The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 215: Bill Whittle—Han Shot First

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Mike recalls the circumstances of a young man's first flight in a plane with an open cockpit, the mother who allowed it to happen, and the consequences that followed. With a little help from George Lucas, Jon Stewart, a mechanical shark, and a conversation with a pilot named Bill Whittle.  

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This one is called Han shot first. The Han in question, of course, is the one and only Han Solo. brought to life by Harrison Ford and a little movie you may have seen called Star Wars. The title of this episode refers to the now infamous scene in Star Wars that took place

in the Moss Isley Cantina on the planet Tatouin where a bounty hunter named Grito announces his intention to abduct Han Solo and bring him to a gangster called Jabba the Hut who plans to kill him. Now

in the original scene, Han Solo is seated in a booth across from his kidnapper with a weapon pointed at his chest when he learns of the kidnapper's intentions. Preferring not to be abducted and murdered, Han takes action, surreptitiously removing a blaster that he had cleverly concealed in his boot and then shooting the bounty hunter from underneath the table, killing him instantly. In the original scene, Han shot first. and everybody knew it.

Two decades later, though, the director of the film, George Lucas, re-edited that scene in a way that showed Grito, the bounty hunter, firing first and missing. George Lucas did this, he said, to better justify Han Solo's decision to use deadly force. Now, this struck a lot of people as kind of absurd. because in a gunfight, there is no line between drawing first and firing first. Both moves are equally aggressive. If a man or a woman or an alien bounty hunter, for that matter, points a weapon at you and demands that you leave with them against your will, then you have every right to shoot them from beneath the table, assuming you had the foresight to tuck a blaster into your boot and the courage to use it.

But here's the point. In 1977, George Lucas saw Han Solo's decision to shoot first as an act of self-defense, consistent with the actions of a hero. Twenty years later, he did not. And so, George Lucas changed the scene, and with it, the history of that film. Then, in 2004, Lucas authorized another edit in which Han and Grito appear to fire at each other simultaneously. And now, in the most recent print, airing on Disney Plus, a new camera angle has been inserted in yet another re-edit. This one shows a close-up of Grito, in which he makes an exclamatory remark in his native language, a moment before the exchange of fire in which he is killed.

So this has reignited the whole who shot first debate with fans of Star Wars, many of whom are uncertain, why the scene needed to be tampered with in the first place, much less for a second, third, and fourth time. Now, to be clear, none of this has anything to do with the story you're about to hear. The true story of a boy who loved to fly. But it does have a lot to do with what happens next. Because the decision to reimagine a famous scene

in a beloved movie like Star Wars is really not so different than the decision to reimagine the events in our history books. And that's what today's conversation is all about with my most excellent guest, a pilot named Bill Whittle, whom I will properly introduce momentarily. First, though, please enjoy the short but true tale of a boy who loved to fly and the mother who let him soar. This is the way I heard. The nervous mom with the old-fashioned name was getting the hard sell from her 12-year-old son. Please, Mom, you can't. You've got to let me go. It means the world to me. Captain Davis is the best pilot ever. He says

it's safe. Please, Mom, please? Paul's mother ran her fingers over the metal rivets on the Waco biplane and shook her head. The very idea that such a machine might actually take flight was hard to imagine. But Doug Davis was indeed an accomplished pilot, and his confidence was undeniable. I've done this a thousand times, ma'am. I'll have him back in no time, I promise. Stenciled on the side of the plane, Paul's mother noticed a woman's name. Who's Gina May? she asked. The pilot smiled. Well, that's my girl, he said. We were married on Christmas Day, and I flew her to our honeymoon in this very plane. The nervous mom with the old-fashioned name sighed.

Surely, a pilot who put his sweetheart's name on the side of his plane had much to live for. Paul could see his mother teetering. Please, Mom, can I fly with Captain Davis? Please. Eventually, Paul's mom relented and watched with great trepidation as her little boy climbed aboard the Gina May. You both be careful, she said, and hurry back. It was early August, a perfect day for flying. The skies were mostly clear and the winds favorable. Paul felt a rush of excitement impossible to describe.

not just because this was his first flight, but because this was his first mission. Captain Davis gave the signal. A volunteer spun the prop and the engine roared to life. Seconds later, the biplane thundered across the open field until the jarring bump suddenly gave way to a gentle, otherworldly glide. Paul was transfixed. The wind stung his cheeks as the horizon disappeared, revealing nothing but the wild blue yonder. For the first time in his young life, Paul felt completely and unambiguously free. Far below, his friends and neighbors waited in anticipation. They look so small, 400 feet away. Paul hoisted the burlap sack into his lap and gripped it tightly in both fists.

Now, Captain Davis, now? Not yet, Paul. The biplane climbed another hundred feet and started another slow circle. above the eager crowd. Okay, Paul, get ready. Paul gripped the top of the sack with his right hand and clutched the bottom with his left. Then he leaned over the side and waited for the command.

Okay, Paul, bombs away! Paul dumped the contents over the side and pulled the empty sack back into his lap. Bombs away, he repeated, in quiet wonder. Instantly, the air was filled with 150 rice paper parachutes. Below each chute, a delicious chocolate bar floated gently toward the earth, courtesy of the Curtis Candy Company. Captain Davis banked his aircraft away from the payload and back toward terra firma as the nervous mom with the old-fashioned name, paste and bitter nails.

All around her, children squealed with delight as the fluttering battalion of sweets floated down from the heavens. For Doug Davis, the lead pilot of the Baby Ruth Flying Circus, it was just another routine flight in one of the most successful publicity stunts of all time. For his 12-year-old assistant, the experience was nothing short of transformational. That was the day Paul became the boy who loved to fly,

a passion that would stay with him the rest of his life. And though she didn't know it, this was also the day that Paul's mother was destined to become a household name. It's interesting, isn't it? The way men are often inspired to name their most precious things after the women they love. Those candy bars, for instance, were named for President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth. The Curtis Candy Company was named for its founder's mother, Helen Curtis. Paul never forgot the thrill of his first flight, or the real reason his nervous mother allowed him to climb into a biplane with a perfect stranger. It wasn't the pilot's confidence

or his own incessant begging. It was the presence of that girl's name on the side of the plane. That's why 20 years later, when Paul flew into the history books, he did so in a brand new plane with an old-fashioned name, a plane named after his dear old mom. It was early August, a perfect day for flying. The skies were mostly clear and the winds favorable. Paul felt the same rush of excitement he always did whenever the propellers started to turn. But on this day, the boy who loved to fly wasn't taking orders. He was giving them. And when he was Colonel Paul Tibbets yelled bombs away. He wasn't dropping candy bars

over Miami. He was dropping something altogether different from a plane called the Annola Gay over a town called Hiroshima. Anyway, that's the way I heard. One more quick note, if you'll indulge

me before my conversation with Bill Whittle. Back in 2009, 64 years after Paul Tibitz dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. And 22 years after Han Solo shot Grito under the table in the Moss Isley Cantina, John Stewart of The Daily Show called Harry Truman a war criminal. Harry Truman, of course, was the president of the United States who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. John Stewart argued that Harry Truman was a war criminal because he didn't first drop an atomic

bomb a few miles off of the Japanese coast to fully demonstrate the lethality of this new weapon. He made several other arguments against dropping the bomb, many of which his audience applauded, and none of which confirmed my understanding that dropping the atomic bomb had actually saved many millions of lives. In other words, the way John heard it and the way I heard it had nothing in common at all. Anyway, shortly after John Stewart's comments, a pilot, I know, named Bill Whittle, recorded a very persuasive rebuttal that I was pleased to share on my Facebook page. And to this day, I think it's one of the most important public corrections I've ever seen. Because even though John Stewart apologized for his remarks about Harry Truman,

I'm afraid that lots of other Americans today still believe that dropping the atom bomb was in fact a war crime. in spite of the fact that the Japanese themselves, including the emperor Hirohito, publicly said that without this new and terrible weapon, the war would have dragged on until there were no Japanese left to fight. So too did Mitsudu Fushita, the man who led the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, Mitsudu said to Paul Tibbets, quote, You did the right thing. The Japanese people would have died for their emperor, all of them. They would have fought to the last man with sticks and stones if need be.

I wanted to talk to Bill today because I think the further away we get from the date that Paul Tibbets dropped the atom bomb, the more people forget the actual circumstances that drove Harry Truman to do what he had to do, just as they will forget the actual circumstances that drove Franklin Roosevelt to do what he had to do, and Abraham Lincoln before him, and Han Solo, before all of them, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away. Because look, if we don't remember who shot first, there's no telling what else we'll forget as time goes by. Anyway, this was one of my favorite conversations so far. It's a rambling and circuitous tete-a-tete with my favorite pilot slash historian slash space geek slash content provider. The one and only, Bill Whittle. Do do do do do do do do. Dumb. Well, are you sick of it yet?

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demystifying AI. It's filled with super, Super useful information. And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mic. That's net suite.com. Netsweet. Slash mic. You know, I think anybody in this business eventually comes to the realization

that every single thing you do is a tradeoff. And I just remember watching after Burner and Firewall at the time thinking, man, he figured that out. There's no network executive. There's no focus group. Yeah. Otherwise, you know, if there'd been a network executive there, Mike, the thing I did on the atomic bomb would have been done with a talking dog, you know. I mean, it was so much fun as a professional editor to work with studio executives who, you know, they're going to come in and they're going to tell you this version of Hamlet is just awesome. We think it'd be more popular if Hamlet had a talking dog.

And what do you say to these people? They get paid $300,000 a year to put their fingerprints on things. And this is what they come up with. So generally, I just nod. It's a great idea, and then I just cut it. They would have looked at Hamlet and said, Bear Bodkin? What does it mean?

Who would fartles bear to grunt and sweat under a weird? No, no, it's way, too many words. If somebody said, it would have been great because if somebody said, what's a bear bodkin? I would have just turned him and said, it's a solid tip armor piercing arrow. Duh. You know, make them pay for their ignorance.

Bill, can you turn your game down? You're coming in super hot. Yes, I can. Tinian hot. That's the way I like my... Titty and hot. Let me jot that down. That just might be the title of this episode.

How's that? Is that better? Yeah, much better, much better. Thanks. Okay. Charlie, you're recording? Yep, we're recording. Can you see the chat, both of you, either of you?

Like the voice. Yes, all right. So, no, no, the chat, Mike. That's, you know, where I put the... Oh, that thing. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. Please turn you. Look at that.

Look at us communicating. I was looking at the voice print. Why is my voice print so thick and meaty, Chuck, and yours so average and Bill's so tinny. Mine is thinny and reedy. Because you've got the golden voice there, Mike. Otherwise, I'd be doing Ford commercials. If only I had an original thought in my head, imagine how far I could go. Well, you get to do the Ford commercials and I get to do the, you know, the Fiat mini commercials.

No, it's funny. We did so many of those things. I don't think I've done one since 2013 or 2012, but people still, there are people out there who still think dirty jobs is in production, right? I mean, it's been literally out of production since 2012, but the network never stopped airing it. Because it's a great show. And I'll tell you, if there was ever a topic I would like to cover with you, not today, obviously. But the one thing I would really genuinely like to talk to you about is elitism. I don't know why we wouldn't do that.

I mean, look, you're welcome back any time, and I say this before you've even said anything prescient, but so many of the stories in this library lend themselves to a deeper historical perspective and context that I'm sadly ill-equipped to provide. That's why you're here today, Bill Whittle, and before we jump into it, I got to tell you, in the interest of creating the illusion of research, I did go to your Wikipedia page and learned a couple of things we have to get out of the way first. William Shatner. You worked with Shatner on what was it? I worked. I did four episodes of Shatner's raw nerve. I was the editor on that show. And 15 years before that, I was at the University of Florida doing a video for the Florida Gators.

And he came to do Gator Grow, which is their giant homecoming thing. And I did a little segment. I needed one sentence from him. And I thought, this guy is the most unpleasant guy in the world. Now, I need to stress this by saying one, two, three, I've got four pictures of him on my wall here in the Museum of Star Trek. And this is the ultimate cognitive dissonance for me, Mike, personally, is, what a great guy. What a rotten guy. What a great guy. And, you know, I'm not breaking any news with that one. But nevertheless, he is American mythology. I had a chance.

I was a limo driver for many years. I had a chance to drive to Forrest Kelly was somebody said, somebody from Star Trek. but I want to pick him up, Mr. Forrest. I'll take it. And as I was driving back with him, driving him up to Sherman Oakes from LAX, I asked him this in like a very serious manner. I said, you know, Mr. Kelly, I don't know if you really fully realize this, but you're functionally immortal.

I mean, as long as there is electricity, Dr. McCoy is going to be saying he's dead, Jim. I mean, it's part of the pantheon. He said, I just thought it was an audition. I just thought the show was going to run the pilot and I'd go back to doing my westerns. What you said before about Shatner's so true. He's one of those few people who is truly iconic. I was in business with him for a couple of years briefly. Yeah, I had some friends who started this company called Future Call, which involved prepaid phone cards. And we would buy the licenses for certain Hollywood properties that had rabid fan bases. Started with soaps, you know, and then went to like the Simpsons and the X-Files and so forth. So we'd put art on the front of the card, put $100 worth of prepaid time on it, and then give people the option of either making a long-distance call or accessing the

entertainment platform and listening to relevant, right? So I thought it was genius. It wasn't quite genius. It was a bit premature, but Shatner got wind of it and said, hey, I'm William Shatner. I can get you the license. Like for Star Trek from Paramount. And those fans are fairly rabid, wouldn't you agree? No kidding.

So I sat in a meeting at Paramount. Everybody was in the meeting, and they did not want to let this license go. And as I'm sure you know, Shatner and Paramount went head to head for many years and all kinds of lawsuits and disputes. When Bill Shatner walked into that room to demand the license, he was willing to pay something for it. Not much. but it wasn't Shatner. It was Captain Kirk. He walked into the room and I'm telling you, dude, these people, they sat up straighter.

Some of them leapt out of their chairs. Captain on the bridge, he demanded the license and he got it for us. And I've never seen anything quite like that. Clint Eastwood walks in, it's Clint Eastwood. It's not dirty, Harry. But Shatner walks in, it's Captain Kirk. Yeah, it's like he's coming down and talking to the ship. at the base of the mountain, you know? It's like, you're not going to argue with him.

I actually got a real, it always makes me happy when I can get a laugh out of somebody. I really respect. I was having lunch with Johnny Voight, who was the guy who was in the interview in Shatner's raw nerve that I'd edited. And we were having lunch and I turned him. I said, you know, John, the thing I like most about Shatner is, if you go see William Shatner movie theater, you pay $750 for the ticket, but you get $20 worth of acting. And John just thought that was the funniest thing. That's a great joke. Yeah, man, he didn't leave a lot on the table.

That's for sure. No, he did not. Well, the second thing on your bio that made me spit my coffee back into my cup, and you just referenced it, was your time in Florida. You mentioned a guy that I didn't, I thought that Jack Horkheimer was a figment of my imagination. This guy, he was called the Star Hustler. Right. Until the internet came out. And then people searching for Star Hustler got taken to Hustler.com.

This is absolutely serious. And that's when he had to change it to Stargazer. Right. Because otherwise, the little boys and girls are in for a big surprise. Oh, yeah. They were gazing at more than the Starfish Gaser. We, in 19, I'm going to say 76, maybe maybe, my brothers and I back in Baltimore would sit late at night and watch what I still, it was like

the best block of programming around. It was so weird. It was like Monty Python. Yeah, I'm with you. And it was the Avengers. And then sometimes Doctor Who. And in the midst of it, this character called Jack Horkheimer comes walking out of a really cheesy kind of CGI setup. Chuck, he's standing on the rings of Saturn. And he's talking with such unbridled enthusiasm about something happened, you know, in the heavens. And it was his enthusiasm for that that ultimately led me to narrate how the universe works, which I'm still doing to this day. It was Jack Horndimer's true story. I started working for him when I was 13.

Good God. And I had my first nervous breakdown at 14. The planetarium had these thick oak doors, and I came near put my head through them. Intentionally, I have to say this about Jack, Jack Horcomber was a hard guy to work for, but he gave me essentially all of the opportunities that I got started. I was a ticket taker, and I came in, and I wanted to work there very much because I'd wanted to be an astronaut. I saw the first planetarium show from my elementary school, and I said, I got to work here. So I went in and it took tickets, and I said, I'll just do this.

this for free. He said, no, we don't have to pay me. I'll just come back. I'm sure you will. So I came back the next day and I kept coming back. And after a while, they took pity on me and started me at $2.15 an hour. So I was cleaning out vomit in the planetarium because we'd swing things around a lot. You know, you get a lot of people get motion sick in there. Sure. And other glamorous jobs. But I really was really, really so deep into the, into the whole thing. Because it was all done manually. All the slide projectors and all those motions, no automation at all. So I would come in early and and stay late and just kind of practice these shows. And after about a year, this one show that he did, which is genius, called Long Jernaby Young God, which was about the Apollo program. And it was an extremely complex show to run. And he came in one day and said, I've got a guy visiting from another planetarium. Can we put up the projectors and run Long Jernaby Young God? And the only two guys

you knew how to do it. One wasn't there. And the other one said, I've got a commitment. I can't make it. And I said, I can do it. I was 14 or something. He says, look, Bill, this is important. You know, this, you got to get this right. I said, I can do it. I've been practicing. I can do it. Okay. So we put it up and we did it and I ran it perfectly. And I started doing planetarium shows as a console operator the next day. So it's one of those great examples of the thing you always talk about, Mike. You know, it's like people talk about luck and fortune and so on. You know, fortune knocks, but you got to have your bags packed, right? I mean, you've got to, you got to be ready to go. And I just, I just knew I could do it. He let me, the first professional writing I ever did was

was Planetarium shows in the Miami Planetarium. He was a tremendously supportive guy in that respect. But he was also mad as a hatter. And not in a fun kind of way. He was just very, very, almost hysterical about getting things exactly right. I'm going to encourage everybody listening right now, not at this exact second,

but when we're done, Google Jack Horkheimer, star gatherer, gayser, or hustler, whatever you'd like. And you'll see what I'm talking about. It's almost unparalleled today to see that level of unapologetic enthusiasm, almost frothing at the mouth. It's practically camp. Greetings, greetings, fellow stargazers. And I said, okay. But he, but he sold it because he believed it. He really did. He really believed it. And he influenced so many people. Whenever that comes up and it's not widely known, I can't tell you how many people I hear from whose life he changed. And mine more than, than anybody. I certainly would not be here without him. That's extraordinary. I had no idea.

In my memory, Bill, and this I think goes to so much that you've written about and talked about the way. I mean, this podcast is called The Way I heard it because so much of history seems to, well, it has to go through the filter of our own biases and our own recollection. And so much of that has to do with timing and context. And to be sitting there in the darkened living room and my parents' home and to have Monty Python interrupted or the Avengers or Doctor Who with this cat, right? He was a different version of reality. But yeah, to say the least. Right. Had he been surrounded by other forms of programming, I don't know that it would have resonated the same in my memory. If the graphics hadn't have been so bad, nobody would have watched the show. It was the best he could do.

They had to send to the Netherlands to get that kind of cheese, you know? I mean, the graphics were just horrible. He would be sitting on the rings of Saturn in this god-awful chroma-key kind of thing. But you bought it because he didn't, he wasn't ironic, Mike. That's what it was, you know. He didn't do a take on it. He was just 100% there and it was sincere. And I think that's why everybody enjoyed it so much.

That's something I want to get into as well. I want to talk about John Stewart. I want to talk about the amazing piece you wrote as a rebuttal when he made his comments. about Hiroshima, or is it Hiroshima? Can we get that straight right now? I think it's Hiroshima. Okay. So you've listened to the little story I wrote, which was my attempt to find, call it an inciting incident in the life of a guy who went on to do an extraordinary thing. Tibitz was an amazing guy. Good grief. Well, tell me what I don't know. And believe me, you could fill a book with it. But where my story stops, I really wanted you to come in and just talk a little bit more about it,

because I know you're well-informed. But I also want you to do it through the lens, if you can, of what's happening right now in Afghanistan. And I don't need to make this a big geopolitical thing. And we won't mention political parties. We'll just talk about, you know, what's happening. I'm just, well, let me say that I'm just so struck by the confusion that John Stewart seemed to express by not really understanding what the enemy demands. back in 1945. And the same thing that may or may not be going on right now with the Taliban and al-Qaeda

and our own confusion about who are actually fighting. So it's a lot, but your thoughts. Well, the most amazing thing, frankly, about Paul Tibbets and the job he did was that he did his job so well and so did everybody else of that generation that we now have the luxury of doubting their motives. I mean, that's the kind of success that they had, right? They absolutely put it under the table. we don't we no longer have to worry about foreign invasion or any of the rest of this stuff.

Tibbitts was an amazing guy because in order to pull off the delivery of the bomb, you needed a guy who first of all was just a great natural flyer. You needed a guy who was a natural leader of men, but you also needed somebody who understood the secrecy aspect of this. And it's a very difficult thing to try something completely new and keep it secret at the same time. That's a really tough thing to do. He had a small group of highly trained handpicked people to man this specific squadron that he had.

And when we took over the Solomons, we started getting bases in Tinian and Saipan, the Tinian base that the B-29s took off from on the atomic bomb missions, had just rows and rows of airplanes, but off in the corner, sealed off with Barb wire, that was Tibb its bomb group. I think probably the coolest thing about Tibb is just in terms of visual interest is you're flying a propeller-driven airplane, you know,

at 20,000 feet, maybe a little lower. And you're about to drop the biggest bomb in the world, and it's got a fall time of less than a minute. And that means you have to get the living daylights out of there, and you have to do it fast. And you don't get to hit the afterburners, you know, and move out at the speed of heat. You've got a lumbering, essentially an airliner.

And so Tippett's essentially perfected this move where the second they would, I think they actually did it a little bit of a climb, kind of a loft thing. But the second the bomb was released, and it was on its way down. They had 60 seconds or less. So instantly, Tivots, he probably had his coat pilot help him, just all the way over on the ailerons of this enormous B-17,

by far the biggest plane of the war, just goes into it like a 90-degree bank and dives, dives, dives for the dirt. Because he is trying to get airspeed. He needs to get this plane going as fast as he can. He practiced this hundreds, if not thousands of times. And this is what he trained all of his guys to do. So nobody knew. whether or not that bomb blast was going to tear this plane to shreds.

You know, people look at a flying fortress or something. I remember when I was a kid, I was watching like 12 o'clock high. And you see these guys in the B-17s over Germany and the fighters come in. And I thought, all right, no problem. And my, you know, my dad said, Bill, the skin on these things is as thick as a Coke can. It's just super thin. It doesn't stop anything. So Tibbitts may very well have been on a suicide mission.

He didn't know. Nobody knew. I've also done some work with the Doolittle Raiders, and those 80 guys were sure they weren't going to come back, and they had the backup crews offering them $250,300, huge money for enlisted men in World War II to get on the planes that were launching hours and hours early. Those were the kind of people they were. I am ashamed to say that the first time Doolittle really, really got on my radar was in, I guess it would have been Chicago, right? airport, just walking through. I missed my flight and I had some time to read up on what he did and the point of no return and the stakes and the leadership of all of it. And a couple years later,

I was deeply honored to have the opportunity to read his tribute for an annual event that the veterans do each year that tells that story. And I get goosebumps every time I think about it. And it's strange that I hadn't thought of Tibots in the same way. I think most people just imagine the Inola Gay was way up there and they dropped their thing. And, you know, it's one of the safer things you can do. You would think he hits the bomb release and you can almost imagine him turning to his co-pilot and saying, you know, let's cheese it. We got to get out of here, man. But you'd mention Afghanistan.

And I think to me the superficial take on it immediately is the entire Manhattan project and specifically the first mission. because the Nagasaki mission was a real, real goat rodeo. But Tibbitt's mission, the Hiroshima mission in Inola game, was absolutely perfectly executed. And he'd been flying for, I don't know, 9, 10 hours, something like that just to get there. He dropped the bomb within 15 or 20 seconds of when he was supposed to. It was just perfect, perfect, perfect mission without computers and GPS and all the rest of it. And that's because they knew what they wanted to do. They were very clear about what their objective was.

And they trained and trained and trained and trained for that objective. And they did not give their location to the Japanese air defense forces, you know, in exchange for an assurance that they wouldn't come up and shoot them down that particular day. I mean, that bomber essentially went over Japan alone. There was another B-29 with the scientific equipment. But the reason that they could fly over Japan pretty much unmolested was not only that Japanese defenses have been worn down, but because we're thinking ahead, we were flying two or three. or three B-29s over Japan at the same altitude, same time a day for months before that, just to get them used to it. I must be a photo reconnaissance mission.

Okay, go after the first couple and after a while, they just kind of ignored it. And that's what you can do when you think ahead of what you're trying to accomplish. And there didn't seem to be a whole lot of thinking ahead in what I've seen in Cabell lately. No. And to your earlier point, this whole thing is complicated by the fact that you can't really talk about what it is you're doing as you're doing it for the first time. You mentioned Tinian. You know, the first time I think I heard somebody talk about Tinian was in Jalls when Robert Shaw is telling the story. That's an amazing story.

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Jesus, I mean. Completely just lit. And it's one of the greatest moments in cinema. It is absolutely one of the top five scenes in the history of movies when he's talking about the Indianapolis. Man, I'm so glad you said that. I auditioned once for a show on, I guess it was TBS. No, Turner Classics. And, you know, it went to somebody who knows movies far back.

better than I do. But in the audition, they asked me about my favorite film and my favorite scene. And I said, you know what? I think Jalls is my favorite film because I can't turn it off. Yeah, it's first modern movie, for sure. Yeah. And it's like Jack Horkheimer. In a weird way, when you think of that jacked-up CGI effect of those rings around Saturn, and then you think of that ridiculous shark in all of its clumsy awkwardness, but made amazingly real, thanks to Spiel way of shooting it. And then you combine it with one of the drunk stars with respect. I love Robert Shaw from Black Sunday and back. But for him to sit there and talk about that mission was so secret where the Indianapolis delivered the bomb. What happened, of course, after that,

the shark attacks and so forth. Everybody knows the story. The ship was so top secret that nobody, nobody knew, nobody was allowed to know when it was expected back. No one was allowed to know where it was going or when. So these guys were in the water for days. And that final line of his, you know, he's just told this horrific story of all these people screaming in agonies are being ripped apart. And then he just kind of gathers himself and he takes a little sip and he says, but we delivered the bomb, though. Oh, my God. You know, Mike, the reason, this is how I heard it, the reason that the Jaws is such a great movie is because the shark didn't work. Right. So Stephen Spielberg has given his first big directing chance. He's done one movie before. The

I think. And now he's out there with this enormous project, hugely popular novel, and they've built this mechanical shark that's going to work underwater, and he gets a thing in the water, and it doesn't work. And when you do see the shark in the movie, as you mentioned, it just, it looks ridiculous. But because his shark wasn't working, he had to think of a way to tell the story so that you had the shark in your mind and not see it. And that is much, much more terrifying, no matter how good the effect is. My favorite moment in that movie is when you've seen how big and massive this thing is, and it's pulled a barrel down, and then it's pulled two down,

and Quince says, I've never seen anything pulled down to, and it pulls down three of these enormous floats. And there's the orca out there and all of a sudden, these three barrels come up. You don't see any of the shark, but you know, you know, it's like, oh, this isn't going to be good. This is not going to be good at all. But there's more to it than that, Bill.

the camera, Spielberg puts the camera about 100 yards off the stern of the boat, right on the surface. And he cuts from the interior shot where the three men are singing, show me the way to go home. And for a second, you're not sure why he would give you this angle. It's low, it's weird, it's a little compressed. The audio goes from 100% to about 40%. And now you've got this little boat in the distance with this crazy drinking song. and that's when the barrels appear. Plop, plop, plop.

It's the shark's POV. Yeah. It's the shark's point of view. That's exactly what it is. This is where the shark is. This is what these three guys look to the shark that's coming towards a little speck out there on the ocean. And he's taking you from inside this enclosed space into this open sky and open sea. And he's giving you the shark's point of view.

Yeah. And if that shark were working, you not only would have remembered Jaws, you probably would. would never have heard of Stephen Spielberg. It's one of those things where it's like, again, we talked about this before. It's a kind of fortuitous sort of accident where you have a choice. Now, you can either go down the road of despair and dismay, which is the modern solution, or you can look at this as a challenge and you can't pull it off unless you've got the kind of talent that Spielberg has.

But he was forced to realize that the best movie version of this was a movie version where you feared something that you didn't see. Because nothing's scarier than what you can't see. Well, if we're going to talk about the shark's point of view and we're going to talk about Tibbitts, what was his point of view on that day? If you had to, I mean, I'm sure he's been interviewed countless times, but before he dropped it, after he dropped it,

a day later, a week later, a year later, how does it age? If I had to guess, Mike, I would say that on the mission, Tibbets wasn't the slightest bit nervous. He was probably relieved. That's usually what the story you hear from men going into combat. And he had trained for so long that everything was going exactly the way it was. And I'm pretty sure he must have had that kind of calm sort of confidence. He's constantly, you know, in airplanes, we're always talking about you got to stay ahead of the airplane. You got to think about where the airplane's going, where it's going to be. I'm sure he was thinking about the next two things on the mission. That's a great line too, by the way. I got an instrument rating and I got it in Los Angeles, which, is the busiest airspace in the world. And all of the things that you have to do in terms of communication and setting up your VORs and all this other stuff, it's overwhelming. And so they would say, just worry about what's the next thing and what's the thing after that. What are the next two things? So I'm sure that's how Tibbets flew the flight. And I'm sure that when he got back, I know that when he got back, he was overjoyed. And so was everybody else. And when the news broke,

one of the people that was among the millions of people that were overjoyed was my dad, who was not in Japan, but was a second lieutenant in Germany. Germany had already surrendered. And you've got millions of American soldiers, army soldiers in Germany expecting now we have to go and invade Japan. And none of us are coming home. None of us. And that was the expression that my dad had and everybody else had. So Tibbitts was proud of what he did. For the rest of his life, I'm proud of what he did. But I think probably the most interesting person to ask about this. And I've forgotten his name, but the Japanese aviator who led the attack on Pearl Harbor. This is the Japanese equivalent of Tibbets, right? He's the guy you go to who's going to command the ultimate mission, which was

the Pearl Harbor strike for the Japanese. After the war was over, they both survived the war, and that in itself is kind of a miracle. The Japanese pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor said to Tibbets, no, you were absolutely right to drop that bomb, because if you hadn't, we would have fought you with bamboo spears to the last man. That's the culture that we had. If the emperor had said, keep fighting, we would have fought until 20 million of us were dead. You did the right thing and you saved a lot of Japanese lives. And it's not Harry Truman's job to save Japanese lives, but he did. He saved a lot of them. I want to talk about John Stewart for a little bit. I was so interested in the way he got a new sort of agency to use that platform to talk about things that matter to him in a way that was unique

to his point of view. And I really do respect all of that. But I was watching in, was it, 2009, when he made those comments. I think he called Harry Truman a war criminal. He did. And I think he affirmatively said that, well, had we dropped the bomb off the coast, had we done a better job of demonstrating to these people, to our enemy, what the capacity was of this weapon we had, then that would have been a far more humanitarian thing to do. And that's what I meant early on when I said. That made me think he didn't understand who our enemy really was at the time. And it makes me worry that we don't really understand who our enemies are today.

Yeah. And we have the same cynical sort of attitude because of the comfort that we live in, the prosperity and the security that we live in that these men sacrifice their lives for means we can be that stupid. They've allowed us to become this stupid because they've kept the wolf away from the door for 70 years now. But when I was watching that clip in a group full of people, he said he thought Harry Truman was a war criminal, and I felt my temperature going way, way up. And then the argument he got into was that he wouldn't have been a war criminal if we'd only warned them.

That's when I went back and started writing this afterburner. And after an exhaustive six and a half minutes of research, I discovered something called the LeMay Circular. which you can find on the internet. And it is a leaflet with B-29s on the front, and on the back, it basically says, if you live in these cities, Hiroshima Nagasaki included, but not limited to these cities,

get to the country immediately. The United States is going to be attacking these cities in order to end this military regime that has oppressed the Japanese people. We're the friends of the Japanese people. We have no quarrel with them, but we're going to put an end to this militaristic thing. Now, I did notice that while they dropped,

millions of these pamphlets over Japan before the atomic bombs. I don't recall any pamphlets being dropped over Hawaii prior to Pearl Harbor. But Stewart's argument was, no, no, no, we should have detonated one out in the bay. And then if we'd given them warning of what was coming, then they would have surrendered and then we wouldn't have been the war criminals. Well, the Manhattan Project was the most expensive project in American history. when they were refining the uranium at Oak Ridge, the centrifuges used one-sixth of the total electricity generated in the United States. One-sixth, the total U.S. electricity was dedicated to generating enriched uranium from centrifuges. The Manhattan Project probably used more electricity than the entire empire of Japan did.

Pardon me, but if you put 100 people in a room right now, 100 Americans who fancy themselves up to speed and more or less conversant on the war and whatnot, How many know that Oak Ridge was in Tennessee? It's breathtaking to me. I had read years ago about the amount of electricity that was required and about the cost. The cost is immense. They had, what, four bombs maybe? One they, we tested one. This is my entire point when I was rebutting John on this.

We'd managed to get enough of this stuff together to make four bombs. We had one uranium bomb. which was little boy, the Hiroshima bomb. And that was basically you take a hunk of uranium and you fire a bullet of uranium at it. And we were so confident that that would work that we didn't test that design. But the Nagasaki bomb and two others were plutonium bombs. And for them to work, they were a sphere of plutonium encased in steel surrounded by explosives. And Mike, these explosives had to fire at exactly the same instant in order to compress this thing.

because if one of them is just a nanosecond late, practically, then there's a place for the explosion to get out of, and there's no fission. They had to account for the length of the cables. Six or seven feet of cables had to be put into that calculation. Those electrons are moving pretty near the speed of light, and they got to factor that in. So they had to test this. Of the four bombs we had, little boy, the uranium bomb is off to the side. We take one of the remaining three bombs called Gadget, and that was the Trinity test.

And once Gadget worked, we had some confidence in this. that. So what I was basically saying to John Stewart is, look, we started with four bombs. We used 25% of our nuclear arsenal to test whether this one's going to work. And now he wants us to drop one off in the bay, which now leaves us with 50% of the total bombs we have. And by the way, this is where I, the only part in that, I really got snarky. He was like, and how's that supposed to work, John? We're supposed to get on the phone and say, hey, hey, hey, Japanese high command, how's it going, guys? Hey, listen, just wanted to give you a heads up about something. On Sunday, Monday, why don't y'all get in your lawn chairs, go up the top of hill here and look directly

southwest, about 15 miles out, bring some sunglasses. It's going to be something you really need to see. We're going to put a bomber over there to make a demonstration for you guys for what about to do. Now, no fair shoe to get down because we just told you where and when and exactly why and all the rest of it. And somehow, if we do this, then we won't be war criminals, but if you see it and turn it down, then you would be. But, Mike, the main point of all of this is it's all moot. His point is moot. Anybody who claims that we should have demonstrated the bomb because then they would have surrendered

misses the point. We dropped a bomb on a city and they didn't surrender. Right. We dropped a bomb on a city and they didn't surrender for three days and then we dropped another one and they still didn't surrender. We dropped the Hiroshima bomb

on August 6th, 7th goes by. We're waiting for a surrender. Eighth goes by. Nope. Doesn't look like they got the message yet. On the ninth, we launched the Nagasaki mission. The 10th goes by. The 11th goes by. The 12th goes by. We're getting bomb number four ready. We're beginning to think, my God, we're going to have to run a whole other run of these atomic bombs for the invasion. Four days after the second bomb was dropped, the Japanese Minister of Defense said, with 20 million Japanese willing to commit themselves to suicide attacks, we can repel the American invasion. Nagasaki and Hiroshima are radioactive clouds. And they're still talking about facing Americans with bamboo spears.

they were training Japanese children put explosive packs on their back and dive under American tanks when they came ashore. And and, and when the emperor went to finally make the announcement of the Japanese surrender, a small group of Japanese high-level officers attempted to kidnap him and prevent him from surrendering because that's how committed they were to this bastardized version of Bushido. So when you listen to what Hirohito said, he said, the enemy now has a new and powerful weapon, and this is why we are ending the war. He says it verbatim. The last thing I want to do is trivialize the deaths of thousands and thousands of people. But honestly, Mike, when I think about this, the only thing I can think of in an analogy is in these movies from the 40s where somebody gets hysterical.

And finally, somebody just slaps him. And they calm down. And then the next thing they say is, thank you. Because that's essentially what happened. Yeah. It's Skin Bracer. Thanks. I needed that.

Yes. You know what? You did. You needed it. I mean... You did. Actually, Hirohito needed an excuse. He needed a fig leaf.

The atomic bombs allowed him to surrender with what was left of their honor. Right? Yes. If there had not been atomic bombs, there would have been no point in the spectrum from Pearl Harbor to whenever the end was in 1946 where something happened. But the atomic bombs put a milestone down where he could say to his people, there's no defense against this. Now, I don't know what John Stewart knows or doesn't know. And I hate to generalize too much. But I'm going to assume his audience doesn't know a lot about this either.

And you've referred to the emperor a couple of times now. But correct me if I'm wrong, he was a God emperor. He was the God emperor of Japan. So this is a deity. This is a deity you're talking about. Absolutely, yes, 100%. And so basically the men who most believed in the deification of the emperor were ready to kidnap the emperor. Let's think about that for a minute.

Jesus Christ comes back to Earth and you put a gun to his head, put him in the back of a black sedan and drive him someplace. Because you don't like what he's about to say. Okay, wait a minute, just so I'm tracking. After Nagasaki, a couple days after Nagasaki, the emperor. Three days after Nagasaki. Three days after, Hirahito is finally persuaded that he's pissing up a rope. Right. Game over.

He makes the announcement that we are going to surrender. Yep. And I'm going to the radio station now to surrender. And on the way to the radio station, his top people attempt to kidnap him. A small member of the hardcore Japanese high-level officers made a serious attempt to kidnap him and prevent him from surrendering Japan. God, man. It's just so... And just to put a little cherry on the top of this, Mike. So Japan is surrendered, right? And now the Americans are everywhere. We're in the harbor where we've started putting some guys on the ground. We're starting to go to prisoner war camps and free these guys, including, by the way, three Doolittle Raiders who'd been in there since April of May of, you know, 1942. And the guy who headed the Kamikaze program, the emperor has surrendered. It's four or five days later. And he says, I want all of you guys to come with me. We're going to launch Kamikaze. attacks now on the American fleet that is essentially anchored in Tokyo Bay. And the other guys around him kind of saying, why don't you go first? Yeah, after you. And he did. He did. So four or five days

after the emperor has surrendered, you've got a guy out there in a plane trying to launch a kamikaze attack on the American forces to restart this thing. And see, this is selective history, right? If you don't know these things, then none of it makes sense. If you don't know that Apollo 11 was preceded by Apollo 10 and that was preceded by Apollo 9 and then Apollo 8, if you just look at Apollo 11 like it parachutes out of the sky, then it seems impossible. But if you look at the entire history of the space program, you see there's nothing between Alan Shepard's first flight and Neil Armstrong's first step. That's particularly incredible, you know? I mean, it's all incremental. Right. It goes from impossible in a vacuum to inevitable in a timeline.

Perfectly said. Yeah. And so thank you. Chuck, make a note. Perfectly said. In fact, that might even be a better title for this. Jotting that down now. Yeah.

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commit to this whole interviewing thing. So this interview drove a stake through the heart of it, did it? Put it off the table. It's over. Yes. Now I finally have clarity. Goodbye, everybody. And thank you.

Got the same excuse at the emperor head. No, I'm just, look, the shark's point of view is a fascinating thing to ruminate on. But even more so right now, I'm just thinking the only time I've ever met you in real life was in an airport. Actually. No, no, that's not true. We've met three times. One of the three times we've met. The last time we met was at the airport definitely.

Correct. The first time we met, we were at a lunch for an organization that may or may not have existed. Oh, yes. Yeah, and so we had a room full of Americans, let's just say Americans. They were definitely Americans, yeah. Absolutely. And we were going around talking and you said, hey, I just saw this video called Eat the Rich. Did you guys see this thing?

It's absolutely amazing. Anybody see this? And I was hosting the meeting. I said, I actually saw Mike, I was the guy in the video. It's nice to know that's the kind of impression I made. And I think we might have seen each other at a restaurant later that night or something. Yeah, so you can't count that one twice. No, I don't.

You're right. Chuck actually brought me to that meeting. And I sat there looking around, I think was there. Might have been. I won't commit to it. Right. May or may not have been there. I can either confirm nor deny.

Well, this is a great example. Sorry to interrupt, but this is a great example of how people remember things differently because Bill and I talked about this yesterday where he mentioned that story at the restaurant and I was like, I had a different version where I introduced the two of you together at Barney's Beanery. Hey, man. Oh, right. My version, that's how I heard it. Right, exactly.

Everybody's got a different version. You thought, Mike thought the time you met was the only time was in the airport. I thought it was Barney's Beehnery. You thought it was a bistro garden. Nice to know him as memorable as all of that. Well, listen, man, it's all history. Some of it's macro, some of its micro, some of its personal. Well played.

Some of it's huge, right? But, I mean, I don't know how John Stewart heard it. or whether he heard it at all. But, you know, in the interest of keeping this somewhat on the rails, Chuck's point is exactly right. Harry Truman can be a war criminal if you don't take the time to peel back a few of the layers and ask yourself a few questions. And look, it goes the other way, too, right? I mean, part of the fun of these stories is, you know, the cognitive dissonance that comes when we realized that Hitler like dogs. Right, exactly.

No, absolutely. Yeah. So aside from murdering all those people, he was a swell guy. Aside from that, yeah. And this is the point, actually, that I think that subconsciously enraged me so much about calling Harry Truman a war criminal. Because when he made that decision, we had been firebombing Japan nightly. And for those people who say, well, that's a racist thing because they're yellow people, have a little talk with the Germans in Dresden. Those are about as white people get, we were firebombing them, too.

That's what World War is. And we are so far away from World War that the entire idea now is just inconceivable to us. But if Harry Truman is a war criminal, then FDR is a war criminal because he ordered the firebombings of these cities. And if FDR is a war criminal, then Abraham Lincoln is a war criminal because he ordered the Union Army to burn Columbia to the ground and so on and so on and so on. And if all of these people become war criminals, John, then what does that do to the actual war criminals? What does that do to Hitler or Stalin? If you're basically saying that Harry Truman and Adolf Hitler, more or less the same guy, what is that due to the millions of people who died in those extermination camps?

It kind of lowers them down a little bit, doesn't it? You know, it just sort of smooth things out a little bit. It's this moral equivalency. When you hear about American atrocities, which happen in war, and then you say, well, we're no different than the Nazis. Look, there's a difference between one guy who goes off and kills a bunch of civilians and then is caught court martial tried and imprisoned versus getting orders to go out and kill as many civilians as you can. One of them is a defect in the human heart and the other one is a defect in a civilization. And these things don't weigh the same. Shameless plug.

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and this inherent baked-in propensity to try and understand our villains. And while all of that can exist under the umbrella of objectivity and understanding, when the chili really meets the cheese, you're going to have to decide. You're going to have to pick a side. And I think that's the thing that worries me. That will never change. Unless you truly believe that good and evil are utterly fungible, there's going to come a time when we're going to have to choose.

Afghanistan worries me because we're not in a headspace right now. We're making those decisions feels wise. It feels like a capitulation, and it's not. We're so far away from reality that we're allowed to make bad decisions because we have nothing to compare it to. In other words, if you say let's defund the police, you could say, well, if we do that, we'll get rid of police brutality. And so when you say defund the police, in your mind, you're thinking of a perfect world where there's no police brutality.

What you're not thinking about is what the world looks like without any police. And the thing I've come to realize is that these days, the only way to cure people of these bad ideas is give it to them. I did a segment on the Cold War, did a 14-part segment on the Cold War. And when I was talking about the difference between the two sides, because personalizing things, everything, right? This is why your shows so popular. And why your TV shows were so popular. It's got to be about people. You've got to connect big pictures to the human experience or else it's just data.

So I was trying to find an example of the difference, really, between America and Soviet Union in terms of the Cold War. And what I ended up doing was I said, on one day, Joseph Stalin personally signed over 3,000 death warrants in an afternoon. He killed millions of people, but just in one afternoon, he just went down a list and just checked off 3,000 people to be killed. One day, the worst thing that Dwight Eisenhower ever did on a day was he was on a golf course and he got a little upset and he hurled a putter in the general direction of one of his aids. Now, if you can't see a difference between these two things, murdering 3,000 people versus being angry enough to chuck a putter in the general direction of somebody, if you can't see that there's a difference between these two things, a chasm is unbridgeable chasm, then there's something wrong with you. It's not something wrong with me and there's not something wrong with anybody else. There's something really seriously wrong with you if you can morally equate these two things. Well, if you want to hear something really screwed up, let me just say this about Stalin.

I've signed 3,000 books before at a book signing. It's exhausting. Now, that guy must have a really. What a work ethic that guy. And he didn't have the machine. He stamped him. Yeah, there's no magic pen. One of the things that's fun was looking at the humor of the Soviet Union.

So you basically got Stalin who's a psychopathic murder. You've got Khrushchev who had tendencies who was, you know, considerably less evil than Stalin. Psycho-adjacent. Yeah. Exactly. So then you have Brezhnev, who's kind of a nice guy. And one of the things that's fun is to look at the jokes from each one of those times. So you'll appreciate this.

So here's a joke about Stalin that was told in Stalin's time very, very quietly. So Comrade Stalin is at the 15th communist international or something, there's thousands of people in the room. And somebody sneezes. And Comrade Stalin stops his speech. says, who sneezed? And everybody's terrified. And nobody says anything. Stallone says, first row of you stand up, shoot this entire first row. So down, they go, 400 people go down. Now, who sneezed? And again, everybody's terrified. Second row, stand up. Kill them all. Gun them down. Who sneezed? Finally in the back,

this guy, you know, raises like a trembling hand. It says, cover selling. I'm sorry, cover selling. It was me. It was me who sneezed. God bless you, says, Stalin. And then he goes on with his with his, with a scene. Okay, so that's the Stalin joke. The Khrushchev joke is, Khrushchev goes to a farm, a collective farm where they're growing pigs. And it's a publicity thing because this is just another one of the benefits of Soviet labor. So he's got a picture out there, surrounded by these pigs,

and then they're going to run the story in Pravda the next day. But the editors are like, oh, my God, how are we going to put this? Comrade Khrushchev among the pigs, pigs with comrade Khrushchev. We got to be very careful about how we're going to do this. So the next day the paper comes out and below the picture it says, Comrade Khrushchev second from left. And then the Brezhnev joke is,

Brezhnev loved his medals. He comes into a Politbuhr a meeting one day. And everybody's amazed. He's not wearing his medals. You know, walk up to him. Come to Brezhnev. What happened? did you what happened to your medals and he looks down and goes I forgot to take him off my

pajamas and um so you can tell the Russians the I'm married to a Russian and the Russians are masters of this dark humor because it's sometimes the only way to cope with things but if you if you think about those three jokes the descending level of terror you know what I mean the just the the the descending level of darkness as it slowly emerges to them that maybe we can say something and not be taken out and shot for it. Yeah. No, you got a guy who sleeps with his medals coming all the way off the heels of a guy

who will bless you for sneezing and then shoot up half the room. Last one, last one, super fast. Just in general, just my favorite joke ever about the Soviet Union. So this little babushka goes into Comrade Brezhnezovich says, I demand to speak with Comrade Brezhnezegov.

Well, Comrade Brzez was very busy. I was in the great patriotic war and I served Russia and so on and so forth. I will speak to Kamrad Brezhnev. So she just doesn't leave. She stays there, stays there, is there. Finally, three o'clock in the morning, Brezhnev, comes out. There have been things. Comrade, Brezhnev,

this woman has been here forever. She just wants to ask you one question, one question only. And Brezna says, yes, what is it Comer, what did you wish to ask me? She says, Comrade Breznev, was communism invented by politicians or by scientists? And Breznev says, well, by politicians, of course.

And the woman said, I knew it. If it had been invented by scientists, they would have tested it on rats first. Let me just say something, though. Bill, you know, your podcast, the Cold War, what we saw, was great. And there is a great section in that where you go through a bunch of the dark humor that the Soviet Union used, the dissidents used. And my favorite thing is the expression, and it seems really prescient recently, that the future is known. It's the past that keeps changing. That's exactly right. The future is certain. It's the past that keeps changing. And that's what I kept thinking of with all. of the statues coming down and everything. Yeah. And now we see this in front of our very eyes,

right, when we're talking about the Taliban, our partners in peace. You know, they're not our enemy. ISIS K is our enemy. The Delta version of ISIS is our enemy. It's not the Taliban. We would be friends with them the whole time. They're our partners. They're running perimeter security for us. We're pals. This is the exactly how we were supposed to do it. And then all of a sudden, ISIS came along and ruined the party. Oshedia has always been at war. with Eurasia, right? Always until suddenly it's not. And this effort to suddenly make the Taliban our allies is a result of mirroring and mostly it's a result of spin. It's just spin. It's like, here's a catastrophe. So instead of us having a catastrophe with our allies, let's just say,

no, no, we planned it this way all along. We're great buddies. Our partners in peace, the Taliban, our brothers, as somebody in Canadian government said. Here's what's different, I think. And this is where we started and it's probably a good place to start to wind it up. But you said at some point in your rejoinder to John Stewart, you said, don't worry, 64 years later, a snarky comedian will come along and set the record straight. And what I took you to mean was in a breathtakingly short period of time, a single generation, the bulk of Americans can become completely disconnected and untethered from the fundamental facts that existed in 1945 that ultimately drove Truman to do what he did, right, in just 64 years.

Well, 9-11, we're coming up on the 20th anniversary, just 20 years. And I would argue even less than that. For us to get to a place right now where a big chunk of the country is affirmatively thinking about the Taliban as our partners in peace, If that's not the way I heard it, written in fire and stenciled into the heavens, I don't know what is. That's really about all there is to say about it. The reason that I've been looking forward to this podcast so much, and by the way, I can't tell you what an incredible disappointment it's been. I feel that way all the time.

No, but seriously, Mike, if it weren't for following standards, neither one of us would have a career. But the serious point to be made here. The reason I like Dirty Jobs so much, and I thought it was such an important show, was because if you don't see the infrastructure, which means below the surface structure, then you can assume that it doesn't exist. Water flows, sewage flows, electricity comes on. It's all magic. We don't have to think about it.

It's only when you're shown these things that are actually there, when you're only shown the other side of the story, as Paul Harvey would say, that you begin to realize that, okay, if we only, if we cherry picked the stuff that's immediately visible or made to be immediately visible, then we can form any conclusion we want to. Once you start talking about the people that have to do things like clean dead animals out from underneath our house, which I had to, a guy, we had a possum by under her house two, three years ago, some guy crawled under there, came out with a plastic bag and he was pouring a hose over his head. Sure. And I tip this guy $200 because I didn't have to do it. You know, he did it. And without this acknowledgement that the stuff that's not glamorous matters.

And in fact, matters a lot more than the stuff that is glamorous. You end up with a society that's extremely unbalanced. And when you've got a society where the information is being suppressed on half of the argument, the irony of this is that having a discussion, having information, That's what thinking is. And if you're going to lock half of the population out of the discussion through social media and so on, those people still get to think. The people who don't get to think are the people you're presumably protecting because they've never heard anything different. They've never had their ideas challenged. And then you get people who are censors saying,

well, that's not true. And I say, how do you know it's not true? How do you know? You've never heard the other side of the story. You don't have the faintest idea. Well, I'll tell you, the challenge for me, and I think you and anybody who's in our industry right now, who wants to be persuasive, has to figure out the difference between talking to a room full of the people you described earlier, where we apparently first met, a place where you could say, okay, let's preach to the choir. Like most everybody in that room was politically on the same page. But in the real world, when it comes to media, both social and otherwise, I made my bed and I've got to lie in it. And it's a good bed, dirty job. Somebody's got to do it. Returning the favor. This podcast, these are all attempts to talk broadly and in a friendly way to people on either side of the aisle. But one of the things I think I said to you regarding your excellent video, Eat the Rich, was it Eat the Rich? was, look, I could never say that in any of the formats where I work, but I can, from time to time, look back at lessons from the dirt. And I can do a special, which I did, called Brown Before Green, where we take the position that, look, we all want to live on a healthy planet, but maybe you don't want to march and lockstep behind Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio. Maybe there are other role models who care just as deeply about conservation, and wouldn't it be fun to meet some of them?

you on your podcast, you did something recently on safety, which is a big thing for me. You basically... It was based on your segment. Was it safety third? Safety third. Yeah. No, safe. I tell that story all the time.

This safety culture is making people not only scared, the more you protect people, the more scared they get. I'm sure all of us know actual members of active seal teams. And these guys are fearless. and they don't freak out at the sight of a Pop-Tart chewed in the general shape of a pistol because two days ago they had guys with real pistols shooting at them trying to kill them and nothing else beyond that really bothers them very much. It's an amygdala response.

It's actually a biological thing. But I did all of that based on safety third. If all of this suppression is predicated on our safety and the obvious logical conclusion of this is, well, then let's all just lock ourselves in the bathroom. I mean, that's certainly the safest thing we can do. You don't go out there to catch crabs in the Bering Sea because safety is first. And it's not second either, right? We live in a world of risk and of all the things that scare me the most now is this idea that somehow life owes us a comfortable death in bed at 103, surrounded by relatives.

We peacefully just disappear off into the veil. We can't be killed by violence. We can't be killed by disease. We're not allowed to be killed by anything. We've got this idea that life owes us, this safe, perfectly secure life. And it's a credit to the people that have gotten us to this point. But when COVID came along, my response was, okay, now there's a new way to die. There's a new way to die.

It wasn't here before. But smallpox was a way to die. It's not here anymore. Typhoid. Bubonic plague. I live in Los Angeles. I could probably catch bubonic plague about as easily as COVID-19. But if I get bubonic plague, I get a shot in him.

fine. So we take all of these ways to die off the table and one new way comes on to die, 99.98% survival rate, and we have to shut everything down. It's because we've been trained to be terrified because we've not been allowed to fail when we were young. If you don't lose a little league baseball game, then you don't know how to lose your job and you don't know how to lose anything. This is the thing that concerns me the most. Think about the time. when you were a very small boy growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, you and I and Chuck were all of that same basic generation, duck and cover, right? We knew that there was this thing, this new way to die vis-a-vis fat man or little boy or gadget or the fourth unnamed bomb. That was a

new thing. And I think it was C.S. Lewis who wrote in 1948, I'm thinking, how to live in the Atomic Age. It was really just an answer to a question from somebody who said, how can you possibly sleep at night knowing that Armageddon could fall from the Bombadier doors of any number of planes at any time? How do you do it? And your fans and your listeners will love this. Please share it with them. But the very, very, very short version is, same way we always have. Same way you slept when the Vikings could pop up anytime with their swords. That feeling is always the same, but it always feels new and it always feels different. And as we navigate through that, we always do some really childish things.

That's happening to us now, I'm afraid. What do we call it? A novel coronavirus. Sure, the virus might be new, but there's nothing novel about the machine and the gods. And what C.S. Lewis said was really true. What it comes down to is if you are determined to make a population as free from threat as possible, then you prevent the development of courage in individual people. There's no need to learn how to be courageous if you're being protected from cradle to grave. Courage is a learned activity. And in a healthy society, it's given to children in small doses where you give them something requires a little bit of courage. You're not going to give a four-year-old an IRS audit. Although my sister has a picture of my sister taking when she was for. It looks like she's about to get one.

But you gradually increase their exposure to threat, and you increase their emotional ability to deal with that threat. And when you think that you're protecting people by not allowing any threats to be in there, all you're doing is making a race of perpetually frightened people. They're frightened about everything because they've never had to develop courage. What C.S. Lewis said in that quote you just said is, how do you sleep at night? Well, I sleep with courage. Am I afraid of this?

Yes, I'm afraid of it. But I'm not going to let my fear master me. That's what courage is. And you can't have courage if you try to prevent people from things that are scary because the scary things aren't going away. That's the thing, right? If the actual scary things were, in fact, disappearing, then we could all be the Eloy and who cares. But it's not the case. There are actual threats out there.

And we have to face them like adults. And that means we have to develop a sense of courage. And that's what growing up is. What a great place to land the plane. An Olegay Tibbets was scared. She didn't want to let her boy get in that plane. Exactly right. She was scared.

He was curious. The pilot was confident. And somehow that triumvirate, I think, is the thing that forges the people that you write about, the heroes that you write about. Paul Tibitz became the man he became. for a long list of reasons, the least of which certainly isn't the fact that the pilot of that plane once upon a time had his girlfriend stenciled on the side of it. You just never know, man. If Anola Gay had prevented Paul Tibbets from getting into that biplane as a child,

then Paul Tibbitts wouldn't have been the commander of the atomic mission and somebody else would have been. But Paul Tibbitts would have led a far more pathetic life. He would have, you know, I know we're getting late, so I just close with this, Mike. You've seen the video of these guys in these flying suits, right? And they're going through these canyons. And there's a couple of French guys who put jetpacks on these things. And these two men are like Superman. They've got no airplane around.

They're just banking and flying through the air and all of this. And then I heard that one of these guys was killed. And I realized that life is not about length. It's about volume, right? It's about volume. How much can you put into this space? Now, it's true that the longer life you have, the more you can generate, volume, but this guy lived more in 25 years than most people will ever live in a hundred.

And this isn't a dress rehearsal. You know, we don't get to hand in a receipt at the end of this and then say, I'm going to now bring on the real life. This is it. And if living is just surviving, then how does that make us any different than sponges, you know? Honestly, there is a risk and a reward. And if you're not ready to make that deal, then probably life should have been given to somebody

who was because you, you, you, you, you, you, you. Rocks don't take risks, you know, palm trees don't either. This is what life is about, is deciding what is worth increasing my risk and what do I get out of it. And Paul Dippets had a lot of fun that day. And I've had a lot of fun in a thousand hours of flying. I've had three engine failures. And they command your full attention. But I was ready for them because of my training and because I developed a sense of courage. And I have seen things and done things that people will never be able to imagine, ever. I have flown between two layers of cloud. with my wing in a glider, with my wing in a waterfall that was falling upwards,

air was hitting the mountains and going up as it rose it was condensing. I look off my left wing. There's a waterfall of mist going up. And I got my wing in it. And I get to a point where I can see the Pacific Ocean was flying over the desert in a glider. There's a cloud deck above me. There's one below me. The one above me is gold.

The one below me is purple. I can see the ocean. And Mike, I swear to you, this is the thought I had. I said, if I go through the grill of a truck on Paragblossom Highway on the way home from this, it'll have been worth it. It'll have been worth it. I did this and I saw it. And I remember just from that point forward in my life, I've just reached a place of a real peace about it, you know? It's like, well, I did this. You slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God. I, in fact, did that in an airplane with no engine, just using my wits in my training. And that moment

it changed my life. And if I'd been deprived of that, I would be very, very sorry. The right angle is the name of your podcast. Bill Whittle.com is probably the place to go for people who want to just immerse themselves in more of this sort of spontaneous wisdom and interaction. Anything else we should know about what it is you're up to these days? Yes, I am moving aggressively into telling stories using 3D animation, using computer game engines like Unreal, because the way to really reach people is to reach them so that they don't know they're being reached. I just want to show people things. I want to show people how people behave in certain situations, and then they can draw their own conclusions. But that's still a few months out.

All right. Well, it's going to be a huge success. I know that. If there's any way I can return the favor and appear on any of your fantastic endeavors, I owe you one. As it turns out, I'd had this thought prior to this introduction. Well, let's do it. Okay. Seriously. And look, I've got 150 stories in this library, and it occurs to me that about half of them are uniquely suited for somebody who knows a bit more about the actual facts than yours truly. So you're welcome back anytime. You know the stories that are in there. Yeah, let Chuck know what you like and what you like to chat about, and we'll make it a thing. Thanks.

It's a real pleasure being here. You know, now that we know that you're a big Star Trek fan as well, we have some Star Trek episodes. Oh, yeah, man. Oh, yeah. Some very good ones. I'm down. Yeah, good. All right, don't hang up.

Chuck has to upload your big, giant, fat, meaty, vascular voice print. Thank God for computing power. No kidding. And to officially say goodbye to you, gentle listener, it's not really goodbye. It's not even farewell. It's just, you know, see you next week. It looks like we're, Chuck, it seems like the pattern has actually morphed into a trend. and we might have to do this again next week.

We have no idea who we're going to talk to or how it's going to happen. But once again, you've pulled it out of your, you know what you've done. You know what you've done, Chuck. People binge watch you anyway, Mike. They might be with you again in a few moments. That's true. True enough. Well, there's no accounting for taste.

But you know what I'm going to do, man? I'm going to watch Jalls tonight again for maybe the, I don't know, 500th time. I'm going to listen to your podcast, The Cold War, what we saw again. Thank you. I already listened to two more episodes this morning on my walk. By the way, greatest improv line of all time, either one of you, any opinions? Greatest improved line in a major motion picture of all time. I know what my favorite greatest improv scene is, but it's, there's no line.

What's the same? What's the greatest improv line? Greatest improv line is from Jalls, and it is Roy Shider. and it is we're going to need a bigger boat. Need a bigger boat. Not in the script at all. My favorite moment in cinema is when in Indiana Jones, he comes out and this expert Arab swordsman's

and all this other stuff and he just pulls out his gun and fires. That's not in the script. Harrison Ford had dysentery. He could barely stand. And he's out there. He's just barely on his feet and he's going to have to do this fight scene with a whip and everything. And he just turns to Spielberg.

I got a gun. Can I just shoot him? I saw people come out of their chairs in a theater. I saw that in a theater. And when that happened, people came out of their chairs. Chuck and I were working for United Artists when that movie came out. And I don't know how many times you sat through it, Chuck, but I just again and again, and you're right. How many times does Spielberg have to learn the same damn lesson?

Right? The Sharks a mess. Don't shoot it, and your movie's going to be better. Harrison Ford's got the squirts. Don't make him fight. The movie's going to be better. When you have to use your ingenuity, ingenuity Trump's budget and anything else,

that collaborative moment in the moment when it's like, what the hell are we going to do? That almost always produces the best stuff. That's how life works. I got a scene for you, for both of you and for anybody who's still listening. My God, we have to work on our goodbyes, Chuck. Yeah, we're terrible at this.

It's okay. I'm not exactly known for my brevity either, to be honest with you, Mike. They're still listening. So we're in good company. But wait a minute, before you say this, I just want to say that the Indiana Jones film, I have the poster that hung at United Artists,

the original, the ones that back in the days when they mailed it in an envelope about, you know, 12 by 12. So it has all the creases in it as well. They didn't think to roll them up back then. Right. But I've got an original because they let me take one. Because I used to change.

And it says Raiders of the Lost Ark, not Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is another example of rewriting history. You know what? I don't even remember. I don't even remember that it does. For sure, it says Raiders of the Lost Ark. Oh, look what they did in Star Wars, right? The seed and the...

This is it, man. E.T. They took the guns out of E.T. Right. The all-time classic, if you want to talk to people who are not deep into history or politics about history being rewritten, then the absolute gold, standard of evidence is Han shot first, right? I mean, I have walked into rooms of millennials and started my speech by saying, who shot first? The first word's out of my mouth. And everybody says, Han shot first. So for the two of you who are listening, both our parents probably,

in the original movie in 1977, Han Solo is pulled over. He's about to get in the Millennium Falcon and take Luke and Obi-Wan where they're going. And he's pulled over by a bounty hunter who pulls a gun on him. And once somebody pulls a gun on you, that's why you don't pull a gun on somebody unless you're ready to shoot him. Pulls him over into a booth, sits him down and basically is gloating about, oh, Jabba's going to really enjoy tearing you apart, and I'm going to love turning him into you. And Hansen buckled his blaster underneath the table, and he says, yeah, I bet you will. And he pulls the trigger and blows a hole in this reptile guy, Grito, and he goes down. That's the second time I've seen people come out of a chair in a movie

theater. And somewhere in the 90s, Lucas and Spielberg and all the rest of these guys decided, don't want to promote gun violence. So what they did was they, no, I'm serious, man. It's not a joke. This is, this is how sad things are. They re-edited the scene where Grito shoots a split second first, misses the wall behind him. This is a professional hitman who's two and a half feet away, misses the shot and shoots so fast that it's like, bang, boom. Oh, so Grito shot first. But the thing that is most disturbing about this, Mike, is you cannot find that original scene unless you own a VHS tape. It is not available. You cannot get it. It's been a race from history.

Do you have it? No, but there are people online who have it. You should look at YouTube, who shot, Han shot first. You'll see it. I mean, it's the kind of thing that should be in the greeting on your website. It's the kind of thing that the people who are in your world should see. Otherwise, how do you, look, that's not his movie anymore.

He made the movie. He put it out there. He gave it to the people. Now it's our movie. That's right. That's our culture. And to think that, okay, kids are going to be upset if Han shot first, first, any child realizes that Greta was going to kill him. I mean, it's not like, it's not

like Han Solo just walked up in the bar and just blew his brains out. It's not morally difficult, but we're treated like children all the time. And we're treated like idiot children. Well, to land the plane for the second, third, or possibly fourth time, right? The second war and Lord of the Rings. Well, who shot first? I mean, it does matter when you're looking geopolitically, right? Pearl Harbor seems to be the first shot. Nagasaki feels like the last. Exactly right. And so, you know.

And there is cause and effect, right? Hiroshima and Nagasaki would never have happened if the people who suffered Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn't decided to put 3,000 Americans at the bottom of the bay on a Sunday morning. This was the cause. This was the effect. We didn't start the war by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima. and Nagasaki. This was the cause. This was the effect. And when you eliminate these two things,

that's how you get to this moral equivalency, which is the way you destroy people's ability to make judgments of good and evil. I knew if we kept talking, you would land the plane as only you can do it. By God, you've done it. Bill Will. Oh, the movie I want to mention, apropos of nothing, is called The Big Kahuna. Don't know if you've seen it, but it's Danny DeVito's greatest work. and he gives a speech on character. It is so flipping good, Bill. It's not nearly enough people have seen it. Watch it now.

Danny DeVito, character, the big cahuna. You're welcome. Thanks, everybody, for listening. The odds are 50-50. We'll be back. Talk to you next week. If you've ever wondered what combat actually feels like, not the headlines, not the movies,

but what it was like to be there. This is combat story. I'm A.J. Peschuti, a retired force recon marine and scout sniper, and this show is for anyone who wants to understand the human side of war, through the people that lived it. I sit down with veterans from across generations and special operators, pilots, infantry, law enforcement, and everyone in between, and we talk about the moments that stayed with them,

the missions that went right, and the ones that didn't. and what it costs during and after. There's no script and no agenda, just real conversations between two people who've walked similar paths. We're not here to create content. We're here to provide context. So whether you've worn the uniform or just want to understand those who have, watch, listen, and follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

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