ask, is that Easter West? Because I get it mixed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's East.

The West, after the fall of the West, eventually became the Holy Roman Empire up there for the North. And it still exists today. Near Germany. Yes, never fell. Never fell. Never fell. Still there. But yeah, Basil the first, I think it was Basil the First or Basil the Second, who led like, it the great like bulgar war because all these bulgarians were causing fucking problems for the

the high-minded awesome romans were having to deal with these fucking shitbag bulgarians and they uh basil just rolled the bulgarians so hard and so mercilessly after the bulgarians kept raiding for so long that to this day greeks consider basil because this was again eastern roman empire byzantine more greek in nature the greeks have statues of basil everywhere like he saved us He saved us from the Bulgarian hordes. He fought them back. And to this day, in Bulgaria, they're like, Basil, fucking scumbag, genocide, murderer. Like to this day, like, if a Greek and a Bulgarian talk, and they, and that's so bizarre, because, like, our historical window is so tiny compared to theirs.

Well, the windows, that, but you would think because the United States is so young that each part of our history would mean more. but like you ask a guy today he has no ill will against Jimmy Carter you know what I mean like he has no if you asked him anything just hey what would you say one of the defining moments acts or events from Jimmy Carter's presidency was

you asked a 20 year old bat today they will have no idea they might not know Jimmy Carter was a president it would be like if all of us had a hatred for the British monarchy today like if we all like if when you brought it up to us in public

we're like fuck you yeah we want fuck you like and that's just not how we're wired in that way probably because we're a superpower so we can brush it off more easily but like Bulgaria Greece their best days are behind them oh you're hanging your hat you're hanging your hat on lower poles I see yeah I mean it's true like

that that's what has Bulgaria done for us lately forever I don't know I bet I mean the greatest accomplishment of the Bulgarian Bulgaria seems like one of those countries that like every 10 years spits out like a super chess genius or something or like some Nobel guy who figures something out with crops but other than that I googled what do they do in Bulgaria

they desperately try and recover from Soviet influence yeah the energy sectors mining um it's really I mean if Google Google AI is struggling to come up with anything about Bulgaria other than they famously shake their heads for yes and nod for no. Oh, that would have made integration difficult, I bet. A lot of misunderstandings.

All right, there's it. Yeah, the Byzantine Emperor Basil the second was the primary Basel who fought and ultimately conquered and destroyed the first Bulgarian Empire. I'm sorry, Bulgaria. Did you get fucked up on your first try? First Bulgarian Empire and then the Romans come in? 1018 What the fuck

So 1,000 years ago 1,000 6 years ago Almost 7 That's when it'll become relevant That's when the Bulgarians and the Greeks Will move past this Yeah The same way like

If you talk to a Greek right now But Ottomans or Turks They're like they'll spit at you And be like fuck you Like our country was Treated unbelievably cruelly For centuries by the Turks And now you want us to be like

Buddies because of NATO Or the EU Fuck you! No Well, while you were getting more cultured this week, I think I was getting less cultured. I've been watching old, there's this movie producer called Roger Corman, who is famous for making cheap, like, sci-fi and adventure movies, and like turning a big profit. But competing with Jaws with a $3 million movie, stuff like that. And I watched in Seminoid. I watched Forbidden Planet.

And I watched another, like, space. they're all like rip off such alien basically like they're they're all trying to do what alien did it's a bunch of guys in a spaceship but they're more like truckers than like star trek guys you've got that vibe and then they go down to the planet and bad shit happens and like there's always three smoking hot chicks in the space crew like fucking tins and there's always a sauna on the spaceship and then the one chick they always get raped by the alien and it's always like this big like this big larval like sucker beast to grab the one chick and all she can do is flail and scream she's immediately on her back and the first thing it does is like suction cup all of her

clothes off so her and so now she's like covered with k y jelly and she's just ah like titty's flopping and it full on rapes her to that oh it was crazy i thought i was gonna get no no it wasn't well i mean it was a little hot like a little bit yeah yeah you see a little thrusting like like and she She didn't seem entirely against it. I mean, like, 9% against it would be fair to say, because it wasn't. I mean, she seemed more against it on second one than second 30, so who's to say.

It just gives me such an appreciation for what we lost. You know, like those movies used to just titties everywhere. You'd hire three titty models to be in your fucking space movie. Because you'd get them tities out later on. It'd make up for bad special effects. We could do more nudity

if we return the role of the actor to that of very low. and then they'll have to do it. I don't think they've been considered very low. Like, for a long time, right? Like, you know, I like actors. I like acting. I'm glad that it's a high bar.

There's so much competition to get in there. You know, the reason we got such... The reason the NFL is so good is because everybody wants to be in the fucking NFL. Yeah, and what happens to the NEPO babies in the NFL? They go, oh, you actually can't play in the NFL. I'll tell you what I'm out of here. The Nepo Babies in Hollywood just badly act for 40 years.

I've been watching Shaduris Sanders this year, and I want to, I do dislike him. He is a Nepo baby, but God damn, he's pretty fucking good. Does he have, uh... Kids don't act well? I think they do. I think they do. I don't think so. Like, Nepo babies are often, like, really strong sound actors.

I don't think there are any, I should say, I don't think there any better than people who would have been fresh. Why wouldn't they be? Like, like, if, like, if you grow up with, with, with a... playing pretend professionally. It's not like the genetics it takes to be insane at running or jumping or... But you grow up with that guy. You grow up in a household with other actors in it who do acting. Like, from childhood, you're immersed in the thing that will be your profession. Like, I... I used to say there's no genetic component, too. Like...

I think there might be. I mean, most of the good looks. Good looks for sure. Looks are genetic, a lot of traits are genetic. So it could be... Every time you look at these Nepo babies, they're never unattractive because it's two movie stars baby. It's like, holy shit. That looks like, you know, it was. It might have been Jody Foster.

I saw her with her kid. Her kid looked more like Jody Foster than Jody Foster did. So does Reese Whitherspoon's kid. Reese Whitherspoon. Yeah, might have been who I was talking about. It is. Yeah. Because Jody Foster's like 5560 now.

But I saw the picture you're talking about with Reese Witherspoon. Her daughter's a mini her. I don't know if she's an actor or anything. but like what's his name from the boys like I always fuck up his name the main little quirky guy with that's like the nerdy guy his dad's Randy Quaid yeah is his name Howard in the show oh boo Randy Quaid sucks not no it meets the other quade I forget it is the other quaid start the reactor no Randy Quaid is the guy for Christmas vacation

I got him mixed up. It's the other one. Hang on. Oh, which is the one from the baseball movie? Exactly. That one. Yeah, fuck that. He's bad. So Jack Quaid is the kid. And then Jack Quaid's dad is Dennis Quaid. I always get those mixed up. What's bad about Dennis Quaid, I just, every movie I've seen of him, I don't like the way he's doing it. I feel like he's doing a bad job.

That's the only reason. It's not that I know anything. It's just there are some actors I like, some I don't. when I see Jonah Hill is in a movie, I'm like, I'm most likely in. This guy fucking kicks ass. I especially like fat Jonah Hill. Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez are brothers, right? And their father is the West Wing dude. Do I have this right?

Yes, who Martin Sheen is the father. But Martin Sheen is his acting name. His real name is like Julio Estevez or something like that. But the problem was, you can see his look. He looks like an Irish guy. So he was going out for all these roles as Julio Estevez. and it wasn't working because they figured there was a Puerto Rican

going to show up or something like that and he wasn't getting the sight unseen and so he got a new social security card from the IRS that has his acting name on it just so he could live his life he's like because I'm Martin Sheen but I'm also Julio Estevez and that's a problem when you start making some dough

so I just wrote the IRS and said hey I'm making a lot of dough as Martin Sheen could it's hard to like and they just made it right and I was like there's no way our government works that well. I feel like you got it anymore because you were Martin Sheen. But yeah, they're all Estevez. Is Martin Sheen the oldest or did Martin Sheen's dad also in the industry?

That's the Douglases. You're thinking of Kurt Douglas maybe? Yeah, 100%. Wow, I'm so glad you have the requisite. He was Spartacus back in the day. They didn't have crew cuts in ancient Rome. Hmm. You don't know that.

They didn't have crew cuts. Yeah. It's from the... No. Do you think Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estabez are good actors? Emilio Estabez is the only movie I remember him from is Mighty Ducks, and he'll always have me on his side for Mighty Ducks. I haven't seen that, no. That's what I liked him in.

Charlie's a Calvin movie. Like a platoon would probably be one of Charlie's best performances. You know, he's... I was too young when I saw that. That's what I'm remembering. I was bored during... Platoon's a real downer, you know? at this point in my life if I watch a war movie I want one

with a happy ending where it feels like yeah we got them all the baddies are dead I want that in my war movies enough of this shame I'm tired of feeling it all right don't show me a bunch of poor like Vietnamese women getting raped like I don't need to see Charlie Sheen like shoot some limping guy with one leg

I don't need to see all that it's dark well if you don't want that guilt trip in war movies you need a like fucking Mel Gibson to make it someone who's not trying to guilt you I do like my Mel Gibson movies my girlfriend's ever seen a Patriot I I got to keep meaning to show her the Patriot but every time I go to watch it with her it's like 10 p.m. and we don't want to start a three hour movie but I got to remember one night like to start it good and early because she's never seen it and it's tremendous it's sad it is hard to get

my wife to watch actual shows now it's always like uh I'm going to be quizzed on this next week. I'll need to know what happened in this episode. She just, even if we have the time, she doesn't want to give it that kind of focus. She might want to fall asleep during the show and that be okay. So we put on burnt peanut every night. Is she,

is she an Instagram scroller? Mm-mm. Or she'll... Zero. Social media, really. So she doesn't even have a burner like look account on stuff because that's what I notice with my girlfriend is when we're watching stuff. Sometimes I'll be

like, you know, this is you know, this is kind of an important part. Can you hear, and then I'll hear, like, volume off Instagram reels. I'm like, I think my wife has never seen Instagram. She's never seen TikTok. She's never, she's seen Facebook probably less than 30 minutes an entire life. She doesn't have her own account. She's not a social media person.

Yeah, that's how, like, most of the girls that I've ever dated are the same way. And I find social media so just annoying. No, Reddit is kind of social media, but I'm like a, I'm a taker, not a giver, you know? Like, I'm not on there trying to get new followers from my, for my carpentry subreddit or anything like that or like, oh, man, I need to get my camera angles right for this, for this cooking video for my cooking subredd. I just love it because it's aggregated all the best things of the internet. And I do like my YouTube shorts, which are essentially TikTok with less brain rot.

I think the algorithm on YouTube or maybe just my viewing habits give me a better, less brain rotty format of the like short videos. I think mine are educational. I think the nature of short form video is in itself brain rod. It's not because here's why not. It's the it's the format that trains dopamine, dopaminergic responses based on the next possible thing. It's a, it's a bigly reminiscent of gambling.

Like that's how it is. Like you're not committing to an idea. You're just, it's, but it gives you a little taste of something. It's almost like doing a flight of YouTube. channels, right? You got like eight of them here. You do a little tasting of each one here at which bottle you want to go, you want to take home with you. So I'm flicking

through my shorts and if I find a good like Sarah Payne's a good example, that historian that I'm really into, I just kept finding these like 30, 40 second clips of her really profoundly explaining something about World War II economics or like how much...

That's the problem though. No one can profoundly explain anything meaningful in 40 seconds. It takes longer than that. There's more nuance there's more on more on more to be understood but then like like what i'm saying is like i i get that and she does she she can put things like condensed things really well and it's it there there's snippets from podcasts she's done and from speaking engagement she's done so then i go down this rabbit hole of watching like three hour podcasts of her and watching these sort of like a ted talks that she's done for she's just on stage with a microphone and i learned so much about

like the chinese side of world war two and the the the war in the pacific she lived in the soviet union like during like she was writing i think a dissertation or something about the soviet union or maybe economics or something and so she went and lived there for years and she was like oh you'd go to the grocery store and the meat aisle just smelled of rotten meat and you couldn't get meat most of the time so we'd buy bones and so i'd buy bones and then you in bulgaria at least they had apples but there were no apples in and you know near moscow so they were all important and they be mealy apples and she's like breaking down the process of just making a soup for herself and like like how horrible the soviet union this the soviet union did well

despite communism and a lot of people think they competed what they skipped the plastics age well they they they lost before the plastics age really like they before plastics became commonplace as far as like consumer goods like that was what 89 like it wasn't nearly as common prior to that. When do we start putting sour cream and plastic? It was 69 for plastics or? Yeah, yeah. Like I think of Dustin Hoffman and the graduate, plastics being the future comes to mind. Probably, but where were, when did it hit consumer phase? Like, when did plastic bottled water as an example? Like, when was that a big thing? When did milk go in? I'm agreeing

that they were woefully unprepared for the new revolutions because they were communists and they were bought into a failed ideology. Mid-60s. Mid-60s. Because milk has got to be the thing you go to. It's the most common. When milk went from glass bottles to plastic, it's 1964. The Soviets skipped over the fucking plastic sage.

And they never miniaturized the computer. We were, you know. All right. I've been corrected. I agree then. Yeah, that's pretty gay of that. Anyway, I like the shorts because my shorts feel educational. and also like one will lead into another like maybe 30 seconds isn't enough to get something across

but 120 might be and they'll just come back to I'm like oh yeah that's this is the short from earlier this is that continued like I'll go down a lot of Warhammer factoids like each one is a fact you know each one is like did you this day in history kind of thing or this Roman emperor like did you know the Roman Instra blah blah blah built the Coliseum and this year and that year He went on to die five years later, though, and never got to see it at its full glory. And I was like, I didn't know that. Cool. Yeah. I think that went away.

I think mine are the brain rot Taylor's talking about. I see live stream highlights, people getting angry in public, policemen misbehaving, shit like that is my shorts. Oh, no. Like, I don't like my. I'm going on there now. I don't use shorts, like, ever really. But when I do, I'm not getting that feed you're describing, Kyle, of like, concurrent videos like I'll get an age of empires to highlight and then another age of empires to highlight

and then something about ancient Rome if that's what I'm looking at and then something about Warhammer if Kyle sent me a video and I saw that and it's just it feels too random where I feel like I'd spend more time scrolling to the next thing than I do actually watching the only time I've had fun on YouTube shorts is when I went to Nile Redd's channel the chemistry guy and then just went to his short section and watched all of his like chemistry explaining shorts because i'm not actually attempting to learn about chemistry i just think it's cool and i'm fine with the the short form you know you know not not that efficient information delivery system actually kyle i see that chick a lot too i do learn from her yeah i love her peak what's her name sarah pain

sarah pain yeah she calmly presents history as if the is no debate about it and gives her, like, her version of that truth. And I don't know enough to say she's right or wrong, only that I bet someone disagrees with her. Sure. Yeah, and that's the thing about watching historical videos is you will have it presented to you. Like, Nero was actually the most evil person of all time and terrible. And it's like, oh, wow, that's crazy. And then you'll watch something else about Nero and they'll be like, this is unpopular in the sphere. But in contemporary history. A lot of people give lots of credit to his infrastructure

reforms very early prior to him deciding that being the gladiating what's more important. I bet they're fantastic. How do you smell it? PA, yeah, with an American historian who was the William S. Sims University

Professor of History and Grand Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. She's written and co-edited several books, on naval policy and related affairs and subjects of interest to the United States Navy and Department of Defense. She's also authored concerns in political military history of East Asia, particularly China and Japan during the modern era. She graduated magna cum laude in Latin American studies from Harvard. She then obtained an MIA from the School of International Public Affairs from

the Columbia University, an MA in Russian from Middlebury College. She spent 10 years on her doctoral research in Russian and Chinese history. I'm gathering that she's even smarter than us. There's two more paragraphs of this ship. There's some fellowships in Thailand and Australia and Japan as well.

We should have her on the show. I wonder how she feels about certain current events. Like is she up to speed on the Ukraine. Yeah, she is. Yeah. Without being political, she's just like and then we have the way that we're doing things right now. You know, it's just kind of like that. She tries not to get too

into it politically and you know just say Trump but. Right, right. But if you buy it going to talk about your country. I've heard of talk about tariff policy and then talk about, but of course she mirrors it with historical

relevance and she goes back to previous times when tariffs were or were not effective and why they were or were not effective. She goes back to like when the country was founded, like from when it was founded to prior to income tax and is like that's when the country ran on tariffs and then it pivoted

and became more well that's what she would say I don't know what she would say about that there's a lot of things that led to the golden age of the United States if you will I think that us bombing the rest of the world being in shambles probably helped I think it certainly

helped yeah then we sat over here and just built infrastructure and happiness and they were over there cultivating shame pain and mass destruction for that's true but it was our undeniable manufacturing superiority

that boosted us into that golden age for sure we dominated like that's we made stuff people need it's concerning now right that we don't have that kind of if we were to fight China listen I don't know up from down in this thing

but I feel like we'd win the first two months and then what yeah and I mean like what I don't want to go back to Rome There's always the nuclear deterrent To say that we can't lose too bad, right? We just, but I don't know I don't know

Yeah Read about the Roman numbers You gotta kind of like imagine it Like what's that war going to be And what's that war going to be about To be Thailand, right? Them blockading Thailand and us breaking their blockade Potentially sure

So that would be the scenario That's the most likely scenario You would imagine that NATO's involved that the southeastern partners are involved that Australia, New Zealand's naval assets are involved and I don't know what happens there. I would imagine that Russia takes advantage of the chaos and does something to Europe maybe.

Like what if they... Russia has revealed themselves as a pure-ass paper tiger, dude. They can't win a war against Ukraine. You think they're storm in Germany? No, they're not. Well, they have to get through Ukraine and Poland to get to Germany, but I think they could sweep down

through Lithuania as easily as they want. Lithuania's as close as. But a different direction, they can avoid all that. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. But the war between United States and China, yeah, like we would burn up all of our expensive, high-end munitions in the first, like, days or weeks, they'd all be gone. And there's, and, you know, there's no supply chain that's just feeding that fire. So they'd all be gone. We can only fight.

I think the idea is that the wars won't last long between the United States and China, that we would both be depleted in some way. If we can make ourselves, and if the Russians in the U.S. had some come-to-Jesus moment where they became friends and they realized that they all like Breaking Bad, then we could ally against China. China has beef with Russia. There's disputed territory that China would love to make back to Russia. There's a say, historically, China and Russia have immense beef. There's a common saying in Russia called, oh, this is China's last threat, like, eating like China never. follows through on threats where China's last Korea that's what it's called that China in Russia there's is saying called China's last warning where it's like hey we better be really careful otherwise

fuck us up woo like but they're I guess China's big on last morning it's not following through but we do need to get to the hangout boys all right PKN 593