Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 306 - The Battle of Brisbane

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Joe and Nate talk about the time a bunch of drunken American soldiers caused a pitched battle between themselves and their allies while stationed in Australia during WWII Correction: Indigenous Australians were given Australian citizenship at the same time other Australians (1949) however, the quality of that citizenship was not equal to that of non-indigenous Australians. This continued for decades and as many indigenous Australian activists have pointed out, continues in various forms to this day. This included discrimination on enlistment. Some areas of Australia legally allowed indigenous people to enlist, but in practice, turned them away based on how they looked. Others were enlisted but not paid. Others were paid, but not equally and kept in segregated units and virtually none received benefits. sources: https://www.ozatwar.com/ozatwar/bob.htm https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/E84830 https://www.9news.com.au/national/the-battle-of-brisbane-how-world-war-ii-mass-riot-startedg/78b4e1be-bd3d-4d35-aef0-8b196213f4e7 https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/culture-clash-americans-in-world-war-ii-south-pacific/ https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/battle-of-brisbane.html https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/brisbane-news/diggers-lay-into-yanks-in-brisbane-battle-20171122-p4yx5o.html https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/homefront/us_forces

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lines led by donkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always

been ad-free. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody, this is Joe from the future here. I actually have a correction to issue here when I'm talking about indigenous Australian citizenship and enlistment. So indigenous Australians were given Australian citizenship at the same time as other Australians in 1949. However, the quality of that citizenship was not equal to that of non-indigenous Australians. And this continued for decades. And as many Indigenous Australian activists have pointed out, that pretty much kind of continues

to this day. This discrimination extended to enlistment. It was technically legal for Indigenous people to enlist, but in practical application, that was not always the case. Some were turned away based on simple skin color, for example, saying that they were too dark. Other people were allowed to enlist and serve in segregated units such as the Tories' Stray Islanders.

Other people simply turned away just because of the baseline, they didn't want indigenous people in the military. And this varied wildly between branches. After enlistment, they were not given benefits or rewards for the most part. They were treated incredibly unequally. People were not given the or rewards for the most part. They were treated incredibly unequally. People were not given the same amount of pay. In some instances, they were not paid at all. I thought I wanted to clear some of that up.

Now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Lions, led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me, trapped in the British based content basement of the Trash Future Studios is Nate. What's up, buddy? Hey, what's up? Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's fun to be actually

making content because I feel as though I have been spending a significant amount of time in the Trash Future content basement, the London dungeon, if you will, trying to do system upgrades, and they haven't fucking worked. And so like just being like, oh, I'm doing something involving recording on microphones as opposed to like figuring out where the line buzz is coming from and shit.

It's actually really nice to be to be in the cell. So in a way it's like, it's like, you know, locked in a dungeon brackets positive. You know, it's interesting because I'm looking, as you know, of course, You know, it's interesting because I'm looking, as you know, of course, I'm looking for a studio space to build the lions led by donkey studio here in the Netherlands because I have learned there are certain quirks in Dutch law, both in business and like renters law that you can't really work from home necessarily. For instance, like handling merchandise and things like that. I can't do that from my house. If my landlord finds out, I will be in trouble and the municipality cannot help me.

So I'm looking for, in case you're listening landlord, I don't currently do that, but I'm looking for a studio space. It's very, very funny, because I'm trying to find a place in the city I live in, in The Hague, and there is a lot of office space, but obviously not everything works, a studio. And I'm looking around,

and so the real estate agents and the landlord's like, so what is it that you do? I'm like, oh, well, you know, we have a audio production company. And like, okay, but what kind of, it doesn't work with Dutch people. You can't just like, this is something I do vaguely. They're like, okay, no, but what do you actually do? We, and they just cut to the chase. They're like, you know, it's, you know, we, we do audio production.

We record audio as well. So we'll have like a recording booth in there, but like not like music. And they're like, one real stage is like, are you telling me you're a podcaster? I was just like, yeah. I always say, we just do digital media production. We record podcasts, voiceovers, audio books. The other night I had an Uber driver who was really into audio books and telling me about erotic audios in Bangladesh And I was just like I'm glad that folks are fucking using digital recording media to really get after the thing that matters

Which is listening to someone narrate an erotic story. I've done it once. I never want to do it again. Yeah, exactly That's not true. We've done it twice. We have done it. That is correct twice. Yeah, it's it's funny I don't know if I told you this story, but I Correct choice. Yeah, it's funny. I don't know if I told you this story, but I actually got refused service from an online bank because they don't do business with podcasters. It happened to me as well here.

Yeah, and they argued that it was because they didn't want to potentially be responsible for any content and thereby being like associated with it if it was something that violated like, or just made them look bad, which I understand. But it was funny because they were so vague about why they denied it to me. And you know, because I'm an American and I had to show my American passport in like a video and recorder rather I showed my British passport, but I was taught to narrate a thing

for this like ID verification thing. And so I was like, Oh, fuck, did they hear my American accent? I mean, that's a stupid thought because it's almost always going to be either analyzed by a computer or it's going to be outsourced to someone in a call center somewhere in the developing world. But then my accountant who was the person who had the business customer relations liaison for this company asked them and then they were like, oh, it's not because he's American, it's because he's a podcaster. That happened to me as well, but I think it had more to do with the way we monetize the show. We don't have ads. My initial application was denied, so I contacted the bank, like,

what the fuck? And I thought it was maybe because I'm American, I don't have Dutch nationality, I didn't have a residency card at the time, which I now have. And they're like, well, no, it's because in the paperwork, he's like, your show runs off of donations. I was like, yes, but it's not a charity. Like, no, it's a registered company in the Netherlands. But that's not a sustainable business model. Like, yeah, you're telling me. It's subscriber, they pay for subscription.

I don't know. That's how I tried to frame it is we have a subscription service. Yeah, but all your money comes from Patreon and we're not going to set up a business account for that. Yeah, we had a similar problem with British banks basically not understanding the business model at all. So I mean, it's very funny. And like, yes, I am the first to admit that you are building a foundation on quicksand

in the sense that you are fully reliant on one payment processor. And like, if that platform owned by a venture capital firm, a private equity firm that's run by Jared Kushner's brother decides to do something stupid and fucking nosedives, it's not like the fan base goes away, but obviously you have to rebuild it, and also payment processing is one of those things

that's annoying no matter what, and you can't really DIY it. No, no. You know what I mean? Nor would you want to, because it would be world's most declined transaction. And so yeah, I'm aware of that, but it is very funny sometimes, where you're sort of like, right,

but you all give a business account to like world's most obvious shell companies Right, you tell me which one is the biggest problem and you know, my money is real. It's coming in It might not be in tomorrow, but it is in for now, you know, I will give them credit They also wouldn't work with crypto companies, which like we're not one but like You know the back of my, I was thinking, you know, if I just showed up at the port in Rotterdam with like a VOC sailboat full of mysterious gold from Indonesia, y'all wouldn't ask any questions. But because it comes from Patriot, I can't get an account. It's the JJ Kasabian Batavia Trading Company. Do not ask what's in the shipping container. Exactly.

Nate, I've gathered you here, us here, that sentence doesn't work. I've gathered us here today to talk about a very dumb piece of World War II history. It has nothing to do with any real battles because we just came off of five weeks of talking about the Boxer Rebellion. So I figure we'd have to reset somewhat and talk about something truly stupid.

And what is dumber in the history of military conflict than soldiers? Oh, yeah. I mean, to me, that's what makes it always interesting is that you think, oh, must have been so different. And then you actually, because I've talked to guys who were World War II or Korean war vets, and they're like, no, it's literally the exact same. They were drawing dicks in the Porta-Shooters of 1945 and 1950 that were made out of wood, outhouses, slit trenches. You give a guy a slit trench, he's going to take out his fucking 1940s equivalent of a gerber and

carve a dick into the tree for some reason. Exact same. Looks like they found dicks drawn on the walls and old Roman outposts and stuff. Oh, and graffiti, basically calling a guy gay, but not in the pejorative sense of how we grew up in the Midwest, but rather being like, this guy sucks at being gay. And that's why we're making fun of it. That's a very impressive level of true Roman or Greek discrimination. It's like, yeah, you're gay, but you're not even good at it You're not even good at it. You're bad at being gay and Do this long enough we're gonna call the gay cops

That's a callback to a whole different whole different story of Suetonius mid. Yeah, exactly like like Yeah, like the Antonines give better head than this Yeah, like the Antonines give better head than this. Now during World War II, soldiers of allied nations were stationed throughout the world for a lot of reasons. Use of deployment to upcoming combat areas, rest and relaxation, simple garrisoning duty, and of course, defending an area from a possible attack. And as anybody who's ever lived near soldiers can tell you, that is not always a pleasant experience for anyone involved. The soldiers don't want to be

there. Generally speaking, you don't want the soldiers there. But the two worlds will mix at some point. There's a whole point in the US constitution about keep the troops out of my house. I don't like that. Yeah, it's because nobody wants to live around soldiers. Yeah, exactly. Because nobody wants to have around soldiers. Yeah, exactly. Because nobody wants to have like that disgusting, like let's be perfectly honest here, like seven layer dip of cum sock smell. And I fucking know that very well

because I was on the last thing smoking for my brigade out of Afghanistan. And I wound up having to do more or less over personally involved, not just overseeing a detail, literally doing it myself with some soldiers. All of the Joes abandoned their dirty old uniforms in the clamshell tent at Bagram, and we had to get them all taken because it's legit.

They were probably so stiff, they were standing in ranks still. Yeah, this is gonna sound stupid to people, but this 2010, this is actually a valid concern. You can't just take all of those fire retardant ACUs and just throw them in the trash because the trash is handled by people who, if they were like, hmm, these are American uniforms. We can take them and sell them. Who are they going to sell people who want them? It might just be guy who drives a truck and wants to look cool in Afghanistan.

That guy exists. It might also be guy who's like, hmm, we can dress up as Afghan auxiliary troops and sneak in somewhere. Which they did. Which they did all the time. So we had like hundreds of uniforms that hadn't been washed in months because it's Joe, not Joe Kasabian, but Joe the collective term for enlisted soldiers.

And so they have to be incinerated. One and all. Yeah, I guess that's the thing. It's like they have to be incinerated in an incinerator probably fueled by expensive imported diesel fuel taken on an overland route. And it's like, what is a better metaphor for the war in Afghanistan? Then these uniforms are designed to be fire retardant and we need to burn them with diesel that we got by flying it in or

trucking it in from Pakistan. Unfortunately, common ball sweat is not a flammable miasma of liquids. I just dip bottles, dirty underwear, socks, frac-eos, just stuff. So much fucking stuff. And yep, it's like, yep, you've been in country 13 months, probably longer than anyone in the brigade. Guess what your job is, Captain or Lieutenant Bethea? Fucking cum socks. Just get all of them. You have the cum rag detail. Yeah, exactly. It's like you're gonna open a Goodwill

for the grossest pieces of cloth in human history. You know what else they call the cum rag detail, Nate? Being airborne. Uh. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? You guys, you're like six foot. Fuck you guys, that's what. You're six foot four and they put your ass

in a fucking sardine can. Like not even Fidel Castro did that shit to people You volunteered for it. The army didn't do anything to me I did that to myself because I alone am stupid like yes Paratrooper being a paratrooper breaks your body like nobody's business like fuck me the opening shot Especially when you're jumping with a combat ruck is awful But you know what I jumped like I think 18 times in seven years in the army Like you got your ass cramped into a tank more than 18 times in a month in the field Look if there's if there's one thing paratroopers and tank crewmen can agree on is that we neither of us

Probably really need to exist anymore But at least tanks are still using modern conflict Yes, that's true and also like if you're gonna use the engine block of your vehicle, if you're gonna use the engine block of your motor transportation to get warm when it's cold, you'd much rather stand in the exhaust funnel from an Abrams tank than in the prop lodge of the C130 or Z17. It will warm you up, but it smells like you're huffing more fumes than fucking the dude from Stone Temple Pilots.

And you're on a- Oh, rest in peace, buddy. You're on, I loved that band. Actually, you know what? It's really mean. I made that reference not even wanting to be a dickhead because Scott Wileman was actually a really good dude. It just sucked what happened to him.

But more that my home radio station did a fucking free concert tickets giveaway. You had to be like the seventh caller and your cue to call in was them playing a sound of as they described it, Scott Weiland huffing fumes off his tour bus's tailpipe. Oh my God. It was just like sucking sounds on the radio.

So in a way I feel like a dickhead. I've become the shock jocks of- Doing a fat bong rip of C-130 fumes? Of Indy's new rock alternative X-103. I'm fucking, I'm just as bad as them and probably look just as frumpy as they did in 1999. At a long enough timeline, we all become shock jocks. Yeah, at a long enough timeline, we all become fucking,

was it Michael Malice or, or fucking the guys on- Matt Cowell in the morning, is he a shot job? Yeah, drive time commute, whatever the LA guys, always getting fired for some kind of racist song they wrote. Yeah, so we've got a digression already. It's very early. I never missed a top or two dude if I had a shot at paratroopers, much like anybody standing

on the ground with a rifle. Much like the Allied air defenses in Sicily when it was Allied paratroopers coming in. I never miss a shot to fire at paratroopers, says literally anyone who has ever watched an airborne insertion. Now, generally speaking, depending on where that soldier happened to be stationed, the local populace was perfectly happy to have them. And this had nothing to do with Allied brotherhood or anything.

It was rather simple practicality. World War II was a shit time to be alive for more reasons than anybody could count. But on the home front, far away from the front lines, there was boredom, a lack of commerce for the local economy, and of course rationing, which made getting normal everyday things incredibly hard or simply impossible depending on what you were looking for. This rationing of course hit armies at war as well as most armies were not exactly awash with creature comforts. Their soldiers got enough to get by, hopefully, and were given a small paycheck on top of it. Again, hopefully, depending on what country you happen to be serving in,

voluntarily or against your will, your experience may vary on that front. But one country that didn't really have this problem was the United States. In comparison to its peers, American soldiers were clothed well, paid better than anybody, and were issued with things like chocolate and silks that a normal person, civilian or otherwise, just couldn't get anymore. So when American soldiers showed up on the shores of an allied nation, they brought all of those things with them, which led to, let's say, the most likely possible outcome.

A barter system, a whole new economy about prostitution. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Both of those items. I'm like, hmm, there's a full the full spectrum of human experience of what you can trade for sex chocolate and silk You know what it reminds me of that We watched fury for a bonus episode years ago and I it's still one of my favorite movies when it comes to tanks because I am a simple man Again, I was a tank crewman, but you were. There's a line that's like,

you know, she'll fuck you for a chocolate bar. It's like, no, she won't. And he's like, bet you would. I mean, look, it's not, it's not good. It's not great. It's bad actually, but it's true. It's real. It's not, it's real. It did. It does happen. It doesn't, didn't really, I'm not aware of it being a thing to any degree of the scale that it was in the past in conflicts like postaks back onto FOP Liberty through the main ECP and tells the gate guard who knocks him down and detains him that he was at a whorehouse. And it's like, I can't think of more of definitionally the place you get killed at than you as an American soldier in Iraq being like, I'm going to walk off post and go to what I've been told is a whorehouse. Yeah. I'm sure things like that existed, but I've never heard of them.

Yeah. It's called, but the people who got to do them were your brigade commander taking TDY in Turkey with his interpreter who calling it coin centric TDY. Yeah. Or the guy in your unit who took a suspicious amount of vacations to Thailand. Yeah. I mean, look, troops are troops, soldiers are soldiers, goes throughout history. The US military in the last 30 years is the only one who have decided to say that we can finally achieve humanity's noble goal of banning sex. And it has worked about as well as you would imagine. Ah yes, the infamous pornography ban. So everybody certainly followed.

General order number one. Yeah, good old general order number one. Can't fuck unless you're married and deployed together. Can't have sex at all. And that led to a lot of marriages I bet. A lot of quickie marriages. But it's not, they didn't even have the fucking dodge that Shia Islam has, where you can have the temporary 15 minute marriage,

20 if you last longer. Like, it had to be legally married. You actually go to JAG and get married. Nah man, who needs a 20 minute marriage to get out of here with that shit? No. It's got like, you know, time to warm up and smoke a cigarette. While still being married because it might be illegal. You could do that while you're divorced.

It might be illegal to smoke a cigarette in bed or outside your beehut with someone in a state of post-coital fucking relaxation if you're not married. The army loves defining shit like that. Now all of this brings us to American soldiers in Australia during World War II and what become known as the Battle of Brisbane. I know about this, what the fuck? Or as I should say to piss off all of our Australian listeners, the Battle of Brisbane. I know about this because I was fascinated by the Papuan campaign and actually wrote my battle analysis paper at the Captain's Career Course on a specific engagement in the Papuan campaign.

Basically the turning point of the Battle of Bunagona at the end of 1942 into like New Year's Day 1943. That's how I know about Herman Botcher. That's how I know all about how much it fucking sucked in the South Pacific, particularly in New Guinea. That's how I knew about Adabrin. Hell yeah. From reading about it. And I also knew that yeah, their forward training marshaling location

and R&R spot and like sort of like refit spot was yeah, Queensland. That's how I know about that. Oh, we're getting there. Have you heard of the Brisbane line? Do you know this story? Yes. It's kind of apocryphal, but the truth is that the Australian government had a plan that if the Japanese invaded Australia, they were just going to write off everything north of Brisbane. Like, y'all are fucked in North Queensland, Northern Territory, doesn't matter.

What you do is you retreat far enough back so the Japanese have to fight the emus in which case the Japanese will then lose to the angry birds of prey. But also, you know, Australia had like five million people and 3.5 million of them had been requisitioned by the British army to get shot at Dunkirk or something like that. And so they should have requisitioned the emus. The war would have been over years. Yeah, exactly. The war would have been over. Hitler would have been born aloft by flightless birds somehow. His fucking stupid face pecked out of his head. Yeah, that guy walking down the street in Manchester drunk off his mind at nine in the morning. He'd be like, it's your fucking emu.

That would actually be a Veterans Day parade. He'd be honoring troops there. The Australian government's secret plan was that they would write off everything North of Brisbane. They called it the Brisbane line. It was supposed to be secret, but MacArthur's a moron and fucking blew up the spot. At a press conference, like, I've heard about the Brisbane line, but don't worry, we won't do that.

We'll defend all of Australia with the American, you know, the allied forces. And Australians were like, wait but what's what's what's the Brisbane line? Well, it's like all that like during the Cold War the US had certain cities They just accepted we're gonna get nuked and did nothing to protect them Yeah, everyone was just gonna go to Seattle Miami fuck fuck yeah, Tallahassee got me good my Tallahassee fucked Atlanta probably fucked Yeah, I think I'd brought I'm a Detroit definitely was on the top of the line to get nuked, I'm sure. I mean, they make machines there. Used to.

American soldiers arrived in Australia virtually as soon as the US and Japan fully entered World War Two. For instance, Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7th, and US soldiers arrived in the land down under before the end of the month. Australia made a lot of sense as a hub for American soldiers during the rapidly expanding and at this point, unsteady war in the Pacific. It was a logistics hub, a medical treatment area as a good place to dump soldiers, marine sailors, whatever, on the beaches for rest and relaxation as their mental health quickly imploded from the stresses of war. After all,

it's kind of sad to be hard when you're on a beach, assuming it's not one of, you know, the beaches that Marines were normally at. Yeah, it's not Bedio. It's not the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, et cetera. I'm going to go on a nice vacation to this place. I think it's called Tarawa. Yeah, I heard Guadalcanal. That sounds pretty nice.

I think that's a nice joke. It's like an eternal joke. Getting water boarded at Guantanamo Bay sounds nice. Yeah, I heard Guadalcanal. That sounds pretty nice. I think that's a nice fix there. It's like an eternal joke. Getting water boarded at Guantanamo Bay sounds wonderful if you know what any of those things mean. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about like, it does make sense. It was like, yeah, Australia makes sense. It's like, well, it's an allied country. You can just turn your heading extremely southwest from Hawaii and get there.

And after a few weeks, I think back in those days I don't know also the Japanese had fucking just just just curb stopped literally everything And we're just on the march and the only thing that stopped them for fucking getting further was things They insisted on making their guys walk over the goddamn Owen Stanley Voutans in New Guinea So they got to Port Moresby literally within sight of Port Moresby, and they're like, all right, time to attack. It was like, sorry, all the men are dead. They're all dead.

They were all killed by General Mosquito. Yeah, they were fucking, they were killed by, exactly. My malaria, jungle rot, the itch, some sorcery. I'm sure one or two of them was like, oh, that's a delicious pig those Bushmen have. I'll just take it, they won't mind and wound up a delicious meal. Yeah, it's New Guinea. Interesting place. Just saying. Most of the American camps are plopped on in northern Australia around major cities

like Townsville, Cairns, Brisbane, and Rockhampton. Though, I use the term major cities pretty loosely here because World War II Brisbane, for example, had a population of about 325,000 compared to about 2 million today. 2 million. Yeah. I went to Australia for a combined joint exercise in 2011, and Brisbane was the only major city I went to. I spent almost all of my time in Rocky.

So, Australians were just like, wait, really? You did that? I was like, yeah. I tell them the story. I'm like, yep. Before we toured for Trash Future, I'd only been to Australia to spend a few hours in Brisbane and then like a month in Rockhampton. And I flew Anchorage to San Francisco, to Sydney, to Brisbane, to Rocky all in one go. That sounds fucking miserable. It's like flying from fucking New Zealand to, and you're like, I can't wait to see America.

I'm going to Lawton, Oklahoma. And that's all you see. The Australian government was more than happy to absorb as many American military personnel as the US was able to throw at them. This is from the Anzac portal, quote, the Australian government, lacking confidence in Australia's capability to defend itself,

had expressed its willingness to accept a supreme commander in the Southwest Pacific Theater, initially from either Great Britain or the United States. Although MacArthur's appointment had been discussed for some time, it was only confirmed after the devastating loss of the Philippines to the Japanese. Australia's security became a vital link in the future American offensive against Japan, providing a base for which they could fight the Pacific War. From the Australian perspective,

the US offered the opportunity for strategic protection as well as the acquisition of weapons and personnel from which to fight the Japanese. At these early stages of the Pacific War with the Philippines taken by the Japanese and the Imperial Army on effectively Australia's doorstep, who could really blame them if they had actually taken Port Moresby would be like I think a two-hour flight from the from Australia's northern coast like Darwin is not a particularly connected to the rest of settled Australia area the northern territory is huge and and and that the that point at which you know the the Peninsula up there where Darwin is is very far away.

But once you're in, it's easy for the Australians to mount a defense. As I said before, basically every single able-bodied man had been fucking requisitioned and shipped abroad to do ultra-gallipoli. And so they didn't have anyone to defend. Yeah. Yeah Soon thousands of Americans were showing up in Australia in such numbers It fundamentally changed the way Australia worked both locally and nationally for example, Brisbane the focus of our episode here its population ballooned by 90,000 members of the American military. Maybe that's where they like, I don't know,

they like Americans in Queensland. I don't know, I've never been to a place where like buying a coffee and the young woman making the coffee is like, oh, I love your accent. No one says that, no one loves my accent. I love that Midwestern American accent. Yeah, I love, yeah, please, I love, God, I love that. If I bump into you, will you say, Ope?

Yeah, I definitely will. I'm guilty, I love I got I love that I bump into you will you say oh Yeah, I definitely will Guilty of that all the fuck I didn't even know I'm doing it I do it all I'm sure Dutch people are so confused when I'm like, oh, let me just squeeze past you there Like the local Albert Heiner, what? Yeah, what's this guy talking about? What's oh the fuck is oh, I think this guy wants to buy some porn under Sorry, I like Dutch people. I have no complaints thus far. I don't want to trade in

cheap jokes, but there's a bluntness about Dutch people that can be very funny sometimes. Let's just say though, when it comes to Australia, also just bear in mind, it's a big country that's hard to get around now. In the I mean, it's a big country. It's hard to get around now.

In the 1940s, it was far, I mean, it was perceived in the Commonwealth as being kind of a backwater that just produced a lot of cattle and sheep. And, you know, obviously Melbourne was the biggest city in the British Empire at one point. Sydney was not yet that size, but like Melbourne and Sydney are very, very far from Brisbane. Australia is one of those places that continues to amaze me. It's something that I've often joked about living in Europe or the caucuses. People fundamentally do not understand how big the United States is. I am guilty that I occasionally forget just how fucking massive Australia is. Yeah, Darwin, like think of,

Australia is basically the size of the 48 contiguous states of the US. So Darwin, when you think about its position, is basically in like Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Melbourne is in like, it's like going to Destin, or I don't know, fucking, like the southern coast of Alabama or at a bare minimum if that's too far, it's at least like being in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Like

imagine, yeah, like trying to, I haven't explained this when planning our tour there. Can you describe it to me in burgers, please? If that's the only way I can understand things. So you'll probably at least count around 300 to 400 highway exits with signs for Burger Kings when you make the drive between the two. We talked about, because we drove when we toured Australia from Sydney to Canberra to Melbourne, and that's a long drive, but I had to convince my co-hosts, I was like, no, we need to fly from Brisbane to Sydney because to put it in terms, you'll understand driving from Brisbane to Sydney is like driving from Detroit to at a bare minimum,

Tallahassee, but probably more like Miami. Jeez. It's a, it's, it's- It's not a fun drive, especially if you hate driving long distances. And also like most of the way, it's like not a very big road because it's like, it's a huge country. And I think there's like 30 million people in Australia.

It's one of the most urbanized countries on earth. Brisbane's a big city. It's the biggest city in the area. But then it's basically just bush all the way until you get to... I'm going to be a little bit rough here, but Newcastle, I think, before you get to that part of New South Wales, there aren't very many big cities on the way, big towns. The nearest big city is Newcastle, which is not that big, and then Sydney, which is like 6 million people. Local Australian businesses of all kinds changed rapidly to accommodate this massive influx of Americans. This included hotels, bars, nightclubs, all being able to stay open later,

as they previously would have, and of course, jacking up the prices on fucking everything. And that's because the average American soldier may double that of an Australian soldier, and business owners would be goddamned if they're going to miss out on that bag. As you can imagine, this infuriated Australian soldiers who suddenly found themselves getting screwed every time they went out drinking and found everything more expensive. It also meant that local owners were much more likely to give better treatment and service to Americans over their own countrymen so they could get more money. I'll be honest with you.

Those poor Australian troops were avenged in 2011 when I was there because it was in the middle of the commodities boom and the Australian dollar was actually more valuable than the US dollar. So Burger King was like $30. Buying a coffee at the kiosk in like the Rockhampton Hospital, one of our troops got hurt, I had to go visit him, was like $6.50 for a coffee in 2011. Revenge comes full circle in enough decades, baby.

It was so unbelievably expensive. So they got their fucking revenge. They got their revenge. You know what? It only took 70 years, but it happened. Of course, with two different cultures of soldiers and people who desperately wanted to make money off of them, it meant that Americans came in and opened their own American-centric bars and clubs, as well as the American military opening their own bars, which they did used

to do. And then they expanded the postal exchange system. Now for people who are not aware, the postal exchange or PX is a kind of private store only available for use by the American military and their dependents. Most of the time back in the day and also as today as well, the selection in these stores is oftentimes better than in the local economies, as well as being normally cheaper because you don't have to pay local taxes on the price of goods. You don't pay sales tax and there's no import tax. And similarly, the commissary is like,

the military is emphatically not a socialist organization, but it has an at-cost grocery store that is basically like, it's the closest you can get to like that concept The commissary doesn't make any profit. It just sells stuff that got rules. It fucking rules. It's fucking amazing And also you could get anywhere the US military has been they'll have fucking products from that So you can be like I said be in lot in Oklahoma or Dongdechon, South Korea and you can get I mean American stuff Like you'd want but then like random products you're like, oh,, I guess we can get Hawaiian, niche Hawaiian foods, flavored spam here. We can also get- None of it's like in any increased price.

None. No, it's great. Yeah. Yeah. That's why they, it's kind of, it's at best rude and at worst racist, but when they talk about the land of the big PX, it's just sort of like America, the idea that like, you know, you get stationed overseas and that local women want to marry Americans because they can finally go to America where life is easier and shit's cheaper and stuff's available and yeah,

we have burger everything. The streets aren't paid with gold, they're paid with burger. Which explains why the roads are in such shit shape. Yeah, exactly. Just keep fucking, all that sauce, just fucking tires have no purchase whatsoever. Especially back in the day, it's not so much the case now, but after World War II, when most of the world where the US military happened to be stationed, it might not be so bad to hit your wagon when these soldiers going home and get a ticket out of your devastated homeland. My grandmother came from a family of four, I believe, and she and her sister both married American Airmen and moved to America.

She was profoundly traumatized by the Blitz, but she managed to find the dude who knocked her up and make his command, make him marry her. So there you have it. I think like 20,000 Australian women married American military personnel, which is not a small part of that population. When you think about how small of a country it still is, but especially was back then. Now, all of this was especially true during World War II

when it comes to the PX and even more so in Australia, as a lot of things that it carried in the store were just completely unavailable in Australia due a lot of things that it carried in the store were just completely unavailable in Australia due to rationing or if they were, the prices were so outrageous, they were completely unobtainable for normal people. So if you're in the American military, you had free access to these things at much lower prices. Now these stores were only available to the American military, not the Australians.

While the Australian military stores were open to Americans. So the Americans had free reign over both of them. So if Americans, you had like a me circa 1941, who's like a weeb for Australia and you're just like, Oh, I'm gonna go buy Vegemite. Like he could go in. Yeah, Vegemite and nothing else. All the Vegemite and, you know, I don't know, bonds, I think they made bonds underwear back then, but they definitely had the fucking, what is it, Bundaberg rum, that was around. I feel like Vegemite was one of the few things

that probably weren't rationed. Yeah, you probably had Vegemite to your heart's content, but you never know, I mean, weird shit's happening. Where else am I supposed to get my koala meat cutlets or whatever? I don't know fucking anything about Australia. Dude, they eat crocodile, I'll tell you that kangaroo, obviously, but that's not exactly like haute cuisine, but people-

In Florida, you eat alligators. Yeah, exactly. It's not weird you would either. It's edible. It's good. Quite frankly, if I went through the effort of killing a crocodile, I'd want to eat it to have something to show for it. If something is going to eat you, you have to be able to eat it back to show dominance.

Exactly. That's why I love eating wolf meat. Please don't check my blood. I'd want to eat it to have something to show for it. Look, if something is going to eat you, you have to be able to eat it back to show dominance. Exactly. That's why I love eating wolf meat. Please don't check my blood for parasites. I could feel them crawling behind my eyes. Of course, this not only led to jealousy, but rampant skyrocketing crime as American soldiers did

what anyone would do in their situation. It started selling PX shit on the black market to Australians, making an absolute fuckload of money. Squads, platoons, and entire units would effectively act as gangs competing with one another over turf who are doing the same thing and would routinely fight and even kill one another over that sweet, sweet Australian dollar. So it's basically a three-way handshake between Australia in the 1940s and World War II, South Korea basically forever and South Korea became a developed country. Yeah, currently pretty much.

And the US military in West Germany in the 80s. And it's like, rather handshake slash Venn diagram of you've got black market profiteering, nationality-based exclusion, troops murdering each other. I'll go one further. The US military in the United States during the era of when the PX did not tax cigarettes because when I was stationed in Kentucky, I was stationed at Fort Knox. And this tradition of soldiers engaging in black market trade because of lack of taxes and the PX, I did this in 2006 or 2007 when I was in Fort Knox, I could buy incredibly depreciated cigarettes because cigarettes were cheaper in Kentucky, but also even cheaper

in the PX. So I would buy several cartons of them, put them in my car and on long weekends when I drive back to Michigan to visit my family, I would sell them in the neighborhood. I remember being at the National Training Center in 2008 and I smoked back then and I remember a pack of Koolz was like $3.50 at the PX shop at NTC. And let's just say it was not $3.50 in fucking regular California stores. It was like $9 or $10. Now this led to something else and it's probably something that everybody listening saw coming.

American soldiers began witting over Aussie women. The Australian Mint complained that American soldiers' uniforms looked much nicer than theirs and combined with the fact they made significantly more money than they did and the Americans had candy, silk stockings and other things they could lavish upon the local women, they were leaving the poor Aussie men behind for the new arriving Americans. Truth. These Yankhans stealing all Shailas.

I sort of got him not making this up. This is of course how the Australian men saw things. This is from a News 9 article. Historian and author Robert Macklin said, it started because the Americans were getting off with the pretty girls of Brisbane and the Australians are feeling pretty much left out of it. The Americans had the smart uniforms,

they had the PX materials, they had nylon stockings and turkeys and ice cream and all that that could lavish upon their ladies. And the Australians said pretty much nothing. Now, nobody's ever gonna accuse me of having game in any way whatsoever, but could you imagine being a woman in a sweaty, newly arrived American soldier in their dress uniform slaps a whole fucking turkey down on top of a bar like, what's up girl? It's like I might not have came but I got game birds, what up?

It works. Like, hey yo, Miss Lady, we got a whole goddamn backpack of fucking ice cream back in the barracks! This shit's melting fast as hell, so you better get down there, right? I should point out here in case anybody is thinking otherwise that according to the Australian women themselves, this had nothing to do with it. Because of course it didn't. According to the Queensland Historical Atlas, women simply thought that the newly arriving Americans were nicer than their own Australian men.

This is the direct quote. Quote, even the official war historian Gavin Long notes, although not in an entirely critical way, Australians have always treated their women as little worse than their dogs. Therefore, the Americans who have usually been taught to respect women have displayed some tenderness towards Australian women and have stolen most of the pretty girls. Also, I mean, let's be perfectly honest here. It would be very difficult to get American soldiers to the point where they would be like, I think it's funny to put a funnel in my ass

and drink a beer that way. Whereas many of us have heard of the Australian butt chug. So all I can say is that I imagine if you're used to the latter, the former, as uptight and weird and gauche as Americans can be, I mean, they're not sticking funnels in their ass to fucking dump Victoria Bitter down it. also the apparently they have turkeys and ice cream They just you fucking you rob an American in Australia

1940 something Grand Theft Auto style and like ice cream sandwiches and turkeys fall out of their pockets There's also like the tried-and-true thing that like anybody who's ever lived anywhere that could be understood as a tourism spot knows. This has nothing to do with the quality of the people. It's just the fact that they're different. Well, they're different. They're new. It's like, yeah, going to Iceland if you're a foreigner, and it's like, you're just kind of a novelty. If you're single and you're interested, you'll probably be able to meet someone just because it's a country of 300,000 people and everyone knows each other.

I mean, soldiers are effectively no different than anyone else who travels by the seat of their pants quite literally because they just like go around trying to fuck every new local they land in, like backpackers, tourists, quote unquote expats. Like everybody fucking does it. And they're all trying like Australians in this context are framing it as like the American stole our women because they're quote unquote property and the Australian women are saying, well, they treat it to be better. Meanwhile, we're both Americans. We've been around soldiers. I'm

like, how much better could they have been? Yeah, exactly. It's like game recognized game, but also this guy has the unfair advantage of a butterball turkey. So in the end, that might be the tipping point. I open up my dress uniform. I have silk stockings on one side and melting ice cream in the Australian heat in the other. It's very funny too, because that concept of the guy who opens his coat and has all this bullshit, like we kind of have the image, but not the word. The Brits actually have a word for that guy. The guy who's got the coat, he'd be like, the hat and the coat, not a flasher, not a pervert,

but he opens it up and it's got like watches and stolen shit, they call it a spiv. We don't have a word for that. No, we just have like Frank, the guy who has the jacket full of turkey meat. Yeah, yeah, they also, we sell shoplifted meat out of the back of a car in the parking lot of the grocery store it was shoplifted from.

The Brits sell it down the pub, a guy just comes and opens his coat and he's got fucking stolen food. Tom has told me that story in multiple occasions. I've had people offer me stolen food in the pub numerous times too. It's just a thing that happened. I haven't been going to the right pubs. Now, somewhat hilariously, this became so well known, that being Americans tearing their way across Australia by their balls, that the Japanese used it in propaganda against Australian soldiers, pointing out that while they were fighting the Japanese in New Guinea, some American from Nebraska was fucking their girlfriend back home.

I'm just imagining the Australians getting galvanized against the Yankee imperialists. I guess you can't really use that kind of language. That's more Cold War stuff, isn't it? Because if anything, it's not like the Japanese are like, oh, look at thosekee imperialists. I mean, I guess you can't really use that kind of language. That's more Cold War stuff, isn't it? Cause the Japanese, if anything, it's not like the Japanese are like, oh, look at those awful imperialists. It's like, meanwhile, but it's more like, they have basically been like, dear Australian Tommies, got some bad news for you.

There's this person named Jody. We're not even sure of their gender, but Jody's got your girl or your guy, whomever. And they're gone. Jodi exists. Jodi's in Brisbane. Jodi's just laying pipe. Jodi is fucking doing a full plumbing install across the entirety of North Queensland.

The redoing the plumbing infrastructure from the ground up. Exactly. They don't even need a septic tank. You've got pipe laid end to end across every acre of the place. Meanwhile, you are here in between three interlocking fields of fire that we have dialed in and you are going to die. As your dick and balls rot off in the jungle, like humidity. Some dude who probably never went to school and get conscripted from the farm is just

laying waste to your family life. Meanwhile the most you can hope for is that the crocodile that's going to eat you might at least tongue your butthole a little bit before it does. I see the crocodiles in New Guinea are very very courteous. The kink crocodile. Oh no we invented the kink do that. No. No. No, another problem was the perception that the two sides had towards one another. Despite the fact that the US and the Australians were obviously allies, and the Australian media and government was doing everything it could to hype up their new neighbors and win over American public back home in the US with the importance of defending Australia from the Empire of Japan, that's about where the respect ended. Like you talked about, the Supreme Commander in the Pacific, Douglas MacArthur, did not exactly think very highly of Australian soldiers and told any of his peers that would

listen just as much. He also didn't really think very highly of American soldiers. He just thought highly of himself. Yeah, he's just a huge dickhead. Where Australian and American troops were fighting in New Guinea, the Australians were doing virtually all of the heavy lifting in that department. American soldiers were told of the hard fighting victories of the Americans, but nothing of the Australians. And in fact, the Australians at best were slowing them down. So obviously American soldiers saw their Australian hosts as terrible soldiers who shirked their duties and completely relied on their Yankee doodle sigma chinned American brothers to

do everything when that could not be further from the truth. In fact on one occasion while fighting alongside Australian soldiers the raw unproven American soldiers in Bunagona literally dropped their rifles and ran from combat in full view of their allies. So you had Americans full of themselves with fat paychecks, silk pantyhose, jackets full of ice cream or whatever, and seeing themselves as God's gift to Australia and Australians, and not to mention Australian soldiers

now priced out of their own bars, watching some foreign dudes Mack on local women, all while treating them like shit, to see them as like they're unable to fight. In short, a bunch of Australians are looking around going like, ''Yo, what the fuck?'' I mean, also the Australian Army's field craft when it comes to jungle warfare is hard fought and won in terms of how they acquired it.

Famously, one of the critiques of the American troops deployed to Queensland and then subsequently to New Guinea was that acquired it and famously one of the critiques of the American troops deployed to Queensland and then subsequently to New Guinea was that like they were out doing exercises in like fucking big open cattle pastures And it's like Australians were even making this point at the time like hey guys, we got some jungles We got some rainforests. You might want to train in those I just I mean there are I just practice not a lot with all the turkey based games Not a lot of pastures and open fields and in the Owen Stanley Mountains and the highlands of New Guinea or the north coast of New Guinea. Rabaul does not look like Odessa, Texas.

Now with that attitude, you can make it look like Odessa, Texas. Now another big hitching problem between the two of them were the military police. Now Australian military police are seen as little more than rejects by their fellow soldiers. And that is because the job of the MP generally fell to dudes who couldn't qualify for service for anything else. And those men largely acted like it. They're doing a job that nobody else wanted to do, including themselves.

So they kind of had a live and let live attitude towards their fellow Australian soldiers. They wouldn't bother people as long as you didn't bother them. They're also unarmed and had very little authority in the first place. Which is like you put American troops in a situation like that and that's like the fucking rats finding all the dodo bird eggs on the island of Mauritius. You think they make a log and it's just fucking delicious. Just gobbling them down. There's a reason why American soldiers

have to be policed by psychotic American police because it's the only thing that keeps us in line. The poor fighting Tommy of Australia has not yet met Marine Todd, MP. Like just, like not member of parliament, military police. Speaking of American military police, now Nate and I have a fair amount of experience with military police. Speaking of American military police, now, Nate and I have a fair amount of experience with military police,

but American military police have a vastly different attitude that is just about the same as normal American police culture in general, even today. They're aggressive, they're violent, and they're armed. They also had broad powers that cover not only American soldiers, but Australian ones. And the Australians were not fucking happy about this, and this will become very important later. But not everything was Americans pissing off Australians.

There was one major issue that infuriated Americans, and it is not something I'll say you probably see coming from a country like Australia in the 1940s, namely race relations. Now for those who are unaware, Australia is a deeply fucking racist country. It still is, and it definitely was back in the time that we're talking about. Indigenous Australians were and still are in a lot of ways living in a segregated society away from white Australian life and society. They wouldn't even be given citizenship until 1949 and the right to vote until 1960s. Yeah.

Also, Queensland in particular comes into attention here because Queensland, there's a practice called blackbirding where people were basically press ganked into slavery from Pacific Islands. So Queensland is particularly considered worse than the rest of Australia. When you think about the fact that Australia had the white Australia policy until like 1970 where you couldn't emigrate there if you weren't white, like that's saying something. But Queensland in particular where Brisbane is, has its, its reputation today is influenced by this, but just understand the circumstances that like it's a

place where cattle and also sugar cane plantations and people were enslaved there. It wasn't slavery in this, in like, you know, the Atlantic slave trade, the way that it was in America and in the Caribbean, but it was slavery. Right. Not everything has to look like chattel slavery to be slavery. Exactly. And so that is a thing to understand the dynamic. I don't know where this is going. I don't know if they're going to be like, the Australians are too nice to non-white

people or if it's- You're not going to expect what happens next. I am ready to have my weeb for Australia brain fucking explode. So when thousands of African-American military personnel showed up in Australia, Australians were actually fine with it. This requires some explanation. The Australian government was, and soldiers, society in general, were deeply and still are deeply fucking racist against Indigenous Australians.

However, they saw black Americans as fine because they were not Indigenous Australians. However, they saw Black Americans as fine because they were not Indigenous Australians. And it also helped they had the exact same paycheck as their white peers, meaning they didn't give a single fuck about American segregation when it came to businesses because their money spent all the same. Soon, white American soldiers were pissed that Australians were serving Black Americans right alongside them at bars and clubs, and Australian women seemed just as happy to go home with one of them as they were the whites. Before long, you had episodes of white American soldiers attacking black American soldiers for daring to talk to a white woman or go to their bars, only for Australian soldiers

to jump in and defend them. And then when the MPs showed up, the Australians seeing MPs as a little more than shit-headed rejects on a power trip would fight them too. I've forgotten the details of the episode title because my brain leaks. Like when you strain water out of pasta and you put it in the bowl with holes in it, sieve, colander if you call it, however, strainer even. However, wasn't this also the source of comparable intra

ally race rioting in England? Yeah. It led to the Battle of Bamber Bridge, which we did an episode about. Yeah. For effectively the same reasons, practicality, but also British racism is just significantly different than American racism. And Australia is... A fair amount of friends of mine have told me that when they get back, who live in London and they get back to Australia to visit, they're like, wow, I've gone back in time 30 years in terms of racism. And I'm like, wait, you feel that coming from fucking England? Yeah.

So yeah, it's bad. I mean, but it's also different. Yeah. I mean, and also like segregation as so far as American segregation was never a thing It was it was but not everywhere. It was in places in the Northern Territory. It was in places I think Queensland had it specifically in like the United Kingdom hence why hence why it led to Bamber Bridge But also in the in the Australian context of it there was of course there was segregation But when it came to black Americans, they were seen as, well, they're not indigenous. That's different.

So one of the reasons why, if you watch the video for David Bowie's Let's Dance, which came out in 1983, why the locals in the white Australian locals in this bar in the Northern Territory, it's what I think they call it, They call it a hotel, a pub in a small town that's big enough to have one. I kind of weirded out by all of it and not doing a very good job of pretending the camera isn't there is because the sort of heroes, the protagonists of the story told in the music video are indigenous Australian kids. And that bar in 1983 was a bar where it was either officially indigenous Australians couldn't go or it was Jure in the sense of right what's that?

I'm using it wrong. It was de facto in the sense that like you just didn't cuz you knew better be sir You knew better exactly like that's how recent it is slash was like it's it and it's like Whereas in America like we'll go to great lengths to be racist to the point where we make things less efficient And way less convenient for ourselves the whole point of the way America works is that it can't be equal like Absalom Absalom was basically an instruction manual for white Americans was like oh wait There was some such you get miscegenation in your family fucking burn everything down and kill everybody like it's it's bad That's not saying Australia's better, but it's different. Yeah, it's, different isn't always better.

No, but to the mentality of Australians in the 1940s, compared to white American troops, like the absence of that hard line, segregation always enforced, you never transgress, like I could understand why Australians would be like, wait, what the fuck? Like, we do a perfectly good job of being insanely racist. What the fuck's wrong with you?

It's effectively what it boiled down to like, wow, this is, like we wouldn't do this to black people. Yeah, but weirdly that's black is the term they would use and back in those days, especially for indigenous Australians, it's just very strange. They wouldn't do that to like black Americans. Black Americans, yeah, because you're American more. And that's the thing, it's like Brits with class.

It's not to say they're not racist, but class stuff winds up kind of trumping things. It's like, for America, nothing can trump race. That's my opinion, but that's how I feel about it. My experience as a white American is that that's how white Americans think. There is no other delimiter that can interfere with that specific hire. That's how America has always been.

And until people get over that, it's going to be a fucking nightmare. This kind of weird racial crime within the hate crime between members of the US military and then like them being defended by Australians happens so much the US military enforced segregation within Brisbane despite it technically being against Australian law at the time and then Australia effectively being forced to go along with it. Black soldiers were not allowed to cross the south side of the Brisbane River. And this was to be enforced by military police. And as a fuck you, the Australian military police and the Australian military is just like, we're not going to do that.

Which is weird because if I remember correctly, Brisbane was a sundown town for indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians. Yeah. But like when they saw an African American and American military uniform, they didn't get the racism. Like that's different. Why are you doing this? It's one of those mind-bending... Because it's one of those things we've talked about multiple times on the shows. No one ever accused a racist person of being intelligent. Sure. Or being consistent or making sense.

Because you can't rational... You can't use rational thinking to rationalize someone out of a position they got themselves into irrationally, which is exactly what's happening. Like, well, the Australians are like coming to the violent defense of African-American soldiers. Indigenous Australians weren't even allowed to enlist. No, they weren't citizens. If they left the country, they weren't allowed to come back in. They weren't even fucking citizens until 1949.

Yeah. I mean, an offhand comment made by an Australian NCO when I was there in 2011 was that basically the army, sort of apocryphal army lingo story about this was that pre-1967, if they saw indigenous Australians wandering onto a range, they just shoot them. Jesus Christ. And they thought this was funny to tell the story, and we're just like, it's pretty fucked up actually. Nothing of American's history with Native Americans that we've talked about forever on this show. It's just as bad. It's just that it's less recent. Yes, exactly.

That's what I was getting towards is like, all this stuff in Australia is so much more recent. Like in comparison, Native American citizens in the 20s, I believe it was like 1920 or 1919 or something. So like it's still not that long ago, but it's not 1949. But you know, the Australian military police refused to enforce the segregation. Unfortunately, for everybody else, the Americans were more than happy to pick up the racism slack. American MPs declared open season on any black soldier who dared to cross the Brisbane River,

and they killed several of them. Now, just because there was segregation of black soldiers from white soldiers did not mean white soldiers couldn't cross the river, and they often did. It wasn't uncommon for white soldiers to cross the river, commit hate crimes, and only then to be stopped by Australians because American MPs didn't care. This is going to sound fucked up and I'm not trying to make light of it, but like just the sheer, it must be very strange for an Australian to perceive this and be like, you have just made the arduous journey of getting from America to Australia, a 14 and a half

hour flight from Southern California, now on a boat to bring your troops here. And now you're killing them because of American racism. You're killing each other because of American racism. It's like, you are insane. It's the one thing, like no matter what theater that the US military is in during World War II, they imported this everywhere.

Like we talked about this during their Battle of Bamber Bridge episode, and they did the same thing in other occupations. Now, by November 1942, not even a full year into the Americans showing up, military police would routinely report at least 20 yank against Aussie fights per day in Brisbane alone. And all of that brings us to Thanksgiving of 1942 and what would become the Battle of Brisbane. Every American in the city, because you know it's Thanksgiving, had the day off for the

holiday and they spent the whole time getting piss-ass drunk. On top of already bad relations, this set the stage for really anything to blow wildly out of proportion should something come up. So one American private named James Stein had spent his day drinking at a hotel until it closed at about 7 p.m. And then he made for the PX to stock up on more alcohol and continue drinking.

He's on the quarter of Creek and Adelaide streets and ran into some Aussie soldiers who he was cool with and they were talking to one another. But before long, an American MP showed up named Anthony O'Sullivan and demented Stein's paperwork that said he was allowed to be out. He took his sweet ass time getting it because he had spent hours drinking to the point his hands no longer really worked and we've all been there before.

But O'Sullivan began giving him shit for taking so long and when Stein finally found his pass and showed it to him, O'Sullivan just decided to arrest him anyway. The Australian soldiers that he was with began telling the MP to fuck off and leave Stein alone, so O'Sullivan pulled out his baton and hit one of the Australians, which caused all three of them to start beating the shit out of the MP. More MPs came rushing to the scene, which caused the rest of the Australians in the area, dozens of whom were just watching the scene unfold in front of them, military and civilian alike, to rush to the aid of their own men. Soon, a multinational civil-military alliance was beating the fuck out of the MPs, who said

they had seen enough of this Aussie smoke and retreated into the PX and locked themselves inside. **Jade** Doing a Saigon embassy in the PX. **Matt** Try desperately to get lifted off by a helicopter while you're just having cartons of cigarettes under your arms. **Jade** Yeah, she's like, please invent road-rowing aviation and get us out of this mess. **Matt** The cause of the entire situation was now lost. It didn't matter to anybody that was watching. Once word started to go around that some American MPs clubbed an Aussie, that's all that was

needed. Soon over a hundred Aussies gathered outside the PX to start throwing bottles and bricks smashing out the windows. Stein, the spark of this entire incident when the Australians came to his aid, now had to also run inside the PX for cover as other Aussies showed up again beating his ass as just seeing him as another American.

Within a few minutes, he was armed with a baton and he was standing along shoulder to shoulder with the MPs who had originally been trying to arrest him. Then an Australian cop showed up to see what the fuck was going on and the crowd turned on him, forcing him to run across the street into a red cross building for cover, which also came under impromptu siege. By now, this shit was spreading through the city. Australians were talking to one another about what the MPs did, so some started decking

random American soldiers when they saw him, which caused Americans to tell one another that, hey, the Australians are just mugging us in the street. So now there's like roving gangs of Australians and Americans randomly beating each other up and nobody is fucking sure why. Thousands of fights were erupting throughout Brisbane with nobody involved actually knowing why they were fighting. All these Australian women are at home with turkeys. Like, I don't know why we're supposed to eat these today, but I'm waiting for this fucking guy to get home

so we can do it. I have all this ice cream and turkey and I have no American, where the fuck did he go? No American, where are they? Yeah, exactly. Bayonet wielding soldiers were ordered into the city to escort civilians out as this like just continued to spiral out of control. Australian military police took off their uniforms that told anybody they're MPs

and joined in on the riots punching Americans while American soldiers who hated their own MPs also began fighting them alongside the Australians in some places only for the MPs to run. And then the Australians and the Americans no longer had any MPs to fight. So they just turned towards one another and started fighting one another. I feel like if I were an American soldier, I would just do like British sailor who jumps overboard and like swims to the shore of Hawaii or I don't know, indigenous Australia or fucking anywhere.

It starts running through the outback. I'm just going to join your culture now. Like I'm just going to become, I'm going to become, you know, like the white adoptee. I don't want to deal with the Royal Navy. I don't want to deal with rumsodomy in the lash anymore. Or in this case, American military police. It's some Australian soldier clearing the streets with two snakes tied their tails tied together as a weapon, throwing spiders at one another.

Yeah, exactly. Just doing magic tricks like opening their fingers like a magician and a huntsman spider pops out. They invoke the swooping bird. It's Brisbane, so the swooping bird's gonna be there. They were like, listen, you fucked around long enough. It's time for us to escalate things for real It's like a like a wizard casting Ultima like all of a sudden the fucking if you're not familiar with Australian specifically, Queensland They have a kind of magpie that is insanely aggressive and when it's the season I believe in their mating season

They have to put out signs like be careful There's a swooping bird around because it will chase you and fucking peck your ass. Like the swooping bird is just a risk you face. It's probably more powerful than the Australian Air Force. Well certainly at the time. Probably now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Things were escalating so wildly and nobody was trying to control anything.

And in the middle of all of this, a group of Australian soldiers hijack a truck carrying machine guns and hand grenades and then crash it into a bar that catches on fire. I feel like when you have the truck with machine guns and hand grenades, you want to use it for that and not just decide to make Victoria Bidder sponsored VBID. That's what the VB stands for, Victoria Bidder IED. In a desperate attempt to get the right under the control, the Brisbane Fire Department was set into this mess to use their fire hoses to break up the crowds. They pulled up, took one look at the situation, said, fuck this, and then drove back to the

firehouse. Afterwards, their commander told a local newspaper, quote, we have no intention of using our services to quell military or civilian riots. Our job is just to put out fires. It's not really good juice of water, mate. Houses isn't fucking strong enough for that shit. That's shite. I can't even fucking talk like an Australian. I kind of can sometimes. I can talk like the guy who saw the peace protest we were unintentionally walking into

because our NCOIC liaison was an idiot while we were in uniform and looked at the protest and then looked at us and then waved at me and said, I might be going to guns and can borrow shoot these cunts for you. Like that I can do, but I can't really improv an Australian accent. Now somehow so far, not a single American MP had resorted to using firearms, and shockingly neither had the Australians or American soldiers despite the fact there was plenty of guns floating around the crowd by now. That was all about to change.

Eventually a group of MPs was dispatched to the PX armed with shotguns, which is pretty standard for what you could consider 1940s riot control. One of them was a guy named Norbert Grant. And as he approached the PX, he was the first one that appeared with a shotgun. The furious sea of Aussies in front of him began screaming, look at that cunt, he has a gun. Shoot me, cunt.

Like the mood of the crowd fundamentally changed, like from civil disobedience, you could say, to outright furious anger that he brought a gun into this. And they zerg rushed him, smacking him with bottles and sticks, cursing at him for bringing a shotgun to the streets of their city. Like they're beating the shit out of him. And Grant responded in the situation exactly like everybody listening probably thought

he would. He fired three times. He hit seven people because of the shotgun. And Aussie private Edward Webster died on the spot. This is so stupid. So yeah. It all comes down to the MPs being fucking idiots. I mean, there's lots and lots of other ancillary things, but yeah, like this.

Import Americans, you get mass shootings, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and then everyone's like, all right, well, let's have a peacemaking meal afterwards and everyone gets a hamburger. Hamburgers across Australia. Yeah, exactly. But no one is actually hungry because they've had all these turkeys. We've flooded the market with turkeys and ice cream and all the Australians are full eating

their traditional cuisine of wombat and snake. I don't know. Bangers en masse, British food, like inexplicably British food in a climate that's just not British. Wait, mate, you're gonna eat that spider? Well, I'm not here to fuck spiders. That's like a thing they say. Kind of. What the fuck does that even mean?

I'm just laughing. Like, I'm not here to fuck around, basically. But like, yeah, it's just so much more poetic to say I'm not here to fuck spiders. Like, that would be a, yeah, I'm not either. That would be a bit of a challenge. The Australian prose is profound. Oh, it's... I don't want to derail things even further, but I have one for you. But I'm just thinking about this.

It's just like all because basically they're like, hey, we're going to do redlining and American style segregation. And we've got fucking like cop voice, you're like like you're resisting arrest kind of shit and it's led to a intra-ally riot at you know recreating 1975 in Saigon at the PX and now a guy's shot because they did a mass shooting and he did spray and pray and the American cop that that that started this instead of it being like a 45 year old guy who's been

the police force for 20 years and looks like a thumb is like a 19 year old named Norbert. No one, I just think Norbert's a good name. I've only known one person named Norbert in my life and it was German. So I would say that's the world's most German-American but it wasn't his last name Grant. It's just like the world's your extremely German dad your extremely German mom insisted on calling you Norbert, but your dad was like, you know, a dude named Joe Grant. And he was like, whatever.

I just, I can't, I have no idea. It's just, yeah, my brother's fourth grade teacher was named Norbert Kutt in Germany, because that's where we lived. And that's the only person I've ever met with that name. And Mr. Kutt was a weird dude. So it's just a cursed name. And now I've got an even bigger association with that.

Now I've got- I'd rather be a German teacher than a 18 year old, 19 year old mass shooter. But you can't, you know, beggars can't be choosers. Yeah, I feel like I just wouldn't want to be 19 in 1942. I feel like that's just a bad age at a bad time. Yeah. You know, we complain about like being, you know, 18 in the early 2000s, because music sucked and we had frosted

tips and stuff, but this is way worse. The argument's still out on which one's worse. Frosted tips are pretty bad. Frosted tips, mass shooting. Who knows? Well, I mean, I'll unfortunately, thankfully, even in the early 2000s, you could also not have to worry about making that choice because it'd be made for you. That's true. Now, with seven people shot and one dead, things were about to be

seriously cranked up. The Aussies refused to leave the streets now that everyone knew that an American MP had murdered someone. And what they had in their mind on night two was no longer so peaceful. What made everything worse in the situation was wartime news censorship. No crimes committed by Americans or Australians for that matter, if they were in the military, were to be reported on in the newspaper. So people had no idea what was actually happening because it couldn't be reported on. People only learned about the riot through word of mouth and rumors and you can imagine what those rumors said so before long they came down and actually

fucked spiders and then shot a guy. They got a huntsman spider gave it the old what's for now like instead of a jumpy cop shooting a single Australian dead and wounding a few more the rumors were Americans machine gun dozens of Aussies, 15s were dead, then it was 20, now the Americans are driving tanks into the city, shit like that. Rumors were getting wildly out of hand. Meanwhile, the actual thing with machine guns was Australian soldiers hijacking a truck and doing St. Louis cop driving. So now Australians were still like pouring into the streets. Now they were armed.

They had knives, they had guns and fucking hand grenades and they had gathered like up to 300 of them outside the PX, which had since been reinforced hundreds of American soldiers and Australian cops, not to mention the Red Cross station just across the street. Other groups of Aussies roamed the street looking for any American they could find. Civilian, military, it did not matter, and beating the shit out of them. And for some reason, in the middle of all of this, neither the American nor Australian commanders thought about confining their troops to the bases to stop the riot. It's sort of like, there is this whole thing called

martial law you do in civilians, but like, you don't have to worry about declaring martial law when you're already in the military. It's what you already have. It's literally, it's just law. No commanders made any attempt to really control the riot I got confined to the fucking post because a soldier got a DUI in Korea They want to just ruin our weekends like I wasn't fucking blasting a dude in the dick with a shotgun

Over a fight over whether or not he was too drunk to be on pass, you know I wasn't I wasn't doing a sacred battle and cleaving people in twain with a claymore sword, you know to defend the PX I was just happened to be in the same brigade as a soldier who was an idiot. PX volt. At this point, hundreds of soldiers had made their way from the Red Cross station to right in front of MacArthur's office, which he wasn't there at the time. But one of MacArthur's aides was- Because he never fucking would be ever. One of MacArthur's aides was, and he was watched this scene from the window quote

I had just left the barracks and was walking to the headquarters for my shift when I got down to Queen Street They seemed to be at a standstill people were everywhere Aussies were grabbing every American they could find and kicking the hell out of them It didn't look so good So I ran down the lane and made a run for the headquarters. The Aussies were militiamen, not regular soldiers. I could tell this by the bands on their hats. There had been more than 300. I was watching the events from the headquarters sixth floor.

They formed three circles in the crowd and were passing Americans in uniform over their heads into the circles where they were punching and kicking them. They only found 21 and they were taking to the hospital after being beat up. They formed mosh pits that were crowd surfing people into the middle of them. Australia inventor of a lot of things to include the first Slipknot concert. Well, I just find that very funny too the level of understatement in that it's just so American in general and to my ears Midwestern is just like it's like that's like doctrinal doctrinal description tactical terms and drag graphics to basically say open didn't look so good it doesn't it

didn't look so good oh you might open this fucking pit up oh my god yeah more MPs are being dispatched to the scene armed with pistols, and when they arrive, they immediately pull their guns on the Aussies who are facing them down armed with batons, knives, and more than a few guns. It's almost certainly going to turn into a fucking bloodbath when one Aussie officer emerged from the crowd, walked between the two sides and convinced the MP officer to simply load his men into a truck and drive them away before shit got really stupid. And it worked. It's that fucking like the Kylie Jenner Pepsi commercial, but it worked. Yeah. It's like, there's a part of where you're just thinking like, well, guys do realize that you are, you technically like, if you gave them a legal order that they had to like, take out their toothbrushes and clean their dicks with it,

they have to do it right now, right? Like you are kind of in charge of them. Like people are reacting like, oh, what can we do? Force of nature, it's a hurricane. It's just like, no, it's troops being stupid. Like you kind of, you kind of have some powers. Yeah, you get the 19 year old with the responsibility to tell the other 19 year olds to cut the shit and go home, and generally they'll do it.

Yeah, that 19-year-old has exactly one more squiggly line on his shirt, which means he can tell that other 19-year-old that he has to do pushups until he dies. So use that power. Yeah, and the one Australian officer is like, have you guys considered just going home? Have you guys considered the military rank structure? And the American officer's just like, I guess we could do that. That sounds a lot better than, you know, committing a second larger mass shooting in the streets of Brisbane. Yeah. It's like, Hey, I know you guys are all like, me too. I'm a huge fan of, of, of,

of fucking like heroic barbarian combat, but we have invented the regimental system about 400 years ago. Have you guys thought of that? We got all those ice cream and women back on base. Let's just go there. Turkey's getting cold, man. Go eat it. Eat some turkey. After this incident, the situation slowly burned out. Also, military commanders actually tried to get their men under control for the first time. Then came the aftermath. Private Grant was court marshaled for manslaughter, you know, for committing a mass shooting in the middle of a riot. He was immediately found not guilty in the grounds of self-defense,

which admittedly kind of sounds right. I can't really argue with that, although it was incredibly stupid to put him in that situation. Right. But as you said, when you send the 19-year-old MP and he's outnumbered and- 300 to 1 And they're like like yeah exactly like guys who basically have the 4x beer logo tattooed on their face show up And they're like that guy's got a gun so now we need to kill him like You can't act surprised

So like this is like this is like the military law version of like let's just call it even yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, but also it's like, you can't really be surprised. I imagine this didn't go over very well with Australia. Honestly, at this point, it was all kind of burnt out. Like five Australians are found- They were so blackout they didn't remember. Five Australians are found guilty of assault, but the longest sentence any of them served

was six months in a military prison, so it was all just kind of a wash after that. And this wouldn't be the only time something like this happened between Americans and Australians, or even in the region, as a similar riot would blow up between Americans and Kiwis in New Zealand in 1943. Hell, this kind of thing happened in the US between American soldiers and American civilians. In case anyone wonders why you know a term like zoot-zoot riot, that would be why. And we will cover that one day.

I just remember in the background, people talking about the book that the Joaquin Phoenix movie Buffalo Soldiers was based on. The author said when he was researching this novel, he just was shocked to learn that in West Germany in the 80s, there was between 20 and 30 murders each year that were committed. American troops murdering other American troops. It's just, yeah, this happens. I do think there's a certain thing that comes with, if you train thousands of people how to kill people and then lock them all in a room together, that is the inevitable outcome. There's an easy solution to this problem,

but, you know, whatever. Now there was no real aftermath or come to Jesus moment in the wake of the Battle of Brisbane. As one American soldier put it, quote, "'After that, it just sort of settled down and you go into a pub and an Aussie would come up to you and slap you on the back and say, wasn't that a good ruckus we had the other night?

Here, have a beer on me. Fair fox, mate. Like, basically is. Yeah, and that's the Battle of Brisbane. Kind of, sort of, long simmering hatred between two people that ended in a police murder. Yeah, now you can recreate it by going to Australia and disrespecting Mi Goreng noodles, especially the Indomie Mi Goreng noodle packets. Maybe you can get 300 Australians to beat the shit out of you for it.

I'll take your word for it. I don't know what any of that means. Oh yeah. Mi Goreng, it's Indonesian food, but obviously Indonesia is much closer to Australia than other East Asian countries. And so in the way that we have like Maruchan Ramen in America, like Indomie brand Mi Goreng, which is just there. Like it's instant noodles basically.

But it's a thing. I know this both from being a weeb for Australia, being an Australia bunch, and then also being a member of a Facebook group called blokes and their Mee Gurang, where people post photos of their Mee Gurang and people see this, they rang on or rang off if it's good or bad. I fucking love Australia. It's because of Australia, I know what hooning is. Oh, hooning, yeah, hooning's a whole different. We didn't make a single hooning joke this whole time.

I didn't know how to shoehorn it in. Well, the guys in the truck, they were just, they hooned too hard. They didn't use it for its most tajtily producing purpose. They just hooned it into a wall. That's true, they hooned too close to the sun. Yeah, because they were actually burning rubber trying to get to Mount Glorious

and find the pavement that's been designed to blow out your tires, so they can blow out the tires on that truck. That is the battle of Brisbane. Nate, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can donate to the show on Patreon,

and you can ask us in Patreon DMs, you can ask us in the Discord, you can donate to the show on Patreon, and you can ask us in Patreon DMs, you can ask us in the Discord, you can put it in a truck and hoon it directly into a wall, and we will answer it on air. I'm getting word from our podcast attorney, don't do that last part. We can't support hooning. We can't actually support it,

because then we'd be banned in Queensland. They'd make the podcast assume corporeal form and they would crush it and Leave it on the front lawn of the Queensland government a thing they did with a hoon car Thus creating the best hooning trophy and hooning prize ever you could make the government so mad They crush your car leave it out in public. The point is to fuck up your car. Why wouldn't you do this? You've just incentivized the king of all hoons who king today's question is you guys are in your 30s what's something that you learned growing up that you what's something you learned while you're

getting older that you wish you would have known when you're younger I could think about that one too do you have one off the top your head already or I'm gonna go I'm gonna go with something outside the obvious here because someone's probably assuming I'm gonna say something about the military but that was I've been out the military for a very long time. I'm gonna go with moisturizer goddamn face otherwise they're gonna be 35 like me and people are gonna think like so what are you like 40, 41? Yeah, I should be better about that.

I have the, I've always looked young, so that's at least helped me, but like I can definitely tell my skin skincare regime is not regimen regime, whatever you call it, not doing very well. I think that in my thirties, I have learned that there is a degree to which you either get with the program and start looking at what it is about your life that makes you unhappy or about yourself that makes you unhappy and assess what you can do to fix it or at least to make yourself not feel bad or you accept that you will just be miserable. And I think for me, a lot of people talk about kind of like having to give up notions of things and it's weird because for me, like I gave up the notion of having a straight

job and went and did weird stuff and it worked out for me. It doesn't necessarily work out for everyone. And there's certainly some people are not cut out for the kind of uncertainty of that life. But I would say the biggest thing is that if I look at stuff, because I was 29 when I got out of the army. So I've only, in my 30s, I've only been a civilian and I'm almost 40. I would say the biggest thing for me is that I, I'll give you a one concrete example because we've gone on pretty long. So exercise was always a thing that I did because it was kind of taken care of for me in the sense that I was a high

school athlete and particularly when I was a swimmer and we trained a lot, you know, I probably did I think only maybe one or two days a week where we didn't have two days and we always had Saturday practice as well. So we'd have Monday morning, Monday night, Tuesday morning, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, Wednesday night. I think we had sometimes we wouldn't have Friday morning. We'd always have, sometimes it was weights, most of the time it was swimming. So I was always in the pool, in the weight room, at meets, even on Saturdays. And then I was in ROTC, so I always had to go to PT. And then I had friends from ROTC and like, we'd kind of set times with each other.

We'd go to the gym also. So I did that. Then I was in the army and I had PT and I had the PT test and I had all this stuff. I got out of the army and like, I went through a phase where I was in pretty poor shape because like, I didn't really enjoy exercising. Every now and again, the spirit would strike me and I would run. And I realized a little bit in New York that I liked cycle commuting, but it wasn't really tenable, especially once I had a job in Manhattan and I was still living in Brooklyn. It is for some people, but it just wasn't for me. And New York is insanely dangerous to ride your bike in. But what I discovered living here in the UK, and I think as something that my wife really encouraged, because my wife is a later in life

became an exercise person and it's a huge thing in her life. Is that just finding a thing like you are, you can say yourself, I am going to do X thing and I am going to become a gym guy and I'm going to do all this stuff. But like, if it doesn't click with you, then exercise is just more work and a chore. And as soon as you fall out of a routine once you're falling, going to fall out of 100%. I think Tom and I have talked about that on our, I guess you'd call it our gym affirmation corner of like, it doesn't matter if you have the best programming and the best gym. Like not every, like we've never worked, none of us have ever worked out together other than lifting merch boxes up and down stairs. But like, I enjoy going to a gym and lifting weights. It's something I really, really enjoy.

But that's not what you have to do in order to be in shape or be healthy. Being healthy is much more important. It doesn't matter what you look like, become comfortable how you look, which is harder, I think, as you get older, as I found for myself, but also something that is enjoyable because if you don't fucking enjoy it, you're not going to do it. Yeah. I like lifting weights, but the thing for me is it's hard to make myself do it. And particularly I get really annoyed when gyms are like chaotic and crowded and dirty and I live in a huge city in Europe. It's hard to find a gym that's not one of those. Whereas for me, cycle commuting has been the thing. And I just make it a point that I try

to do that all the time. And that is my exercise. And like, I also like running, but it's my goal when we moved to Switzerland is it's much more conducive to just kind of those kinds of sports and I'm actually gonna try to train for- And I'm becoming an innate bicycle pill. I cycle everywhere now. Yeah, cycling and it's great for my mental health. But the thing about this is my wife made the point that she's like, you can beat yourself up

that you're not doing triathlons right now and you're not like fucking in the gym, lifting weights and all this stuff. It's like, or find a thing that works for you. And if you enjoy it, it won't feel like work in terms of making yourself do the exercise. And that has been the difference. I am in much better shape and much better health than I was before we moved to the UK. And some of that is because I don't drink anywhere near as much as I used to. But the other part of it is, is that I found a kind of exercise

that's good for like physical and mental health that I enjoy. I like cycle commuting. I want to do it if it's feasible because I find that the level of focus required in the sense you have to be paying attention, but also you can kind of be in your own thoughts. It's great for me. It simplifies things. It clarifies things. I feel much better across the board when I do it. And so to me, that's like a lesson in miniature that like the thing that works for you isn't necessarily going to look like the thing that works. I know you Joe. I know you take every chance you can to go to the gym because you like lifting weights. I don't dislike lifting weights,

but I don't like it enough that I make it a thing that I always do. Like before he was famous, like his show was huge. Hassan Piker and I hung out in London and like Hassan, everywhere he goes because he lost weight when he was like in his early 20s, every day he lifts weights like in the gym in London, whatever, he finds a place to lift weights

because he sticks to his thing, but he enjoys it. Yeah. I mean, if you don't enjoy doing something for like an hour out of the day, you're just not going to do it. I mean, it's like, then it becomes a chore, which, you know, you don't want to do. And like my cycle commute to and from the studio, if I ride in and ride out is about an hour of cycling. And that's, you know, it's good. It's been great for me. My wife loves organized exercise classes, like boot camps and like Peloton classes, things like that. I have done enough organized group exercise to last a fucking lifetime.

And I'll go to them with her if she wants me to be there for one, like a special ride for her or something, but it's not something I would do on my own. Same. You know what I mean? And so she's like, so that's one small one. The rest would get into like, might get into like sort of, you know,

interpersonal relations, relationship territory. And that's so subjective to everyone's experience. But I would say for this, for like that exercise and stuff, admitting to myself that it wasn't gonna look a certain way, but there was a thing I could do that I enjoyed has made a huge difference. 100%, dude. Like that, I think that's one of the problems

that comes with modern fitness culture. And I can go on about this about fucking length is that we're also pre-programmed to have this idea of what fitness is supposed to look like. And it probably looks like something like close to what I do. And that's not a universal truth by any stretch of the imagination. Not everybody needs to, I don't need to do what I do. I do it because I enjoy it. And like you could cycle, which I do, and I'm coming to really enjoy it, especially like today when we actually

have good weather for once. I do it every chance I get. Or maybe you just like playing fucking pickup basketball or fucking honk ball. I don't know, like whatever you, maybe you just like going for walks. Like. Yeah, I mean, that's what my wife did

when she couldn't run when she was pregnant. She loved doing like, she'd walk a 5K. You know, like every chance she could. The nice part is, is generally speaking, walking, you're not gonna get ripped off, trying to, having to pay some inflated gym membership to go for a walk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like operator-focused tactical walking. But that is a podcast. Nate, you host other ones.

I sure do. I am the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Die, a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military and also about being a dad. And the die part is about the military. The, what a hell of a way to diaper, I suppose, should be what we're saying now. What a hell of a way to dad. Yeah, exactly. And then also I produce and am the cohost of Strat Street for a podcast about why tech is great

and not problematic at all. And I am the producer of Kill James Bond, a very, very funny film podcast that you should check out. So, and then also I am the cohost of this show as well as executive producer, I suppose. Not really the tape cutter anymore, because we got Tom for that, but I am also part of this.

So you know what, it's wonderful to be here. It's been great speaking with you, Joe. I feel like I don't want to steal your thunder and be like, until next time, don't do this, but we all know where it's going. Until next time. God. Don't fuck spiders. Don't fuck spiders.

Don't fuck spiders. And if you do, use protection. And by that I mean antipenem.