#1019 - Fin Taylor & Horatio Gould - History is a Freakshow

Summary

Modern Wisdom #1019 - “History is a Freakshow”

Chris Williamson w/ Finn Taylor & Horatio Gould

Date: November 13, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this riotous and rapid-fire episode, Chris Williamson sits down with comedians Finn Taylor and Horatio Gould—creators of the popular "Finn vs History" podcast—to explore the weird, dark, hilarious, and utterly unpredictable side of history. Playing with the fine line between legitimate history and stand-up, the trio dissect why history is both therapy and absurdity, why the past is always “worse than you think,” and how contemporary life and internet culture reflect deeper patterns that have existed for centuries. The conversation leaps from British politics to Japanese kamikazes, from Churchill's drinking habits to eugenics and embryo selection, peppered with irreverent jokes, social commentary, and a steady undercurrent of British skepticism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Why Study History? It’s Always Been a Mess

Theme: The comforting chaos of history

• Finn and Chris joke about being “historians” now, highlighting how credentials are less important than presentation:

  “We’re just talking out of our fucking ass and people are like, oh…” - Finn (10:54)

• History as a soothing force:

  “It’s always fucked up...it’s been a lot worse and it’s gonna carry on being like this.” – Finn (00:51)

• The myth of “the good old days”:

  “This is the best it’s ever been.” – Chris (01:08)

• Comedy in academic pretense and the British accent as a “superpower” in America:

  “They just think you’re...If you put a suit on, it would be a vector for weakness.” – Finn (11:09)

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2. Japanese History: Suicide, Isolation, and Cultural Weirdness

Theme: How national quirks are made

• The trio dive into Japanese honor culture, seclusion, and the infamous ritual of seppuku, seeing it through both academic and comedic lenses.
  • “The best thing about your life would be the committing suicide in 16th century Japan.” – Chris (03:20)
  • “It was playing World of Warcraft in the basement for a thousand years.” – Finn on Japanese isolation (04:39)
• The link between seppuku and WWII kamikaze:

  “Their belief system...so detached from everyday life...killing yourself for a greater cause is, to our heads, acceptable.” – Chris (07:02)

• Japan’s selective globalization and cultural uniqueness:

  “Japan is like, ‘we’ll take that, we won’t take that.’” – Finn (06:23)

• Occasional forays into Japanese sexual oddities, from Edo-era octopus porn to contemporary TV:

  “First octopus porn was in like the 1800s...beautifully carved, actually.” – Finn & Chris (05:12–05:30)

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3. World War II: The Pinnacle and Fallout of Modern Myth

Theme: Why white men are obsessed with WWII

• WWII as a cultural touchstone and “season finale” for history nerds:

  “World War II stuff is kind of ASMR for white guys in their 30s.” – Chris Willx (32:16) “History is like a pyramid leading towards the big atomic explosion.” – Finn (32:35)

• The aesthetics of evil and the birth of ‘Hitler as the universal bad guy’:

  “Our modern sense of evil...all comes from [Hitler].” – Finn (34:13)

• Pro-Hitler memes and algorithmic darkness:

  “Mine's just tits and Hitler. It's crazy.” – Finn (34:45) “It’s broken past irony—it’s genuinely pretty terrifying.” – Finn (35:16)

• The seductiveness of conspiracy and revisionism:

  “The idea that you’ve been lied to is thrilling for a lot of people.” – Finn (36:14)

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4. British Postwar History—Clement Attlee to Thatcher

Theme: From socialist consensus to capitalist individualism

• The “freakshow” of British PMs from WWII to Thatcher, especially the underappreciated Clement Attlee:

  “What’s defined this country is Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, for sure.” – Finn (14:41)

• Postwar consensus, welfare state, and the creaking under its own weight:

  “In the space of about a year and a half, he builds the entirety of the welfare state…” – Chris (15:34)

• 1970s Britain: chaos, energy crises, and sexual awakening:

  “One of the government advice was...‘to pass the time, why don’t you experiment with your sex lives?’” – Chris (23:51) “Comic Relief in reverse—Ugandan dictator sending charitable donations to Britain. It’s exquisite.” – Chris (24:29)

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5. The Internet, Irony, and Sincerity

Theme: Comedy, kayfabe, and the blurring of reality online

• The comedy show “Finn vs Internet”—a sense of humor as social litmus test:

  “The show is like a sense of humor test almost, which is a very British thing.” – Chris (64:48)

• Dangers of ironic detachment and performative sincerity online:

  “If it only ever being irony, you don’t actually get to come into contact with reality...” – Chris Willx (59:47)

• Americans’ earnestness vs. British irony:

  “After a while, if you never come into contact with sincerity, it kind of feels a bit like...where does the world exist?” – Chris Willx (66:17)

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6. Science’s Dark Side—Eugenics, Phrenology, and Embryo Selection

Theme: When good science gets ugly

• The Victorian era’s “scholar and a racist” archetype:

  “It was scholarly to be racist.” – Chris (72:24)

• Francis Galton: inventor of both modern weather maps and the dog whistle (literally and metaphorically):

  “He literally invented the dog whistle.” – Chris (72:59)

• The problem with eugenics and the slippery slope to embryo selection:

  “That’s the only parent here. The whole thing about parenthood is that you don’t choose the card you’re dealt…” – Chris (83:39) “Wouldn’t you...What if you’re cutting out severe disorders?” – Finn (84:03) “Suffering is a legitimate debate as to how much suffering you can edit out of someone.” – Chris (89:25)

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7. Miscellaneous Freakshow Stories

• Dancing Plague of 1518 (69:10): Entire towns dance to death—possible ergot poisoning, mass hysteria.
• Aztecs: Sacrifice festivals, massive owl costumes as final weapons in civil war, and missed opportunities to use the wheel after seeing heads roll down pyramid stairs. (41:13–44:43)
• Churchill as the proto-influencer day drinker who battled depression, and how today’s politicians lack his charisma:

  “There has been a dearth of political charisma...I guess Farage is probably the last successful.” – Chris (29:41) “Charisma’s gone because trust is gone.” – Finn (29:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On history’s relativity:

  “History, for me, has always been quite like a soothing thing… It’s been a lot worse and it’s gonna carry on being like this.” — Finn (00:52)

• On Japanese WWII culture:

  “You’re so Buddhist, you’re so detached from your own life, you’re so in the moment… you’ll kill yourself because you’re above it almost.” — Chris (07:44)

• On the Churchill mythos:

  “World War II stuff is kind of ASMR for white guys in their 30s.” — Chris Willx (32:16)

• On irony vs. earnestness online:

  “If it only ever being irony, you don’t actually get to come into contact with reality.” — Chris Willx (59:47)
  “Show is like a sense of humor test almost, which is a very British thing.” — Chris (64:48)

• On the dangers of selective breeding:

  “You probably love your kid less in many ways…if you’re like, I fucked up.” — Finn (85:27)

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Important Timestamps & Segments

• 00:40 — History as therapy & "It's always been a mess"
• 02:34 — Life is safest now / The new tonic age / Good old days myth
• 03:09-03:46 — Japanese ritual suicide, honor, and cultural comments
• 06:12-09:22 — Japan’s uniqueness and kamikaze culture
• 13:06-14:41 — Obsession with British postwar Prime Ministers—Clement Attlee, Thatcher, and the welfare state
• 23:07-24:07 — The three-day week and 1970s sexual experimentation in Britain
• 32:16-36:15 — World War II as cultural lodestone and pro-Hitler fringe content
• 41:04-44:50 — Aztec sacrifices and history’s oddities
• 59:47-61:36 — Irony vs. earnestness in online culture
• 72:10-74:05 — Phrenology and the wacky history of scientific racism
• 81:00-86:17 — Modern embryo selection & the philosophical dilemmas of “designer babies”

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Closing: What’s Next?

Finn and Horatio discuss their ongoing tour (sold out but teasing future events), upcoming bonus podcast releases, and their continued mission to reconsider the boundaries between history, comedy, and internet culture. They invite listeners to join their thriving Patreon community for immediate binge access, bonus shows, and a front-row seat to the “freakshow” of history.

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Tone & Takeaway

Irreverent, fast-paced, and British to the core, this episode showcases the wild parallels between the freakier sides of history and today’s culture wars. It’s a blend of historical trivia, social criticism, and dark comic relief, making the past feel every bit as bizarre—and oddly comforting—as the present.

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“It’s always been a freakshow. Just with new costumes.”

— a near-perfect tagline for this hilarious, thoughtful, and sometimes unsettling historical romp.

Transcript

[Chris Willx]

You are historians now.

[Finn]

Yes.

[Chris]

Big pivot.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Hard pivot into academia.

[Finn]

I mean, this is what the manosphere's come to.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

If you're speaking to historians, you'll get us on to talk. It doesn't matter. We can say what we want people to be like.

[Chris]

What really podcasts that need academic guests.

[Chris Willx]

They use all of this is how low the spiral is that I'm scraping.

[Chris]

This is how your business model works is once you've had. Whatever. What's his name. Graham.

[Finn]

Graham Hancock. You've had it on four times, Graham. Hand job.

[Chris]

You have to get a new guy's.

[Chris Willx]

The legitimacy has declined so much. Yeah, I agree.

[Finn]

Yeah. It's not cliquey enough. Graham Hancock is just not.

[Chris]

Yeah, people are used to it. They need to get these guys.

[Finn]

They need someone who's really pushing the boundaries.

[Chris Willx]

Have you been any more capable of predicting the future now with all of your illustrious studying of the past, has it given you any insights about what's going on in the modern world?

[Chris]

It's made me calmer about it.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

It's just always fucked up.

[Finn]

That's true. History for me has always been quite like a soothing thing. It's been a lot worse and it's gonna carry on being like this.

[Chris]

And yeah, it's like asmr.

[Finn]

Because people keep saying, like, you know, back in the day. What do you mean, back in the day? Yeah, it was awful.

[Chris Willx]

It was awful.

[Finn]

It's been awful.

[Chris]

This is the best it's ever been.

[Finn]

The 90s was slightly better.

[Chris]

Yeah. There was four years.

[Finn]

Huan's gone like this. It's gone like this. And now it's like that.

[Chris]

No, I reckon it went like that and then it was like in between Diana and 9 11. And then it's just been.

[Finn]

Yeah, exactly. It's been going down, but people, it is still like, step back. It's unreal.

[Chris Willx]

Coffee's.

[Chris]

Coffee's good.

[Finn]

I mean, tonic now.

[Chris Willx]

Agreed.

[Finn]

Look at. You don't have this in the Middle Ages.

[Chris]

People didn't even have that 10 years ago.

[Finn]

We're living in the new tonic age.

[Chris]

This is the Newtonic age.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

To place this.

[Chris]

To place this.

[Chris Willx]

For anyone listening, that is true. That is very true indeed. No, it's an interesting one. I think the fact that both America and maybe the UK as well had such a little golden era, 80s 90s ish. Where everybody felt like living standards. Stuff's getting better.

[Chris]

End of history.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

But just that you have this felt pullback from then until now, but you had probably steady incline Careful doing that.

[Chris]

Yeah, we're on the wrong set.

[Chris Willx]

You're in a steady incline kind of up until then. So when you compare us between that, I think everyone looks at the golden era that parents had and thinks, oh, well, wouldn't it have been lovely to have grown up in the 80s and the 90s?

[Finn]

Yeah. And it's before social media and stuff and I guess that there's just a little sweet spot. But I guess if you just do history a lot, you just look at it much broader and so you just view it, you take a much bigger step back and it's just like. Yeah, you know.

[Chris]

Yeah. I mean, like, we're more likely to die naturally now than ever before.

[Chris Willx]

What's. What do you mean?

[Chris]

Well, as in, like, not die. I mean, I mean, obviously there are people in your orbit who don't want to die. And that's the new. That's the new frontier to conquer.

[Finn]

People won't die.

[Chris]

People won't die.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Yeah, good on them.

[Chris Willx]

They refuse.

[Chris]

I'm. I'm looking forward to it, frankly. I would like to die at some point. It's not before my time, but I do think there's a time to die.

[Finn]

There's a time and a place.

[Chris]

Time and place.

[Chris Willx]

It's.

[Chris]

But it's the amount. The way you would die up until about 100 years ago was probably very bad compared to now.

[Finn]

We just did a Japan series and they made him. They love committing suicide, seppuku, ritually. And it's because it's like, life's so rubbish. You just want to do something big and then kill yourself. Is like a brilliant life.

[Chris]

The best thing about your life would be the committing suicide in 16th century Japan.

[Chris Willx]

What caused them to do that? There had to be an incident because.

[Finn]

They didn't have modern wisdom to listen to to help with their mental health. That's true. There was a severe lack of mental.

[Chris Willx]

Health problems to get them up at.

[Finn]

4.30Am so young Japanese men were committing seppuku en masse and it would be.

[Chris]

The slightest faux pas. You'd fart at the dinner table. I can't live with this.

[Finn]

But was it guts everywhere?

[Chris Willx]

Was it some kind of like weird honor culture?

[Finn]

Yeah, it was still like that. But, yeah, they absolutely fucking loved it because I thought it was just like a racist trope. But when we went and studied it for these episodes, you can't believe everyone ends with seppuku. And if they don't, I'm immediately thinking like, well, you're. That's a bit dishonorable.

[Chris]

Yeah. Their death is treated as suspicious if it's not suicide.

[Finn]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Chris]

Suspicious circumstances. He didn't seem to do it himself, wasn't it?

[Finn]

What.

[Chris Willx]

What made Japan such an odd country? Because even now it's about as close to kind of an alien planet as you can get to, I suppose.

[Finn]

Well, it's an autistic culture. Right. Culturally on the autism spectrum.

[Chris]

It's up there with Scotland.

[Finn]

Yeah, Scotland. Yeah. Germany. That's an autistic culture. I think Japan, it shut its doors.

[Chris]

For 300 years and had no internal wars, which is very rare in history.

[Finn]

It was playing World of Warcraft in the basement for a thousand years.

[Chris Willx]

And what does that. Cause if you shut the doors for three days, what it causes?

[Finn]

I don't know. It's like homeschooled kids.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

Oh, is this weird? Oh yeah. We shit with the door open. Right. No one's ever.

[Chris]

There's no outside influence or. It's very moderated. And then they. That's why they're so. They were never colonized, but they always took stuff and made it Japanese.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Which is why, like.

[Finn]

Oh, we put a squid in. Fuck it.

[Chris]

No, that's not actually. We did find that the first octopus porn was in like the 1800s.

[Finn]

Yeah, yeah. What?

[Chris]

It's like a wood carved octopus porn because they had obscenity laws about showing. So the. The blurring, blurred porn that's been going on for a while to get around obscenity laws, but to still get the rocks off. They'd show. They'd carve. Someone would carve it. That's fucking hilarious.

[Finn]

Quite beautifully carved, actually.

[Chris]

Octopus. A woman Octopussy in 18. Whatever. 1840 or something.

[Chris Willx]

Okay. Don't they have those hand job on TV things? I've seen that.

[Finn]

What's this?

[Chris Willx]

So Japan, Japanese TV has these weird like, I don't know, competitions where girls.

[Finn]

Hand job competitions, milking competitions on tv.

[Chris Willx]

Or maybe it's not. Well, it's certainly.

[Finn]

Maybe it's on pornheart. I don't know if that's.

[Chris Willx]

Honestly, I'm not kidding. I feel like this has been cast outside of X rated Takeshi's Prime Minister.

[Finn]

Whoever comes last because. Prime Minister?

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. Like the most diplomatic game of Soggy Biscuit ever.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

High stakes. Soggy Biscuit. Yeah.

[Finn]

Elite level.

[Chris Willx]

Okay. So Japan closes its doors for a long time and becomes weird. That's basically how you make a culture odd.

[Chris]

I wouldn't say it's odd. It's just unique. Very unique culture. Very distinct in a way that other cultures.

[Finn]

It's one of the least. Yeah. It's very selectively globalized. Right. Most cultures don't get to choose how they get globalized. Right. It's just this kind of permeable wall and it just blends all together. Japan is like, we'll take that. We won't take that. So it's like very structured how their culture's developed.

[Chris Willx]

Does that play. Does that seppuku heritage play into kamikaze stuff? When it comes to.

[Finn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Willx]

That's just the technological advantage.

[Finn]

Kill themselves.

[Chris]

Me, please.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah.

[Finn]

It's the easiest to find.

[Chris Willx]

His granddad did.

[Finn]

And everyone's like, so jealous when it's.

[Chris]

Like he gets to fucking fly doing what he loves.

[Chris Willx]

Ugh.

[Chris]

But there's a.

[Chris Willx]

Taking math.

[Chris]

And the whole thing about, you know, their. Their belief system is like Shinto and Confucianism and Buddhism. It's like a whole mix of it where all of it is like. It's so detached from the everyday life is so. You're such an observer of your own life that killing yourself for a greater cause is like, to our heads, acceptable. Whereas with the west, we're like the individual. The freedom life, that's the most important thing.

[Finn]

Right.

[Chris]

But the Japanese honor.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And it's wearing no shoes in the house. And your life is subservient to wearing. Not wearing shoes in the house.

[Finn]

They're not.

[Chris]

But that leads to what we would call the night night bomb, which is the night night. The big bang. Go to bed.

[Finn]

You weren't going to be Nagasaki night.

[Chris]

Yeah. Roshman. Night, Night night. It's Nagasaki that leads to a culture where you just will not surrender because you're so Buddhist. You're so detached from your own life. You're so in the moment. You're so mental health. Perfect score. That you're just will kill yourself because you're above it almost.

[Chris Willx]

You don't sound like modern wisdom. Doesn't it?

[Chris]

Well, I don't wanna.

[Finn]

But you know what? That Japanese soldier was found on that island in 1974.

[Chris]

Still fighting the war.

[Finn]

Still fighting the war. Yeah. So in one of the islands in the Pacific, I think he got stranded during World War II. And they found him in 1976, I think.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

And he was like. He still came out and he was still with the. He thought the war was going on. That's how fucking mental they are. But God love him.

[Chris]

God love him.

[Finn]

God love him.

[Chris Willx]

What was the name of the operation where America thought, we're going to have to do a land invasion if the atomic Bombs don't work. And they were getting ready and they had a million body bags. They were ready for the most.

[Chris]

Well, that's one of the reasons in the. Deciding to use it. One of the. I can't remember the name of the operation, but they were basically. And I don't know how you'd ever actually do this. They were tallying up the potential deaths from the Night Night bomb and the potential deaths from a land invasion of American cells. And they. They said that actually it was. Again, I think maybe just they just wanted to use it. Yeah, they just said, I think we've got this new thing.

[Finn]

Cool toy.

[Chris]

Yeah, it looks fucking sick. Look at this.

[Finn]

Anyway, it's the ultimate dad toy, isn't it? If you're president in the show, when you've got like a. Yeah. When you've looked online, you've looked at all the reviews and you've got like the right hedge trimmer, you really want to use that.

[Chris]

Anyway, they said in their calculations that the less deaths would be used from the atomic bomb than a ground invasion.

[Chris Willx]

Presumably less American deaths.

[Chris]

Oh, yeah, obviously.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. But also, I guess maybe less Japanese deaths because it's that slow encroachment that makes you think, well, we can push them back, we might be able to win as opposed to. Okay, that was a big mess and we didn't really seem to be able to do anything about it.

[Finn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris]

I mean, we're not historians, that's the thing to say.

[Chris Willx]

So hang on, so can you just. What. What level of credentials do you have?

[Finn]

I got none.

[Chris]

Right. I have a degree from Bristol in history.

[Finn]

And if you weren't a comedian, you'd probably end up being a history teacher.

[Chris]

Probably. Yeah. I mean, everyone in my family is a teacher and a lot of them are history teachers.

[Chris Willx]

Okay.

[Chris]

And my aunt ran the photography at the Imperial War Museum my whole career. So that's the reality. It's a real history. And like, you know, the obsession with Nazis is. But I'm realizing it comes from Christianity.

[Finn]

Your aunt takes photos of guns. That sort of your credentials.

[Chris]

Yeah, right. She collects photos of guns and she. Yeah, but that's. My whole family is history teachers, actually. They keep it up about it and then you just. You just.

[Finn]

I just like it.

[Chris]

You're just autistic.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Okay.

[Chris Willx]

Spent too much time on ChatGPT.

[Finn]

Yeah, something. Something like that.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

So we don't have any credentials, but we are.

[Chris]

We are comedians.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And it's a. It's. It's a comedy podcast before. It's a History podcast.

[Finn]

I'm worried that we've been called on here as historians.

[Chris Willx]

Not at all.

[Finn]

The west has fallen.

[Chris]

Well, but this is. The podcast is legitimizing.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, yeah. As you know, this is how low the barrel is being scraped.

[Finn]

In any case, part of the bit as well is how much you get away with having a posh accent and suits.

[Chris]

Yes.

[Finn]

It's amazing.

[Chris Willx]

It carries you a long way.

[Finn]

We're just talking out of our fucking ass. And people are like, oh.

[Chris]

You know, I do learn things.

[Finn]

I really want to hit America. Because that day, they can't. They're so vulnerable to Brits and suits.

[Chris]

They are, yeah.

[Finn]

Like, they just think you're.

[Chris]

If you put a suit on, it.

[Chris Willx]

Would be a vector for weakness.

[Finn]

Yeah. I mean, the amount of havoc you can run with the British acts in America. I mean, you're doing it right now.

[Chris Willx]

But it's crazy.

[Finn]

Russell Brand, Graham Hancock.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

I saw Graham Hancock.

[Chris Willx]

James Corden.

[Finn]

James Corden. Yeah.

[Chris]

I mean, it's mad, isn't it?

[Finn]

Jimmy Carr going on those podcasts. I mean, they can't believe it. He's a smart guy in a suit. It's like they'll believe anything he says, even if it's absolute bollocks. I saw Graham Hancock on a. Like one of those. I think it was fucking. Not Huberman. It was one of those podcasts saying that he believes every candidate for US Presidency should have to oftaken ayahuasca. Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

That's the rule. I did see that.

[Finn]

I did see that. And him saying it in a suit, being British is like, that is quite a good idea. You know, it's a terrible idea. You have to take psychedelic drugs to be the president.

[Chris]

Yeah. Cause that's who you want in charge of the nightlife. It's someone who at any moment could have a flashback.

[Finn]

Yeah. And Americans are like, maybe I'm wrong. Cause he's got. He does have a posh accent. He's very sick. Yeah.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

So that's the dream. We really. I do want to hit America. I'd love to try and see how far we can push it.

[Chris]

Do a university tour.

[Finn]

Yeah. Just like, how far can we be intellectuals over there?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

I think that you'd be very well respected and they would. You probably could actually reshape what Americans think about their own history. I'm sure you'd be able to psyop them into believing something else with.

[Finn]

Well, you're trying to recolonize the curriculum in the minute.

[Chris]

I am writing a book called that.

[Chris Willx]

Recolonize the curriculum.

[Finn]

He's recolonizing it.

[Chris]

Recognizing.

[Chris Willx]

What does that mean?

[Chris]

I don't know. I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about it yet.

[Chris Willx]

Okay.

[Chris]

But yeah, I am writing a pseudo historical book.

[Chris Willx]

Okay. Okay. Well it seems like you've kind of specialized in obscure bits of history as well. There's like a 24 year period of or 34 year period of post war British prime ministers which I didn't even know was a period of history. And you did.

[Chris]

Well, it's British history after the war until Thatcher. Is that the political consensus is very, very, very funny.

[Finn]

Yes. Like if the podcast is defined by anything it probably that's the period.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

It's a sort of. If the podcast aesthetic is anything, it's British people broke in the seventies nostalgizing the fifties or the war. That's sort of the vibe that we're going for. So us doing that massive series on post war premises even though it did lose a lot of viewers. But yeah, people like you're still going on.

[Chris]

This has been a month and then also there are now people this week when we started talking about Japan going what do you mean you're not doing that show? We've been here for 10 episodes and you're not.

[Finn]

You did a whole episode on Douglas Alec Yu. Alec Douglas Yu Y.

[Chris Willx]

Okay. So it was like watching. Being forced to watch a really boring prequel in the hopes that you were about to get the main series and now you've just.

[Chris]

You just don't give it to him.

[Finn]

But we do a test cricket approach though. It's like we're doing every inch of the pro. No matter how boring they are. We will cover them.

[Chris Willx]

The blue balls.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Millions of people.

[Finn]

But the section we just the 10 part series that was more the aptly consensus and how it broke. Right. So after the war, Atlee's post war socialist consensus building, the NHS welfare state, all of that sort of stuff and basically how that slowly broke down to the point that Mummy needed.

[Chris]

They got so desperate that they elected a woman as prime minister to come in and clean up the mess. That's the sort of.

[Finn]

That was the reach of the postal Britain. Cuck dad, bitch Mum. That's defined this country.

[Chris]

Exactly. Attlee and Thatcher is who we all are, who we all be living in really.

[Finn]

We're living in Thatcher's world. But there's still remnants of Attlee. What's defined this country is Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher for sure.

[Chris Willx]

I'd never heard that name before.

[Finn]

Clement Attlee.

[Chris Willx]

No.

[Finn]

So he was the Prime Minister who was in the war cabinet for Labour with Churchill, served well in the war. And then afterwards, in kind of a shock, he was voted in over Churchill straight away. Cause even though Churchill was a war hero, everyone wanted a change. The country was on its knees. They didn't trust Churchill.

[Chris]

This happened at Potsdam at the post war conference. Churchill's there one day, goes home to the election results and then Atlee comes to Potsdam with whoever. Is it Truman or.

[Finn]

Yes, it'd be Truman. Truman and Stalin.

[Chris]

Yeah, and Eisenhower and all these people. And Attlee looks like a fucking competition winner.

[Finn]

So Potsdam was the conference when they're divvying up, it's not. It's the one after Yalta where they're all divvying up Germany after the war. And on the plane Attlee finds out he's Prime Minister and no one thought.

[Chris]

He was going to win. You can see photos and he's like, fuck it.

[Finn]

It's like fuck a fan with Stalin.

[Chris]

Yeah, it's crazy. But when he comes to power, in the space of about a year and a half, he builds the entirety of the welfare state and then from that moment onwards until Thatcher comes in, the state is just creaking because you start to live in a globalized economy. The Middle east kicks off, turns our lights off. But everyone in politics has fought in the war. No one feels they can disrupt the consensus until a woman comes along.

[Chris Willx]

Because.

[Chris]

It'S all the money they're paying for the unions. And this is where the union power gets too big.

[Finn]

In the 70s, also the blitz spirit, these guys all fought together. So there was just a much more communal attitude for rebuilding Britain as Thatcher.

[Chris]

Releases this kind of free market. And also this sort of psychological individualism.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Where it's like all about making money, suddenly about the individual. And it's not that.

[Chris Willx]

That's the tension. The conflict is this sort of very socialist beginning to a very sort of capitalist meritocratic.

[Chris]

It snaps back home.

[Finn]

But you know, we've still got the nhs, we've still got the welfare state. There's still like Atlee's.

[Chris Willx]

We didn't have the NHS before.

[Finn]

No, no, that was a Atlee venture. And also he was basically a one term prime ministership. You know, he was only in for six years, but did a lot. But did so much in the first two years. Pretty much did so much that it's like the most productive and revolutionary prime ministership.

[Chris]

But I do think it was only possible because of the complete blank slate. The end of World War II.

[Finn]

I mean, your view is that we didn't get bombed enough because it was one or the other. We got bombed. Annoying.

[Chris]

Because if you look at Germany, if.

[Finn]

All of our rails were bombed, then we could rebuild them because that's like they're actually paying to do the breaking down.

[Chris]

Well, if you want to get into it, Germany and Japan arguably win the peace because they were so devastated, defeated. And then they were basically funded by the Americans to rebuild. So they, their economy start growing very quickly after the war. They have a massive 50s boom. Britain is bankrupt and yet not completely destroyed. And yet we spend all of that.

[Finn]

Pretending we're not bankrupt.

[Chris]

No, but also we spend all the money the Americans give us. The condition of them giving the money is that we have to have a nuclear bomb.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And so we start arming ourselves because we're in the Cold War era.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And so that's why we have no money from the off.

[Finn]

That's why so many houses from that period are still there.

[Chris]

They build these temporary prefab houses that were meant to be like last three years.

[Finn]

That's.

[Chris]

That's well Welsh housing stock still. It's crazy.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Anyway, there's a whole. Yeah, There's a whole 10 hour symphony of that.

[Chris Willx]

Were there other. Any other unlikely heroes that you sort of fell in love with post war?

[Chris]

I mean, Howard Wilson's second term.

[Finn]

Wilson's a beast.

[Chris]

The episode is called Stop Pegging Granddad.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

That he was being sexually dominated by his private secretary, Marcia.

[Chris Willx]

Actually, this isn't one of your euphemisms.

[Chris]

No. You can look at the rest of history. They talk about it, so it's real.

[Chris Willx]

Okay, hang on. So the litmus test for Finn versus history is the rest is history.

[Finn]

I mean, I ran into Tom Holland at a historical exhibition. I said, by the way, I'm about to start a podcast, which is misremembering your podcast. And you know, so that's basically what the premise of this podcast is in many ways, is us trying to remember some of their episodes and getting it wrong. That's sort of the shtick.

[Chris]

Yeah, it is. But there's a brilliant. Probably my favorite is because Sam Brook is a very. That's one of his specialist topics is political history in the 70s.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

There's an episode, there's a series on 1974, the Crisis Year. That is fucking hilarious.

[Finn]

It's the best one, probably.

[Chris]

Yeah. And that's where. That's where we. Why we wanted to do this, because Like Heath as well. Heath is such a funny prime minister, basically.

[Finn]

Marcia, he. Wilson, on his second term, his first time was pretty revolutionary. It was like repealing gay rights. It was the 60s.

[Chris]

Repealing gay rights.

[Finn]

Introducing gay rights. Yeah.

[Chris]

So, yeah.

[Finn]

Repeating gay rights was what's about to happen.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

And by a second time, he was completely exhausted. They're all exhausted.

[Chris]

He had early onset.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Outside.

[Finn]

And then his assistant, he had this sort of psychosexual thing. Wasn't his wife, his assistant? Marcia, for example, he was at, I think, in Downing Street. This happened, that Marcia said, come here, you little cunt, to the Prime Minister in front of all of his aides. And then he went. Yeah.

[Chris]

And he just went with her.

[Finn]

Yeah. So she was just like this. She. When he won. When he won his record fourth election, he. She told him the wrong address for the celebration parties. There was no one there.

[Chris]

She cancelled it.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

And she just liked to dominate him.

[Finn]

Yeah. And she was there and he turned up and then she started bollocking him.

[Chris]

They had an affair in the 50s. And she told his wife, she said, I went to your. I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956. And it was less than satisfactory.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

But she's his private secretary. So through the whole of his political career, he has these two wives and one of them is pegging him in Downing street whilst the country's completely crumbling.

[Finn]

I mean, Wilson's great. Ted Heath. Cause it flipped between Wilson and Heath. Heath over the 70s, the rudest man there's ever been. And he maybe is a paedophile.

[Chris]

Who knows?

[Finn]

Who knows? You couldn't possibly know. But he absolutely hated women so much that they were invisible. He transcended misogyny.

[Chris Willx]

So he had one person whose life was run by a woman that was pegging him and another one who didn't see.

[Finn]

And they would flip Downing street because the country kept going to State of Emergencies. There had to be so many elections. It was like Brexit, but it was worse than Brexit.

[Chris]

But then the great irony is the man who literally didn't see women, he got so annoyed by them, then gets usurped by Thatcher and he hates. He hates Thatcher. And he goes into what's called the longest sulk in history, where he's still in the Commons and he becomes the father of the House. He's there till, like, the 90s whenever he dies and whenever Thatcher speaks, you can see him turning a Snowzer.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Oh, I love Heath.

[Finn]

Yeah. So Heath and Wilson are two other favorites.

[Chris]

Yeah.

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[Chris Willx]

I didn't realize that there was so much bullshit going on that we needed to have these snap elections just back to back to back, like.

[Finn]

Well, one thing that I found quite therapeutic, which I've always found therapeutic about history, is realizing how fucked things were to put some perspective. Certainly if you're on Twitter, it feels like everything's growing to a halt, everything's awful. But you just look 20 years, 30 years backwards and you're like, it could be a lot worse. 1974, comparing it to British political history. Now you remember it's a lot of the same things we're going through now, but worse. Energy crisis, economy, three day week. Yeah, all of that sort of stuff.

[Chris Willx]

It's a three day week.

[Chris]

They didn't have the energy because the miners were demanding so much money and the. And the Prime Minister was in a standoff with them. And then the OPEC crisis kicks off with the Middle east wars. So suddenly energy is insanely expensive and the miners realize that they actually what They've got all the leverage to demand what they need. The country can't afford to pay them what they want. So Ted Heath doesn't give them what they want. He says everyone can only use electricity for three days a week. So rations, electricity, TV ends at 10pm that's when football starts getting played on Sundays because they can't afford to use floodlights.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

So football, which was always unsafe in the daytime.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Has to be in the daytime.

[Finn]

I mean, it got so bleak.

[Chris]

And apparently that's when kinky stuff starts.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Because one of the government advice was this, only you can only work three days. So to pass the time, why don't you experiment with your sex lives? So butt stuffed starts. Because the lights, well, you got to.

[Finn]

You got to pass the time somehow.

[Chris]

You can only do with the lights off.

[Finn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Willx]

That pegging guy could have been perfectly.

[Chris]

That's probably when you start getting pegged.

[Finn]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris]

Three day week.

[Finn]

But it got so bleak. Edi Amin said was going to send. Was trying to send an airplane full of vegetables to feed the starving Brits. He said, we're so heartbroken to see the way that, you know, our former colonial masters are suffering that all of the people we've gathered around and everyone's like done a whip around to help Britain reverse reparations.

[Chris]

And Britain obviously Comic Relief in reverse. Yeah. Ugandan dictator sending charitable donations to Britain. It's exquisite. It's absolute.

[Finn]

The point is though, when people say this country's in the toilet, there's a feeling that it's like we're in terminal decline. It's like it's been far.

[Chris Willx]

Do you realize how much worse it's been?

[Finn]

And within our parents lifetime and we've gotten out of it? So I do think it's good to have a bit of framing sometimes.

[Chris Willx]

Speaking of the vegetables thing, I had John Lyle on. He wrote the Dirty Tricks Department which was about the founding of the oss.

[Chris]

Mind control.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

We did a series on. Oh like CIA.

[Finn]

Oh like MKUltra.

[Chris Willx]

His second book was on MKUltra. His first book was the founding of the OSS. Stanley Lovell, William.

[Finn]

Fellow historian.

[Chris Willx]

Fucking. Anyway, there was a story that he looked at. Cause he's in the archives in Texas and he's reading these original documents. The vegetables thing reminded me of a story where a psychological assessment had been done of Hitler and they'd found out that he had a very fragile hold on his masculinity.

[Finn]

Oh yeah.

[Chris]

And I won't take it.

[Finn]

That was the most secure man I've ever.

[Chris Willx]

So their attempt was they found the gardener who grew the vegetables that went to the. What was it? The bird's nest. What was the eagle's nest? Eagle's Nest.

[Chris]

Birch's garden. I know that one.

[Finn]

Yep.

[Chris]

Bang. Don't even fish and finish the question.

[Chris Willx]

They found the gardener who grew the vegetables that went to the eagle's nest.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

And they.

[Chris]

Hans, I believe he was called. I don't know I met him once.

[Chris Willx]

Shook his hands, tried to inject the vegetables that were going to the Eagle's Nest with female sex hormones.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

In an attempt to try and trans Hitler. They said his mustache would fall out.

[Chris]

His voice would go high. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, you do know your history. That's incredible. What an obsessive history.

[Finn]

Incredibly well.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. What an obscure story to know. I thought I was going to be able to teach you something new.

[Chris]

No, I knew that.

[Finn]

Don't try. You can't get anything about Hitler past Finn. Nothing goes past.

[Chris Willx]

Okay. You're world expert on Hitler, let's say that.

[Chris]

Yeah, that's what I'd like you to say. World expert on Hitler.

[Finn]

Well, Hitler's biggest fan, I think is a better word.

[Chris]

Biggest empath.

[Chris Willx]

Cosplayer.

[Chris]

No, I'm an empath. I'm an empath.

[Finn]

Yeah. He's a selective empath. Yeah. He's only an empath for one man.

[Chris Willx]

Reverse empathy.

[Finn]

He has no empathy for anyone else.

[Chris]

No.

[Chris Willx]

But yeah, that idea of injecting vegetables with female sex horses.

[Finn]

Well, I mean, transit. I mean, that opens up a world of possibilities.

[Chris]

Imagine powerful, the things we never got to see.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, interesting. For the worst crimes of the 20th century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, all terrible relationships to their fathers. Imagine if they'd had modern wisdom back.

[Finn]

In the day, in that period, who had a good relationship with their father? Like, I feel it was before. It was pretty good relationships with fathers. Right.

[Chris]

This was handshakes, fathers. Yeah, I mean, I mean, as a father myself, like that, I'd like to see who.

[Finn]

Did Churchill have a good relationship with his father?

[Chris Willx]

No. Horrendous.

[Finn]

So it's just like, awful.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

I don't think you could say that was the cause of them because it was like everyone.

[Chris]

We're the first generation to be dads that are trying.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

That are actually invested. That's a really good point.

[Finn]

Because if you look at them, you look at their life and you're like, it was clearly this. But then you look at anyone on their street, you look at anyone in the village.

[Chris Willx]

Why did he not become mad?

[Finn]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Willx]

Why did he not Churchill. How do you think he would get on in the modern world of TikTok with.

[Finn]

He'd be a body cutting of a booming influencer.

[Chris]

You know, he's like that guy. He's my drink today, that guy. What the world?

[Finn]

What's his name? I've got a shout out. Sandro. He does the problematic pub podcast. You've got to watch this. This is great for Your listeners.

[Chris]

He's like the opposite of you.

[Chris Willx]

Okay.

[Chris]

In that your health, your health. You know you're a bit biohacky. Right, okay.

[Chris Willx]

Biohack Lite.

[Chris]

Yeah. Right. This guy is the. What's the opposite of a biohack?

[Finn]

I don't know.

[Chris]

It's a biofuck.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

This guy.

[Finn]

Biofuck.

[Chris]

This guy. What are you drinking today? He's my drinking a day.

[Finn]

And then he'll go on holiday to Magaluf with his friends and then he will proceed to video every drink he drinks and it will be 25 beers. He'll go through the cocktail menu at his hotel. Fourteen cocktails.

[Chris]

Strawberry daiquiri. Lovely, lovely. Is Della lovely.

[Finn]

So that would be. If we can get any of that up. If you can do some research and put it up, please. We can shout him out and he doesn't have long left.

[Chris]

Can't have long left.

[Chris Willx]

Is it a YouTube channel or Instagram or what?

[Finn]

It's on TikTok. Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Okay, brilliant. But anyway, Churchill day drinking, booming speeches. How do you reckon he'd get on Modern World? Can you get away with that? I guess it's kind of like the culture shifted, certainly.

[Chris]

But then we have. There has been a dearth of political charisma and I think that's not politicians fault. I think it's as trust has gone. Not trust is gone, but trust. Love you, Liz.

[Finn]

Charisma's gone because trust is gone.

[Chris]

Charisma left when trusted. Yeah. No, we got to stop electing people because they're fit.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

But the. Yeah. The charismatic politicians, we haven't really. I guess. I guess Farad is probably the last successful.

[Chris Willx]

Is that because to be statesmanlike is not to be sort of gregarious in that way.

[Chris]

Statesmanship is. Is old fashioned if we're living in the era of Trump and Farage and Vance and stuff.

[Finn]

But is there a link between the success of the country and the success of the politicians? Because if you look at the politicians during the Victorian age when Britain was the predominant power in the world, they. They did seem more charismatic, but just by the nature of what they were dealing with. Right.

[Chris]

Do you feel like we didn't have to deal with the public in the way?

[Finn]

Yeah, I guess so, yeah.

[Chris Willx]

I guess Trump is kind of like a sober Churchill, at least in that he's very gregarious. The booming speeches, he just doesn't do the drinking bit.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And maybe it's just Churchill's accent and dress sense that lends a sense of charm to the outrageousness.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Was he outrageous?

[Chris]

Well, by today's standards, I guess. But then at the time maybe he wasn't.

[Finn]

Yeah. What's more impressive, I think is the. It is extraordinary that level of. I don't know anyone who has that level of productivity drinking that much.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

I just. It's quite. I don't know how cultural that is. I think people drink less now. People are much more health conscious now. But seeing as you're so normalized to drink and smoke that much. If I started drinking, smoking, I wouldn't get anything.

[Chris]

The more interesting question is how would Brian Johnson get on in the war cabinet?

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Wow.

[Chris Willx]

That would be a church.

[Chris]

The fuck's this?

[Finn]

Nonce. Yeah.

[Chris]

Have a beer, would you mate?

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

I mean you want to live forever.

[Chris Willx]

It's the 40s going to bed at 10:00pm yeah.

[Chris]

Come on, wake up.

[Chris Willx]

He also did deal with depression his whole life though. Right. Really aggressive depression.

[Chris]

Yeah. Let's get serious. Let's get serious, Chris.

[Chris Willx]

Churchill.

[Chris]

Churchill. Churchill was depressed.

[Finn]

I thought he was.

[Chris Willx]

Was he not? Was he not. Is it not the black dog thing that was following him around? Is that not his whole thing?

[Chris]

I mean you look at what he was drinking.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. Is it possible to be not depressed being that hungover all the time?

[Finn]

Yeah. Because Churchill would depress. It's one. He wouldn't even know what depression is.

[Chris]

I don't think depression existed.

[Finn]

He was just a British bloke which is like sometimes using a grump and he didn't know what that was.

[Chris Willx]

Right.

[Finn]

So I don't know drinking.

[Chris]

We had whiskey on the nightstand. You're drinking whiskey when you wake up.

[Chris Willx]

He had a. He made. Is it Paul Roger Champagne and he had a custom sized bottle made because he said a half bottle was not sufficient and a full bottle was too much to have with last. So he's sort of a. Two thirds what.

[Finn]

I drink it a day.

[Chris Willx]

That could have been it. Yeah. It's weird. Like World War II stuff is kind of ASMR for white guys in their 30s.

[Chris]

Yes.

[Finn]

Documentary.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. And that is. I imagine that there's just an infinite amount of stuff that you can keep going back over with regards to that.

[Chris]

Well, we're trying to stretch out on our pod because it is. It is the. It's real. Just nitroglycerin for the listeners. They love it.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Because it is. But it's probably. It's the most exciting thing. That's. That's.

[Finn]

Well, it's like all of history. Right. Was leading to the Night Night Bomb and everything's been Going out. It's like an hourglass. That's it. It's like history is like a pyramid leading towards the big atomic explosion. So that's like the. And then everything's been a fallout since then. Right. That's how. So I think World War II is just. If you like history, it's. It's the big. It's the season finale.

[Chris Willx]

It's the perfect amount of long enough ago that it's interesting to research, but close enough to us that there was sufficient information captured about it to be able to.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

But also the kind of the biblical nature of the light and dark, good and evil.

[Finn]

Yeah. The sides are more.

[Chris]

Stuff that doesn't really happen. And the fucking aesthetics. And so much of culture, like Star wars is built off that similar, like, evil dark sides with the great outfits. They look great. And this kind of iconic baddie. And then the rebel. I know it's based on Vietnam, Star wars, but, you know, the rebels and stuff.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

That doesn't really happen in conflicts since.

[Chris Willx]

I guess we're saying sartorially, World War II was the sort of pinnacle.

[Finn]

And also when you're looking at Hitler in the 30s, people didn't have a Hitler to compare them to.

[Chris]

No.

[Finn]

So the idea of evil is Hitler. Hitler invented that. Really. And also it didn't really come in until the videos from the camps came out.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

The kind of idea of this, like, everyone comparing everything to Hitler, there being this idea of true evil and stuff like that, that just didn't really exist in the same way. Obviously there was like religious things where it's like heretics and that sort. But our modern sense of evil is all comes from.

[Chris]

And the bad guy. You know, like James Bond, all the outfits that did Blofeld's a dictator. Kind of. Cause, you know, like that whole culturally, we're so born out of World War II.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Like action films. But then. Have you seen heroes?

[Finn]

I don't know what your algorithm's like. The amount of pro Hitler stuff is getting crazy.

[Chris Willx]

Pro Hitler stuff.

[Finn]

You're not getting it.

[Chris Willx]

I haven't seen any of that.

[Finn]

What's in your algorithm, Chris?

[Chris Willx]

Like, just dog videos and it's very fluffy. Mine, I don't tend to get much of that. Like, really?

[Chris]

Boobs.

[Chris Willx]

Boobs. No, it's not really.

[Finn]

What is Gan? I'm tits and Hitler. It's crazy. It's just. Mine's just the same.

[Chris]

It's not even Hitler, it's just it.

[Chris Willx]

So what do you mean, pro Hitler?

[Finn]

Oh, it's crazy. That's Like a whole community of stuff.

[Chris]

Also the Pakistani guy with the mustache.

[Finn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris]

Pranks in a. I love that guy. Shout out. I don't know what his name is. Hilarious.

[Finn]

It's like. What's shocking is like, there's like Hitler's speech has been translated into English. And it's not only like memes that are like, I guess kind of quite like nihilistic, like being pro Hitler because it's edgy, whatever. It's the comments that there's a whole.

[Chris Willx]

Is it ironic or not?

[Finn]

No, it's broken past irony. It's genuinely pretty terrifying. Okay, so it'd be like, we owe Germany an apology. That'll be a lot of the comments.

[Chris Willx]

Is it just anti Semitism repackaged as pro Hitlerism?

[Finn]

It's. I got a friend who sends me all of these because it's just.

[Chris Willx]

Well, that's where the algorithm's got considered. It might just be him.

[Chris]

And on Twitter, it's not me. I should have just.

[Chris Willx]

I have a friend who sat next to me in the room.

[Finn]

Yeah, you sent me some. But on Twitter, now that Elon's taken the handbrake off, it's just gone crazy. The Nazi stuff. I got sent, like a three hour documentary with quite a proper voiceover. Well produced. It's like a Pro Hitler 1. It opens with a misunderstood artist, a man who changed the world. So there is definitely, I think when you're told someone's evil and that's the most defined, kind of like truth.

[Chris]

Yes.

[Finn]

The idea that you've been lied to is thrilling for a lot of people.

[Chris Willx]

Very seductive.

[Finn]

Very seductive for sure. But it is definitely crazy what's going online in the Hitler space at the moment.

[Chris]

The Hitler sphere. Are we in the hitless sphere?

[Finn]

We're in the hitless sphere.

[Chris Willx]

You are orbiting the Hitler sphere.

[Chris]

We're the sun, I think. Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

A quick aside.

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[Chris Willx]

I would not have guessed that.

[Finn]

There'S videos of Hitler playing with his dog, trying to show his light aside, they are.

[Chris]

I mean, they're great videos.

[Finn]

I really like them.

[Chris]

Happy. There's happy Hitler. You talking about the photo shoot he did? Was it in the 20s? There's a photo shoot. Or maybe it's the early 30s.

[Finn]

Well, when he's trying to work out his act.

[Chris]

But no, it is like a comedian.

[Chris Willx]

Does he do early bits? Is there any of his early material? The work in progress shows of Hitler.

[Finn]

There's very rare, these very rare photos, basically where Hitler's trying to work out his, like, his shtick, you know? Cause it doesn't come straight out.

[Chris Willx]

When does that.

[Finn]

That's Chaplin. He's the biggest Chaplin fan in the world.

[Chris Willx]

Right.

[Finn]

And it's hard to get at Hitler, but he got every Chaplin film sent to him. And then in 1941, a great film, the Great Dictator, an amazing Chaplin film which is a parody of Hitler during the war, made in the middle of World War II. He gets everything sent to it. And this got sent to him and it made fun of him and he was heartbroken.

[Chris Willx]

It was like your hero, your biggest hero, the guy whose fucking facial hair. Wouldn't it have been a real middle finger if he just shaved it off?

[Chris]

Chaplin?

[Chris Willx]

No, if. Yeah. Oh, actually that would have been easier.

[Finn]

I mean, I feel like, yeah, Hitler doing the middle finger. I feel he's done a lot worse, I don't think. I feel the Holocaust was the middle finger.

[Chris]

Yeah, but that, that's worse than that.

[Chris Willx]

Was that aimed at Chaplin? The Holocaust?

[Finn]

No, I guess not. I guess not.

[Chris]

Fuck you, Charlie.

[Chris Willx]

Shutsee Faust.

[Chris]

Yeah. No, I don't think. I don't think we can say that. Hot take Chaplin Calls the Holocaust. It's the thumbnail title to this.

[Finn]

Is that what you want now?

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, that might work.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

I don't know. Trying to repurpose or trying to reinvent Hitler's position and what he stood for.

[Finn]

Seems like, well, it's fringe now, but all these things that were fringe five years ago coming into the mainstream, so.

[Chris]

I wouldn't be surprised, are getting bigger. Niches are big now because of the.

[Chris Willx]

Fragmentation, because the echo chambers actually start to grow.

[Chris]

Because it's more that if. If the market digitally is everyone, then a niche of that market is a massive amount of people.

[Chris Willx]

It's enough to hold a community together.

[Chris]

Exactly. Totally.

[Chris Willx]

Wow. Yeah, I. I love that John Lyle book because all of the little obscure bits and pieces of stories that were in history. There was this thing I learned. You were talking about the Japanese before. At some point, the cio, the oss, tried to scare the Japanese by putting luminous paint. Foxes are a bad omen in Japan, apparently. So they tried to scare them with Glow in the Dark, what they thought would be foxes, but they couldn't get enough foxes. So I think they used something. Not skunks, they used some other type of creature. And then they put them in water and found that they washed up both dead. And the stuff had been luminous paint.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Had been washed off them. So then they put a huge fox head out with a PA system and broadcast, like, sounds. It was crazy, what they tried to do in a desperate attempt to just psyop, like the early versions of Psy Ops, really. Like, it was wet clay that people were playing with.

[Finn]

Well, there was like a. They tried everything and they're like, we're have to put a nuclear bomb on them, aren't we? We've done the big screaming fox head.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah.

[Finn]

That didn't work.

[Chris Willx]

Tried to trans Hitler well, but that's like the.

[Chris]

We tried everything in the Aztecs. Do you remember in the Aztec series when holding out against Cortez and Conquistadors, their version of the nuclear bomb is a guy dressed.

[Finn]

This is the last. This is like the. But when the Aztecs are doing their, like, final stand, the ultimate deterrent.

[Chris]

You don't want to press the button, but you do. And it's a guy dressed as a massive owl. Yeah. Who comes out and goes, ooh. And they all just shoot.

[Finn]

And they're like, we don't want to have to use this. But you forced our hands yeah.

[Chris]

And there's just someone going like Spanish, just kill him. And they're like, okay, right. It's the same equivalent of dropping the nuclear bomb, but it bounces off into the scene.

[Finn]

Or the nuclear bomb. You drop out a plane, a guy dressed as an owl.

[Chris]

Yeah. Drop on Hiroshima. Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

I know nothing about the Aztecs.

[Finn]

The only thing I'll say about that is the misconception. Is it. It should be viewed more as a civil war than like a colonizing thing. Because it was like. Everyone talks about there's like 600 conquistadors who took over all the Aztecs. It was actually two Aztecs who the Mexica was a rival clan with who were fucking over loads of other.

[Chris]

Can you remember the name of the rival clan? I remember.

[Finn]

Tlach Klarlands.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

Right. And then they basically allied with the Spanish to take over the internal civil.

[Chris Willx]

War, assisted by someone from.

[Finn]

What's missing is that it wasn't 600 conquistadors versus all the Aztecs. It was 600 conquistadors with thousands of.

[Chris]

Other church clients versus a guy in a massive owl suit.

[Finn]

I mean. Yeah, yeah. With an owl suit. They had guns and one guy had an owl suit.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Were the. Were the Aztecs as brutal as.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Finn]

To be fair, it's pretty nuts.

[Chris]

Similar to the kind of, you think, you know, the seppuku thing with Japan. That's a stereotype. Oh, no, it's not similar to that. Oh, the humans sacrifice. Oh, they loved it.

[Finn]

What was the festival?

[Chris Willx]

What was the timing of this?

[Finn]

What, what this was, to be fair. Because you always. When you think of Aztecs, it feels ancient. Yeah, it's medieval.

[Chris Willx]

Right?

[Chris]

Well, it's a. It's a. It's a.

[Finn]

They're cultural.

[Chris]

It's a meeting of worlds. And it's basically an Iron age civilization with a kind of early modern European one. That's the. Yeah. So they had. Is it 15, 16, I want to say quarters.

[Finn]

But they didn't have iron, they didn't have steel. They did sort of have wheels, but they didn't have wheels. They didn't have wheels that they actually used.

[Chris]

They thought of a wheel, but they hadn't made a wheel.

[Finn]

That was wheels on kids toys. But they'd never thought to use that to proto wheels.

[Chris]

But it's funny. Cause they would chop people's heads off the top of these pyramids in the human sacrifice. Rip their heart out, chop their head off. And the head would roll down the steps and they didn't quite link that. Rolling with the wheel.

[Finn]

Yeah, it's interesting. Like, the physics was there.

[Chris]

They did invent Slinkies. Yeah, that's not true. That's where our podcast.

[Finn]

Yeah, we can't give them the credit. Inventing Slinkies.

[Chris]

We don't know. Do you know who invented the slinky? I don't know. No, we can't know.

[Finn]

I imagine it was an American in the 70s. That's my feeling. But what was the Festival of Blood? That was like the crazy.

[Chris]

It's basically a bank holiday festival where they killed 80,000 people.

[Finn]

So, yeah, like a day off work, day off school.

[Chris Willx]

But like criminals.

[Finn]

No, it'd be right.

[Chris]

It'd be the Tlaxclaans, prisoners from the Tashkaran. So if you got captured, they would.

[Finn]

Not like killing you in battle. They're like capturing you and then chopping you up.

[Chris]

Then sacrifice you to their gods.

[Chris Willx]

Okay.

[Finn]

Because also their form of battle was more like a step up dance battle. Like it was a bit more ritualistic. So that's why the Spanish, when they're just like shooting them, it's like, oh, I thought this was more like a.

[Chris]

That's why the owl guy is the. The end.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Because it's a dance off and you go body popping. I can't compete with the guy body popping. Just as an owl. This dance off is over.

[Finn]

There's one guy doing the worm.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Finn]

But, yeah, they killed like 80,000 people at once. And they're like just. The stench of blood was just extraordinary.

[Chris]

But the last. They're doing it. They don't have steel, so they're doing obsidian. Obsidian glass. Like shards.

[Finn]

It's like a glass that you. Yeah.

[Chris]

Volcanic sort of rock that is sort of like glass and it's very sharp.

[Chris Willx]

Oh, and you chip.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Finn]

Sort of like a flint type thing, but super sharp. Super sharp.

[Chris]

So they're cutting into the breastbone and pulling after the head. No. So you see that and then they.

[Finn]

Hell.

[Chris]

And they have a big axe, an obsidian axe, I think.

[Finn]

So if your heart gets taken out, do you get like a couple of free pumps where you get to see it for a second?

[Chris]

No, I think the blood's still going round, but it's like heads get cut off. There's still. There's still a bit of consciousness for a few seconds, isn't there? Or is that chickens?

[Finn]

No, you can't if your head's. No, no, no, no. Because you're telling me if you chop my head off, my. My pov. Like I'll see the carpet as I'm falling towards it.

[Chris]

Yeah, because there's a lag. Right.

[Chris Willx]

Wow.

[Finn]

Again, can you get one of your science guys?

[Chris Willx]

Do you have anyone Googling Brian Johnson? Brian Johnson.

[Finn]

Get your fucking head, guys on this.

[Chris]

The real test of the Ryan Johnson is if someone cuts his head off and he.

[Chris Willx]

How long does he stay alive?

[Chris]

Stay alive. Because if it's longer than if they cut my head off, then fair play. Fair play.

[Finn]

Have you had Brian Johnson on this?

[Chris Willx]

I have, yeah. It was once a while ago. He's a sweetie. He's a really sweet guy.

[Finn]

I tell you what, I did say it'd be funny if he got hit by a bus just cause like it. Comedically.

[Chris]

Comedically, yeah.

[Finn]

If he died at 62 because he got run over, it is funny. But it is nice to have someone nosing about in that sphere. Someone's gotta be doing it, you know, it's nice to have just a person doing it because people really don't like it.

[Chris Willx]

The way to think about Brian Johnson is that he is like a scout in an army. And you don't want an army that's filled with scouts. And I also probably myself don't want to be the guy that tries to climb up to the top of that mountain to see if there's something interesting over the far side. And I'm like. But I'll happily have him go up and come back and tell us. Let me tell you what I found up there. If he comes back.

[Finn]

He's nosy as hell, but he did digging around. It's like, you shouldn't be digging around in there, lad.

[Chris Willx]

What are you looking for? He did. It's like trying to change the source code OS of your Windows computer. Windows xp, mate. You're gonna break something in there. But he did tweet not long ago. He said, I guarantee I will die in the most hilarious and ironic way possible.

[Chris]

Well, it's just cosmically, it would be too funny.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Chris]

To just slip in a banana and hit his head.

[Finn]

Because the oldest person in the world right now is British. Ethel. Ethel.

[Chris]

We're starting to come. Ethel. Catherine. We're starting a campaign. She has to overtake the record, which is held by a French woman.

[Finn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris]

Was it another campaign?

[Finn]

I think she's been cooking the books, though, the French woman.

[Chris]

There's a campaign. We're starting a podcast to get Ethel Catherine passed.

[Finn]

What is Ethel Caterham's?

[Chris]

I think on 113, she's 127, I believe.

[Finn]

No, no, no, the French one is 119. That's the oldest. So Ethel is 113.

[Chris Willx]

French one's still alive.

[Finn]

Yeah. No, no, she died.

[Chris Willx]

Right, so that's the finish line.

[Finn]

No, so, like, we got. We gotta keep Ethel alive because if.

[Chris Willx]

They were both racing at the same time, that would be. Because you could just take.

[Finn]

Take out the old one and that's an easy one. You can fucking. Yeah, one slap to the face. Gone. Yeah. No, no. So we. We. Any. If you see Ethel, like. Like marathon runners on the 20th mile, you know. Cheering. You got this.

[Chris]

Come on, give us some fish and some companionship. Fish and mates. Yeah, Give us some Blue Zone, all.

[Finn]

The Blue Zone stuff. What is funny, though, is you've got the Brian Johnson thing. It's going to be interesting to see if he outlives.

[Chris]

Yeah. The Blue Zone.

[Finn]

An olive oil farmer in Sardinia. It'll be just some guy, you know, smoking, who's just like, this old Italian guy is going to outlive Brian Johnson. He's going to.

[Chris]

He's drinking olive oil and just smoking and having fish. He's got mates, supposedly. It's mates. That's what everyone says on the Blue Zone.

[Chris Willx]

It's fascinating. Brian's a good example of this. There's certain people who sort of capture a cultural niche, because when you're thinking about longevity, biohacking, kind of the modern world of that, you think Brian Johnson.

[Finn]

Empathy with Hitler. Yeah. You think Finn Taylor.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. But it kind of speaks to the fact that there was some subculture beneath the surface that needed a figurehead, not maybe too dissimilar to Hitler. And whenever. Whenever that person sort of comes up, think, look for better or worse, like a Tate or a Dan Bilzerian or something. Was. There was obviously some story going on, some subculture thing happening. And then there's this person that's the tip of the spear, right?

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

That is like the epitome of this. They're like the distillation of all of this stuff. And I think Brian Johnson's kind of.

[Finn]

He's emblematic.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Finn]

Bonnie Blue.

[Chris Willx]

Bonnie Blue, yeah. End result of sort of the modern sexual liberation stuff.

[Finn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris]

But then I tried to watch a bit of the Andrew Tate Bonnie Blue podcast for research, because we had it on our other show. And I just thought, this is like a fucking GTA cutscene. Like, neither of these people are real. Like, it's just not real. And I don't know if it's people, their followers are like, they're playing along with the not real of it and. Or they're actually taking it real.

[Finn]

But. Because if it's just.

[Chris]

They're not. Neither of them.

[Finn]

Because you've grown up online, the lines between irony and sincerity has just become completely blurred. So it's sort of like.

[Chris Willx]

But no one's. Very few people are earnest now on the Internet. Right. Sincerity is basically like non existent. Do you know the idea of kayfabe? Do you know this from professional wrestling?

[Chris]

No.

[Chris Willx]

Okay. So it's just basically the.

[Chris]

I have a mortgage, Chris. So any. Any professional wrestling stuff, I'm.

[Chris Willx]

That's true.

[Chris]

I will default if I engage with it.

[Chris Willx]

Basically the idea that sort of the hyper real, like the fake real, the sort of Trump. Trumpian, like meta story, people just sort of buy into that and they kind of don't care.

[Chris]

Hyper normalization. That Adam Curtis film. You seen that?

[Chris Willx]

No.

[Finn]

You'd like Adam Curtis.

[Chris]

You love Adam Curtis. You should have him on. He doesn't do.

[Chris Willx]

I don't think I'm super familiar with him.

[Chris]

He makes.

[Finn]

He makes these films, these documentaries. He's a documentary maker where he says it all got a little bit strange.

[Chris]

So he makes these. He's this guy that's allowed. Yeah, British guy. He's allowed into the BBC archives and he just lives there like a hobbit for years, going through all the.

[Finn]

Someone brings some food down to Adam Curtis. Actually we need to check on him because he's been down there for about.

[Chris]

15 years and he builds these incredible films. They're all on the iplayer and it's all used with documentary stock footage. And then he sort of tells this story of Thatcher.

[Finn]

Thought she was unleashing Britain's potential. She was actually unleashing something much darker.

[Chris]

Bonnie Blow. Yeah, that would be it, though.

[Chris Willx]

So he's like the British Ken Burns in that way? Sort of.

[Finn]

Yeah. But it's much more like. Much more kind of enchantment and like the music's more hypnotic. It's much more kind of like in some ways emotional.

[Chris Willx]

A little bit psychedelic in that.

[Finn]

Yeah, definitely.

[Chris]

Because Ken Burns Vietnam is totemic and amazing. KEN Burns Civil War I can't. I can't.

[Chris Willx]

I couldn't get through it either.

[Chris]

It's just that the camera on the paintings. Yeah, I can't do it. But.

[Chris Willx]

I think that Vietnam series might be.

[Finn]

That's as good as it gets.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, I think that might be the best.

[Chris]

Phenomenal.

[Chris Willx]

And it goes on and on. And this one's an hour and a half and this one's two hours and this one's the key thing.

[Finn]

I've realized if you're a documentary maker like Adam Curtis and Ken Burns, you gotta make the people who are watching it feel clever. And that's what Ken Burns and Adam Curtis do really well. I watch it and I go like, well, I'm brilliant.

[Chris]

Why?

[Finn]

And then you ask, particularly with Adam.

[Chris]

Curtis, because he will always tell a story about history and politics that you haven't thought of and I guess.

[Finn]

And you feel really smart and if someone asks you about it and you're.

[Chris]

Like, it opens the door to like, here's what's really going, here's what's really going on. There's a bit of that right amongst his fan base, definitely. But they are, they make you think about things in a way that no other dog.

[Finn]

Yeah. But it makes you feel like you've come up with it.

[Chris]

Makes me feel like. It makes me feel like you've like drunk the world and you can see everything and you're like.

[Finn]

And then if anyone asks you what it's about. MUSIC PLAYING and that was a lake.

[Chris]

There's a lake where they did a deal. And then that's why Bin Laden exists. Bin Laden was an idiot.

[Finn]

I'm fit.

[Chris]

Yeah. Yeah.

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[Chris Willx]

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[Chris Willx]

I still don't know why Vietnam started. And I've watched that Ken Burns three times.

[Finn]

You're watching. You're like, well, I'm brilliant.

[Chris]

Well, in many ways, to start. Well, let's not get into it.

[Finn]

It's a quagmire.

[Chris]

Yeah, it is. Yeah.

[Finn]

But it was interesting saying how no one. It's the French's fault. It's interesting. You're saying that earnestness has gone. I'd consider you quite an earnest person.

[Chris Willx]

I think I am. Yeah. I have a problem with ironic speech. Too much ironic speech.

[Chris]

Oh, we don't have that problem.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, I imagine.

[Chris]

Well, we have the opposite problem.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

I don't know.

[Finn]

Syndrome, I think. I think it's a syndrome.

[Chris Willx]

Well, even that I don't mind. Like, it's the Internet show that you guys do then. That's the Internet. Like, the whole thing is like, matter in the jokes on jokes and it's.

[Finn]

But you were one of the best guests, if not the best guests on the show, by the way.

[Chris]

Why you just your reactions.

[Finn]

Yeah. I think that you came into it.

[Chris Willx]

People laughed at how I laughed.

[Chris]

It was a weird lot.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

But I was trying to not interrupt too much because you're still talking. And if I'm cacuring throughout the whole thing, I was like, okay, I'll try and be like, it looked like you're so gracious. I was trying to be, like, gracious about, like, not exploding all the time.

[Finn]

You cared a lot about us getting a good show. And that really helped, I think.

[Chris]

Really helps.

[Finn]

And I think also this world's the funniest to write jokes about.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

The kind of man. Really. Oh, yeah. Because every guest we have on Internet is to. Is fundamentally actually is to open up a world of jokes about what's going on. It's not about Bonnie Blue. It's about let's do things about Onlyfans and stuff like that. You know, we have wine culture. Yeah, wine culture. But this is what I've been interested in for so long, this whole world. And it just opens up anything motivational. Anything kind of the kind of.

[Chris]

Well, I think part of the reason it works so well is that you could laugh at it all. And I think that punctures the sincerity and the earnestness and the control that comes through in, like, clips of this and your other clips. A friend of mine actually was like, oh, yeah, I love that episode because I got those guys Clips. And I thought, oh, fuck off. Who's that guy? And then I saw the show and I was like, oh, fair play. He seems like a really nice guy.

[Chris Willx]

Doesn'T take himself too seriously.

[Chris]

And that's where the show actually, film versus the Internet is best, is when we had it with MDOT as well.

[Finn]

It's like when people run on xg.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah.

[Chris]

It's like people think. They come to it thinking, oh, good, they're gonna tear this guy. I hate this guy. And then they see how they're laughing along and they're aware of the absurdity of what.

[Chris Willx]

So you could humanize anybody. Well, that's dangerous.

[Chris]

Yeah. And I think what's tough about Bonnie was that, like, I knew. I knew we weren't gonna get the same kind of reactions from her than we got from you or M. Dot. But I also thought if there's even a chance she submits to the silliness and even just engages with the fact that, like, all morals aside, the absurdity of what she's done, it is absurd. The numbers are hilarious. If she even submits to laugh along with that, it would be amazing. And obviously it will get views because she's very current. But I just thought, oh, there's a chance we get her to kind of laugh at it. And I don't think she could because I think she's such a. She has these.

[Finn]

She's done so many of these interviews.

[Chris]

She has these sticks and she puts up a garden and she's allowed to.

[Chris Willx]

She does get. That's her projection phrases.

[Finn]

I mean, she's got a soundboard of things. She said, if you.

[Chris Willx]

If you were.

[Chris]

I'm not traumatized. I'm a feminist. I'm the real suffragette. That's her soundboard. She's splashing all the time. But. But yeah, so it's always a. It's. It's so funny. For a show that is so, like, it's expensive to make. It's so stressful to make. We write it for weeks before we film it.

[Finn]

People think it's like a podcast.

[Chris]

We have these two. We've got to get everything we think is funny about that guest.

[Chris Willx]

It is a real. I felt the pressure me, and there was no pressure on me.

[Chris]

It's a high stakes thing. And it all ultimately, if it's a good episode or not rests on whether the guest is in a good mood.

[Finn]

Cause if we've worked ages on a joke, like, there'll be four of us, Paddy, Young, Vittorio, and us two. If we really care About a joke. You're in the room and sometimes the guest can trample. It doesn't get the right reaction. And it's just.

[Chris Willx]

You tried to get me to say the word men.

[Chris]

Oh, fuck.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

The barbershop quartet.

[Chris Willx]

That wasn't me trying to be awkward. I was just trying.

[Chris]

You're probably just really confused.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, I was like. Because you were waiting to.

[Finn]

We had to get the joke.

[Chris Willx]

Begin this thing. And I didn't say the word men. I was like, well, you know, guys, you know, it's like young dudes. And you were like.

[Chris]

What'S the opposite of a woman? Yeah, but it is that. It's like this. It's such a stupid show and so many. Well, obviously it's a stupid show, but to make it. It's so stupid because it's, you know, it's part. Not that I'd ever do it on tv. Cause I don't think it would work, but part of the reason it wouldn't work on TV is that it's just too high stakes.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

It's too high risk. It's too high risk.

[Finn]

It's too much of a noble medium compared to.

[Chris]

Well, it's not just that the guest might walk out. It's that really, you have to get everything in one take, sort of.

[Chris Willx]

Have you had anyone walk out?

[Chris]

Yeah, mdot tried to. And then there were so many cameras in the way that he couldn't get out. But then I also think he was sort of playing along in the.

[Chris Willx]

He seemed like a really good sport.

[Chris]

Yeah, he's great. I love him.

[Finn]

I tell you what, he charmed us. He really charmed us.

[Chris Willx]

Cause we were messaging about this. Did you go and do some in America?

[Chris]

No. So we've just gone after.

[Chris Willx]

I think you could get Brian John. I think we could easily get Brian Johnson.

[Finn]

Oh, Finn as well. I think Finn's character is built for Americans. I think Americans take themselves more seriously.

[Chris Willx]

And I just think there's so many people.

[Finn]

I think the clash will be much more, you know.

[Chris Willx]

Aubrey Marcus, owner of on it, founded on it with Joe Rogan, recently revealed that he's in a. Like a polyamorous marriage where he's having kids with both partners kind of at the same time. There's something there for sure.

[Finn]

There's just a standard woman.

[Chris]

Right. Two family WhatsApp threads.

[Chris Willx]

I think it's all part of one. Yeah. I think it's all part of one. That's just.

[Chris]

Can't be.

[Chris Willx]

Can't be two women in it family unit.

[Chris]

It'd Be a group.

[Chris Willx]

Different threads, like the Slack Channel would have a couple of different versions in the organization. But anyway, the earnestness thing is really cool. No, it's a really, really good point. Do I have a problem with iron? I like ironic speech when it knows what it's doing. One of the problems with it only ever being irony is that you don't ever actually get to come into contact with reality or what someone thinks or what they feel about a thing. And that's kind of fine when there's a bit of self awareness, but it feels like a lot of the stuff on the Internet. If you look at most Twitter disputes, ex disputes, whatever, it's someone going like, I know you are, but what am I? It's this very standoffish. It's very insincere. It's very sort of cutting and sardonic. And at some point, I.

[Chris]

Sorry to interrupt. I think the problem is that with that is that you separate or. I certainly do. I mean, it's easier if you're a comic, but it's like everything I do online is comedy because it's online. It's not real life. I then have a family life and a personal life that is not, you know, I don't use Instagram like a millennial.

[Finn]

You're not being ironic with your kid.

[Chris]

You're not being a pumpkin patch at Halloween.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Oh, so many pumpkins. Who gives a fuck? That's not how I use it. I use it to make comedy because I'm a comedian. I think that's how everyone actually treats online. It's not real. But then there are people who cross the streams who are like comedians that then try and make actual points. Or maybe they interview, like, Trump genuinely, and it's like, never clear whether it's jokey or you're just platforming a guy or, you know, that whole world.

[Finn]

Yeah. You open for a Trump rally.

[Chris]

Yeah. It's like, well, what are you at this point? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tony opening for Trump, it's like, well, you.

[Finn]

If you're anti Trump, that's a great place to be as a comedian. But if you're pro Trump on a pro Trump rally, then that.

[Chris]

What's the point of this? You're just.

[Chris Willx]

The comedy doesn't get injected.

[Finn]

I don't understand certainly our view of.

[Chris]

Comedy, but I think you separate church and state. That's what I think you do.

[Finn]

But also you separate them. I do agree with you. You know, there's a danger with the irony and insincerity that nothing is meaningful. Anymore meaningful. But the something is also symptomatic of that culture is. I do think there's a lot of bad sincerity out there. There's fake sincerity. The other side, there's this irony of.

[Chris Willx]

Sincerity and performative irony or like sincerity.

[Finn]

It's like you don't know who you are and you're just. You're just sounding sincere. There's this. The music. Let it all work out. Like there's that music playing underneath it. What you're saying is absolute bollock. I would much rather be ironic and sarcastic if you have nothing meaningful to say in a sincere manner.

[Chris]

So the curtain's fallen right. In that people know that like a mum influencer is broadcasting her private life for followers, for money, for brand deals.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

So how can you say that?

[Chris Willx]

That's earnestness.

[Chris]

Yeah, it's not earnestness because you are privatized. You privatized your home life and therefore you live in a state where you can't actually live earnestly. Because at any point you're thinking, well, this is a moment always. Exactly. So actually I think online will always be sarcastic and ironic and dumb. And what people need to get better at doing is realizing when people are real and when they're not.

[Finn]

And that's take online less seriously.

[Chris]

Yeah, because it is.

[Finn]

But I guess it is serious.

[Chris]

Well, that's the thing is that you have things like Charlie Kirk and it all kind of bleeds in. And Kirk was clearly doing. There was moments, things of what he said where I think he would say it's like more of a shtick. It's rage based on. And does he end up getting killed for that? Who knows? Do you know what I mean? It's. At what point would he separate his clips from him as a person? It all seems quite muddled.

[Finn]

Yeah, definitely.

[Chris Willx]

And it's really. It's something I think about a lot. And you're right. Somebody that is. Thinks they're being earnest and is just not self aware and that is their whole sort of Persona online. Like the performances like got inside of the person and is staring out through their eyes and they. They haven't been able to separate out themselves from that anymore. That's cringe.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

That makes everybody like.

[Finn]

Or it's a grift or it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Or maybe they are aware or they're half aware or they've got whatever. But that. That is what. That's like catnip to the Internet. Right. Like pointing out this person who.

[Chris]

Snake.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, yeah. Grifter, shillo, whatever. Yeah, you know we can do that.

[Chris]

In real life though. Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Comes from, you know where the word nonce comes from?

[Finn]

Or is it not. Is it stands like not on normal courtyard exercise?

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Prison stuff.

[Chris Willx]

So good.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Anyway, just, yeah, the, the earnestness ironic speech thing is I think it does dependent. It would be nice to have some people. Brian Johnson, for all that you can criticize, he. He is quite self aware about how insane his life is. And to tweet something like, I can promise you I will die in the most ironic way.

[Chris]

But that's why I'd love to have him on our show because I think actually. Cause people would go going, oh, it's this fucking guy. Because people judge, they hate him because it feels like he's telling them to live better. And then people always hate that. So they go fuck this guy. And then if he could laugh at it with us, people would fair play, you know. And I think that's kind of what the show is. It's like a sense of humor test almost, which is a very British thing. I think it's a very British.

[Finn]

Yeah. Do you find the American British thing? Cause obviously, you know, you grew up in Stockton, Britain and I feel you.

[Chris]

Stockton is bad.

[Chris Willx]

Stockton, very British. It's very British.

[Chris]

It's the worst place. I went on that tour last year.

[Finn]

What was quite interesting is when you said where you lived and you without a pause said, that's the worst place I've ever been. It's the worst place.

[Chris]

Stockton.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. The escape velocity that you need to get out of there is quite high.

[Finn]

And like the northeast, Finland was traumatized.

[Chris]

Newcastle, Northumberland's gorgeous part of the world.

[Chris Willx]

Stockton.

[Finn]

But the appeal of America, right, would be this attitude. It feels like even though you're British, you are much more enamored with the American point of view. There's no ceiling or there's more sincerity.

[Chris Willx]

In America to a degree. There's less self awareness all over the time. The big thing for me is sort of enthusiasm or encouragement that I seem to thrive. Maybe it's low self esteem if the people around me are pretty enthused and encouraging like, oh, I can maybe go and do that thing. Isn't that great?

[Chris]

It's not any of that.

[Chris Willx]

And stop. No. Whatever the opposite is. Gravity is like five times heavier in Stockton than it is anywhere else. So I just like being around it. I had this debate with Piers Morgan and he said I love when my friends sort of piss taking is sort of my favorite mode of bonding and I'm like, yeah, I get that. And that. Every British working class guy grows up with that as like the mode of bonding between you and your friend. Class, I'd say ironic.

[Finn]

Yeah. Every class, probably.

[Chris Willx]

Ironic speech, lack of earnestness, sort of piss taking. But after a while, if it never come. If you never come into contact with sincerity, it kind of feels a bit like, well, like, where does the world exist? Is it all this, like hyper world? Like, true, but also where is something.

[Chris]

But also that. That, you know, when we go to. When I go to America in the first day, I'm like the, the, you know, the tipping and the service, I'm like, off. They're a bit much, aren't they? Hi there, I'm gonna be your waiter. Like all that. And then you get into it and you're like, ah, this is really nice actually.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Because it's a holiday. And then I don't think if I could live there, couldn't live there because it's too much.

[Finn]

I'm cursed. I'm. Yeah. I'll never not be.

[Chris]

It's a sugar rush.

[Finn]

Yeah. I'll never. I'll never shed my Englishness. And I do think I'd find it.

[Chris]

But I'm also very European. I like walking around. I can't.

[Finn]

I like walking around and I like people being rude to me in shops. I just don't. You know, it feels New York might work. Yeah, New York. That's why New York. People that like walking around New York feels European, the most European part of the States.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, I've enjoyed. I've enjoyed that. But you're right, it's dose dependent for America stuff. And there's a small contingent of British and Irish people in Austin and I think that we sort of cling onto each other like life rafts.

[Finn]

You must need a bit of a break, right?

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, yeah.

[Finn]

But there's still a little bit less. A tiny bit more.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. I think mercifully, a lot of the team that I work with, there's still, I mean, British guys, like beautiful British boys. I wanted to ask you guys if you knew, I found an interesting snippet of history. Did you look at the dancing plague of 1518?

[Finn]

No, don't.

[Chris Willx]

We have.

[Chris]

Not yet.

[Finn]

Not yet.

[Chris Willx]

Can I tell you about it?

[Chris]

I'm aware of it, but yeah.

[Finn]

Oh, yeah.

[Chris]

People just couldn't stop dancing.

[Finn]

Oh, yeah, we did talk about.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, well, maybe you did that.

[Finn]

No, no, we did.

[Chris Willx]

I'm doing a bit on the dancing plague of 1518.

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[Chris Willx]

In Europe literally dance themselves to death. Began in July in Strasbourg when a woman named Frau Troffea stepped into the street.

[Chris]

Beautiful language, beautiful people.

[Finn]

Frau Troffe.

[Chris Willx]

Frau Troffe began, stepped into the street and began dancing uncontrollably. Within a week, dozens joined her, and within a month the number had grown to 400 people. Many danced for days without rest and some reportedly died from exhaustion, stroke or heart attack. Authorities were baffled. Doctors ruled out supernatural causes. Don't know how you do that, and blamed it on hot blood. Incredibly, they even hired musicians and built a stage hoping that people would dance it out. That only made things worse. The cause remains a mystery. Theories range from mass hysteria triggered by stress and famine to ergot poisoning. But no explanation is universally accepted.

[Finn]

I mean, there's not much to do.

[Chris]

Is it always Urgot? That's what it is.

[Chris Willx]

Kind of the God of the gaps of.

[Finn]

Well, that's not an egot, that's what's an Urgot. It's not winning an Emmy we talked about.

[Chris]

No, it's not an Emmy. A Grammy and an Oscar and of a ton. So.

[Chris Willx]

No, it's the ancient Athenian.

[Chris]

It's the wheat thing.

[Finn]

When.

[Chris]

When bread goes bad. Supposedly it's witch trials. Witchcrases.

[Finn]

Right. Because moldy bread.

[Chris]

Moldy bread. A woman eats some moldy bread and she goes cuckoo and blokes just like. Well, string her up.

[Chris Willx]

Which.

[Finn]

Exactly. Yeah. But the dancer stuff is, you know, I guess. How are you gonna get your dopamine rush? You need that somewhere.

[Chris Willx]

For a month.

[Finn]

It's pre.

[Chris Willx]

400 people dancing for a month.

[Chris]

Dancing for a month.

[Chris Willx]

It's like the worst version of the. And do they only die in history? Some did. Many danced for days without rest and some reportedly died from exhaustion, stroke, a heart attack.

[Chris]

They could have just accidentally synthesized some kind of drug, couldn't they?

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

And then what?

[Finn]

For a month?

[Chris Willx]

That lasts for a month.

[Chris]

They probably could just keep eating it. Cause they're not aware of, you know, dosage.

[Chris Willx]

I see.

[Chris]

Pre dosage. Isn't it?

[Finn]

And also you're a God fearing people, so if you get anything psychedelic, you think you're being predominant.

[Chris]

But even in the. We did this in the Greeks, you remember the wine, the Dionysian cult.

[Chris Willx]

They'd all drink the same wine, supposing.

[Chris]

And they. Yeah, they, they'd eat. What's it called? The. Eating a goat with your bare hands. There's like a word for it. We're eating an animal. Tearing an animal apart.

[Finn]

Yeah, yeah, that was.

[Chris]

That was wine culture. 2000 years ago. You drink glass of wine like that.

[Chris Willx]

Bloke that you had on the show.

[Chris]

Yeah, Tom. Yeah. Yeah.

[Finn]

That's where it's ended up now.

[Chris]

Now it's. Now it's a pony guy walking around London going, oh, Chardonnay. Like that's. That's how well the story of wine has changed.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Eating goat with your bare hand to walk around.

[Finn]

And that was beer culture.

[Chris]

What I drink in a day, what.

[Chris Willx]

I eat in a day. What about Darwin? You did Darwin?

[Chris]

Yeah. One of my favorites. Scientific races.

[Finn]

Well, why was your favorite? Is the story of Darwin on the Beagle. Fine. When we start getting into. I do think one of our best episodes is part two of that series where we look at the birth of eugenics. Yeah. Basically Darwin was looking at bugs and writing it in his little notebook. And everyone's like, brilliant, let's rank races. This is. I love all of these theories. That's brilliant. Let's measure black people's Skulls and say how low their IQ is.

[Chris Willx]

Phrenology. Physiognomy.

[Chris]

Phrenology. There's something so funny about the esteem of scientists when the science is completely wrong, that is.

[Chris Willx]

What do you mean?

[Chris]

Hilarious?

[Finn]

Well, the smartest people in that age were the most racist.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

So it's been sort of flipped.

[Chris]

We have a catchphrase on the podcast which will. He's a scholar and a racist because in the 19th century it was scholarly to be racist.

[Finn]

And also the idea of racial. Because racial science, a Victorian polymath. It will be people who have done extraordinary things in multiple fields, invented, like the weather, pain. Invented so many different forms of science, history. But they also.

[Chris]

So there was a man called Francis.

[Finn]

It's the most racist thing you've ever ran.

[Chris]

Galton. Galton, who in many ways invented the modern weather, maps, meteorology, so many things. But he was also a massive eugenicist and he literally invented the dog whistle.

[Finn]

That was. We found out on the podcast, and that was one of our biggest.

[Chris]

So when you say dog whistle politics.

[Chris Willx]

Okay.

[Chris]

When you're talking about race, but you're using words like urban and inner city when you're actually. What you mean is black people. And that's like a way of.

[Finn]

It's like a dog whistle.

[Chris Willx]

Yep. Yeah.

[Chris]

That's why I call it dog whistle.

[Finn]

Because if you're tuned to it, if you hear it, you can hide messages in speech that you can get away.

[Chris]

But he invented the actual dog whistle for dogs. And what's a eugenicist?

[Finn]

But to be fair to him, he never did dog whistles because he was just saying.

[Chris]

No, he was shouting at dogs.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Well, you didn't need to dog whistle.

[Finn]

He was writing a book saying black people are stupid.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

Probably a dog whistle.

[Chris]

It's more calling your dog.

[Chris Willx]

You know that Galton had.

[Finn]

Fenton.

[Chris]

Fenton. It's the opposite of dog whistling.

[Chris Willx]

He had a patent for how you could cut it a cake so that it wouldn't go off. A circular cake.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

You weren't allowed to cut it like that.

[Chris Willx]

I don't know. He registered. I don't know. He'd registered it. I read an article by Adam Mastroianni about Francis Galton. It's fascinating. I mean, again, birthed some pretty dangerous skull and racist.

[Chris]

Skull and racist.

[Chris Willx]

So you circular cake and you sort of cut a corridor out the middle of it and you push it together. That was apparently revolutionary in the early 1900s.

[Finn]

He's a brilliant man.

[Chris Willx]

Well, yeah. As opposed to cutting a wedge. And then how do you Fill the wedge. It's exposed from the inside out. His sister had some spinal problem.

[Chris]

Yes.

[Chris Willx]

So he taught her as she was laying. She would be laying facing the ceiling. And he would read to her. I think she would read to him. And that was. She would lay on a table, and that was how they would. Cause he was homeschooled. He also said in his. Whatever biography or memoir that when he started working in the doctor's office or a pharmacist's office, that he decided he was just gonna try every different medicine from A to Z. And he got to one that was, I think C or D. I can't remember what it was that he took. And it caused him to shit himself so badly that he remembered it five decades later.

[Finn]

Oh, right.

[Chris Willx]

And then he stopped after that.

[Chris]

To be fair, I don't think you want to ever be able to sort of brush off shitting yourself. Yeah. Do you remember it?

[Finn]

You don't want them to. To blur into one, I think.

[Chris Willx]

Right, okay.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

What, 10?

[Finn]

Yeah. Yeah. I think once you're an adult, I.

[Chris]

Can remember my shape myself.

[Finn]

Yeah. You want those to be memorable.

[Chris]

You. You hold on to them. They're almost.

[Finn]

You don't want it to be like, I'm shitting myself so much. I couldn't possibly.

[Chris]

I don't know what day it is. I just know that I've shat myself.

[Chris Willx]

Could be. Could be a Tuesday.

[Finn]

I remember when I didn't ship myself. That's those memory.

[Chris]

Myself now, that's very distinct because normally I'm constantly covered in shit.

[Finn]

But that episode was. There was crazy stuff, which. Because of. Because of the Nazis, you can't even go back over it in the same way. So we discovered so many things. It was like, because of the kind of moral consensus that came after World War II, saying that all of this stuff is racial science, this is leading to genocide.

[Chris]

And the Holocaust kind of was the full stop on where it goes.

[Finn]

So people missed this 80 years that was leading up to that. That had so much funny stuff if you view the world like we do. But there was amazing stuff where there was, like, disabled people campaigning for themselves to be sterilized.

[Chris]

Sterilized out of. Yeah.

[Finn]

Saying I cannot read. I shouldn't have kids in a misspelled sign.

[Chris Willx]

I was gonna say, who wrote the sign?

[Chris]

Well, that's an amazing photo of people. And we don't know whether they're genuinely meant to. They could be likeable people holding the signs or they're people pretending.

[Chris Willx]

False flag.

[Finn]

False flag crisis.

[Chris]

And there Was a. There was a.

[Finn]

They're like the Sandy Hook victims.

[Chris]

There was a massive thing. What did we find out? It was like. So there's a big camp. There was in the twenties in America. America. And interestingly the America and Nazi Germany were like. They were the two people who were really going for eugenics. And. And there was a eugenics office. I don't know where.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah.

[Finn]

The race. Race.

[Chris]

Yeah. It was the race for race, not like the race for life. And. And they were. And there was a. Something about. Because in the build up to the 30s, like America, like Ford were basically militarizing Germany. Like all the. The Nazi industrialization remedialization was a lot of American companies.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And there was a. There was a eugenics. This was when eugenics was a charity.

[Finn]

Right.

[Chris]

It's like a eugenics charity in America who were writing or rather Hitler took just copy and pasted their text and made it Nazi policy on racial science. But they influenced a lot of American states. And I think the most amount of forcible sterilization, involuntary sterilization instel is California.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Which coincidentally is where everyone looks the fittest.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Yeah. It's quite funny.

[Chris Willx]

It's quite funny that selective breeding.

[Chris]

Actually Sunshine State was where the most selective breeding happened in America.

[Finn]

There's also this amazing graph which was. Was it Victorian about the. When they were trying to categorize stupid people.

[Chris]

Yes.

[Finn]

So you have. I think at the top you have.

[Chris]

Is the cleverest stupid person.

[Finn]

Yes. Simple.

[Chris]

This is scientific terms for what we'd now say mental health conditions. This is what the scientific term was in the imbecile.

[Chris Willx]

And stuff would be imbecile.

[Finn]

You do moron, which I think means that you can do low thinking skills. I think is that like low cerebral tasks.

[Chris Willx]

Is cretin gonna be in here? I imagine.

[Finn]

And then it's high grade imbecile, which means you can only do stuff with your hands. Then medium grade imbecile, low grade imbecile. And then at the bottom is idiot which means you can't do anything.

[Chris]

Yeah. You can't keep yourself alive. It's an idiot. That's where that word comes from.

[Finn]

But I didn't realize that moron was ranked above idiot and imbecile was in between. I didn't really rank it in your.

[Chris]

Bio back in the day you'd have like proud moron.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Right.

[Chris]

Okay.

[Chris Willx]

Because you're the top of the bottom of the.

[Chris]

It's more the mental health labels nowadays people are like queen or whatever.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

In 1910, you'd say proud moron. You'd say imbecile Ally or whatever, you know, imbecile adjacent. Imbecile. Jason. Yeah. Medium grade imbecile.

[Finn]

Oh, my God.

[Chris Willx]

So how much was Darwin at fault for his. More than we thought.

[Chris]

He was Darwin's cousin. Darwin writes the book on the theory of natural selection. Then there's another one. But then a lot of people around him go, yeah, this explains. They bring in Malthusian concepts of like, the poor. And like, what's that thing where you.

[Finn]

I talk about lizards, Guys.

[Chris]

No, no, no, no, no, we get it, we get it, we get it. Chinese people are stupid. I know what you're saying. And so it's Darwin's cousin who might actually. Is Galton. Maybe Galton was Darwin's cousin. I can't remember. Anyway, they take. They take the work and apply it to things like, you know, the empire, slavery. All these things are. They're trying to sort of retroactively justify things like colonization and slavery, imperialism. Yeah. It makes sense to them through that lens that these people are stupid because we've conquered them and we have to paternalistically nurture them to our level.

[Finn]

I mean, Hitler is very Darwin and Hitler's the world.

[Chris]

Yeah, the end point.

[Finn]

That's the power of the world.

[Chris]

Hitler's the bonnie blue of scientific racism, taking it as far as it can.

[Finn]

Go.

[Chris]

As far as the numbers. And I mean that for both the numbers. But, like, you know, Hitler takes scientific racism to the end point. And that's why everyone goes, well, we're not even touching this stuff. Phrenology is debunked. All this stuff is, you know, is not science.

[Finn]

But we're bringing phrenology back, aren't we?

[Chris]

Yeah, we are. Just because it's very funny to call us.

[Chris Willx]

Have you done it in?

[Finn]

We're gonna start a thing where all guests are going to get calipers out and we're going to measure and we're gonna have like a Top Gear leaderboard. So we're sort of like.

[Chris Willx]

And is it bigger head is better?

[Chris]

No, thicker.

[Finn]

Thicker, yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Thicker head is better.

[Finn]

Bigger head's stupider.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, mentally thick, Smaller head better.

[Finn]

Yeah. It's a complicated science.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. You wouldn't get it.

[Finn]

You wouldn't get it. You're not wearing a suit.

[Chris]

You're not qualified. It's true. I'm an amateur.

[Chris Willx]

For another, the head's too big.

[Finn]

We should do branded merch calipers.

[Chris]

We should do brown and calipers.

[Finn]

Yeah, that's a good idea.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Do you think we're about to go into a world with embryo selection for ideas, you know.

[Chris]

Yeah. It's not a million miles away from sort of. Yeah. Gene therapy.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And all that stuff. And is that. That's legal in the US you can.

[Chris Willx]

Embryo selection is. Embryo editing is not.

[Chris]

Right.

[Chris Willx]

So you can do editing means you.

[Finn]

Can just be like, yeah, yeah, get rid of that. Oh, that's good. That's nice.

[Chris]

Because what about like the BRCA gene and all that? Those genes that cause cancer and it's a woman's thing. You wouldn't know what it is. But some women have this gene mutation called a brca, which means that they're very likely to get ovarian or breast cancer aged 40. And that's where it turns out most ovarian cancers from this one gene mutation that you screen for. Supposedly you can screen for it in a. In a unborn baby or an embryo. I don't know if that's legal or not. I don't know.

[Chris Willx]

I'm pretty sure you can screen for everything now. I mean there's companies in America that will allow you to do polygenic risk score. You do a little sample and then they'll say, well, here's a dashboard. Ten fertilized eggs.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

And if you embryo one, like, wow, intelligence is high, but immune system's quite low.

[Finn]

Low.

[Chris Willx]

And autism risks quite high. And then you go look at the segment. Well, intelligence is back a little bit.

[Chris]

You have like a sort of mixing board and can you. But you can't move.

[Chris Willx]

You can only choose. You can. It's like having. Yeah. It is like Top Trumps or FIFA when you get this player stats. Yeah. But you can choose. You've got your. There's your harvest, there's your build a.

[Finn]

Five side team, you know, or you go in goal. Big hands. That's good.

[Chris Willx]

Literally like that.

[Chris]

You can do that.

[Chris Willx]

But so I think what's. It's kind of weird about that is everybody has some sort of understanding that traits are heritable. Right. That's how dog breeding has occurred. That's why people have got the same eye color as their parents, et cetera. So there's some amount of heritability. But because eugenics was such bad branding for anything that was to do with behavioral genetics.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

That it's like everyone's got this like, oh, fucking hell.

[Chris]

Squeamishness.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. It's real ick. But this is going to bring it back into front and center because as soon as parents realize that they can select their kids.

[Finn]

They don't have to have ugly kids. Brilliant.

[Chris Willx]

They're gonna have. They're more likely to go to Ivy League. They're more likely to.

[Finn]

But what's gonna be interesting is if everyone is selected, it's gonna be like how middle class families decorate their living room. It's gonna be a sign of taste trends. It's gonna be like, oh, that's embarrassing. You chose your kid to be like that. That was very like trendy for the time, but now it's gosh, it's very ghost. It's dated. That's new money.

[Chris]

That could be.

[Finn]

That's a new money. Like it's new jeans.

[Chris Willx]

That'.

[Chris]

That's the only parent here. The, the whole, the whole thing about parenthood is that you don't choose the card you're dealt and you raise the kid no matter what the.

[Chris Willx]

You play the ball where it lies.

[Chris]

You can only play the team in front of you. You're a parent to your kid. That's why you should never really take advice from any other parent because they're dealing with another kid. And so.

[Finn]

But wouldn't you. What if you're cutting out like really severe, like the far end of it? What about cutting out severe disorders and stuff?

[Chris]

Well, yeah, if you can do. If I guess. I guess we just wear. That line is.

[Finn]

Yeah, that's.

[Chris Willx]

This is exactly.

[Chris]

That's where the debate will be.

[Chris Willx]

It's the exact question which is. Okay, okay. We say that selecting against Huntington's or like negative traits is good, but when it's just a single spectrum, the argument is it's just a single spectrum all the way up to. Well, a more robust immune system means that they're going to survive. So. And then. Well, you know, intelligence is correlated with not going to jail. Isn't correlated with life satisfaction.

[Chris]

No, but all, all that. Yeah, all that stuff. I mean, you have to have. Surely it's a suffering line where all the rest. That's not predestined. That's not predetermined. You can't predetermine whether someone's going to go to church, jail. That's.

[Chris Willx]

That's predict it. You can predict it at least a little bit Higher IQ is negatively correlated with likelihood of going to jail.

[Chris]

Yeah, but again that's like.

[Finn]

But then there's those things. If you've got high iq, you'll be in a safer. Normally you're probably in a safer home environment.

[Chris]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Willx]

I haven't done the data.

[Chris]

No but what I mean is that I guess part of the thing about being a parent is that you just have to. You're dealing with the kid you get. And. And mentally it's a much easier journey if you are like, well, this is the kid I've got. This is the kid I'm gonna as a bastard.

[Chris Willx]

This is the kid I chose, the.

[Chris]

Kid that I would like to be.

[Finn]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[Chris]

Rather than going, well, I actually, I.

[Finn]

Should have picked differently. Cause the whole time, the choice paralysis you have when you're picking what your kid's gonna be, like Netflix, there's no return policy.

[Chris]

Too many things.

[Finn]

Cause you're like, ah, fuck, no, I shouldn't have picked that. He's so fucking annoying.

[Chris]

This is an 80s China. There's no return points. Yeah.

[Finn]

Cause also, you probably love your kid less in many ways because. Because the.

[Chris]

You feel like you miss sold the magic.

[Finn]

The unrequitedness of the love for your child is this is. No matter what. This is destiny. This is what's meant to happen. But if you're like, I fucked up.

[Chris Willx]

I knew I should have chosen real three.

[Chris]

Yeah, exactly.

[Finn]

Yeah. And that's what you shout at them when you fall out with the teenagers.

[Chris]

Your whole point is you watch them grow and you do not have very much control over them. So if you go into it thinking you have control mentally, that is the worst place to be in when you have children is thinking you have control over for it. You don't have any control. You're just trying to keep them alive.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And make sure that they are happy. That's. That's the mental as my advice. Surrender control.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Because you're not in control of anything.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Have you found that hard?

[Chris]

No. That's great. It's liberating.

[Chris Willx]

Hands off the wheel. But you tried to.

[Chris]

Hands off the wheel. I'm driving the car. I just.

[Finn]

They're just shitting everywhere naked, you know, just hands off.

[Chris]

Whatever, man, whatever.

[Chris Willx]

But, you know, you're trying to drive a career forward and get the show and all of the prep and the rest of the things that you do. Ring fencing that, partitioning that off and saying, oh, but I'll just, you know, hope for the best with finding the line. Finding the line between control and not control.

[Chris]

It's like at this stage, you know, they're four and two. They're like, if I'm around a lot, that's good, you know, because the alternative is to go, well, well, my career, I've. You know, but your Career is a never end, like it's a never ending thing. And I don't think you look back on your life, think, I wish I'd worked more, you know.

[Chris Willx]

An interesting situation that people are in now. At least some people that have the choice of whether they want to work or not work. Yeah, that we went very quickly from a world where the dad was five days a week, up at five in the morning and then back on an evening trying to, you know, single family income, single person, income type to now people have started to put that philosophy forward as them. It's self generated. It's like, well, I'm gonna push myself into my career because I want to validation, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, well, you got someone who is pretty validating there playing next to you.

[Chris]

But I also think, I mean I get a lot of these reels about like the science behind dads. But there is, there's a, there's a woman, you might have had her on. Doctor. I think she's a doctor. Sounds like one you talk to. Chester says that a child's mental health is linked to how available and present their dad is. Maybe it's daughter, maybe it's girls, maybe daughter's mental health.

[Chris Willx]

Okay.

[Chris]

And I just think just being around is like, as a dad, you know, you can be, you can be hopeless, but if you're around, just be around, you're doing something.

[Chris Willx]

Do you feel like a bit of a spare part for the first few years? Like, are you. You're like a cheerleader from the side.

[Chris]

Six months, you are, are you are a spare part. But then you, you know, you need to prop up the wife.

[Chris Willx]

You're there as the pit crew, kind of.

[Chris]

But also that's, I think that's something men tell themselves to, to be like, ah, I'm not really, it's not really my thing, you know, it's a, it's a defense, it's a comfort blanket. Being like, oh, I don't know what I'm doing. You know, there's a lot you can.

[Chris Willx]

I'm not even needed here.

[Chris]

There's a lot you can.

[Chris Willx]

Everything that isn't the kid, you can.

[Chris]

Bottle feed the kid.

[Chris Willx]

Like, I saw a video, I couldn't possibly. I saw a video of a guy on a plane who must have been. Maybe the wife wasn't there. He was traveling with just relative, like newborn Y type kid and tried to bottle feed, didn't want to put a photo of the wife over his face and stuck the bottle through a hole in The T shirt. Fine.

[Chris]

Yeah. I mean, they're idiots.

[Chris Willx]

You could take them. Yeah. Outwitted them.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

Then he starts doing it without the kid and it's like, oh, he enjoyed it too much.

[Chris]

That's a dog, that's not a kid. Madness. But yeah, I mean, I get, I sort of. The whole gene therapy thing, I think you're kind of ruining the surprise of parenthood. And I guess, you know, suffering is a legitimate debate as to how much suffering you can edit out of someone.

[Chris Willx]

But.

[Chris]

Yeah, I just think it's a slippery slope because you will just start having these expectations as you're a kid that are like more foundational than your own neuroses in that you have. Have bought and ordered your own child.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah.

[Chris]

So, yeah, you're gonna go mad.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. You knew you should have got the new Subaru in gray instead of in white.

[Chris]

When we were potty training my daughter because we have a dog and the dog shits outside. There was about six months, my daughter would go outside to have a.

[Finn]

And you're like, learnt from the dog.

[Chris]

Because she learned from the dog. And then you're like, well, how do I explain to a three year old that you're not a dog and the toilet is here. If I had bought a genius, I would be so livid. But because the fact that she's at least not pooing on the floor. I'm proud of her.

[Finn]

Congratulations.

[Chris]

I'm proud of her, you know.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

I don't know, maybe we'll see the new world of. I think that I should be present. Like, that's a, you know, revolutionary if you were to look back 50 years. Yeah.

[Finn]

I'll meet you when you're 18.

[Chris]

Yeah. Mad man kind of handshake and a glass of Scotch when you're 18. See you later.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah, The Churchill thing. Just going back to that. I remember I read a lot from him, he said to his father how proud he was to have finally got into this regiment. And his dad responds with just the most fucking hurting. And it's this whole thing, like, you have cost me this much money. You have failed. Wanton and disrespect and all the rest of it. And then at the end of it, he signs off and he says, your mother sends her love.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Fucking rude.

[Finn]

At least.

[Chris Willx]

Yeah. So being a rat, just being there.

[Chris]

I think, I think that does something. Yeah.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Even if you're getting shouted at all the time.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Just being around.

[Chris Willx]

Gentlemen. What are you doing next? What can people expect over the next few months?

[Finn]

Well, I Don't know when this is.

[Chris]

Coming out, when this is going out.

[Chris Willx]

Probably three weeks, something like that.

[Finn]

Okay. So we'll be in the middle of our tour.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

Which is sold out, so people can't.

[Chris]

Get tickets for anyway. Yeah. There's stuff in the pipeline. There's lots of stuff inverse. The interaction Internet. The stuff that there's fingers. History twice a week.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

We're. We're one of weird. I checked this morning. We're like the 26th patron in the world.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

So join the Patreon.

[Finn]

Join the Patreon. Join the army. What.

[Chris Willx]

What do you get for being in the Patreon?

[Chris]

You get a bonus episode every week. You get early access to the week's.

[Chris Willx]

Episodes ad free listening is Finn versus History and the Instance.

[Chris]

So you can. You can pay for both shows.

[Finn]

You can.

[Chris]

Just one.

[Finn]

I think the main thing people do the Patreon is especially with the history podcast, they. Everyone wants the episodes immediately because if you listen to one part, people don't like being wet and forced to wait for the next part.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Finn]

So the main thing, you want to.

[Chris Willx]

Binge all of the Prime Minister.

[Finn]

If it's like two weeks, you can get four. They like lavender.

[Chris]

They just don't stop eating.

[Finn]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Just eat. 10 hours post in a day.

[Finn]

Yeah. And they're throwing up everywhere. Bloated. It's. Yeah.

[Chris Willx]

No, it's also. I really. I think that what you guys are doing is super cool. Oh, thanks, man. Thanks for having a fun. No, my pleasure. My pleasure. Until next time, boys.

[Chris]

Thanks, Chris.

[Finn]

Cheers.

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[Chris Willx]

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[Chris Willx]

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[Chris Willx]

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[Chris Willx]

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