Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 332 - Miyamoto Musashi, The Troll Samurai

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Grab tickets to our live show in Belfast: www.universe.com/events/lions-led…t-tickets-83V5QD Can't make it to Belfast? We're streaming it! Get your stream tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-live-in-belfast-tickets-1008166803047 Once upon a time, a man became a wandering warrior, testing himself against the best in the land and beat the hell out of them with a combination of hyper violence and trolling. Sources: Miyamoto Musashi. The Book of the Five Rings O’Brien Brown. Miyamoto Mushashi: Samurai Legend William Scott Wilson. The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi

Hello Lions led by donkeys fans Just a heads up if you're interested in attending our Belfast show on October 26th But are not on this side of the Atlantic or anywhere close to it We wanted to present another option, which is live streaming The venue has a live stream setup and we have a ticketed event set up now as well where you can watch the show Live from wherever you are in the world. Check the link in the show notes. It's got all the information you need about how to get a ticket and also the time zone information, which is obviously very important. Once again, that is Saturday, the 26th

of October in Belfast. So British summertime, GMT plus one at 8 p.m. And if you click the link in the show notes, you can find all the information that you need if you are interested. Anyway, thanks for being a Lions fan and we hope you enjoy this episode. Hey everybody, welcome to the Lions That Buy Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Tom. We're wandering the countryside of Japan. Our master has died and we've been forced to become ronin.

Struggling to afford lodging, food, and water, we become desperate, turning to banditry. Over the course of the last several weeks, we've been stalking a trade caravan that is slowly making its way towards Edo Castle, knowing the finest wares would be inside. After all, why else would they be transporting them to the Shogun himself? When we know the time is right, we spring our trap and the caravan's guards are no match for us because, while they were learning how to get a real job, we were studying the blade. We fight our way into one of the wagons where we know our prize is being kept and find a locked chest. Tom produces a block of plastic explosives, a weapon

he learned how to use during his time studying under his previous master in Derry. He blows the lock in the chest and we all stand back in awe. We have found the coveted jewel of the Shogun. A single can of white monster. Honestly, I could do it. I could do it a kind of white monster right now. It's the Tuesday after a bank holiday. I'm quite tired, but we have great news, Joe. We do. Oasis of our reuniting. Is that good news? I mean, listen, it's fucking great news for anyone who sells cocaine in the UK. It's bad news for security personnel at all of these venues. Would the brothers start fighting one another again?

Oh, like I said on Twitter yesterday, I was like, if you have to work at the bar or in any pub nearby the fucking stadiums where these gigs are going to be happening is like that's going to be worse than serving at the Somme. The only thing this tells me is that the brothers have finally burned through their wonderwall money. Oh they will never burn through that. I'd say it was just a case of like the offer got so high that was like okay we just have to do this. I can respect that. I mean, why not? They're gonna make a fucking killing, but you know, it's like going to... I'm trying to think of another act that's well known for melting down on stage. I would say Guns N' Roses, but I don't even know if they count anymore.

Like Led Zeppelin, kind of. I didn't know they had their reputation. Oh, they all like fucking hated each other by the end. Doesn't ABBA hate one another? Yeah, but that's a different reason. It's because they all fucked one another. Do not look into the history of ABBA, specifically some of the members of ABBA. Oh, I'm aware of the Laban's Strum thing.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry, the Laban's Born. The Laban's Born program, yeah. Yeah, but like honestly, like I am fully going to buy tickets to go see Oasis on Saturday. Like I am shameless in saying that like that is going to be so much fun. I'm definitely going to go see them in Dublin. But like, yeah, just a big week for guys in their like late forties who like never fully got over Oasis breaking up.

Good news for other people looking for live shows that have a much smaller possibility of a fistfight occurring on stage. We still have tickets available for our live show in Belfast. You can check them out in the show notes at OEM Music Festival. 26th. On October 26th, it's going to be our last live show for the year. So go ahead and grab those. I can't speak for the business that cocaine dealers or if we're going to fist

fight each other on stage, but it should at least be entertaining. Yeah. Who knows? Like we might fight on stage. I don't know. I might fight someone afterwards. Like if you, if you want to square up and have a scrap, I'm sure one of us will oblige. Not me. Don't come at me, bros. Lines led by donkeys, a significantly more stable business venture than Oasis. I feel comfortable saying that. I feel comfortable saying that since day one. As far as I'm aware, nobody that works on the show has ever fist fought anyone else who works on the show. Yeah, true.

I feel very good saying that. I should asterisk that with so far. We get to do a tour, you know, where we're locked in a van together. I feel like being locked in an enclosed space where we're just filling the air with our shit gas and vape smoke. Like I feel like we could brew a fight. I believe in us. Whenever people are like, talk about specifically as well, like some bands from the eighties and it was like, Oh, they all hate each other now. And I'm like, yeah, imagine you spent

like five or six years just like touring around small venues in a van with like people you used to be mates with. No wonder you fucking hate each other. I saw something the other day where it's like some algorithm based bullshit, something recommended to me on Reddit, where it's like, this band, it's a band that I like that actually personally knows my family so I won't say who they are, but I heard they don't even talk to one another when they're not working or touring, like would you? Like, you live they don't even talk to one another when they're not working, or Tori, like, would you? Like you live in a fucking van, or like, they're probably upgraded to like decent sized bus

these days. But still, you know, I was in, and the military is not entirely dissimilar where you can like someone an awful lot, but you fucking hate them after like a field training exercise or a deployment where like, I can't get rid of this motherfucker. Yeah. But one motherfucker that they couldn't get rid of is today's topic. That's right. We're talking about Miyamoto Musashi. Have you heard of him? Of course you have. Like, what do you know about him? Who hasn't heard about him?

I know he was like a very famous swordsman who was very good at it. He also enjoyed painting and flower arranging. He seemed to enjoy those last things a lot more than sword fighting. And you know, there are few people in the way of like, you know, quote unquote legendary samurai that say people in the West could name. We've talked about one of them on the show, Saigo Takamori of the Satsuma Rebellion, famously known by most of us because of a Tom Cruise film, kind of. Yeah.

However, Saigo might have been the most famous in the West and deified as this great idea of the selfless sacrifice of Meiji Japan. He came at a time where you can consider the end of the samurai. There's only one samurai that comes to mind when you think, who would the samurai themselves consider to be legendary in the peak of their era? Yes, the samurai samurai. It's kind of like being really into Jonathan Richmond and the modern lovers. I don't even know who that is. The Modern Lovers were a brilliant band from the late 70s, early 80s and Jonathan Richmond quit playing music live because his ears hurt too much.

Yeah, I could get that. Yeah, real like musicians musician. He's the man who embodied the ideas that they held dear. Mostly, anyway. A man who was everything they saw themselves as and everything they wanted to be. Martial expertise. Taking all challengers in order not only to improve themselves, but to prove they were the best. A man whose weapon was not only sharp, but also his mind. A poet, a philosopher, a writer, an artist. He was everything. It's because he kind of founded that idea, but.

It's really funny, like this period in history, and like particularly like in Japan, there's so many like famous like wandering swordsmen. It's just like playing Fallout and just like being hit with a fucking random encounter NPC who's like level one million. I get to say it. Tom, hold that thought. Oh fuck sakes, too early for this. That was 100% a thing, and we will get there. Miyamoto Masashi was a lot of things, and a lot of what people think about him is actually true. However, it's not the whole story. He was all of those things, but he was also much, much more. He was a brutally efficient killing machine,

taking on challengers from the time he was literally a young teen to elderly, as much as elderly existed in that era. But he was hardly doing this with the honor and rigidness that you think of when you think of a samurai. He would use any trick, underhanded or not, to get under his opponent's skin. To Masashi, standing toe to toe in a duel of equals was fucking stupid. Which is why I have dubbed him the troll samurai. Oh god. We'll touch on a few sources here that I use for this. Obviously and probably most famously is the book of the five rings, which was written

by Musashi himself. The next source was called the long samurai. The title makes me think is like what if Slender Man learned how to use a sword? Oh, that'd be terrible. You'd have such like a advantage in reach. Yeah you can't get inside man. The book is called The Long Samurai, The Life of Miyamaru Musashi, written by William Scott Wilson, and finally Miyamaru Musashi, His Life and Writ writings by Kenji Kotatsu. Musashi was born in 1584 in Harima province with the birth name Shinmin Musashi No Kami Fujiwara no Horinobu, which in his own book is about as much information as he gives about his early life.

We are dealing with some myth building right now. I don't know if he was trying to build a myth as much as he didn't think it was important. Yeah, do you know what is important? Flour arranging. Oh yeah. Sometimes he gives his name as Shinmin Musashi Fujiwara Genshin, in others his given name is Benosuke, which is commonly used during the time when he was a child. For continuity's sake, I'm just gonna call Musashi throughout the entire episode.

We don't actually know what his real full birth name is. Also weirdly, his father, Hirata Munisai, is sometimes called his birth father and other times called his adopted father. Either way, Musashi fucking hated him. It didn't matter. Evidence of a real strained relationship there. Even weirder than that, we don't know who his mother was. Like, his real mother. As his father was married multiple times, and since nobody cared much to record the thoughts, feelings, and history of women back in the day, rumors swirled that Munisai had

cheated on his second wife, whom Musashi thought to be his real mother, with his first wife since divorced. She got pregnant and then the second and first wives, not wanting to face the public scorn of the region, of this entire drama, said, you know what, we'll just say it's your kid. That is kind of thought of being village gossip, so to speak. But yeah, we have no idea. And there's a good chance Musashi had no idea either. For the sake of moving along, Munisai is Musashi's dad.

Let's just go with that. He's a senior vassal to the Shinmin clan, a small fiefdom in Miyamoto, which is in Okuyama today. Munisai was considered not overly important to the grand scheme of things, but within the Shinmen clan he was. He was the instructor for all the clan samurai, and he was considered a master of multiple different weapon styles and swordsmanship, as well as unarmed jujitsu, not Brazilian jujitsu, as funny as that is to think about.

Just a samurai like losing his sword and then just falling to his ass and trying to pull guard the whole time. I mean, like that'd be really hard to do in samurai armor. From a young age, Musashi would have been surrounded by weapons as well as been trained and you know, who are fantasizing about using them. You know like a normal kid in let's say Texas today. The Munasai may have been a great sword teacher, he was a dick and his child rearing skills reflected that.

He raised Musashi as if he was a student rather than his son, which meant all he did all day, every day, was learn how to use a sword and get his ass whooped. This only got worse when his father divorced the woman that Musashi believed to be his real mother and then remarried a third time. When his mother moved away, Musashi decided to show how much he hated his new stepmom by hiking for dozens of miles through the mountains to go and visit his real mom. Now, by the time Musashi was eight years old, it was clear that not only did he hate his father, his father hated him.

Uh... Look, I didn't have a good father. I just, I'm going to assume my dad probably didn't hate me when I was eight years old. Cause I was eight years old, right? You don't really have a personality yet. Yeah, it's kind of hard to hate, you know, an eight year old. They don't have a lot of personhood to dislike. Other than like, if you just hate children. I feel like he probably hated children, and look, I don't like other people's eight-year-olds.

I don't have my own. I assume when it comes to hating your kid, that happens with at least a teen. Yeah. Munisai believed the best way to raise his son was to show him what a man should be and to Munisai that meant only one thing a warrior a martial artist and nothing else. So Musashi was plopped down and forced to watch his dad practice for hours a day. Eventually Musashi began like screaming out things across the training floor that he believed his dad was doing incorrectly. He was heckling him. He was samurai heckling.

Aye, your grip is shit. What were you holding that sword? Come on, fucking loser. All that footwork? Fucking piece of shit. Come on, you need to pull guard more. This went on for hours one day until Munisai turned and chucked his sword at his own son's head. It's like the Edo period of like an alcoholic father throwing beer bottles at his kid's head. Kind of, but you know Munisai had trained his son enough at this point where he had

the reflexes to dodge it, so I guess that works. It's like see, what I was telling you is correct, I couldn't even pale your skull today son. like see what I was telling you is correct I couldn't even peel your skull today son mm-hmm now when he did dodge it that only pissed his dad off more so his dad grabbed another sword and began chasing him around the dojo attempting to kill him and Musashi had to run I assume this was to test his cardiovascular ability yeah he was just doing the Naruto run eight-year-old Musashi Naruto running away from his own murderous father. At this point, Musashi ran out of the dojo, ran off into the woods, left home, and would never return, and instead ran to his uncle's house.

Though there is another way this story is told, according to the Book of the Five Rings. His dad was an asshole, sure, but he never ran away from home. Instead, Munasai died, leaving him into the care of his uncle. However, we know that is not true, by Musashi's later telling in his own book, his father is still alive. Hey, listen, you know, he did the inner work and reconciled his differences with his dad and, you know, it came together. The book of the five rings is very weird because it's kind of a biography, kind of like more of a philosophical work and Musashi doesn't exactly have a narrative structure through

the entire thing. So Munisai could have very well died. However, due to his position, we probably would have records indicating that he died at the time. We honestly have no idea, but he probably didn't die. In my opinion, what happened is Musashi ran away from home and then his dad was dead to him. So dead. Between the ages of eight and 13, we kind of lose Musashi as if he was samurai Jesus. We don't really know what happened. From the book of the five rings, we know Musashi, at least according to Musashi, was just kind of wandering and training with his uncle. According to Musashi, he was very large for his age, but also incredibly aggressive, probably from having a very abusive father.

His uncle was a local priest, but was also an accomplished warrior himself. He was literally the stereotypical warrior priest. And he continued training him in two swords of swordsmanship, kendo, and something known as two swords. Yeah, it's a warrior priest brackets complimentary. Yeah, kind of. Compared to his dad, his uncle was great. Yeah. He also taught him how to fight with a spear and unarmed fist fighting.

So some early form of karate, kind of, before karate was karate. Mm-hmm. We also know during this time he developed very, very, very severe eczema all over his face, leading him to be very embarrassed by it and attempt to grow out his hair so he could just kind of drape it over his face and cover it up. Yeah. He's doing like kind of late 2000s, early 2010s, my chemical romance hair, the emo samurai. Emo samurai. Fuck. I mean, maybe he was painting his fingernails black, wearing guy liner.

I mean, that would have been your username on MySpace if you thought of it. You know what? This is where I would say no. But come on now, I've been doing this show for six years. Everybody listening just kind of nodding. Yeah, yeah, we can see that. Sounds about right. Maybe he'd have like one single highlight of red hair, you know? By the age of 13, Musashi suddenly reappears.

This is where we get to actually talk about what you brought up earlier, the concept of the wandering samurai, a martial artist who would travel from town to town. And not all these guys are samurai, mind you. Like, some of them are not part of any kind of samurai class that existed at the time. Many of them don't even use swords. It's a wandering martial artist more than anything else. Going from town to town, accepting any challenger that would come, in what was known as Musha Shoigyo. This would include every kind of fighting style imaginable, and it was seen as a way to test yourself against the unknown,

get better, or, in many cases, get murdered. Both laugh Since killing your opponent was perfectly fine as long as you two agreed that it was a fight to the death beforehand. This was not illegal to the death beforehand. This was not illegal to murder each other this way. There's like states in the US that have these laws called like a mutual combat, where it's like no, beating the shit out of each other is perfectly fine because you agreed to do it.

I fully believe in the concept of mutual combat if both people are consenting. Like, you know, why can't I have a punch up on the street with my friends if we're both okay with it? Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I mean, unfortunately, you know, when two idiots are swinging each other in the street, bad things can tend to escalate from there. And also similarly to this as well, a lot of people got killed. You know, the thing is when you meet a random guy in a village and you square off to try out your spear fighting style against sword fighting style versus jiu jitsu or fucking

whatever, and you kill him, who's to say that he didn't agree to a fight to the death? Exactly. Listen, you know, this is the nanny state gone too far. You know, this is big government saying that I cannot kill my friend in a pre-agreed combat situation. I blame the British Meiji restoration for taking that away from you. Yeah, you literally, you cannot kill your friends anymore because of woke. And most of these people when they're traveling, they would travel alone.

Sometimes they'd pick up students if they got more renowned from winning, but it was mostly a life of like dire poverty and like aestheticism. You're kind of a bandit because you'd have to steal to feed yourself, you're like sleeping in the woods. So at the end of this strange aesthetic samurai murder pilgrimage, many would have earned enough name for themselves. They would then enter into service with the feudal lord as a vassal because everybody

know like that guy's really good at killing people. One of these traveling fighters is a guy named Arima Kihei and he showed up in Harima Village in 1596 and posted a sign on the town's temple telling the town if anybody wanted to square up with them, write their name, and he would take them on the next day. Musashi, then aged 13, wrote his name down on the list, and the next day Kihei showed up at the temple, where he was living with his uncle, to fight him. You know, such a bygone time of, oh, I'm just gonna put a flyer up, like, just if anyone

wants to brawl in the streets, like, I'm just gonna put a flyer up, like, just if anyone wants to brawl in the streets, like pull up. Go down to your local church and just like, anybody want to fucking square up with me, put your name on the list. Obviously his uncle, the town priest, was like, what the fuck are you doing? You can't fight him. He's 13." Kihei agreed with his uncle saying like, look, yeah, he's a dumb kid. I'm not going to fight this 13 year old. But you know, my honor demands a formal apology from Musashi and they can meet the next morning and hash this whole thing

out. The next morning they both show up to the temple once again, and Musashi shows up carrying a six-foot-long pole staff. Now still thinking this is a simple apology meeting, Kihei didn't think anything of it, and when he walked forward to meet the two of Musashi and his uncle to shake hands and accept his formal apology, Musashi smashes him in the side of the head with his staff, jumps on top of him, and beats him to death. Jesus Christ. Nobody's sure if Usashi's uncle was in on this whole plot. It seems unlikely for a priest to trick a man into being beaten to death.

But it would be very funny if he was in on it. I'm not sure if I agree with it. It's kind of like sucker punching someone. But you know, the samurai are a lot of people talk about their honor. They weren't that honorable. And also it's important to remember this is way, way, way long before like what you'd consider the modern samurai ethos of what would eventually turn into Bushido. That does not exist yet. Most of that actually has its foundation in Miumato Musashi. So it does not exist yet But there is you know these duels are supposed to function as like you agree upon the terms you agree upon the weapons

Is it to the death or not you meet up you fight you don't ambush a dude and beat him to death with a stick It was three years after his first teenage murder that Musashi would go on his own fighting pilgrimage. He's 16 now. He brought with him nothing but the clothes he was wearing, his sword, a tiny bit of money, and a writing brush. And after that, he hit the bricks. Despite this being a well-known part of life in Japan at the time, the journey was not

a safe one. Bandits lined the forests and mountains and not to mention there were people like Musashi on their own journeys who were just as happy to murder someone when they weren't paying attention than they were during an arranged duel. Because if you killed a guy, you killed a guy. Who was to debate what happened in that moment? Yeah. Like, yeah, I took on Musashi,

me and Musashi of this fighting style and I won. And that's the only thing anybody's gonna know about it. This is why I'm proud to announce the development of the dualist app. So before entering into combat, both people entering into a dual will have to accept the terms and conditions of the dual on the dualist app. So then that way immortalized on the blockchain using AI, we will forever know that you agreed to get your shit rocked. And the app is called like Dueler, but it's like without the E. There's like no vowels. It's kind of incomprehensible. The UI also sucks.

If you subscribe to Dueler premium, Premium, you only get to fight unarmed opponents on the first tier that haven't leveled up. Yep, yep. So another thing, Musashi developed a disgusting habit of never bathing. Ugh. His reasons for this were kind of practical. He feared, you know, if I decide to take all my clothes off and climb into a river to wash my shit, he could be caught by another fighter unarmed. So he decided, don't need it. Don't need to wash anything. I'm disgusting. Also as well, they hadn't invented, you know, topical creams to treat his eczema. So he probably thought it was like, oh, well, you know what? The river water is probably going to aggravate my eczema and then I'm going to be like scratchy and itchy and like really dry.

All my humours will be fucked up. You know, if I, if I bathe too often, I'll get the flux. Hiking through the hills, forests and mountains and never washing himself quickly made him turn into like a shambling dumpster. Just like stink linesambling dumpster. Mm-hmm. It's just like stink lines coming off of them. Yeah. All of Musashi's travels were taking part in what is known as the Sengoku period, or the Warring States period. I'm sure most people listening have heard of this from every piece of samurai media

ever made. We'll eventually cover some of this in depth at some point, but for the sake of the series, just know that Japan had been ruled by the Ashikaga Shogunate for decades. This collapsed into a pile of wars before being slapped together by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who also died, left five men to rule in his place until his son was old enough to take over. This is the backstory kind of of the book Shogun. Of course, it is dramatized and made entertaining by introducing the side character that we all know as the eingen or the pilot. Also the TV show Shogun, fuck it rules, you should watch it.

But that is the period that this is taking part in. Eventually, those five guys would have a falling out, break into camps of East First West rap groups known as daimyo, and the armies would meet on October 21st, 1600 at the Battle of Sekigahara. Here we go. Sekigahara is a very important battle in samurai and Japanese history and Musashi was the middle of all of this. Not because he gave a flying fuck about politics in Japan, he was not even the subject of a feudal lord anymore. But because when two armies of 80,000 men or so apiece decide to meet up in a field and kill one another, there's really no better way than to prove your worth as a warrior than get in on that murder game.

Musashi in his own book says that he did not care about the battle, but he simply quote, borrowed the battlefield to prove himself. He's literally studying the blade. Yeah, yeah. He rejoined his dad's clan, the Shinmen clan, for the battle, but was not sworn to any lord. And despite Sekigahara being one of the most important battles in Japanese history, with Musashi in the middle of all of it, he barely even writes about it. It isn't about him, so he doesn't care.

I mean, this is kind of common for him throughout all of his own history that he writes. He writes more about his individual duels than the wars he took part in because he doesn't care. He doesn't really give a shit about politics. He just sees it as a way to like fight the best fighters in Japan. They all happen to be camped out at once. I got to go. And you can't miss samurai Woodstock. Oh, it's more like samurai gathering of the jugalos than anything.

Miyamoto Musashi, the first jugalo samurai? I mean, listen, jugalos are quite similar to Musashi in the sense that they don't wash so they smell. I mean, most samurais are obsessed with bathing. It was Musashi who certainly was not. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You know specifically like him. The Juggalos are musical Ronin. They just wander the lands until each year of gathering of the Juggalos and then they convene in one place. The Juggalo Ronin forced to wander the Midwest because their lord in the dark carnival had

died. They had no choice. Yeah, no jugalows are like Ronin's because they are going from job to job working as a line cook. In his book, Musashi pretty much only says, yeah, I fought in the battle of Sekigahara and that's it. Yeah. Some of this could have to do with he was on the losing side of that battle so maybe he isn't super proud of it and virtually everyone else eyewitnesses whoever says that he fought like a fucking monster and everyone on both sides of battle knew Musashi was in that battle despite the fact he was 17 years old. Though many people on the losing side of that battle found themselves you know at the wrong end of

a sword in its aftermath. And Musashi may have known that, which is why he kept his head low about the whole thing. He spent his time living alone in the mountains and training, occasionally only reappearing to fight other people like him. He's like a sword wielding cryptid at this point. He just lives in a pile of his own filth in the forest and re-emerges to murder someone with a sword and then disappears back into the woods. If there was photography back then he would be naturally blurry. You know?

I'm learning through Google that jugulows have a ranking system. No, no, I refuse to accept this. And there's a tier of jugalow called a ninja. This is from Reddit from this is me pushing my glasses up my nose that I'm not wearing at the moment. Anybody who's listened to the discography of ICP would know they love singing about ninjas. Yeah. So this is from or slash jugalo subreddit. What's the difference between a ninja and a jugalo in brackets I'm new? Top comment is, in the hatchet world, a jugalo is a standard family member. A ninja is an elite jugalo capable of throwing fago with pinpoint accuracy.

Follows the scripture of the 665. A jugalo is down with the clown till they're dead in the ground, while a ninja upon death is awoken by the ringmaster to begin eternal work in either the carnival grounds or the killing fields of Hell's Pit. Nah, I'm just fucking around, they both mean the same thing. You down, we got love. Jason So in this situation, the ringmaster is much like Amaterasu. You know who wouldn't get promoted to the rank of ninja is Musashi's father because while he didn't throw feigo, he missed his

own son when he threw a sword at him. So there you go. Yeah. I just realised something. The reason jugalos say ninja is because they're all white and they can't say the N word. Although that is correct. If you listen to ICP, you picked it up pretty quickly. Musashi lived this way until he was 21, being a weird samurai force cryptid. And then he made his way to Kyoto. The reason for this is practical and petty. Despite some sources saying Musashi's dad had died, one of those sources being Musashi himself, he hadn't. In fact, he had fought in the same war as his son, but on the other

side after he had left the Shinmen clan. Furthermore, the battle had done opposite things for the two men. His father being on the winning side was raised to prominence and Musashi being on the losing side, like nobody's gonna sing his praises, you know? Everybody knows he did some weird ass shit in the murder pit, but nobody's gonna... He's not gonna be promoted for losing. Kyoto was home to the Yashakoa clan, known for generations as being incredibly talented swordsmen and once the personal teachers of the Ashikaga Shogunate. The family was largely known for being undefeated in duels, outside of one, when now Kada lost to Musashi's father in front of the Shogun himself, after he brought Munessai personally in to challenge

him, curious if anyone could defeat his undefeated teacher. Oooh, losing in front of the Shogun? Yeah. Embarrassing. Yeah, it's not good for the resume, you know? No. So when Musashi showed up in Kyoto, he challenged his generation's best swordsman from that clan, Naokada's son, Sejiro.

Sejiro accepted immediately. What is kind of funny is they both accepted it for the same reason. Musashi's dad was the only person to feed Sejuro's family in a duel, in front of the Shogun. So, by defeating Munusai's son, he could earn honor back for his family. And Musashi was the opposite. He wanted to be better than his father, and what better way to do so than being the only other person to defeat a member of this family.

But Musashi was also the polar opposite than his father in every way possible. He was disgusting, unwashed, and completely without merit. Musashi did not go around telling people that he had been trained by his father, because in reality, he kinda hadn't been. He was effectively self-taught. He never claimed lineage or lines to any school or any form of martial arts. And the only reason he told the Yashacoa that he was Munasai's son was because that was almost certainly the only way they would give this weird, smelly forest creature the time of the day. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I mean, like what other teenager wouldn't had taken up like not washing because of daddy issues happens to the best of us. Like hating your dad to the point you become one of probably the best sword masters in Japanese history is an incredible move. I got to respect it. Yeah. It just made me get into drinking. Meanwhile, for Musashi, the victory could be huge. Obviously, he would be the only other person other than his father to take this clan down, but it would allow him to earn a name for himself, divorced from the idea that he was on the losing side of a war. So they decided to have a duel, deciding that the entire thing should be won or lost via

a single blow. Now that sounds really impressive, but remember they're fighting with swords I generally believe or at least I thought that is how most sword duels go You get fucking got with the sword and you're done. You're fucking cooked But yeah, they cut themselves up quite a bit and but they decided this will be done with one stroke of the sword However, Musashi always found a way to make things you'd expect to be equal, not so equal. When they decided on a time to meet outside of the city, Musashi purposely showed up late and wore his nastiest clothing, on top of

already smelling like shit. All of this was a way to piss Sejiro off and break his concentration. But the real icing on the cake was while Sejiro was armed with a regular sword, Musashi showed up armed with a bukato, or a wooden sword, to show him that like, I don't even need a sword to defeat you in one stroke. I will somehow beat you with this bit of wood. Now with Sejiro well and truly pissed off, they squared off with one another. Within seconds they launched at one another, and Musashi blasted him in the side of the head with his one sword, nearly killing him. Sejiro's students had to rush him away to a doctor to save his life, and he was so dishonored

by the loss, he retired and became a monk. I mean, listen, I would probably react that way as well. You got beat with a bit of wood. However, the rest of the family couldn't let it go. Their name had been tarnished by some random asshole of no pedigree, and the head of the family had been so beaten beaten it could ruin them. So Sejiro's younger brother Denshiro challenged Musashi in order to make things right. Denshiro was known to be much larger than any other swordsman in the area, and he carried

a wooden sword as well, though it had been sharpened at its tip for stabbing. Musashi agreed, and again showed up hours late because apparently denture alert absolutely nothing about what happened to his brother However this time Musashi showed up completely unarmed just hands out. Let's do this Denture was even angrier at this and charged him Musashi then grabbed den Chirou by his shirt hit him with a takown, wrenched his own sword from his hands and paled him with it. That must have looked so cool. Fuck yeah! That is, yeah, that is fucking so cool.

Within a matter of days, Musashi had strolled into town and destroyed with the most prestigious samurai families up until that point in Japanese history. But that did not mean they were gonna go down all the way without fighting tooth and nail. Musashi may have destroyed their standing, but that didn't mean other members of the family, or even the clan's students, weren't going to come for him next. With that, Sejiro's son, Matsushiro, challenged Musashi to another duel. However, Matsushiro was not known for being a swordsman, so Musashi immediately came to the conclusion, this shit is a trap.

And it was. Machishiro had grabbed anyone still loyal to his clan, including at least a hundred students, all armed with swords and spears, and gathered them all at the agreed upon meeting grounds. But this time, Musashi wasn't late. He had been there the whole time. He had showed up at least a day early, lying in the grass and dirt, completely camouflaged. He's doing fucking Metal Gear Solid 3 snake eater shit.

Yep. So, Machishiro and his around a hundred men all just stood around, figuring he was late again, and not that he was waiting in the weeds like a weirdo. Then, Musashi jumps out from the bushes just as the sun is coming up, screaming, Did I keep you waiting? In the confusion and partial darkness, the small army gathered couldn't figure out where the fuck he was coming from or where he was. So he used that cover to charge through the group of men, kill Machisjiro immediately before he could draw his sword, and then turned on the group, cutting down people as he went, until he escaped on a pre-planned route before they could get a beat on him. He is a troll, he is a troll.

Oh that's so great, like he destroyed the entire family, the whole school of swordsmanship of that family faded from history entirely. Yeah. And from there he traveled to Nara to take on what else but a dojo full of spear-wielding monks. Oh, incredible. He defeated them all pretty much immediately, but killed nobody. Instead, he befriended them, and he wanted to learn how to fight with spears. He did that for like a week, and then vanished into the forests and mountains for another three years.

Okay. This guy rules so much, he must smell terrible at this point. Like someone, they must have thought of like, we can just tie him down and wash him. I really wish a hose existed so I could spray him with it. No, you don't understand. This is my tactical stank. It kind of is like he used it as a way to disgust people and there's actually I used to do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Competitively not at a high level by any stretch of the imagination But this kind of tactic still exists where people or purposefully never wash their gies. So you smell Terrible. I've heard people do this in wrestling as well like Greco-Roman or freestyle wrestling

wrestling as well, like Greco-Roman or freestyle wrestling. This smell like shit, like it feels like you're fighting a stinky stinky dumpster, is a tactic that still survives to this day. Thank you very much Musashi. Okay, you gotta work on your tactical stank. Musashi re-emerges in Iga in 1607, trying to track down a man named Shishido who was a master of something called the Kursurigama, a combo of like a sickle and chain. He found him in a small mountain dojo and they had their duel surrounded by the man's students.

Pretty quickly Shishido managed to disarm Musashi by tethering his sword in place with the chain portion of his weapon. As he closed in on Musashi for the kill, Musashi waited for him to get close, then unsheathed his second sword and chucked it like a throwing knife, impaling Shishido to the wall. I love that on the Wikipedia page for a Kasurigama, like on the legality it just says, in the Republic of Ireland, the Kasurigama is classified as an illegal offensive weapon. Why specifically Ireland? Luke- Because Musashi defeated this master, therefore the Republic of Ireland recognized

it's an inferior weapon to the Musashi's throwing a sword like it's a shuriken. So that means the Republic of Ireland is canonically part of Musashi's story. Yeah. In a similar way that like, I will get into it later on that like Miyamoto Musashi is like canonically part of a lot of very weird video game series. People love them some Musashi. This is something that Musashi had purposefully practiced simply because nobody did it. Throwing your sword was considered such a bush league move, a true fighter would never do it. So he's like, I should do it.

Knowing nobody bound by the rigid ethics of what existed as warrior culture at the time would see it coming. It became one of his favorite ways to surprise his opponents. And it went directly back to a philosophy Musashi had developed. He saw being a warrior, similar to being a carpenter. Your weapons were tools to complete a job and nothing else. There's nothing sacred about them. There's nothing to be worshipped. They were tools. If you found yourself not using your tools in the best way you could, well, that made you a bad carpenter.

He figured as long as the person that he was dueling, and him, acted within the confines of whatever it was they agreed on before a duel, anything and everything was free game. By 1608 the Shogunate had solidified his rule and began to transport Edo into a bustling capital, thanks in part to the shogun's, you know, official kidnapping policy. We talked about that before in our Satsuma Rebellion series, go back and listen to it. One other set of things was because the daimyo were forced to live for a very specific time in the capital, it became a hotbed for people like Musashi, wandering fighters looking to make a name for themselves in both fighting

but also attracting the attention of important daimyo to secure sick gigs as higher ranking vassals. Many of these samurai moved in and opened schools, taking on students for a small enrollment fee so they could pay bills for the first time in their lives. And for Musashi this was his first real job. He was only 25 but he had earned such a name for himself that he had lines of eager students showing up as soon as word got around that he was opening his doors. But by its very nature it also attracted people like well himself. People looking to fight him because of the name that he had won. Many of these people were like Musashi's first challenger

in Edo, Musou Ganasuke. They would try to be flashy on purpose to kind of stick out, make people think that they were a bigger deal than they were. In Ganasuke's part, he wore something akin to a cape that read, quote, greatest martial artist in the realm, founder of the Himamoto Ryu style, Musou Ganasuke. So much trip, so much style. Yeah, it's like samurai peacocking. Musashi agreed to fight him, met him, and defeated him in a duel via BEATING HIS ASS WITH A PIECE OF FIREWOOD. Honestly, like, I feel like you could give this guy like, a potato, and he would kill

someone with it. I call this, potato style. And the only thing he does is eat said potato, kick you in the balls, and then rip your throat out with his teeth. Yeah, there you go. However, Musashi eventually grew tired of Edo because of the politics. The people he wanted to challenge were so connected to the Shogun they could duck out of duels and not have it dent their public or social prestige.

So tired of the bullshit, he left and made for Kyushu, tracking down a man named Sasak Korijo, the sword instructor of the Hasakawa clan in Kokura. A swordman so good, he was nicknamed the quote, Demon of the Western Province, sick name. Yeah, a lot of great pseudonyms in this episode. Fuck yeah. This is where Musashi showed up in 1612 and made his challenge to the clan's chief retainer, the highest rank a samurai can hold within a clan. It also happened that this retainer was a former student of Munessai, Musashi's dad. The two men quickly agreed to a duel, and the challenge was officially issued for the next day. The retainer, as

a show of respect to Musashi's family, allowed him to stay in his house overnight and invited him to travel by boat to the dueling grounds together. Musashi agreed, but when the time came to leave for the island, nobody could find him. He had vanished. This wasn't some underhanded plan, but rather Musashi thought if he traveled with the chief retainer of the clan, a man trained by his father, it would look like he was showing him favoritism and spoil his victory. Also, he was worried it was showing honour to his father by showing honour to one of his students, something he apparently refused to ever do. I hate you dad, even from beyond the grave.

That is so funny, he hated his dad so fucking much he's just gonna disrespect everyone remotely connected to him. However it also had a secondary, almost certainly planned outcome. People began to spread rumors that Musashi was a coward, looking for a way out of a fight. This is only reinforced when Musashi was found and told that Trigio was already at the Dueling Ground waiting for Musashi. Musashi, as always, took his time. He sat down, ate breakfast, took a nap, got on a boat, and arrived nearly a day late. Congratulations,

Musashi, canonically Armenian. He had done something else as well. See, this guy was known for favoring a very, very long sword, and Musashi had actually previously been asked to see it, because the sword had a hell of a reputation. The guy showed him the sword, figuring, of course a fellow warrior wants to admire my weapon right? Like this is a thing that we do. But instead what Musashi was doing was taking note of the measurement of the sword. So on the trip over, he carved a new wooden sword from the boat oar that he was using, making sure it was a bit longer than the sword his opponent would be using.

Uhhh... When he got there, his opponent began to scream and yell at him, calling a coward, telling him he was late. Musashi ignored him, calmly and slowly walked toward him with his giant boat-oar sword holed out in front of him. This only pissed Kirito off more, who charged at him. The entire duel took seconds. Musashi stepped to the side, smashed him across the skull with his boat-oar, missed being cut by just a matter of centimeters

during the charge, and then beat the man to death when he hit the ground. Jesus. Then, with a small audience watching, Musashi said nothing else, walked away, got on his boat and left. According to his book, at this point of his life, Musashi had fought 60 duels, winning all but one, the outlier being a single draw. He was kind of getting bored with the simple dueling life. I'm just a small country duelist. So he began to take up painting and gardening just for funsies. Then Japan blew up into another bout of shogun undymio violence and revolution. Musashi of course found himself in the middle, but thought so little of the war and the battles in comparison to the duels and how even his passion for gardening, he doesn't even write

about it. We do know from another telling that this war and revolution rebellion period went very smoothly for Musashi, though he was wounded when a peasant hit him in the face with a rock as he was riding a horse. He got his shit busted by a man with a rock. He spent years fighting in the Osaka campaign, but again, didn't even bother to write down any bit of information about the war. He doesn't even note which side of the war he was on. However, he was 31 years old now, and on purpose had never swore loyalty to any lord or anybody

like that. He never saw battles as important or anything. He never even saw war as being something you should strive for. However, he was about as famous as a samurai could get, and Asagara Tarazane, the clan heir of the Agassara, offered him a job. Not a job you probably would imagine. Designing his castle and the surrounding town of Akashi. Narshek Mishra Doesn't know anything about building? Luke No, he does not. But he just kind of becomes

a civil engineer as a hobby. He takes the job This is where he gets really in on gardening and flower arranging I suppose a man who just spent most of his life as a wandering homeless man in the woods would have a deep appreciation for green spaces. Yeah, he's very passionate about you know, I am Ecological preservation, you know the importance of green spaces for people's mental health. Yeah. Yeah.

He's very thoughtful. This is where we get to see Musashi develop the ideas that he would eventually go on to arguably be known for more than the sword fighting aspect, the importance of art, education and philosophy. Because according to him, everything was, and you couldn't be truly skilled with a sword if you were a dumbass. So as he writes in the book of the five rings, quote, touch upon all the arts, and develop a discerning eye in all matters.

Yeah, this is kind of the development of, like, what would become the solid concept of Bushido. Pretty much. Even his writing turns into something of a philosophical exercise in swordsmanship. He hated pomp and circumstances for the sake of it. So if you read his book, you'll see that he writes plainly and directly. There's no flourishing language, nothing. According to him, you should only use the things that work and discard anything that would complicate those things working. Hence why other people spent their time dressing up, devoting a ton of time to meaningless

charades and ceremonies. He could throw a sword directly through your chest, after showing up late for work and leave before anybody said anything about it. According to him, art, life, fighting, they were all disciplines and if you sucked at one, you would suck at all of them. So that might explain why even while working directly for a clan, he never swore loyalty to them as a vassal or retainer. Rather, he agreed to stay on as a guest, allowed to leave whenever he wanted. Some of this almost certainly had to do with Musashi's unrelenting pride.

In his book, he never wrote that he had a teacher in what he called The Way, which is obviously untrue. This is a guy who learned painting, he learned tea ceremony, drama, poetry, ceramic arts. I mean, he learned spear fighting from that dojo full of monks. He did not do all of this on his own. He had teachers. He just didn't want to accept anyone could be considered a teacher to him. So that's a huge part of it. And on top of becoming a civil engineer seemingly on a whim, he became a well-known gardener because he was really into it. He writes more about gardening and flower arranging in detail than he ever does swordsmanship. Musashi was developing what would become known

in the field of swordsmanship of his two-sword style. You see, he had beaten so many people one-on-one, he was becoming bored with that. So he decided to perfect it in ways to be able to fight multiple people at once. However, it was hard for him to actually practice this since it was considered so out-sword of what was normal. So he resorted to accepting people's duels, which he constantly got into due to his fame, and then shit talking people who were watching until the entire entourage would join in and then he would beat them all at once. Oh cool. But most importantly here, he was never killing people at this point.

He decided he would never kill in a duel again, as long as his opponent accepted their defeat and stopped fighting. Whereas before, he would ambush people and just murder them in cold blood with a piece of wood if they so much as looked at him. A reason for this probably had something to do with his gardening.

Gardening in Japan at this time was heavily couched in Zen Buddhist belief. And while Musashi wrote that a person should honor the gods and pray, they should never rely on them because they were not a physical tool that you could use. He was beginning to see the whole fight to the death thing as a waste of natural life. Hell, he surprised everyone after one duel of not only stopping as soon as his opponent hit the ground, but quickly rushing to his aid and saving his life. This may have been why he eventually decided to settle down. He traveled back to Kakora at

the invitation of Hasakawa Tadayoshi, the local lord, to duel his favored warrior, and quickly took him out. Afterwards, he became the lord's retainer, accepting a fee and a salary. This was mostly because Musashi and Tadayoshi's family saw arts, both war and otherwise, in the same way. And at this time, this is revolutionary. Before this, other warriors literally thought Musashi was like a coward because he spent his time practicing poetry and stuff. Musashi had met a member of the Tadayoshi clan at a poetry circle. He's doing slam poetry.

Meeting other samurai. So like that is where they're like, oh, there actually is a clan who isn't full of like brutish idiots. Perfect. He saw kinship in them and he entered their service. And this is normally when a samurai such as Musashi would settle down even further and get married. And this is for a lot of reasons. Some were practical and had absolutely nothing to do with what we consider today as love. Marriage for

samurai for people like Musashi was like a marriage in a noble family and anywhere else in the world. It was for political and practical gain to solidify or improve your position in life. However, Musashi did not care for political or social standing or gain in any way outside of fighting. So he refused all offers of marriage. He virtually never talked about his relationships with women in his work, but we do know that he had several of them. All of them were sex workers and were seemingly for

the sole purpose of fucking. He saw romantic relationships as a distraction to his work. So, you know, he would get his nut off and go back to swords and gardening. Yeah, studying the blade, either the sword or the gardening hoe. Yeah. This has led to pervasive rumors that Musashi was actually gay. And the answer to that is not black and white. Especially, it's not as black and white as some people would like to believe, whether it be on one side of this argument or another. Because wouldn't you know it, concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity have never been black and white. No.

For starters, Musashi never wrote about any romantic relationships with women, but also with men. But institutional homosexuality was very common in his cast in the same way as it was with other warrior castes across the world. Through a practice called Shudo, an older samurai would take younger boys, normally their students, into a sexual but also seemingly romantic relationship that would be exclusive until the student left. At this point the sexual relationship was expected to end, but it's not like that was demanded. It could continue. And while these men were

expected to remain effectively quote unquote heterosexual life partners, take that for what you will, most of the time they continued their sexual relationship as well. It's very easy to see this as a form of grooming, because it is. But it is also reasonable to assume that Miyamoto Musashi took part in this lifestyle as a boy but also as an adult. And there's no reason to doubt he continued living that lifestyle into his old age. So when it comes to Musashi's romantic life, man or woman, he was a lot more interested in gardening than either of them. The only hoes I care about are in the garden.

100% correct. Yeah. The Shuto thing is very, very weird, very akin to like kind of what happened in Sparta to some aspects. Yeah. Cause their romantic partner was also their teacher and most of the time they would grow up and they would effectively break up sexually But the reason why that happened is because at that age men were expected to marry a woman and have children Not because they were supposed to no longer want to fuck this guy. It was like socially this is expected of you now Well, look all I gotta say is Yeah, it's it's nasty it's grooming it's mm-hmm the hundreds and hundreds of years ago I was very, very short in his writing style. When told to write down his ideas and beliefs in his own personal sword style that he'd spent up until this point, his entire life perfecting, he wrote 15 pages, which is shorter

than this script. He also became an important member of the Fiefdom's government and close advisor to his lord. He spent years there and eventually his lord, and Musashi came to understand he was getting very, very sick. Years of fighting, even successfully, had left him with incurable and constant nerve pain. He was also developing what people now consider to probably be cancer.

He was in his 50s, and he spent the majority of his time teaching his growing number of students, practicing his various arts he had picked up over the years, and helping around the government. Then in 1643, he retired, retreating to a cave to become a hermit, and began to work on what became the Book of the Five Rings. This went on for two years. He very rarely left the cave. If he did, it was to walk around the surrounding area of Rigando Cave in the woods.

His students would visit him, but he would never go and visit his students. He sat there again for two years, writing and meditating until 1645 when he felt his cancer was finally going to kill him and he returned to his home in Chiba Castle. He sent word to those that followed him that, yeah, I'm checking out soon. You might want to come say your goodbyes. They sent doctors to check on him, who he ignored. He called all of his closest students to his sides, passed out his swords to a few selected students, and finished his version of his book and handed it off to them. And on May 19th, 1645, Miyamoto Musashi died at the age of 62. He had been given the title of Tensai or Sword Saint,

and his life and message has been used, twisted and mythologized to no end, in order to reinforce the already twisted, mythologized ideas of Bushido, the very concept of what would become the modern samurai and a bunch of other horrible, horrible things we have talked about in the past. It's pretty clear that Musashi, the man, would have probably loved being embraced as this sword saint, but he would also absolutely hate Bushido and what it turned into. After all, he saw war and battle and even politics as largely meaningless and a waste. And after taking part in institutional violence, he hated that too. He hated pomp and ceremony. He hated being deferential to superiors. He would have hated all this shit. More than anything else, Musashi was

everything those same people should hate. He roundly hated pointless pomp and circumstances and all of this stupid shit that would be attached onto Bushido. He stank and he dressed like shit. He showed up late so he could piss off people and ambush them. He saw victory and self-development as more important than any rules that told you how to get those things. Most importantly, he hated the idea of writing down a list of rules to follow. But most importantly, he has been immortalized in lots of video games, including a Yakuza game.

Which one? Ryu Ga Gotoku Kenzan, which is like from the Samurai one. Yeah, 2008. It's when they made like a version of the Yakuza game where they go back to the, I believe it's, I want to say the Sengoku period, maybe not, but yeah, everybody involved in the Yakuza universe is still there and now they're all samurai. Yeah. Um, only musha blade warriors. He's also in grappler backy in the most grappler backy way in the sense that he is a clone of the original Musashi, but with his soul, these actual soul inside the clone. So is that a clone or reincarnation?

I don't know. I don't know. I feel like we're entering some deep thoughts here. He's also in Magic the Gathering as well. What? There's a card based on him. I would like to believe he's happiest about that one. Musashi probably would have played a red aggro deck, which I respect. Also heavily influenced Isshin, the final boss of Sekiro, Shadows Die Twice. I feel like he's the inspiration for the epitome of any samurai anything in any video game. I believe he was in the game The Way of the Samurai, which is a really, really badly janky ass made series of games.

I believe they're still making them, but I think it started the PS2. That Tom, dear listeners is the story of Miyamoto Musashi. Tom, we do a thing on this show called questions from the Legion. Hit me with a question. Our question today is what is your most heretical food opinion? Ooh. Hmm. I don't know cause I'll eat most stuff. Oh, I have, I have one. If you're making spaghetti bolognese, if you create some dark chocolate into it, it makes it so much better. Interesting.

My heretical food opinion is a little bit bigger than that. I guess it's probably a little bit, it has nothing to do with the eating of food, but the arguments that happen around food and that is nobody cares where your food is from. Yeah. Because like- How so? And like, okay, I can say, you know, specifically like, let's say Europe, right? You have all these different groups of people insisting that they invented this very specific thing before everybody else. And it's something very, very simple.

It's like, I feel like in a long enough timeline, any group of people with like leaves and beef would invent this dish. You don't need to fight over it. I know exactly what you're talking about. I know exactly the food you're talking about. Or saying that like one type of food can't be that like this type of cheese can't be called this thing because it wasn't made in this region. Like food culture, I think is important. It's part of cultural identity. I'm not taking that away. And stealing that in ways that some people do it is very, very bad. I'm not taking away from that. But when like, you know, your Parmesan isn't from a very specific part of Italy, I don't care. Oh, I, I will disagree slightly in a sense of I live in London and I'm sure people in the US experience this

and in all parts of the world, but it's like, here is like a very specific food from a certain region. Like it could be Bangladeshi food, it could be Burmese food, it could be, you know, Indonesian food. And the worst version of that is when you go up and it's like a white guy who's like, Oh, I want my G, you know that we want your banging noodles. I was like, dude, like, yeah, you know that food's not gonna be good. I call it a gap year restaurant. So it's like some guy went and lived in some country for like a year or two and was like, do you know what I can do? I can do that. There is a, that is different than what I'm thinking of. Admittedly. Um, I, I think that restaurant's

probably going to suck. What I don't like is like, you know, there's, there's been like lawsuits saying you can't call like wine a certain kind of thing because it wasn't bottled. And it's like, I don't fucking care. I don't care. That is a whole different argument that we do not have time to go into because I will talk about it for an hour. But I will say the best example of this is there is a Vietnamese restaurant quite close to me owned by a white guy who is like a French train chef. I'm probably doxing myself saying this. Sorry. People have already found our studio and taken pictures in front of the sign. Don't

worry about it. Yeah. Like, and I go past it. There's never anyone in there. It's still open. And like, there is other, like there's another Vietnamese place, like maybe another 10 minutes away and it's always full. And you all know why it's good. Cause I'm owned by Vietnamese people and the food is good and they're not charging like nearly 20 pounds for a bowl of pho. Yeah, yeah. That's a, that's an own goal. Yeah. I really like when chefs from other places take a, you know, go to these places. Like my brother was a chef. It was very, very good chef. He was a

traditionally trained French cuisine chef, though he never went to culinary school. He just kind of he was that prototypical story of starting off washing dishes and was kind of like guided by various head chefs over the years and taught how to do everything. Surprisingly, never spent time in prison, so he's not that much of a prototypical guy who worked his way up through the line. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, I love the idea of people taking influences or they've spent years learning and then combining them with others.

I mean, maybe that's the American part of me coming out where like we have all these different kinds of food styles smashing up and creating something new and good. But that requires deep respect. Yeah. for the culture and the food you're absorbing. Yeah. And it's not like whatever the fuck you just described. I think those two, like it's, it's, it's perfectly fine and okay. Whereas saying like, you know, this can't be called this thing or it's not this thing, cause it's not from this patch of dirt is just fucking stupid.

And I don't care who the first person to do X, Y, and Z was. I don't care what it was, I don't care. It's an interesting piece of history, but when it comes to the food itself, I just care if it tastes good. I don't care who's claiming it. I have the real, real controversial food opinion. Pizza is baby food and... Fuck you! This is a direct attack on me. I love pizza. No pizza is good. But the thing is, is that like, there's all these places that do like these really fancy pizzas and I'm like, it's pizza. Like you go to Italy. Yeah. The pizza's good, but it's not treated with this sort of like reverence. No, it doesn't need to

be churched up. Pizza is good when it's simple in my opinion. And it's like, you know, this is like, I'll go to a restaurant and someone will get my opinion. And it's like, you know, this is like, I'll go to a restaurant and someone will get a pizza and it's like, you shouldn't spend like 25 pounds on a small pizza in a restaurant because it's a fucking pizza. Like it's all pizza in the same way with burgers can only be so good. And you reach a certain point of how good it is where the price just does not match what you're eating. I've seen some weird pizzas in my day, specifically in Europe more than anywhere else.

Not counting Italy because I've never been there, but like, and it's fine. Like pizza is a lot like a sandwich. It's a vessel for its cut for its contents. Yeah. Look, you can go too far. As someone who if I was to be told what do you want your last meal to be? I would choose like a shitty large pizza from like a chain restaurant. Cause I don't have to worry about like the next day,

what's going to do to my insides. Yeah. So understand my taste level is not high, but like I've been to like so many pizza places where my friends are like, Oh, this pizza is incredible. You're going to love it's going to be the best pizza you've ever had. And I eat it. It's like, this just tastes like every, you know, good pizza I've ever eaten. Yeah. Yeah.

They all just are the same. That could be said for like a lot of things. Yeah. I feel like we probably piss enough people off with our food opinions today. Yeah. Do you got any other ones you could just fire across the bow before we sign off? Oh, and Guinness is not actually a good stout. It's just very plain and very drinkable. That's why it's popular.

If you want a good stout, there's way better stouts out there. That's an opinion that someone with your accent should not be able to piss anybody off with. It's true. And also the whole thing of like good Guinness pubs and bad Guinness pubs is a lie and a marketing gimmick from Guinness because they can't make a consistent product. Ooh, spicy.

It's true. It's true. Any anyone who knows anything about brewing who's listening to this will agree with me. Sorry. I do not have the the standing to disagree. That is our show. Tom, you have another show. What is your other show?

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