Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 32: Salang Tunnel Fire Part 2

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

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Hey, this is Justin in post-production. Again, we recorded this episode a while ago, and since then we've entered what historians call the cool zone. And that means there's probably some more important things for y'all to do with your money than give it to us to get bonus episodes. So for the duration of the protests for George Floyd and against police brutality, you can donate to any of the charities listed below, which are mostly bail funds, and send us the receipt via Twitter DM or email, and we'll send you the link to the bonus episodes instead

of y'all having to donate to our Patreon. Though if you want to, you can still donate to our Patreon. So far, y'all have raised over $7,000 for bail funds across the country, which I guess means that podcasting really is praxis. Also I split this episode in half, not because I thought you all needed less content, which apparently everyone likes listening to long episodes, but because I'm sick of editing three hours worth of podcast to get one week of content. So you know, it's entirely for selfish reasons.

I need my beauty sleep. Anyway, on to the episode. Well, let's let's listen to the Soviet national anthem some more. This is the only anthem I don't kneel to it's fine. We used we used the Easter's red to replace the the news drop at one point. That's also a banger, right? Like the communists truly do have the music. I know how to do a good one.

Yeah, it always it always bothered me that the national anthem was just a banner because I always thought it should be American to be beautiful. And people just nobody likes that. They're just like, like, we like to start like, no, it kind of blows though. I saw it in God Save the Queen being like a bootlicking song. It's also terrible because it's like. I mean, I have to say, it doesn't good jobs in national anthem because it conveys exactly what living in Britain is like.

It's dismal, but like, no, you could you could have had literally, literally anything else, but no, sticking with that. America should just retroact the weight change. There's to like La Marseilles or something. That's a lot of spots. Yes, the beautiful was written by like a lesbian socialist. So we could do that. But no, no, God, I have the shitty one.

God, I have the shitty one. We always got to pick the worst and the most American thing ever is they're like, yeah, we we fought an entire war of independence and we're going to make the national anthem written by a British dude. All right. Yeah, I'm back. That's what we're talking about. National anthems. Oh, some good.

Some nationalist bullshit, man. Like, yeah, that's true. Apart from the communist ones, which do slap. Oh, nationally, them should just have to be switched to like some of some 41 songs. I have seen you put on the Marseilles when we're drinking more than once. Slaps. Yeah. Like this this made the rounds on Russian or Russian speaking Twitter.

Like, I think the beginning of last year, there was this video of Putin did a state visit to Saudi Arabia and the Saudi army band played the Russian national anthem. And I hope if Justin, if I send you the link, I hope you can find a way to put it in the description or cut it in here because it's truly egregious what they did to that piece of music. Yes, it sounds it sounds like a carbon monoxide leak in the Star Wars cantina. Oh, my God.

There's a whole bunch of gas to try to play it. Yeah. When the Soviets built this tunnel, right? There were a couple of design deficiencies, right? I love design deficiencies. I can see why they're media like stuff. Is that just a guy in there just walking? Yeah, that happens.

Because it's not like there's there's no like sidewalk at the outside. There's no walkway. So this thing gets crowded with vehicle traffic and foot traffic and livestock all at once. Oh, great. I have to like shove all of my goats up against the wall so they don't get like squished. Yeah, there's no lanes that like that's the same paint job I remember seeing. And I'm sure it's been there since it was built.

There's no differentiator between the lanes and it will be used as such at all times. So this is. I mean, there's no lanes, but it's two lanes wide, theoretically. Right. Yeah. Yes. It's got some lighting. I don't think this is original for reasons we'll get into. It has. Yeah, it doesn't weigh 800 tons. I watched a video of someone driving through the pass.

It does seem to have some amount of ventilation. You can see two big fans back here. Not a particularly inspiring amount, though. It's got like a desk fan up to a really long extension. You can just see trailing away to somebody's office building. A generator that's also powered by a goat. They're really red line the goat if there's a fire. Yeah. So speaking of.

Oh, yeah, I enjoy that in both audio. That's that's the the goat fire department. The goat caught fire. It's not it's not the fire department comprised of or using goats. It's like an airport fire department. It's a fire department whose only responsibility is the goats. Got to put those goat fires. Nine one one. What's your emergency?

I knew you were troubled by it as well. All right. So they have this one 20 watt light bulb and a desk fan. Yeah, and this this this road surface here was designed for Soviet trucks of 1964, right? Yeah, so cool trucks, cool trucks and enormous and enormous Mars or like Euro or something. And yeah, it's great.

Now, as society has progressed further into the future, trucks have gotten heavier, generally speaking. And the rule of thumb is road where, you know, like pavement rutting, like damage to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the weight of each tire on the road, right? So if you have an 80,000 pound tractor trailer with 18 wheels, yeah, aside from looking cool as hell,

that does the same amount of damage to the road as sixty two hundred and forty one ton cars. Jesus Christ. What's that in goats? A goat would do almost nothing. The goat in goat terms, it would be just an astronomically large number. An incredible number of goats. I assume I assume this along tunnel is filled entirely with goats.

If the only thing that's happening from this shows, I'm becoming more and more pro goat based public transport. That's exactly that's what will happen when you come on the show, man. We'll find the dumbest possible thing of the thing that Justin did hours of research on laser focus on it. And then we'll just do that for an hour. Yes, the Justin Rosniak talking fast and nor the annoyed sigh. I know the face you're making right now, actually.

If you had only brought goats through this tunnel, this road service would be pristine. This lighting would be adequate. There would be a lot of goat shit on the ground, I guess. But maybe, you know, someone would come through and play in it. You have a pooper scoop or something through. I want to see the goats are job creators now. Exactly.

You know, they'd be like murals of like flowers and happiness on the walls. You know, it'd be so much better. But no, we put trucks through it. So the road service started to grade pretty quickly because once this tunnel is built, it's much easier to ship goods into Kabul. So Kabul can like your average Kabulite, I don't know what the name of the Kabuli Kabuli.

Right. It feels rude. They they they can buy it. It's still not as rude as calling like calling the people Afghanis when that's like that's like calling an American a dollar. So you say you can Kabuli, apparently, is correct. And yeah, yeah, according to OK, OK, sorry. I'm just look, look, determinants in like broadly speaking, the Arab world is very simple.

You just stick an eye on there, apart from Afghani. Right. So they can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Afghanistan, well known for being Arab. Sure. By the hell not. Listen. Don't tell that to like 99 percent of the people who go there. Love to speak Arab, also known as Ash Tau. I said broadly when I said broadly, I mean. Look, if it's ever had an Arab person in it, it's the Arab world

and the Taliban count. So excuse me, Al Qaeda count. So if blazing trails in the podcast, where I, a white man, tell the Muslim woman about her own religion, the also white. The also white is like four white people arguing about what counts as Arab or not. Just just look at the comments on this one. You're entirely within your rights to tell all of us to get fucked on this one. Yes, sir.

You're a famous group of people known to know Arab people. Armenians are right next door, aren't they? You can go hang out with the pro ads. The cry should be nice people. I always like hanging out with the Russians. Yeah, OK. At least at least in college, I don't know. They were always like heavy drinkers. It was fun.

I mean, once again, no, it doesn't look pro ads. All right, just finding over the Soviet Union is that we're all heavy drinkers. Yes, that's I'm going to make that case for like the former Soviet Central Asian countries by far the heaviest drinking Muslims. Like, yeah, me in the fucking shade. No, I have a friend that's a not a Muslim, her parents emigrated from Uzbekistan. And she'll, you know, send snapchat to stuff of like one thing she's at.

Oh, this is not a particularly tall or like big person. And I just had seen her suck down more alcohol. I I a big man and just like, what the fuck? What's happening? It's all picked me up. Ross, come get me. I'm scared. There's a book. There's a book called A History of Islam in Central Asia

after communism that I read. And the guy opens it with an anecdote where he's in like like a university cafeteria in I think it's Tashkent he was in like right about the fall of the Soviet Union, like 1991-ish. And he's like he's a foreign scholar. He's visiting and these guys like Beck and him over and they say, hey, are you a Muslim? He says, yeah. And they say, whoa, that's amazing.

You're the first foreign Muslim we've ever met. Let's have a drink to celebrate. And they do. That reminds me vividly of like whenever I visit my extended family, I still have like various members of family that live in Armenia. And, you know, I I'm not going to say I'm a light drinker. I mean, I am who I am. But like going to Armenia, I'm like, I am a fucking teetotaling sober person.

They drink like aggressively to the point that they will leave you in the dust or dead. Like every time my cousin's like, you want to go to the bar? I'm like, oh, fuck. All right, well, let's pretend that I didn't just call Afghanistan an Arab country and let's move on to why a bunch of trucks have to squeeze their way through this fucking tunnel because it was suddenly so much easier to get chatchkeys into Kabul, people bought more chatchkeys.

It's a feedback loop meant they needed to move more chatchkeys into Kabul. Right. Yeah, you you can be like, yeah, this is great. I can get like Adidas sweatpants now. So I'm going to buy 20,000 of them. Yes, except those were being airlifted in by the Americans. I assume. Oh, yeah. This is all matryoshka dolls coming through the town. You got to keep those Moscow Adidas knockoff shoes that I love so much.

I was looking for those actually. Yeah, when when I did my series, I wanted to find a pair so badly. And I knew the only place I could possibly find them was like old, weird, like military surplus stores. And I found a pair that are like four hundred and fifty dollars. Yeah, it's the same thing with like you remember when the the Afghan like war rugs got big when people like started taking note of those. Those went from like, you know, a guy brings it home.

There's like, yeah, I don't like this thing anymore. It stinks. Fifty dollars to five thousand dollars for like like this Pakistani imitation rug. Man, I fucked up. I picked the wrong racket to get out of going to Afghanistan. Should have gone into podcasting. Should have gone to rugs. Yeah, rug casting. That's where it's at.

Everyone likes a good rug. I mean, you know, that's just the fact of life. But anyway, so goods from the Soviet Union. They can now go through from where they were transloaded off the barge and now go by truck the whole way. No goats involved, right? Right. And it's because it's easy.

It's easy and cheap to ship stuff. People start shipping a lot more stuff, right? OK, so now things go well for a while. And then something called the Soviet Afghan war happens, right? Yeah, I may have done entirely too many hours of podcasting about that. Particularly, look, there was there was a spets nuts involved shooting of the presidents of Afghanistan. And then stuff happened.

It was a glorious war of anti-imperialism. I love my my worker based regime change. Yeah, no, this is great. Yeah, the absolutely no reason why when the Taliban take Afghan take take Kabul, they like fully Mussolini, the guy who was like the last communist leader. That was our boy, Najibullah. Absolutely.

There was absolutely like that was purely just Taliban. Yeah, there was no underlying reason for that. There's no like war crimes that happened. Don't don't even worry about it. Don't think about it too much. Yeah, it was the main reason was because he was a communist. And obviously, the Taliban are the freedom fighters trying to bring, you know, democracy to the people.

Taliban are well known for their love of dictatorship. I mean, I guess my point is right. Like, yeah, obviously, obviously, like the communism was kind of a no, no. But I feel like a lot of the reason why they were able to do the Mussolini thing was because he was fully torturing people. No, I don't think that was it. I think they were clearly trying to dispense people's justice. That's why they blew up the Bahamian Buddhas.

They weren't working. They're. Get a job. Yeah, they're class traders. I promise I'm not pro Taliban. All I'm saying is Bo Bergdahl was freely elected by the Taliban. It's called incrementalism. It's it's the the podcast to Taliban supporter pipeline effort so much about.

Yeah, I hope you enjoy Afghanistan. Send us some souvenirs. I'll only bring green pens. All right. So if you want to know more about the Soviet Afghan war, I recommend you listen to Lyons led by Donkeys. It's good podcast. I've never do that.

Yeah, the hosts are fucking hacked, though. All right. Start this by burping into a microphone. I don't know what we're doing with slip up. All right. So the Soviets decided to do a war and get themselves stuck in the same quagmire that every empire gets themselves stuck in, which is Afghanistan, which means, of course, now they have a war going on.

They need to address their supply lines. Right. Yeah. Now we will see as guards army need or Rus Army needs a lot of shit. Yeah, it's like the weird tin of like weird reconstituted beef that they feed you in Russia. Tastes spicy, which is not what you're expecting going in. Like and it has the consistency of like cottage cheese, too. So you like pry open this tin and you'll be like, hmm, yeah, it doesn't look too bad.

And it doesn't smell too bad, even because it smells kind of like seasoned, at least, which is what you want from like your reconstituted meat. And then you take a bite of this and it like it's like yoga, but like spicy beef and just every molecule of your body like rejects it once. That's what that's what it's like. That's what that's what that's what that's what you're looking at. So many fucking Joe Rogan made some of you that shit on Fear Factor. It sounds like a nightmare.

That's a nightmare and a tin. I like what am I having tonight? Open that. I'm like, I'm having sleep. Be grateful for your memories. Oh, yeah, we did it. We did an episode where we ate a whole bunch of like foreign meal rations and the Russian one was by far the worst. Oh, yeah.

They had something similar to what you described. They had the same consistency, but it kind of tasted like dog food smells. Yeah, like it's all Tushanka, right? It's all like like canned reconstituted meat. And like it will vary a lot. The one that I had was a Russian state rail ace one. Yeah, I don't I don't recommend train. Yeah, I think the troops got got it worse there as always.

Oh, I don't want reconstituted train meat. It sounds fucking horrible. Yeah, that's that's what happens when you scrap a train is you got to like weld it open to get to the train needs inside. Oh, that's that's what happens in Thomas the Tank Engine. Yeah, when they scrap the train and then they they get you put it in the version of fucking Thomas the Tank Engine. Just like doing fully red dead redemption, like field dressing a train.

And he's like, that's good. Yeah, I've derailed this myself. I hold it back. There was a Skyrim mod where somebody replaced all the dragons with trains. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's just like that. The trains breathe fire and you have to slay them to save the town people from public transportation. I like that is so what Moses's nightmares looked for decades.

I have one thousand chest freezers full of train meat from one. One like nine. You know, like a weird uncle who keeps trying to like foist train meat on you. He's just like, yeah, take some train. Yeah, because you get so much from one kill. Yeah, somewhere there's a whole culture with like a national dish that's fermented train meat covered in piss.

Very Nordic. Yeah. Yes, this is. This is a what's a fancy way of preparing meat. Oh, fuck, I don't know, like. They have to massage the train so you get marbled fat layers. Yeah, yeah. Train served in a bed of its own coal. The real depressing part is like train veal.

You know, they get them straight from the factory. Yeah, you're going to kill a little switcher engine. You never let out of the shed. If they're going to fatten up the liver, how what exactly do they force feed the trains? Oh, it's probably just grain. You just get the like foie gras hose full of grain that you like forced to be the goose and you do train gavage.

You just like stuff it into the firebox. It's it's fucking chopped up pieces of car. So all right. The Soviet Afghan War, Joe, can you press see this a bit? Who won the Soviet Afghan War? You know, Alice, I'm glad you asked because there's a lot of people who won that war that are winning this one, too, and it's not the United States. Just a big W column.

And they're actually small. You know, it's it's really brave. I didn't think they'd do the repeat. I didn't think they had the intangibles this decade. But yeah, I think in the final. Clearly, the thing we've got to do is get Pittsburgh to invade Afghanistan because the pit super weapons going to get them. Yeah, I would not wish

Ben Rothesberger being released at any population of unspecified. Soviet Afghan War, but worse and more expensive. Yeah. Yes. It's just like everything that America does has to be bigger, more complex, more expensive and even dumber. So. Oh, yeah. Pay attention to this photo here. We're about to talk about this.

OK. So when you're doing when you're doing a war, suddenly these supply chains, which were fine beforehand, they now had to dress another bottleneck, which was crossing the Amudaria River, right? This is in 1979, right? Because now we got a ship. I remember I remember seeing that photo that you that you've circled before. And I seem to remember that's them coming in the opposite direction.

Yes, bridges work both ways. That is true. I am simply trying to illustrate, right? The way the way that this worked out was not as intended. You should be driving the BTRs south, not north. So the propaganda photo opportunity cannot be ignored. Like, I'm going to build my own retreat route. Fucking blazing trails and military history.

So as they're ramping up this dumb war, they decided to do. They decide we need to get rid of this barge bottleneck that we mentioned before. So they pick a specific part of the Amudaria River, right? Which is notable for the shifting banks. This is one of the only locations where it doesn't shift very frequently. So they what they do is they build the Afghanistan Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge. Yeah, friendship bridge. Nothing good is about to happen.

Yeah, this is like the way that I talked about. The way that I talked about the Soviets thinking about railway gauge is how they think about bridges in reverse. Like, if you try to build standard gauge railroad in Russia, they think of it as a friendship railroad. So all right. So what they do is this is where previously the barges would land, right? So in 1975, at 1979, they built a pontoon bridge, right?

That just floats on the river and they bring people across. And they're like, OK, we're going to set up some kind of security perimeter you know, around here, right, you know, so they can unload stuff. And then they build this whole doohickey here, right? And they get the construction guys in and they build the friendship bridge, which is what do you call a bridge you build during wartime for a country you're invading? Subdling down. Yeah. And there was actually a fort that dated from the fourth century right about here.

Um, it's not there anymore, whoops, because they shaking hands, me, but it's both sides of the Soviet Afghan war and destroying historical life sites. Yeah. So the Cultural Revolution, but Afghanistan. They demolished it to build a rail yard. I understand there was some like emergency team of archaeologists that made it to the site right before it was destroyed by the Soviets. I 18, but architects the fucking the like

I want to see the Soviet Indiana Jones. Comrade Jones, they're archaeology is one of those professions is like usually boring. But like, actually, there are some heroic beats of archaeology, which have happened. All right, so they finished the permanent bridge in 1982. This has two traffic lanes. It has one rail railroad. It has one oil pipeline. They pumped crude oil across the bridge.

And then somewhere down here is actually a tiny cute little oil refinery so they can, you know, rather than ship 50 different kinds of oil products across the bridge on trucks. They, you know, they just refined it on the Afghanistan side. Right. I'm doing the like the thing that I was doing when I was 13, where I was like, man, the fucking Afghan war is all about oil. But like in reverse and they just like pumping oil into Afghanistan. Yes.

And you can see the the trucks, the trains, they come over here. There's a rail yard here. You can see right here. This is munitions depots. Any time you see like a bunch of warehouses at an angle. That's always munitions. Yep. There's just setting the perfect trap to lure in the United States.

They're pumping in oil. They're put bringing in munitions like. Yeah. And they're building communism. Like, what do you want? It's like it's like a big flytrap. It's just a trap with a little hole that like Kiss and Jerk can shove his head through. Hey, guys. Three oil and we've got munitions.

We got trains, which is something the United States hates. So anyway, yeah, this links up with the wider Soviet rail network. You know, you can you can get a train in from like anywhere from the Baltic Sea to like Sakhalin. Yeah. Yeah. No, not Sakhalin. They still haven't finished that tunnel. Oh, OK. So they start they start. You can pick up you can pick up a nuclear submarine with a crane moment.

Put it on a flatbed, a really long flatbed, ship it all the way down here and dump it in the river. Exactly. You know, it could be like somewhere. General Dynamics is taking notes. How can we do this? We're finding the Afghan Navy proposal here. You could get anything from Russia here in like a week. Like no problem.

Like I need like 80 flat cars. So that's sure. You need like Amazon Hoop. Hoops to Uber Eats, but for Soviet tanks. Yeah, we need we need we need to get all the sea students from Kazan Technical University. We're going to bring. Also, we need the same number of zinc coffins just in case.

Yeah, don't worry about this. Yeah, I mean, we can ship them in the same car. It's probably fine. No one knows us. We bought these from FEMA. So, you know, this is to give a comparison to how the Soviets supplied the Soviet Afghan war. I mean, here in the United States, what we flew over all the equipment to go do Afghanistan garbage, right?

Sometimes using Soviet planes like the Antonov 225 for the really heavy ship. Yeah, a lot of the contractors come from like Belarus and Romanian stuff, and they they also go overland, which is ridiculously complex and stupid. If you remember a while back, they shut down the overland passes and like they're they're so used to like a continuous flood of stuff coming in that like bases.

People are like panicking like we can't get any supplies. Weird, it's almost like use not the fucking mountain road that barely works. Well, this is the equivalent of like if we decided if we're going to invade Afghanistan, we're going to build an interstate highway from Washington, D.C. to the Afghanistan border. Look, this is this is one of the decisions about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that makes you remember

that the entire like command structure of the Soviet army had come up during like Stalingrad to the Sea Love Heights, like where they're just, yeah, no, we'll just build. We'll just build a big arrow pointing to Kabul and then we'll just drive down it. It's fine. Somewhere, it's like, that doesn't sound like it's going to make a lot of sense. We didn't stockpile that many goats. Like just invade that country.

All right, fuck it. We're building a friendship bridge. Yeah, it's kind of like I feel like this is the hangover from when you win a war. Is like, you know how you're always fighting the last war? You internalize the lessons of that so well that you're like, listen, son, I didn't need any goats to defeat the entire of Afghanistan. I'm not going to need any here. That makes a lot of sense because like the Soviets who pretty much came up with it completely, almost independently of Brezhnev

were like, yeah, it'll only take like three weeks. Like, man, you have to be high. You have to be so high in your own shit gas to believe that kind of shit. That should only take about three weeks. We got that all buffed out. No one's ever successfully done any military intervention in Afghanistan. But we're we will be the first. Yeah, I mean, I guess also the like the other thing about the assumptions

of the Second World War on that decision making is that you can not only be like, yeah, it'll take three weeks, but like you can also be. Yeah, it'll take like two million dead, maybe three. No more than that, though. That's fine. There's nothing. Plus or minus a couple of republics. Yeah. The long the long term plan for this in 1983, especially as when they were really trying to for reasons we'll get into in 1983, the long term plan was

they were going to extend this railroad all the way into Kabul. Mm hmm. Over the Hindu Kush Mountains in the middle of a war. Can you imagine in the middle of places that like nobody lives for hundreds of miles like they'll put a train through it. Yeah. Can you imagine like trying to survey this line like in the middle of a war, let alone trying to build the thing. They have to like draft an entire regiment of surveyors like

haven't heard from that one in about five weeks. And now. You have to like and then like trying to build it and then operate it. I mean, one of the things I mean, I'm pretty pro train in general. Oh, yeah. Trains can't get around IEDs very easily. That is true. Yeah.

We built an M rep but train. And that that's actually a fucking wonderful like that this road that I had to drive on was in an M rap. And if you're not familiar with those, they look like if you if you had ten or a hundred million dollars but wanted to build like a Mad Max car with like no government oversight and like, well, I want to build like six of them with no interchangeable parts.

You're like, yeah, cool. Do that too. Yeah, because I had a bunch of competing designs and then they adopted all of them, right? Yes, that's the sign of efficiency. We had three different models in a four truck convoy. They all look like a shipping container, like fuck the Tetris block. Like deeply fucked vehicle design. They got like the weird window shape.

They're all angular, right? And then like stick at the side. And they do that. They're like really good at like absorbing blast or whatever. But, you know, they're they're not legal to drive on U.S. roads because how big they are. Now, drive them in Afghanistan through this mountain pass. Cool. See you on the other side.

Yeah, just just like, yeah, we're just like just taking off the wing mirrors preemptively. Just like, yeah, yeah, these and the windshields are so small. It would be like, have you ever seen those sunglasses that people make for solar eclipses? Oh, yeah, put those on and drive your car. That but it's they're like a foot thick. Yeah. And if you don't see something, it will also explode.

So you have to you have to worry about like falling to your death. Like, you know, you can't see the bottom off the side of other than the fact that your window sucks, we can't see it anyway. But like you it's so far down that you can't see it. And there's no kind of guard or anything on the on the shoulder. Thank you. Just thinking, thinking about this statistically, there's a bunch of like 60 year old Russian guys who would like have exactly the same experience, but with a BTR or a BMP.

Yeah, my uncle. I had, you know, the the Soviet the Soviet Red Army or mostly deployed people from outlying republics to fight in the war. So like most of my family, other than my grandpa, who did something terrible and joined the French foreign legion, all fought in Afghanistan. So yeah, we get to that full circle going on. Are you sure that you you haven't been like cursed in some like sort of like a family way, like every generation of your family has to like for some

extremely specific curse reason has to drive a like shitty armoured vehicle down this one highway. I did definitely my grandpa pissed off. So like he slept for a night or like Bivouac than an ancient American. Got cursed for mice. I don't have any kids. But if I do, they better start driving.

Yeah, never learn to drive an armored vehicle very early. Dad, why are you making me learn how to drive this MRAP shut up? It's for you. So they built this whole rail yard and warehouses and oil refining complex and munitions depots so on and so forth. This is still in use today, by the way. And this greatly simplified the supply chain into unload train

load onto truck, right? This got rid of the barge bottleneck, but now the bottleneck was the salang pass and the tunnel. Right. Bodge guys should have got a union. Now they're now they're trying. Now they're trying to unload all these train loads of material and people and the whole oil pipeline worth of oil products.

And now we've got to transport it throughout the country, but most of it through the salang pass, right? Mm hmm. Now, this seems problematic because it's a war, of course. It's difficult to do maintenance on the road reading, leading to the tunnel, let alone on the tunnel itself, because it turns out the people who live in Afghanistan are good at shooting at you from the high ground. You know, I think war might just be a vibe.

They'll get over it after another 40, 50, 70 years. Meanwhile, somewhere, somewhere in Mazarikah, the guy like gets handed a rifle from his grandfather, and it's just it just starts all over again. Great. While the Afghan National Army is using hand-me-down gundams they got from the US. Yeah, we have we have gypsy danger from Pacific Rim, like every time it moves, it destroys two city blocks of Kabul, which it cannot move outside of. It just has a vote for Karzai Banner flapping from the chest.

No, no, it has the it has like a pack all on top. You just did like the G Gundam Afghanistan Gundam version. That's what you just made that. Yeah. So, yeah, you know, usually the guys who show up to repave the road, you know, they're pretty popular. It's like, ah, shit, I'm going to have a nice, smooth drive. Now they're getting shot at. It's difficult to get some guys, you know, to go out and repave the road.

Yeah, you can kind of take that personally if you're just trying to repave a road and somebody starts shooting at you, too. Well, you imagine you're like you're trying to flag traffic to repave the road. You know, you got like the. I'm like, I need you. Yeah. You got like the the sign that says stop and that says slow on the other side. You have to flip another one. This is gunfire. Yeah, exactly.

Triangular sign. And you just like strap a plate to the back of the stop sign. So you're just like trying to stop us with it. I have to stand here stoically while they're shooting all around me. Just so everyone knows what's happening. But the important part is is they got everybody jobs being the bullets water guy. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, they they became a pretty powerful union

within the People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Got a new job. It's called Humansky Shieldsky. Here is my membership card to local death trap 69. Man, they didn't did they even make the 40th Army of God's formation after the Afghan war? Because if they didn't, that's fuck. They don't even give you a little badge.

They I think they did their best to kind of like spread it out. Like, oh, let's go ahead and hide all this shame for a while. No, no. So the, you know, apart from like the extremely heavy truck traffic, which is causing a lot of problems for this road, it's also, you know, it's it's part of an area which gets very hot, but also very cold. So the freeze thought cycles are pretty bad for the asphalt, right? Potholes develop pretty quickly.

So, you know, that slows vehicles down, that makes travel, you know, it makes, you know, you're driving over this road that used to be at best OK and nice full of potholes, like potholes and all kinds of crap, two things, two things that we know produce extremely good drivers are both armies and Russia. We have a bunch of dash cam videos to suggest both of these are the case. Yes. And we also know that like Soviet trucks and Soviet vehicles, famously very light and agile.

Perfect. Yeah, I'm sure this would not be a problem. I mean, you know, the Soviet Union, if they had been smart, what they would have done is invested in this fantastic technology, right? Called Big Mud Tires. They really would have cornered the market on mode. 35 inch. What you need, no, what you need is like a Soviet Elon Musk to be like, we'll just build a like a hyperloop to Kabul.

You'll be able to like get in Nitto's. You'll be able to get you'll be able to get on a train in Moscow. And then you in 45 minutes, you'll be in Kabul because you'll just go under. That's literally what they were planning to do was build the railroad to Kabul, like, you know, shock me. They were planning to do that, but that didn't quite happen. But one of the things that inspired that was, of course, an incident in late 1982, just after this depot had been built.

That was this. This was built in May of 1982. Broadly, or at least finished the November of 1982. There was a convoy that went through the Solange Tunnel. Um, and come on, bad stuff happened. I don't like that slide. Yeah. Not a fan. The Soviet conscript looked just different in this picture. He's just like. Comrade, the truck is on fire again.

That's a very shit. And I should point out that the you're you're like lowest level, base level Soviet conscript was constantly drunk. Yeah. So constantly drunk, having dead off, she's not done to him. She's being beaten constantly. Now drive through this tunnel, like fuck this, I'm setting this tunnel on fire. We don't we don't know for a fact that this didn't start through like an improperly wired stereo playing hard bass.

Well, it's like it's like got some alligator clips hooked up to it. Is it was a bad batch of like Kvas all gone wrong. Yeah, people don't know this, but a Kvas trailer can achieve a fuel air mixture. Well, there's so little there's so little information on this like fire at all. Like the Soviet Union claimed it never happened. Um, yeah, good. And the podcast there. Yeah, episodes, whatever, a thing that never happened.

There were two like. I hope the episode that I'm on achieves the highest numbers of Soviet national anthem plays. That's the legacy. According to my five year plan is the triple that according to the records of the Soviet army on 3rd of November, 1982, two convoys crashed into each other in the slaying tunnel and it caused a traffic jam. Well, that's what you get for not having lane markers.

The guy just like falls asleep and is just like donk. And he just to giant crass trucks off of each other. And everything else, like even if there's a traffic jam, they could plausibly kill a whole lot of people because there's no ventilation, right? Yeah. And then everything else we hear is like hearsay. And Joe, I heard that you have talked to people who are primary sources about this.

Yeah. So. When like there's traffic jams that happen every day in this line tunnel, I don't think I just made a clean pass through it. A single time night or day, no matter what the hour is. I mean, they get tons of speed and then just like fly their truck through it. Sixty miles an hour. And Jesus, even even even ten years ago,

this the all the the CO2 or whatever builds up and. It chokes the life out of you. Like to the point that like people like just get out of their car and walk away from it and then come back later. Hmm. The sleepy time tunnel. The life. Yeah. Beautiful. Just like just putting up a sign next to

next to the big portrait. Just says, yeah, and to hear for nap. Very long nap. It's a that's most problems with public transportation is like or like public infrastructure is one of the major drawbacks. And even driving down your interstate is choking to death, though. So it's a huge problem.

Absolutely. And that's just like a that's an inherent vice, right? You can't do anything about that. It just happens. That's just like the tides magic. Yeah, you can't do anything about it. You know, it's like, well, well, we are officially induced that, honestly, because, you know, you have to hold your breath through the entire tunnel. It's like that that like old mother's tale of like you have to hold your breath

while driving down the road or you'll get attacked by a ghost or whatever it was. Yeah, they'll leave like hand prints on your bumper like that, except it's a mile long tunnel. Yeah, and the ghost is the Taliban. The ghost is the entire regiment of Soviet soldiers. You just start hearing ghostly hard face. Like it works on the Pennsylvania turnpike, but you don't have to slow down to five miles an hour to get through a mile tunnel.

I never fucking do. The other thing about this tunnel is there's no alternate route for hazmats, which is, of course, what we do in Pennsylvania is no hazmats are allowed on the Pennsylvania turnpike tunnels. So you have to direct all of the trucks full of like acid and gasoline and explosives and whatever the fuck. And they have to take a tiny winding road up and down the mountain as opposed to going through the tunnel.

Suck it, nerds. Yeah, they cannot wait until until American truck simulator makes it out of the truck simulator, but you're driving a vat of acid through Amish country. Absolutely. I can't wait. I hope they have the carts. I think it'd be funny if like you have to like you can you can slosh the acid back and forth and it spits out the top and vaporizes the Amish, you know. Right.

Your hatred for the Amish is DLC. Yeah, it's genuinely one of the most baffling pieces of deep lore that this show has. I don't like the Amish. They're like fucking like all they all do puppy farming every single one of them. Well, I mean, for Rumspringer, you get your cart and then you wild out and then you come back and you start a puppy farm. Everybody like that. That's the stuff you could ever see your puppy farm neighbors again.

From what we what is known is that there was a fire in the Solange tunnel sometime in November of 1982 with a military convoy and anywhere between it didn't happen and three thousand people were killed in this fire. That's Soviet numbers. I missed them. So since since the the Estonia Sinking it's their numbers on the war are so bad. Like they I think they may be like 15,000 soldiers died there.

Which is obscenely low. Yeah, there's like 12 guys. I mean, yeah, we lost Ellen Chuck. It's horrible. Yeah, unrelated reasons and cover off cry. We had like about a two million death rate from like unrelated training accidents. But just a just a bunch of horrible closed cast get training accidents.

What kind of training accidents? Well, we were training with these guys called the Mujahideen and things kind of excited to my favorite part was like in the Red Army at the time, one of your punishments would be transferred to Afghanistan. So like and it could happen like, you know, they were they were drafted for about two years, sometimes lower when the war went on longer. And if you went there, you could spend your entire conscription in the country. Hmm. Yeah, you get you get out of your conscription term.

You're like, finally, I don't have to get beaten with sticks by everybody who's been in longer than me. Now I can beat people. So you just go home. Yep. Well, I healthy system. It worked out really well. All the deaths were were were from friendly fire

because Uzbekistan and Afghanistan were friends. Because of the bridge. Oh, God. All right. So, yeah, the inevitable happened like a convoy cut fire in the tunnel and murdered thousands of people, probably. But we don't technically know, but that probably did happen. Most likely. So anyway, what was the aftermath of this?

Well, obviously, number one, the Soviets decided it's time to try and build a railroad to Kabul, which didn't happen. But now is this going to be for the same reasons as it's very difficult to like do anything when people are shooting at you? Yes. I mean, I feel like that's the right ballpark in terms of like things I think would be very difficult to do while I was being shot at surveying a railroad list would be one of them.

Hmm, I feel like building a railroad from the border of the northern border of Afghanistan all the way to Kabul would be one of like the nine engineering wonders of the world. All right. Yeah, I have. It could be done. You would need the Soviet Union used their capacity to do an industrial wonder of the world on Chernobyl, which. Kind of like cancels itself out.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, you get a negative, but also a positive. It just evens out in the middle like you didn't end everything. Good job. Yeah, you did. You did probably like a kind of a containment operation that nobody else in the world could have done. And then also all of the guys who could have built a railroad to Kabul, die of radiation poisoning for some reason.

Yeah, it's an engineering wonder, which corrected a problem which shouldn't have existed in the first place. That's that's like why I'm hesitant to do an episode on Chernobyl. Is that like it's one disaster followed by a long, long program of anti disasters and like containing it. Look, nuclear power usually good. But like, yes, but you're supposed to do the correctly. You're supposed to do the hard work of containment before.

It's a lot of work. If you start with this one weird trick of building a container, you build your reactor. This is why I can still live in Pennsylvania because Three Mile Island, they did that work beforehand. I don't know. I really like. I really like that kid in Michigan who built the reactor in his backyard. I mean, that guy had the, you know, the gutsy of Soviet engineers like, you know what, when it explodes, I'll figure it out.

And he did. He irradiated his entire neighborhood. True. And he later died from cancer. But like he called FEMA and got it handled. And you know what? He didn't have to pay anything because FEMA had to do it. Anything he is disrupting.

He's disrupting the system. Yeah, it's like call 811 before you dig. Call FEMA after you irradiate your neighborhood. Yes. Yeah. And honestly, thankfully it's Michigan, so nobody ever noticed. All right. So the fire happened, the Soviet Afghan war. You know, obviously, the Afghans won.

Yeah, another big, another big W. I feel like the real Afghan war is the friends we made along the way. Yeah, I mean, then we like lead straight into the Afghan civil war, famously a fun time for all involved and which goes very well. I think during that. Yeah, I hear that might still be happening. Weird, weird. Yeah, but how that worked.

At that point, like the tunnel was out. It was it was in various states of disrepair since since the war. I think it's in better shape now than it's ever been, but it's still really bad. Well, like that's a recurring theme, right? Is that you end up with like the the ISAF occupation of Afghanistan. You just end up like guarding and repairing a bunch of like Soviet or pre-Soviet infrastructure, like dams and stuff.

Yeah, I wish it was that good, like because that means that like they would be building stuff that actually worked. One of the things that I had to help build was a school and they mixed it like the the concrete dirt mixture, like ninety nine percent dirt, one percent concrete because it's contractors. And so when it so when it rained, the school melted. Oh, yeah, that costed like,

I don't know, with contractor inflation and grift, probably like a hundred million dollars. Well, some guys screaming about the water cement ratio, as usual, and then like actually now it's terrible. The aggregate is awful. They did not use the finest aggregate. They use the bad aggregate. Concrete jokes, everyone.

So hold on a second. Oh, thank you, Alice. Yeah, any time. Welcome to the concrete cast. Yes, very niche, very niche show. You've seen in Landlord's Super, that new steam game, you can mix concrete with like pissing in it. Oh, man, that would probably be fine.

Well, I mean, it seems to work. You can just use it instead of water. You just piss in the piss is mostly water that wouldn't throw up the water cement ratio too much. It probably collapse is it probably doesn't go up super fast. So like you just scrape out the dead tenants and then you rent it again. I believe I believe piss would be classified as what they call an ad mixture, right?

Which is anything you add to the concrete, which isn't water, cement or aggregate. So, you know, you might you might technically, you know, fail some quality inspections, but piss is basically water. So now now mulling the concept of concrete. I mean, this is this is some true redistribution here, because you're going to have to get everybody to get involved.

This is a bunch of guys standing around a cement mixer. Guys, I got a game called Ookie Tunnel. We're actually. Oh, my God. All right, so yeah, you're a very serious podcast. It's a family show. The tunnel today has got like a five mile an hour speed limit. It's basically unlit.

That's the kind of laugh that you want to hear about. That's amazing. Also, I want to like crowdfund like, you know, how some people crowdfund to build schools in Afghanistan. I want to crowdfund to build, you know, those like nagging signs they have where they like measure your speed and then they don't have a camera or anything. But they're like, the speed limit is like five.

You did 60. I want to put one of those up at the end. You know, the Taliban's going to end up being the good guy and show up and rip the copper wires out of there, too. Someone shoot that on day one, I would support them. Yeah, I was really on the fence about my allegiance to the Taliban until I heard about the righteous stealing of copper. They're just like really anti copper wire.

Hey, Kate, women's rights, hate secular education, hate copper wire, simple as. I mean, as it was written, you know. Yeah, absolutely. It's it's in there. It's in there. The anti copper Hadeeth who can forgive. There. So there's some the traffic is still obviously very heavy on the slang pass because they're still. Massive amounts of just goods and supplies and whatnot that need to go.

A bebus track into. Yeah, into Kabul, right? Which now you can get Adidas track pants in Russia. So, you know, of course, they probably come in through the north. They don't come from Russia. They're just sparkling track pants. And then, you know, all this shit has to go through this two lane tunnel for a city that's larger than Los Angeles, right?

Yeah, you know, which is ridiculous. This traffic is very heavy. And one of the problems with the pass, you know, not just the tunnel, but the road through the pass in general is it's very politically unpopular to close it to make repairs because like. How else? Yeah, we're just going to have to like strangle you a bit to like do the thing. Yeah. So, you know, one thing which various IMF associated, you know, non-government organization, blah, blah, blah.

They've been looking at is like, OK, we should dig a second tunnel. So then we can close and then we have the mongoose out to like fight the snakes. Yeah. So this is like this is something which has been seriously looked at over the past 10 or 15 years. It's like we should build a second tunnel so we can at least fix the road. But of course, you know, there's there's still a bit of war happening in Afghanistan as it turned out. Well, what would the 35 version of a tunnel look like?

It's just like it's meant to be that way. If it's constantly burning, it's easier to control. No, that's just the Elon Musk car tunnel to Hickey. That that's what the tunnel, the tunnel is invisible to radar, but like also for no reason, because it's multi role. It also functions as a bridge and an airport. It's actually just a painting of a tunnel on a wall. The DLC is a sign that just says boom.

And like the placement of the tunnel is even dumb back when the Soviets did it because like the people in the valley are pretty independent, like always pretty much run themselves independent from Kabul. So whenever they're unhappy, they just close it. Like that still happens. That whole area was controlled by Masoud and for the most part, the Northern Alliance, who still kind of run themselves. Oversight.

Tunnels closed. Sorry. We have some. Let me see your tunnel pass. We have some goats you could use. It's a toll booth, but you pay it in goats. Someone's got to go back and get a shitload of goats. But listen, if if we just fund more stuff in Kabul,

if we just give the cops more European uniforms and if we just give them more trucks, then eventually the thing that I see from my window will look like a state, so I don't have to worry about this. My personal favorite thing about the Afghan police is that their uniforms look like hand-me-downs from the Cuban army. Like circa 1960. It's absolutely amazing. Oh, do they still have like the green jumpsuits then?

That rules. It's like this really coarse wool and it's like a light like teal. But it looks in their hat with their hat is really what makes it. It's the same like model hat. So they've just got the Castro hats. Yeah, it's it's absolutely amazing. Oh, that rules. I don't know how they still get supplied things from the 60s.

I believe the sewing tunnels also a time machine. That sounds like it's a liminal space. Yeah, we are now a Vibes podcast. And so you enter into this tunnel and like the world changes around you. Hot tunnel. It's like entering a cheat code in a video game. You have to get your jingle. Like you have to turn your jingle truck to the left, the right,

then they get up to just the right speed and then you're back to the future with your jingle truck. Now, you know, it's not dead, though. The Chinese are now trying to build a railroad to Kabul. Good luck on the road. Just Belt and Road, Motherfucker. We're going to Belt and Road. We are going to do some soft power and maybe also some hard power

by building some friendship infrastructure. It's actually it's not the Belt and Road in Afghanistan. It's like the Pakol and Toyota Corolla. I still I so badly want this. People do fan art and I'm ever grateful. I so badly want Gypsy Danger wearing a Pakol. Be outstanding. Yeah, absolutely.

I so yeah, no, this is this is going to go perfectly. I'm sure that the third consecutive as well. No, fourth consecutive superpower to try to be like, yeah, we will just we will simply influence Afghanistan in the direction that we want is going to do perfectly. The only thing that's going to happen is in like 50 years when we still have U.S. soldiers deployed, they're going to be guarding things outside of like they have like picture of Mao on it instead of Masoud.

Yeah, they're just back again and like your grandkids are like driving like a Chinese copy of a BTR down this thing. My grandpa told me this title sucks. He's got a whole podcast about it. What's a podcast? It's what we had before we had direct mind implementation of before the truck got together to become president for life. They were all podcasters.

So it was really strange. Thank you, eternal president, Christman. The podcast, the president pipeline. You know, really, most of what people got sent to the gulag for was podcasting. I mean, they probably deserved it. I mean, yeah, absolutely. The podcasts are the coolings of this age. Just holding all of the content.

How much is your Patreon make? Get on the train. Oh, man. OK. Well, what did we learn? The fucked up thing about there is a lower and upper bound about how much your podcast can make. If you if you're in the middle, that's when you get sent to the.

The reeducation camp, the content camp. Yep. I think it's actually a skills camp. You learn a lot of nice things. They give you the videos that people that work for the camp say they're very nice. They give you a wallet when you get in. So what have we learned aside from do not try to invade Afghanistan? That was a big one.

Yeah, tunnels are for trains, not cars. For the car. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah, I've learned to be a worry of all tunnels now. I have a tunnel based phobia, and I'm sure this won't be crippling in the Pacific Northwest. Have we tried having special forces assassinate Hamid Karzai and replace him with a train? Abdullah Abdullah is the two track train now.

Exactly. Well, there's like there are now more trains in Afghanistan than there ever have been, because they extended the line from that border crossing to whatever the nearest city is. That's probably unfortunately, they're all ran by Blackwater. If it's an M is be Mazar Sharif, right? Yes. OK, you now get a train from there to I don't think they're passenger trains.

I think we're all freight trains. You can be a hobo. You can be an Afghan hobo. You could be an Afghan hobo. Yes. I mean, the Taliban then shoot you in the kneecaps because playing harmonica is is bida, but. Yeah, the hobo bindle was actually it was too long, it was longer than his beard. So he got his ears chopped off once you cross the friendship bridge.

Everyone takes out their harmonicas and is like, finally. Yeah, here the sound of freedom. Like hobo markings and all the all the houses next to the wherever the rail terminates. Yeah. So do not try to invade Afghanistan. Yeah, do not do not try to build a railroad during a war. Yes. Apart from those cool World War One French railroads, those are cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, so they work pretty good in the Civil War, the American Civil War. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I guess I guess build a railroad in your rear area, but not in the area where you're like getting shot at. I feel really uncomfortable saying anything about railroads in the south as a white man. You'd like that. Oh, man. Sherman's neck ties, you know, they work real good. Yeah. You're like that cool Civil War mortar, you know, the one that like

the first rail gun, railroad gun, excuse me, rail gun is different. Yeah, it's like that. Yeah, they just put a train on like a destroyer now. Steampunk Future comes back and gives all the soldiers rail guns to be fair. To be fair, I think I've solved the US Navy's problem here, right? Like you can absolutely destroy the engine of a fast boat by firing a train at it. We're not we're going to lack megan teak their asses. Yeah.

But if the US made it somehow, the train would be like rocket powered by an orange or something. Look, I mean, that that did happen. Um. That New York Central Railroads M 4 97. That was well, it was two engines from a B 36. They stuck on the top of the train. You got to start naming like ridiculous stuff about railroads

because Justin will be able to say that happened. Oh, yeah, that did happen. Yeah, this is like all these things happened. They're very dumb. They shouldn't have happened what they did. Did anybody ever attempt to build a nuclear railroad? Nuclear railroad. I feel like they probably did.

Yeah, depends on your definition. But yes, yeah, because of course, actually put in a nuclear reactor. TV is a nuclear powered railroad, right? Like it's. Yeah, because the French high speed rail network is pretty much all nuclear powered. Put the nuclear reactor on the train was. That's what I'm talking about. There that was the kind of madness I'm looking for.

Strongly investigated, never actually implemented. And then those range from anything from building a new, like highly sophisticated nuclear locomotive to just taking a steam locomotive and putting a nuclear reactor in the firebox instead of coal. Just shoveling into your nobles one of the ten. They're not open firebox. That was a serious project by the AECs.

I think that Denver and Rio Grande Western was the partner on that one. It's like also highly classified. It's like, what if we could take steam locomotives and put it put a nuclear reactor in there? It's like, well, I do love someone like the fucking Flintstone just shoveling radioactive material like it's a job as a skinelta. It's a living people do be trying to bring back steam trains. Like have you seen some of the like advanced steam propulsion systems

that people like keep trying to make happen where it's just like, no, we can make steam trains environmentally friendly. Let me have my steam trains. Let me have this. So there's like the one that's trying to make heritage operations more environmentally friendly, where they're going to use like biomass to run the steam engines as opposed to, you know, coal. Right. There were a handful of shit.

Yeah, it'd be like like wood pellets, you know. But then there's like, no, there were the insane projects in the 80s from American coal enterprises where they're like, we're going to make a modern steam locomotive. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of. This is when the coal companies saw the rating was on the wall. This is like none of this surprised me because, you know, the U.S. attempted to make like a drive.

It was like a ramjet, but it was originally powered by like nuclear power. So as it flew, it just rained fall down. Yeah, perfect. Who did who created this? Give that man a medal. Hmm. We may do an episode on that in the future. Who knows? We made a we made a like a crop duster, but for cancer. Yes.

Same thing with nuclear rocket engines, which nobody tell Elon Musk about. They're fine if you're in space. Just don't fire it up while you're in the atmosphere. You're fine. Nuclear rocket engines are a good idea. I put my stamp of approval on it. As long as you don't use them in the atmosphere, because then it'll cause a lot of cancer.

But you know what's in space, generally, is a lot of radiation. So it doesn't matter once you're in space. Elon Musk is going to try to put one in the fucking Cybertruck, though. Oh, my God. All right. So now we've learned lessons. So let's conclude this before I have to split it in half. I forgot to put the slide in. Fuck. All right.

Next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, which should be here, but is not. It's a blank slide. That's right. It's the Tacoma Narrows Void. Yes. No. The next episode is about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster seen here at night. So I think the void is just called the Tacoma Narrows. So anyone have any commercials before we go? Listen to Trash Future with me on it.

It's very good. Listen to Lion's Leap by Donkeys with Joe on it. It's also very good. And by his. Thank you. Yes. Yes, please. All of his books. Yeah. The book is The Hooligans of Kandahar, right? Yeah, The Hooligans of Kandahar. That's out. I also have a military sci-fi book called Citizen of Earth is out. And its sequel comes out in August and is available for pre-order now. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I will say personally,

Hooligans of Kandahar is one of the best books I've read in the last few years. You should absolutely go fucking by it. Yeah. That's described to the Lion's Leap by Donkeys Patriot for their bonus episodes, which are much better than ours. That's true. Yeah, that is true. You don't last forever. Yeah. Depending on how drunk I am. You just have to edit.

What is editing? I do not understand. Editing is when you don't say the ref that you are going to say and you let Justin move on to the next slide. Editing is why I make my producer, Nate, drink so much. Like, oh, that's a libel. Oh, that's a slander. That's gone. I mean, this is this is valid to us because we are the only podcast in the Nate Bethea Extended Universe

that is not edited by him. So we don't have to, like, impose our terrible jokes on him. I think we make up for that more than enough on our end because most of the time whenever he's like, dude, why did you say this? You're like, I don't remember that happening. So you go ahead and get it. Why did you say the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a legitimate people's war? Look, I'm just saying that the PDPR are misunderstood.

To really give him a second chance. Right. I mean, at this point, like, quite legitimately, what could they do? What could they do worse? Yeah, it does end up this episode being the Najibullah stand in two hours, but here we are. Well, do you want to end on the Soviet Union? It seems about right now, drawn. It's coming out of this bridge here.

So. Oh, well, all right. All right. I think that was the podcast. Yeah. All right. Good night, everyone. OK, I'm going to stop recording. All right.