248: #248 The Revolutionary War featuring Dr. Ben Sawyer

Summary

The Nateland Podcast - Episode 248: "The Revolutionary War" Featuring Dr. Ben Sawyer

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Nateland Podcast
• Host/Authors: Aaron Weber & Brian Bates
• Guest: Dr. Ben Sawyer
• Episode: #248 The Revolutionary War
• Release Date: April 16, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of The Nateland Podcast, hosts Aaron Weber and Brian Bates welcome their special guest, Dr. Ben Sawyer, a renowned historian and comedian. With regular hosts Dusty Slay and Nate Bargatze unavailable, Dr. Sawyer steps in to fill their roles, bringing a blend of academic insight and humor to the discussion.

Guest Introduction and Background (00:43 - 03:08)

Aaron Weber introduces Dr. Ben Sawyer as the podcast's first guest with a postgraduate degree, highlighting his multifaceted career as a stand-up comedian and history professor. Dr. Sawyer humorously downplays his doctoral title, emphasizing his role as a historian over other doctorates.

Notable Quote:

• Dr. Ben Sawyer (01:26): "I'm glad you guys are like, easing into it. Don't get a real doctor yet. You know what I'm saying? Start with a historian."

Podcast Updates and Promotions (03:08 - 04:30)

The hosts share updates about recent events in "Nataland," including a successful showcase at the Ryman Auditorium and promotions for upcoming specials and merchandise. Dr. Sawyer briefly plugs his own podcast, "The Road to Now," co-hosted with Bob Crawford from Avon.

Comedy and Show Experiences (04:30 - 18:25)

Aaron and Brian discuss their recent performances, including a showcase where both they and guest comics received mixed reactions. Dr. Sawyer shares anecdotes from his comedy experiences, emphasizing the challenges and humor in live performances.

Notable Quote:

• Aaron Weber (05:21): "It was just a solid show, top to bottom, beautifully hosted. And just a good night. Thank you to everybody who came."

Listener Comments and Interactions (18:25 - 45:08)

The trio engages with listener comments sourced from various platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. They tackle a range of topics from giving up chips for Lent to the definition of "chips," using Dr. Sawyer's historical perspective to add depth to their humorous banter.

Notable Quotes:

• Aaron Weber (19:02): "As a good Catholic, I chose to give up chips for Lent. I love chips in all forms, so this has been a challenge."
• Dr. Ben Sawyer (20:58): "Ryan, is a chip about its shape. I mean, is it just how flat it had to be?"

Discussion on the Revolutionary War (45:08 - 87:57)

Shifting gears, the conversation delves deep into the American Revolutionary War. Dr. Sawyer provides detailed historical insights, debunking common misconceptions and highlighting lesser-known facts. Topics include the motivations behind British taxation, the complexities of colonial unity, the role of key figures like George Washington and Benedict Arnold, and the impact of events such as the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.

Notable Quotes:

• Dr. Ben Sawyer (49:36): "I'm for it now. Took a while. There's some years where I was like, I don't know, we could have. You know, having a monarch, you know, it's really hard to. To turn against the idea of having one guy who's just born and everybody goes, well, I guess he owns everything."
• Brian Bates (54:00): "I was so embarrassed how much I didn't know about the American Revolutionary War."

Key Points Discussed:

1. British Taxation and Colonial Response:

   • The Stamp Act and its implications.
   • Colonial unity issues, with different colonies having varied motivations and loyalties.
   • The economic strain on Britain post the Seven Years' War leading to increased taxation.

2. Role of Key Figures:

   • George Washington: His leadership qualities, strategic mind, and reluctance to engage in politics post-war.
   • Benedict Arnold: His betrayal and its impact on the war's morale.
   • Benjamin Franklin: His diplomatic efforts, scientific contributions, and celebrity status during the era.

3. Major Events:

   • Boston Massacre: Its role as a rallying cry for colonists.
   • Boston Tea Party: The act of rebellion and its symbolic significance.
   • Yorktown Siege: The final major battle leading to British surrender.

4. Cultural and Social Dynamics:

   • The involvement of Native Americans and enslaved people in the war.
   • British reliance on Hessian mercenaries and their motivations.
   • The transformation of colonial identity from British subjects to American patriots.

Notable Quote:

• Dr. Ben Sawyer (65:26): "People believe that folks were like, rah, rah, America. They were not. They didn't know what it was. It was introduced to them."

Historical Misconceptions and Media Representation (87:57 - 106:43)

The discussion transitions to how historical events are portrayed in media, referencing movies like "The Patriot," "Braveheart," and documentaries. Dr. Sawyer critiques the accuracy of these portrayals while recommending more faithful representations like "Enemy at the Gates."

Notable Quotes:

• Dr. Ben Sawyer (93:03): "I mean, that's like you pointed out, that's April 1775. We don't even declare independence until July 4, 1770."
• Aaron Weber (99:38): "I've never heard of Ethan Allen."

Concluding Remarks and Future Promotions (106:43 - End)

As the episode wraps up, the hosts and Dr. Sawyer share upcoming events and promotions related to their respective podcasts and live shows. They humorously reflect on past experiences and emphasize the value Dr. Sawyer brings to the discussion with his historical expertise.

Notable Quote:

• Dr. Ben Sawyer (110:53): "I can't teach them everything, but what I try to do is teach them a little bit of love for this place we live and a little bit of appreciation for what happened before."

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Insights and Conclusions

This episode offers a rich blend of humor and historical education, with Dr. Ben Sawyer providing depth to the hosts' comedic frameworks. Key takeaways include:

• Understanding Historical Context: The complexities of colonial motivations and British strategies highlight the multifaceted nature of the Revolutionary War.
• Challenging Misconceptions: Common beliefs about the war are scrutinized, offering listeners a more nuanced perspective.
• Media Literacy: The conversation underscores the importance of critically evaluating historical portrayals in films and media.

Final Thoughts

"The Revolutionary War" episode serves as an informative and entertaining exploration of a pivotal moment in American history. Dr. Ben Sawyer's participation bridges the gap between academic knowledge and accessible conversation, making history engaging for a broad audience.

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Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content sections to focus solely on the substantive discussions of the podcast episode.

Transcript

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[Aaron Weber]

I don't remember how this. I don't remember how to start. Hello, folks, and hey, Bear. Welcome to the Nate Land podcast. This is Aaron Weber alongside my good pal, my compadre, my, my. My friend Brian Bates. All right, Dusty Slay and Nate are out this week, so I'll just paus a few seconds to let you turn the episode off. Okay, that should be good. If you're still around, we've got a wonderful replacement. Smart enough, funny enough, and nice enough to fill both of their shoes. He is a longtime friend of Brian and I. First time on the podcast. Very funny. Stand up comedian, history professor, all around Renaissance man. Please welcome to the podcast for the very first time, Dr. Ben Sawyer.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

All right, thanks, guys. It's good to be here with you, dude.

[Aaron Weber]

It's a. It's an exciting, exciting time.

[Brian Bates]

I think the first doctor we've had.

[Aaron Weber]

You're definitely the first. You're the first person with a postgraduate degree on this podcast. I can guarantee that.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I'm glad you guys are like, easing into it. Don't get a real doctor yet. You know what I'm saying? Start with a historian.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. How much of getting a doctorate is. You wanted to be called doctor? Was that a part of it?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I think it was mostly that I failed being a high school teacher, so I had to figure out another way to teach.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay, you had to get back into. You had to become a student again. Do you insist that people call you doctor? Do you ever do that? Do you ever go, guys, it's Dr. Ben.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, it's a. It's preposterous. Like sometimes. I mean, there's been people I've hung out with like a place like a cigar shop for, for years, and then they go, wow, you got a Ph.D. and I'm like, yeah, like why didn't you tell me? I was like, it's not relevant to our relationship at all. Like, what if I did tell you? Would you still talk to me? You probably shouldn't.

[Aaron Weber]

It's a pretty fun little benefit, though. It's worth the extra years of schooling.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

You know, the bummer is there's a comic here in town, Dr. Ben. So if. If you.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, he's a medical doctor too, right?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. So he's like a real doctor.

[Aaron Weber]

So he, like, trumps what you do. Yeah, well, like, in an emergency, you're worthless.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, I mean, that's great. But if you wanted to know what happened before, you'd have to talk to me.

[Aaron Weber]

That's right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So, I mean, we save you now.

[Brian Bates]

But what to now about that?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Exactly. Yeah. Oh, the Road to Now. Yeah. My podcast I did with Bob Crawford from the Avon.

[Aaron Weber]

You can't be plugging stuff within. We've been here for 30 seconds.

[Brian Bates]

I brought it up.

[Aaron Weber]

I plug in your own podcast here. Come on. Well, we're excited to have you, man.

[Brian Bates]

What a great name for a podcast, by the way. I'm sorry.

[Aaron Weber]

The Road to Now is a solid podcast.

[Brian Bates]

I like names, you know, it's not named after one person. It's not all about them.

[Aaron Weber]

I hate a podcast that's a monument to one guy.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aaron Weber]

In a studio that's a shrine to him.

[Brian Bates]

Yes.

[Aaron Weber]

Now we get it. Dude. Thank you for doing this. This will be fun. I want to plug a couple things before we get rolling here. A lot happening in Nate land, by the way. We had our big Ryman showcase the other night. That was so much fun that we'll have. We already talked about that.

[Brian Bates]

Well, we preemptively last week said you got a standing ovation. I think people knew we were lying, but.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, we got that. We'll get into that here when we talk about our week. But a lot's happening in Nateland. Steven Rogers, who was on the podcast, his special half of we dropped on the YouTube channel. It's getting great feedback. The view counts are climbing. Hop in. Now get in on the ground floor. Steven Rogers is so funny. You're going to be seeing him everywhere. But you can see him right now on the Nateland YouTube. My special still out there, signature dish, Nick Thunes. And then this is a fun announcement. Stephen Bargetze, friend of the podcast, father of its namesake, is doing a one hour special taping. He's taping a special. Tickets are on sale now. One time only event. See Nate's dad do a full Hour special at the Franklin theater here in Nashville. November 2nd. Two shows November 2nd. It seems like a far. Like, far away, but it's going to sell out quickly. So get those tickets now. There's new merch on nateborgetzi.com we got a lot going on here. Go check out the consumers. Don't make me come back there. Our other podcast. Let's get rolling here. Dude. Thank you again for joining. Ben. Sorry I trashed you for plugging stuff, and then I launched into a plug.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's all right. It's your show. It's actually Nate's show.

[Aaron Weber]

But you were here first. Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

You deserve to be here as much as we do.

[Aaron Weber]

So what did you guys do you want to hop into this weekend or.

[Brian Bates]

What did you want to talk about the Ryman?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. So we did the. Here. I got the Hatch print here. This is the. It's one of the coolest parts about doing a show at the. The Ryman auditorium is that they have a deal with Hatch Print. It's like the printing studio here in Nashville, and they do a poster for every show. So we've got a Nateland Presents. You'll see. This is mine, and I ripped it a little bit. Nateland Presents. Good, clean, funny. Everybody on there. Yakov Smirnoff did a. Did a spot on the show. Standing ovation. Dude murdered the guy killed and got a big standing O. And then me and Jackson went up right after him and did great, too. I was like. I was. You know, you see somebody standing, oh. And you're like, oh, who has to go up next?

[Brian Bates]

Right.

[Aaron Weber]

And you're worried about it. But Mia went up there and did great. It was just solid show, top to bottom, beautifully hosted. And just. I hosted it. Just. If that wasn't clear. Just a good night. Thank you to everybody who came. I'm looking forward to a lot more. A lot more things like this. So this was a very fun thing to get to do.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. I'm still thinking about the following someone. You know, you always worry about that. I mean, that's the story of my life. Almost every show I'm on. But. But I went to the day of the show.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Went to eat Name drop here with John Chris, Derek Stroop, and Ryan Hamilton.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

All funny guys. And we're all talking about comedy. And I said, you know, when you're on a showcase and you have a bad set, you want to blame on the crowd. So you want everybody on the show have a bad.

[Aaron Weber]

Right, Right.

[Brian Bates]

I think that's common. They all said I was crazy. Like, no, that's not true. Like, I'm selfish. I'm like, guys, you're lying to yourself. If you have a bad set, you want the next.

[Aaron Weber]

Well, just because you're selfish doesn't mean you're wrong. That is how they're both right. Yeah, exactly. You're like, yeah, I know. It's not good that I think that way.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aaron Weber]

Bomb. I want everybody. Bomb.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. Because want to blame it on the crowd and not me.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

I want to do it. The show was a nightmare. Not just my set.

[Brian Bates]

They all said I was crazy.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

But anyway, I was on a show.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

A couple years ago where there was, like, eight comics and all seven of us bombed up front. And by the seventh one, I was, like, feeling pretty secure.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And then the last guy went on murdered, and it was not fun.

[Brian Bates]

It's not fun.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So I feel you, man.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. I think I was on that show, and I was not last.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You did.

[Brian Bates]

You should do a show over in East Nashville at a. Was it a winery?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Oh, yeah. Forever ago.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

You've got so many. But.

[Aaron Weber]

So Ben's been a long time fixture in the Nashville comedy scene. He's run all kinds of shows. And you. Do you have a show to Yazoo. You have a brewery show here that you run, and then you had a cigar show for a while.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Any place where you could. Any place with a vice.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Ben would run a show there pretty much any place.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

People just want to be doing something else. I'll show up with comics and kind of ruin their evenings.

[Aaron Weber]

Ruin their night.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Ask them to be quiet. Stop enjoying with. They were doing. That's kind of my thing.

[Aaron Weber]

Standup's great for that. Just y'all trying to have fun tonight. Well, that's the end of that.

[Brian Bates]

Turn those TVs off.

[Aaron Weber]

What is that? Yeah. Game seven of the finals. Turn it off.

[Brian Bates]

Yep.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. No, I listened to Bill Burr recently talking about how he was, like, surprised when he did Broadway and people liked him the first time he did it because he was talking about, like, he was just so used to the first few years. You do something, everyone being upset when you show up.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. I still feel that way.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

At a comedy club where they. They know I'm performing.

[Brian Bates]

Let's get into our weekend.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. What'd you get into?

[Brian Bates]

I felt that way this weekend. No, I was in Detroit. I did Detroit House of Comedy. Are you from there?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, no, I'm from North Carolina.

[Brian Bates]

Okay, but you went to school in Michigan.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I went to Michigan State.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Michigan State.

[Aaron Weber]

Does your doctorate count less because it's from Michigan State?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, it does, actually.

[Aaron Weber]

You have to preface every time you go, Dr. Ben. But it's for Michigan State, so it's not that big.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, I really do. I said it's just an asterisk. And when I say it out loud, you can' Hear it, but it's like a slight. You have to, like, lean on the valley.

[Brian Bates]

You can tell I had never been to really spend any time in downtown Detroit. It's very nice. They've really revitalized. I had, you know, had this image that it was going to be dangerous. It didn't feel dangerous.

[Aaron Weber]

You watched 8 Mile before you went.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

You thought it was going to be that.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. And it was. It was a beautiful day. I wish the Tigers were home because, like you said, it is right down that club, and the hotel was right in the heart of it.

[Aaron Weber]

You can see the baseball stadium from the club. Like, it's. It's a block away.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And that park is awesome.

[Brian Bates]

It is so great. And the Little Caesars arena, where the Red Wings and the Pistons play right next to it. So to come to a show at that comedy club, I really appreciate people who came is not easy. The parking next door was $45 to park. Yeah, you got to really want to come down there. The Pistons were playing Friday night when I was there. Cat Williams was there Saturday night. Can you imagine paying $45 to park to see me?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, I can't. But you're like, how much just to park?

[Aaron Weber]

Parking. Parking's 45 bucks. Tickets are buy one, get one.

[Brian Bates]

I know. Four times more than the ticket to see the show.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, it's. That's better. When I was down there, I used to go down to Detroit lot, and it used to be the parking was cheaper, but it was mostly just paying a dude not to smash your windshield out. Whenever you got out of. Out of Eyon, you're paying the guy.

[Aaron Weber]

Who would have done it, or you're paying a guy to protect protection.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You're paying the guy to protect your car from him.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You got to show every guy who, like, you'd park there, you'd be like, I think this is free. And he'd pop out and be like, $10 to watch your car. And you look him in the eyes and be like, I know what you're going to do.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So you paid.

[Aaron Weber]

It's worth it.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's worth still $35 cheaper. Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aaron Weber]

How were the Shows, though.

[Brian Bates]

The shows were fun, small crowds, but.

[Aaron Weber]

Again, wrong with that.

[Brian Bates]

You know, I get it. Like, it's hard. It's not an easy place to get to. And look, it's.

[Aaron Weber]

It's easy to perform in an arena for 20,000 people and just kind of, like, perform that way. Yeah, it's hard. And it's more meaningful, I think, to be in a room with 30 people and give them a real experience.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, I wish.

[Aaron Weber]

You know, I'll take your word for it.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I know the second part.

[Aaron Weber]

I'm saying I think the bar for ticket sales is. Is. It's artificially inflated by Nate being on the podcast.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

That people need to know what the real world is like.

[Brian Bates]

But the people who came were so great. A lot of folks came out, met a lot of great people. You know, they said they'd seen you there.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Brian Bates]

And some people saw you in Grand Rapids and.

[Aaron Weber]

All right.

[Brian Bates]

Nice, dude.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

We're taking over Michigan.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's a good haul, too, man. I mean, those aren't close to each other. Must have really wanted to see one of you guys.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. How far is Grand Rapids from Detroit?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's a couple hours, I think.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

So, yeah, you're right. They wanted to see one of us.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. They probably just lived in Detroit.

[Aaron Weber]

Good deal.

[Brian Bates]

They live next to the clubs. What you're saying?

[Aaron Weber]

Well, Ben, what have you been up to, man?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Oh, man, this weekend? Not a whole lot. Just kind of going to.

[Aaron Weber]

So you're. You're teaching. You're. You're a college professor.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yes.

[Aaron Weber]

I know you primarily as a comedian, but it's fun to think about you in a classroom. I know you're a very good teacher. I can just tell. What are you teaching? What are you teaching right now? What are your classes?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right now? I'm teaching nothing.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, that sounds like I've been on.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Medical leave for a year.

[Aaron Weber]

Are we gonna bring that up now?

[Brian Bates]

Let's get into it.

[Aaron Weber]

My bad, my bad.

[Brian Bates]

Aaron, maybe vet the guest a little bit.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, well, no, it's all right.

[Aaron Weber]

I knew about some of that, but I. Well, what were you teach? Because we had some comics a few years ago that actually had you as a teacher. Right. NTSU students who are coming to open mics, and they're like, that's Dr. Ben.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Is there Matt Boyd? Remember Matt Boyd? Oh, yeah. Matt Boyd was in my class the first time that I ever taught.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. That's crazy.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It was.

[Aaron Weber]

What's your. Like, the primary. Is there a specialty that you have or, like a period of history that You.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So my specialty is economic history, history of capitalism, communism, and things like that.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Thematically. But my. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I do too, but. But then I study the US and the Soviet Union. Russia is my geographic places. So what I teach at MTSU is I just teach the basic classes, the survey classes, US History one and US History too. And nobody can quite figure out why. I only want to teach those. They've offered me other class. I love. I love teaching those classes.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And it's the kind of thing where everybody has to take those classes to graduate. And I really, really love this place we live. And I know, you know, going in there with the expectation that you have history majors is just going to fail.

[Aaron Weber]

Right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Like, I don't. Like, I know some people who give a whole lot of books to read, and I've just never thought that if you didn't enjoy something making you just shoving more of it down. Like, when you were a kid and somebody like, you like broccoli? You were like, no. You were like, what if you just ate. What if you ate, like, four barrels of it? Like, no, it didn't work. So it's kind of great to. To. It's a. I go in there every day feeling like it's a grind. It's a challenge, because, you know, I'm like, the last person for a lot of these folks for a while is going to be explaining history, and you just can't expect that. You can't go in there and expect. They care about it.

[Aaron Weber]

Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They became aware they were alive, like, a few years earlier, and since then, they've mostly been thinking about pizza and stuff, you know, like, you can't be like, well, what about 300 years ago? They're like, don't care. So it's a fun challenge, man. And I also just love, you know, talking about why. Why democracy matters, why, you know, we're fortunate. And I think if you study history, you know, I tell them, I'm like, I don't have any expectations for what you come away with from this class. Right. Like, I'm not. I'm never here to tell you what to think. For goodness sakes, look at what my generation's done to this country and ask yourself, do I. Do I have the right to tell anybody what to do? I'm trying to teach you what I know so that you can save my son, who's 10.

[Aaron Weber]

There you go.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But. But, yeah, no, I just love it. It's. It's a great. It's a great opportunity to. To teach and to kind of share what I love with other people.

[Aaron Weber]

That's awesome.

[Brian Bates]

If you're not familiar with mtsu. Middle Tennessee State University, one of the most prestigious academic universities in the country.

[Aaron Weber]

Boasting such alumni as Brian Bates.

[Brian Bates]

Brian Bates, Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. And now I'm also a visiting scholar over at Vanderbilt, where we'll just stick.

[Brian Bates]

With him to issue.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, well, you know, once you kind of move up.

[Brian Bates]

Bates, a visiting scholar. What does that mean? I mean, I guess I can guess.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, you know, Bates, I think I said this earlier, but I remember listening to the early episodes and you guys trying to figure out what an adjunct professor was. And I thought, honestly, the theme for this show could just be come in and say, I am a master instructor, history at Middle Tennessee State University and visiting scholar, Vanderbilt. And then we could just spend two hours trying to explain to Nate what that meant.

[Aaron Weber]

Exactly.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But. But yeah. So it basically means that they've. I co direct a seminar series over there with speakers and have use of all their resources, which is very kind of them.

[Aaron Weber]

So you're like an adject. Adjunct professor at Nateland right now. That's great. Right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Why would you do that to me?

[Aaron Weber]

I don't know, but I'm happy you're here, man. I'm happy here. Where was I? I was in Florida this weekend with Kathleen Madigan. Great shows. Last night I did a little show with Brad Paisley here at Zany's.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

The lineup was me, Henry Cho, Kevin Nealon hosted by Brad Paisley.

[Brian Bates]

All three of those guys have been on date land.

[Aaron Weber]

It was basically a Nateland showcase. Yeah, I'm trying to get Brad Paisley on here at some point, but it was a great night. Great, great cause. Great, great everything. Just one of those just kind of fun nights, man.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

We watched the end of the Masters on Brad Paisley's tour bus.

[Brian Bates]

Wow.

[Aaron Weber]

With Kevin Nealon. And I'm sitting across from Kevin Nealon, who I think of like he was a Happy Gilmore. And I'm watching the Masters with him and I just want him to be like, send the ball home. Send it home. It was just a bizarre moment for me.

[Brian Bates]

And then you got Henry. Was Henry on there?

[Aaron Weber]

Henry's on there.

[Brian Bates]

He knows all those guys.

[Aaron Weber]

He knows all of them. It was a really fun way to watch the end of that. It was a crazy Masters too. I don't know if you watched it, Ben, but it came down to a playoff at the end. Rory McElroy got the win. If you're around people that are passionate about stuff, it's fun to Watch it with them. Yeah, I got a buddy, Connor Larson, who's super into ufc, and if you watch UFC with him, it's the most fun thing in the world. By myself, I don't know what's going on. I really care, but it was kind of like that with the masters. But anyway, it's official. I look in the mirror and I see gray hairs. Life is starting to end for me. That's what it feels like. I want to cover them up, but home hair dye kits are a mess. The salon is a hassle. This podcast is proud to be sponsored by Simpler Hair Color. Simpler hair color is the easiest way to eliminate grays. Modern men deserve simpler, safer ways to care for their appearance. With simpler hair color, you've got gentler ingredients without the messy mixing. Mixing. I'm mixing up the word mixing.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Or constant trips to the salon or drugstore. If you're tired of conducting a science experiment every time you need to dye your grays, you need to simpler hair color. They have a full variety of shades to match any guy's hair and beard. The medium shade is nice, blends with my hair color perfectly. And I'm around the medium shade. And with simple hair color, there's no need to buy a separate hair beard and touch up product. They they have it all. You're covered for. One can of simpler hair color provides as many uses as up to four boxes of drugstore hair dye. It's an all in one product you can use on your hair and your beard. So say goodbye to grays. The easy way with Simpler hair color had two SIMP simplerhaircolor.com Nate and use code Nate for 10 off your order. Once again, that's simpler hair color.com backslash Nate for 10% off. And make sure you use my promo code Nate so they know we sent you. Fun weekend. Excited you're here, Ben. Let's get into these comments. Let's get into it, I think.

[Brian Bates]

Let's do it.

[Aaron Weber]

You want to read them?

[Brian Bates]

No. You're doing a great job.

[Aaron Weber]

Are you sure?

[Brian Bates]

Are you? Do you want me to.

[Aaron Weber]

Why don't we split it up? I'll do page one, you do page two.

[Brian Bates]

Okay.

[Aaron Weber]

We've never done that before, but I think, you know, Nate and Dusty are gone. It's time to take chances on this podcast. Exactly, Ryan. Oh. Comments come From Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Apple podcast reviews, and [e-mail] Ben Feel free to weigh in on these two, by the way. And first comment comes from Ryan Clark as a good Catholic, I chose to give up chips for Lent. That's quite a sacrifice, Ryan. I.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Didn'T pick a flavor.

[Brian Bates]

What did you give up?

[Aaron Weber]

I gave up. You know what? I gave up making comments like that. So I'm sorry about that, Ryan.

[Brian Bates]

Yep.

[Aaron Weber]

As a good Catholic, I chose to give up chips for Lent. I love chips in all forms, so this has been a challenge. There you go. My work recently put out a bowl of Cheetos for a snack, which spurred a debate amongst myself and my coworkers. Are Cheetos a chip? Easter is quickly approaching, so I'm choosing to ask the greatest minds I know, can I indulge with Cheetos, or would that break my Lenten commitment? Commitment, wow.

[Brian Bates]

We got a professor on to help this.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. I think if you're looking for some type of scientific definition of a chip, Cheetos probably doesn't fit that. But. But deep down, you know that's a chip. Deep down, you know that's part of what you're talking about. Right. It comes in a bag. It's got the same texture to it, basically. I think Cheetos is a chip if we're going at just the spirit of it, which I think is what Atlanta is all about.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

I mean, or just wait till Sunday and you can eat as much as you want.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. I feel like if somebody. You went to a party and somebody was like, hey, man, if you want some chips, they're on the table over there. You wouldn't walk back and be like, you didn't mention that there were Cheetos.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, exactly. Like, I don't see any chips. I see Cheetos. What is that about?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, I guess you're. What about Bugles? Same thing.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Bugles.

[Aaron Weber]

I think it's all.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, I like a good, good Bugle bag. All right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Bates was going to give it up for lint. He goes, I can't do that.

[Brian Bates]

Bugle boy. All right.

[Aaron Weber]

I guess Bugle, not technically a chip, but it's like, what are we talking about? Yeah, it's in the same. It's right next to it in the aisle at Kroger. Like, it's a. It's a chip, and you kind of know what you're doing.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

And if you want to approach Lent as looking for loopholes and things like that, that might. That might defeat the whole purpose of it.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Ryan, is a chip about its shape. I mean, is it just how flat it had to be? A certain, like, does that to be flat. I mean, we're going to, like, get into this where we had to, like.

[Brian Bates]

Does it have to be a potato?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No.

[Aaron Weber]

Well, if you do that, a lot of these things don't qualify because they don't have real potatoes in it.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

You remember Greg Warren told us they had to stop calling Pringles chips because they didn't have enough potatoes to meet the qualifications.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right. So you're.

[Aaron Weber]

But we know that it's a chip, so a Pringles counts. Right? That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, Ryan. But I admire. Either way, man, best of luck and, you know, happy Holy Week, Zach Bennett. Aaron mentioned that he noticed he never uses his smartphone in his dreams. Since that time, I've been keeping track of my dreams, and neither do I. Once or twice I've dreamed about having a smartphone, but then the device fails or breaks and I just move on without it. I think Aaron may be onto something with this theory. How about that? You ever noticed that, Ben? Do you have dreams?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

We know what you do for a living.

[Brian Bates]

They've been crushed. But.

[Aaron Weber]

But I was just thinking, when you're. When I. I never dream about watching TV or looking at a phone.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's interesting.

[Aaron Weber]

Even though that's probably a bulk of my life is looking at one of those. One of those things. And I bet. I wonder, if I were in a car crash and my life flashed before my eyes, how much of that would be like Breaking Bad, you know, because I've seen the whole show, like five times. That's a pretty good percentage.

[Brian Bates]

Why he had a car crash.

[Aaron Weber]

Because I'm watching while I'm driving.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, I remember you used to sit with. Used to set a laptop on the front seat of your van, didn't you?

[Aaron Weber]

No, don't say that. Come on. That's not true. I know you used to hold an Xbox controller with the steering wheel. Come on, dude, I'm a safe driver, man. But it's just. It's. I. It's curious. It's a. Interesting thing. Keep track of that. Let me know if you look at your phone in your dream. Okay. Matt Duvall. A not so funny story about the Jim Joyce blown call. I called him James Joyce on the podcast. People didn't like that.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, I saw that, but I.

[Aaron Weber]

That's what I said is I respect umpires. I'm going to call them by their full name.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Not so funny story about the Jim Joyce blown call. My buddy's uncle who lives in Toledo, one hour from Detroit, has the same name as the umpire. And after the blown call, people started calling him with death threats. He even ended up changing his voicemail message for a bit, explaining he wasn't the umpire to try and head things off. That's. I mean, that's funny now, in retrospect. I bet that was crazy at the time. Yeah, that's so crazy.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's also like, ironic that they're mad at him for like getting something inaccurate, yet they're not really checking which Jim Joyce they're going after.

[Aaron Weber]

That's true. They made a bad call as well. Yeah, how about that?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They should have a forgiveness thing the next day.

[Brian Bates]

That's why you have a professor on. They notice these things.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. Joe Clark. Planting trees in the median and next to off ramps is a. All caps. Super dumb idea. I wish Dusty was here. The whole point is to have a space with nothing in it in case you lose control and go off the highway. Planning dozens of rigid objects rooted in the ground would put a noticeable increase in highway deaths. It's an excellent point, Joe Clark. I did not think about that at all. Ben. We were talking about how we wanted to. We wanted to plant some more trees. Dusty thought it would be a good idea. Some of this, like the median on the interstate.

[Brian Bates]

Someone suggested it.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, okay. It was a comment. Yeah, yeah. Why aren't there fruit trees, like, on the side of the road all over the place? And we thought, that sounds like a good idea. Joe Clark just reminded us why they don't.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. I'd much rather there be nothing in between me and the other side so when I lose control, I can hit another car.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay, I'm back. I'm back. I mean, that's a good point. Counterpoint here.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

How often does this guy lose control of his car? That's what I want to know.

[Aaron Weber]

I think it happens.

[Brian Bates]

I wouldn't want to. You would venture all the way across the interstate median to the other side. That's how bad.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Watch him break the trees in the middle. You might as well keep going.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, I don't think my car is powerful enough to get across that grass.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, that's what it was.

[Aaron Weber]

Saving my car is just so weak.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That van back.

[Aaron Weber]

Dude, I need the van back. I'd love it back. Brandon. Lifite Laette. Brandon. Life heat. Is that how you would say it? Leaf height, leaf height, leaf, leaf heat. Brandon. In addition to CO2 issues with crops in the medium, the amount of wildlife that causes car accidents would skyrocket. Enormous safety risk. Okay, I'm back to the other side. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that. That makes sense too. You'd have what, owls and squirrels and things running up into those trees?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, deer. Deer. I mean deer anyway, but you wouldn't be able to spot them.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Deer in the trees.

[Aaron Weber]

Well, they're gonna hang out in the trees.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Okay, Not.

[Aaron Weber]

Not in the canopy, but they hang out amongst the trees. They're in forests. Don't act like I'm. They hang around trees.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They do. And he's. Nashville in East Nashville. They're already in the road anyway.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, that's true. They are everywhere. I almost hit one the other night. Andrew Khan. I think the NICU and icky debate. The NICU and ICU debate has more to do with it being four or three letters. Oh, this is interesting. Four letters. We make it a new word, such as NASA. Three letters. We just say the letters, such as FBI or CIA.

[Brian Bates]

Huh.

[Aaron Weber]

Huh.

[Brian Bates]

Let me think about that.

[Aaron Weber]

That's why we call it the USA and not usa. I'd never thought about that. I can't think of a three letter acronym where we say it as. That's the word. Ncaa. Ncaa. We don't call it. You say that out loud, naka. Come on. Yeah, okay. All right. That's very funny. I've never. I've never thought about sitting here thinking.

[Brian Bates]

Trying to think of one. I can't think of one.

[Aaron Weber]

We're talking about. You call it the nicu, which is neonatal intensive care unit. But the intensive care unit, they don't call it the icu.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That I think it just got. ICU sounds bad.

[Aaron Weber]

ICU does sound. Yeah, sounds like. Sounds like they just put the gross basement. Icky. We got to put you in the ick. You all right, Brian, you take over.

[Brian Bates]

Okay. Cameron Ramsey. A couple weeks ago, my roommate signed up to be an Uber driver.

[Aaron Weber]

Driver.

[Brian Bates]

His first drive was a couple that called an Uber because the husband was having a heart attack. It was much cheaper to call an Uber than haven't take an ambulance. So my roommate's first ever drive for Uber was taking a man to the hospital while he was having a heart attack in his car. Oh, well, as a former Uber driver. Yeah, I never had that happen. I was trying to think of anything.

[Aaron Weber]

Have you ever had a crazy trip like that? You've ever had somebody.

[Brian Bates]

No, I had a pretty sure a lady of the night I picked her.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Up and a lady of the night trying to take her to the movie.

[Aaron Weber]

Where'd you pick her up from a hotel. Like a loves. Oh, from a hotel.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. And I took her to another hotel.

[Aaron Weber]

Did you really? Oh, my God.

[Brian Bates]

I'm a trafficker. I mean, I can't promise Beth whatever she was, but there were some signs there.

[Aaron Weber]

I'm a trafficker. Yeah. How often are you Ubering from one hotel to another?

[Brian Bates]

And she stopped on the way. She had to stop at a bank and make a deposit.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, this is definitely what it was.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, but.

[Aaron Weber]

But, yeah, but it's not your point. It's not your job to judge what people are doing.

[Brian Bates]

No, no, not exactly.

[Aaron Weber]

It's your job to facilitate it.

[Brian Bates]

The furthest drive I ever had.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I'm accessory, too.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Brian Bates]

Just out of myself. The longest drive I ever had, not that you guys asked, but was to Clarksville.

[Aaron Weber]

That's a hike.

[Brian Bates]

It's about an hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over there.

[Aaron Weber]

Is that a pretty good payday for you? Yeah, I'm trying to think of what, an Uber to Clarksville. It's probably, what, 500 bucks?

[Brian Bates]

No, nothing like that.

[Aaron Weber]

How much?

[Brian Bates]

It was maybe 50 or 60, something like that.

[Aaron Weber]

50 bucks?

[Brian Bates]

Maybe more. Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

You got fleece?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Dude, it was 500. It'd be cheaper to take an ambulance.

[Aaron Weber]

I just took it in Spokane. I. I called the ambulance on myself. I went to the er.

[Brian Bates]

It does this once a week.

[Aaron Weber]

It was a three or four blocks. Yeah, maybe. Maybe half a mile.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Ambulance, right. 3, 800 bucks. Take that ambulance.

[Brian Bates]

Oh.

[Aaron Weber]

Now, insurance covers a lot of it, but that's what it costs. 3, 800 bucks.

[Brian Bates]

I should be an aimless driver.

[Aaron Weber]

I know. You should, man.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, it sounds like you could have been the right person. Caught you.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aaron Weber]

You ever somebody throw up in your car, Brian?

[Brian Bates]

No, I had. I had a drunk guy leave his phone in my car once.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Brian Bates]

I never drove for Uber a ton.

[Aaron Weber]

But would you go pick up on like, Broadway and Friday and Saturday nights? So that's. That's the danger zone.

[Brian Bates]

That's a lot of drunk people. Yeah, I remember. I think now people tip pretty well with Uber.

[Aaron Weber]

It's not a knock on your age, it's just a new thing. Thing where I don't even think back then there was like, the percentage would come up for tipping.

[Brian Bates]

No, no.

[Aaron Weber]

See, now you can just hit 2015.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, I didn't get tipped a lot when I drove for Uber and they take so much of the total payout. So I think now people make more money driving for Uber than they did back then.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, I'd be curious to. To see that. Did you play? You have music blasting in the car? I would try to profile the person. Like your joke?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, I have a joke where I Say that. But I would try to do that as well. I try to match the energy of what? If they wanted to talk, I would try to talk back that same level. If they were quiet, I would be quiet.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay, well, they're leading the dance.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. I would let them lead. I try to get a feel for what I think they do. Yesterday morning, you know, I had a schedule. Noob or 5am in my hotel, and the guy wants to talk.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Just gonna be. I'm like, dude, yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

What about the guy going to Clarksville?

[Brian Bates]

It was a woman. She did not speak English.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Okay.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, it's ideal deal.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. She had a doctor's appointment. She was pregnant. Had a doctor's appointment, downtown Nashville. And I drove her home.

[Aaron Weber]

I like when it says, your Uber driver or Lyft driver is hard of hearing. And you're like. And then I see him, and I don't think this guy's deaf. I think they just put that on there.

[Brian Bates]

Huh. There's a lot of them.

[Aaron Weber]

They probably. If they don't speak English very well or if they just don't want to talk to people.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Either way, I respect it.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. Oh, sorry, I forgot I'm reading them now. Seth Mondragon.

[Aaron Weber]

What a name. Mon.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Dragon Mondragon.

[Brian Bates]

I was wondering if you guys ever come up with a joke and then think, how did I not come up with that one sooner? I look at other people's jokes and think, why did I think of that?

[Aaron Weber]

It's the wrong episode to ask that question. I hear jokes all the time and think, I, I, I wish I'd have thought of that before they did.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Because everything's just for the taken. It's like I'll hear all the time. You just hear a joke. You. That was. Anybody could have made that observation and somebody else did it.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. It's so good. I remember when you started, Ben. I felt like first time I ever saw you was at the Comedy Bar. Does that sound right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, we Bates.

[Aaron Weber]

We.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I moved here in 2013, you know, you were.

[Aaron Weber]

You've known him for over a decade.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You were the first person I'd ever met that performed at Zany. Oh, well, that was a big deal back then. And I remember you came over to.

[Aaron Weber]

See it's not a big deal to know him. Now you show up the street.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. Now it's kind of. It's washed over me, stalled out. It's kind of like caffeine. When I was a kid, it was a big deal. Now it's kind of like I need it I don't need you, Bates. All right. Anyway, that was a bad analogy. But yeah, I remember, like, meeting you because you came over and did some show up the street after you'd walked off stage, and I was like, wow. And, you know, it was. What was that, man? It was some place called. That's cool. I think Chad Ryden was running a show down there. Yeah, there were, like, more comics in there than there were people watching. You know, it was those days. There was no chance to get on stage.

[Brian Bates]

You know, I got the location wrong, but I do remember that. And I remember you. Like, you have smart jokes.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Oh, thank you.

[Brian Bates]

And not particularly funny, but they're smart.

[Aaron Weber]

Thank you.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I appreciate that. That's what my wife used to say. I'd get off stage and be like, it wasn't that good. She goes, yeah, but they were listening. Listening.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Like, yeah, that's what they do. That's how you bomb. You gotta listen to do that too.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. I always respected. You would do, like, we'd be in some dive bar and you're up there talking about Grover Cleveland or something, and we're like, dude, we don't know. None of us know what you're talking about. But you do. You find a way to make it funny. It's fun to watch.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Thank you.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, it's not the same old stuff is what I appreciate.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Thank you. Let me ask you this on the back of that, do you guys ever come up with a joke that you feel, like, so good that somebody else must have written that joke and you just heard it?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

And then that usually is the case.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Sometimes I don't even want to Google. I'm like, I really like this joke, but I know if I Google five.

[Aaron Weber]

Comics, ignorance is bliss.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, it can be. It's a good question. Set. Well, we'll table that one and ask Dusty and Nate, because I think that's who you were asking.

[Brian Bates]

All right, Aaron, let me tell you about our next sponsor, Viori, our old pals. It's the best. Vori is the new perspective on performance apparel. It's perfect if you're sick and tired of traditional old workout gear. But mainly, it's by far the most comfortable and best looking thing we wear.

[Aaron Weber]

Including that hat, by the way. Yeah, it's a great hat. Very comfortable. Fits my head.

[Brian Bates]

I rarely, rarely wear a hat on the podcast. People always complain about it, but Vori, like, they have to dim their. Their phone. But Vori hats are so comfortable, even I want to wear one. Dusty even loves it. Dusty hates everything.

[Aaron Weber]

Dusty hates everything on Earth. Earth.

[Brian Bates]

But he likes Fiori even at the airport. It's incredibly versatile and designed to look great in everyday life. We all love to wear it. And right now I'm into the Sunday performance jogger. I wore it yesterday as I performed and jogged. It's part of their Sunday collection. It's so soft, lightweight with a four way performance stretch. So it moves with you with no restriction. I move a zigzag a lot. You know, you got. It's hard to keep up.

[Aaron Weber]

Very physical comic.

[Brian Bates]

Viori keeps up with me be it's everyone's favorite jogger from Vuori. On top of that, find what you need on the website and it takes no time. Vuori is an investment in your happiness. For our. It says to ad lib here but I've already been ad libbing so. Vuori is an investment in your happiness. For our listeners they're offering 20 off your first purchase. Give yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile versatile, versatile clothing on the [e-mail] Nate that's V U O-R-I.com Nate not only will we receive 20 off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any US order over $75 and free returns. Go to vuori.com Nate and discover the versatility of vori clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

[Aaron Weber]

Trace lawless tris3 3 trace lawless 3.

[Brian Bates]

Lawless 3 lawless Last week we had a debate about whether you can have coffee in church.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I actually listened. I heard that. That's an interesting debate.

[Brian Bates]

I am pro coffee in church buildings. Studies have shown that holding a warm beverage can influence how you perceive and interact with other people. More generous, caring, trustworthy, etc.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, more generous. That's what it is. Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

It works for the church.

[Aaron Weber]

Or she get that offer and play it around. Yeah. Yeah. Hold something warm.

[Brian Bates]

Yep.

[Aaron Weber]

I just. Yeah. I just don't know if I believe. Believe holding a warm drink will make you give more money to people.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. We talked about this recently, didn't we?

[Aaron Weber]

I'm remembering now.

[Brian Bates]

It was a study that showed people like react to people differently. More warmly.

[Aaron Weber]

Do we do an episode on temperature or feel or touch.

[Brian Bates]

Touch.

[Aaron Weber]

Touch. We did an episode on touch.

[Brian Bates]

Yep.

[Aaron Weber]

Where we talked about this.

[Brian Bates]

That's right.

[Aaron Weber]

I don't remember how I reacted to it. That episode. I'm telling you how I'm reacting to it right now.

[Brian Bates]

Well, we didn't.

[Aaron Weber]

Sounds like nonsense.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

We didn't talk about generosity then. I think. Think Dusty Covered sounds like nonsense for you. So you didn't have.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay that's right.

[Brian Bates]

Any study Nate or Dusty are going to shut down.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well I'll just say keep on going with it. You know where all the drinks are warm. Okay.

[Aaron Weber]

That's a good joke.

[Brian Bates]

I wish I'd have thought of it.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Colton. Benji Binge.

[Aaron Weber]

Ben Gay. Colton Ben Gay. Benji Bungie. They made the game Halo. You ever play Halo?

[Brian Bates]

No.

[Aaron Weber]

It's the best game. Halo 2 is the best game ever made. All right. Colton.

[Brian Bates]

I remember during a college class I couldn't stop laughing at the worst time and I had to force myself to think of something sad to calm down. I usually think of someone who has passed. I know grim but it works. Has there ever been a moment where you found yourself laughing when you shouldn't be? If so do you have. Do you have a go to method of or thought that helps you stop? I think about Aaron's act.

[Aaron Weber]

I put on Aaron's special on my.

[Brian Bates]

Footage usually start crying. Your Special just hit 400000 views by the way.

[Aaron Weber]

Did it?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Are the comments getting mean?

[Brian Bates]

Just the ones I About two thirds of them. Different accounts.

[Aaron Weber]

Just from all your alter egos on YouTube.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, yeah yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

This is anything I remember school. It's anywhere you're not supposed to laugh.

[Brian Bates]

You know you have this in your class.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's.

[Aaron Weber]

It's. Which I guess is the question but church. Sitting at church, me and my siblings. Yeah some of the laughs we had there. I mean it was painful holding it in. And then school. Somebody just like. I hate to be crass but like just a fart at the right time is. It's tough to beat. It's tough to be. It's still to this day maybe I'll outgrow that. I have no idea. But it can be very funny.

[Brian Bates]

The fact you're not supposed to be laughing makes you laugh that much more.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. I'm just trying to think as somebody who teaches history and there's pretty dark moments like the worst possible time. I'm just thinking going through my mind and thinking like where in my class would be the worst.

[Aaron Weber]

What do you think the worst day in history is?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

The worst day in history.

[Aaron Weber]

It's some human suffering. What do you think the worst. The worst day of all time. I want the day date.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

The date.

[Aaron Weber]

Yes.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You've got a time machine. You're trying to go back. Good gracious.

[Brian Bates]

World history.

[Aaron Weber]

World history, dude.

[Brian Bates]

I mean the asteroid hit the dinosaurs.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, probably. That was probably it. Let me get on the Calendar for that one. It's definitely bc I'm not.

[Aaron Weber]

That's right. All right. It's a tough question. We'll come back to. Yeah, those are, those are the kind of history questions I'll be asking. So just get ready for.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's good.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, I keep forgetting. Brandon Howe, fourth grade teacher here.

[Aaron Weber]

Now that's a real educator. Fourth grade?

[Brian Bates]

Yep. The story from Brian's childhood.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. You don't have to get as much of an education, but they, they work real hard.

[Aaron Weber]

They work way harder. I mean, you're teaching adults. These kids need, they need to have their hands held.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Look, my son is in fourth grade right now, and I just want to say this right now to be clear.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I respect primary school teachers so much more.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You know what you can't do?

[Aaron Weber]

What's that?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Just tell them to leave. You can't, you can't do.

[Brian Bates]

Get out.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

My students wander off and they're just rejoiced, you know, like my son was wandering around outside the school. He'd be happy about it.

[Aaron Weber]

I think I got sent to the hallway a couple times. I guess you. Maybe that was later, but yeah, just go sit in the hallway or something if you're being disruptive. Or go to the principal's office.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But didn't you go to Catholic school?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. So like, if they told you to sit in the hallway and you didn't stay in the hallway, there would be consequences.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right. Like, I just feel like at other schools they're like, they see the kid walking by, they're like, I guess he's going where he's supposed to be going. Walk out the door, got some parents picking him up. I don't know.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. Like, what year do you teach most of the students?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Most of them are first and second year students, so. But I get all across the board, they're borderline adults.

[Brian Bates]

17, 18, they're.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They're officially adults. Although every once in a while I'll get a student who's like in high school and taking a college class for credit. And it's funny because they totally expect that I would know that they were like 16. But if you're in college and when you're in high school, you're actually so sharp that it doesn't really stand out.

[Brian Bates]

Out.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So it's kind of a cool thing.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, fourth grade teacher here. The story from Brian's childhood is All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury. This has been a few weeks, Aaron, but, well, I'll finish this. Believe it or not, the story is still being used today in our reading curriculum. It's a story on how jealousy can cause people to do things they'll regret. A couple months ago, I told you and Dusty about this story. I remember in school about a kid getting locked in a closet. It was a place where it rained every day and they had one hour of sunshine and they locked this kid in a closet and they forgot about him. So when they came back in, they're like, oh man, this kid's been locked in the closet. And. And you realize guys like, that's crazy. That seems so, whatever. But a lot of people said, no, this is a very. So the story is it was set on the planet Venus, okay? A girl comes from Earth. They've never seen the sun. On Venus, it only rains. And she says, I've seen the sun. And she tells them about it and they're like, you're crazy. And they get so frustrated with her. They lock her in a closet or they're jealous of her maybe. Then once every seven years for one hour, the sun comes out. They all go out and play, enjoy the sun, come back in. They're like, oh, she's still in the closet and it's going to be seven more years before she sees the sun.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

What? Well, well, I was already against colonizing Mars. By the time we get to Venus, we're pretty.

[Brian Bates]

But it's a very, I guess it's a very well known story.

[Aaron Weber]

I had never heard of this is it interesting though, published in 1954. Things were a little darker back then. They didn't feel a need to put a positive spin on things. Huh?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You think when she came out she was like, I don't care. I still saw the sun more than you. You think she tried to hold up, maintain the front?

[Brian Bates]

Maybe, maybe. It's hard to say.

[Aaron Weber]

Kristen, last comment.

[Brian Bates]

Christian Grable, Gray Bell, Gray Beal.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

If I had this group of names when I tried to read them in my class, to call roll will be a nightmare. I don't know where you're getting your listeners from.

[Aaron Weber]

We do get some especially weird names. Mon Dragon.

[Brian Bates]

People think I pick because of the names. I don't, I, I don't think about the names. We're not. Unless it's some business. If it's Bob's Automotive or something like that, then maybe I ain't gonna gonna. Unless they have a really good comment, you know what I mean?

[Aaron Weber]

I'd like to hear from Bob's Automotive, actually. If they write in, I want to hear What Bob's Automotive says. I'd love to hear their comment, Christian.

[Brian Bates]

Great deal. I was just listening to an earlier episode about hotels and was curious if Aaron is still collecting hotel keys. He must be close to the world record by now.

[Aaron Weber]

I'm getting there. I just started a second binder.

[Brian Bates]

Whoa. So how many is in the first one?

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, God, probably. Probably three or three hundred or so, if I had to guess. I haven't counted them, but I keep them in little, like the baseball card things. So it's nine per page. So I've got a whole big binder's worth now.

[Brian Bates]

Like this weekend, the hotel, they gave me two room keys. You put them both in there?

[Aaron Weber]

No, I just keep one.

[Brian Bates]

That'd be cheating. Yeah, right.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. Only one per trip I put in there. But I was on three different hotels, three this weekend. So I like it. It adds up pretty quick.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

The Guinness World Record guy comes in to do the record and he's like, so. Wait a second, wait a second. I'm sorry, we've got duplicates in here. Call it off, Call it off. Takes his tuxedo off, just rips the tie off and storms out.

[Brian Bates]

Well, we were all part of a world record for longest comedy show.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

We were. That's exactly right.

[Brian Bates]

We know they can be strict, these Guinness people.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Oh, yes, absolutely. Had to keep 10 people in the room at all times.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Do you want to talk about that? Explain what that is?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, I think we talked it before and it just came up on my Facebook memories feed from, like, was it 10 years ago? Does that sound right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It was 2015.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. 10 years ago would have been the first year they did it.

[Brian Bates]

And it was during the comedy festival.

[Aaron Weber]

So that's before I. I started my first open mic in Nashville. Was the Monday after that, really? At Bobby's.

[Brian Bates]

Wow.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. So I. I missed the first.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So we inspired you to get involved in this?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Did you come and watch?

[Aaron Weber]

No, I watched the live stream on Nashville.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You were like, I do that.

[Brian Bates]

Why? You drove?

[Aaron Weber]

No. What is laptop? I am a responsible driver. I want to make that very clear.

[Brian Bates]

So I think we've talked about.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But it.

[Brian Bates]

But for people haven't heard, it's. We set a Guinness World Record for the longest consecutive non stop comedy show. I think we demolished the old record.

[Aaron Weber]

Well, yeah, by a few days. Right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

We did. We did. I would challenge anybody to go to the Guinness World Record page and check out how long it actually is.

[Brian Bates]

I mean, our system has been broken, right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I don't know. I don't Think so. But, you know, as it turns out, we're only registered. And this is. Wow, I'm blowing. I'm. I'm leaking out some information here.

[Brian Bates]

Yes.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I mean, obviously on the, on the page, but we only got it certified to the point where the guy handed.

[Aaron Weber]

Us the trophy or on Guinness World Records dot com.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, that makes sense. So as soon as we broke it, he's like, you broke it and then he stopped.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right. So it's not actually like eight days long. It's. It's, it's just at the moment that we broke it, 80 hours.

[Aaron Weber]

Whoa. Is that true?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, that's not.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So there you go. So if you guys want to do comedy for 3 days and 13 hours.

[Aaron Weber]

80 hours, 5 minutes. Minutes. It's still pretty long.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's very long.

[Brian Bates]

It's still pretty over four days, right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yes. And the best part was we were like, we want to do this.

[Brian Bates]

No, a little bit over three days.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It was DJ Buckley's idea. Yeah, I remember, dude, this was, I mean, this was a year before he got me, Joe Kelly, Dusty and Chad Ryden into, into Smoker's Happy Cigar Shop and was like, I've got an idea. And he just looked crazy. And we were like, this could be good or bad. Yeah. And he laid it out there and it was so much fun. But you had to keep the rules were you had to have had show that you had 10 paying gigs in the last year, which I only had because I ran that cigar shop show.

[Aaron Weber]

There you go.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I remember that you had to perform for 15 minutes. There couldn't be a five minute set. At least 15 minutes on stage and there had be 10 people in the room. And I remember. Can I just tell my story about this?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You know, you know, I'm not, I'm not a Bates or Weber level comic even now, but back then I was new to it and I had signed up, had a Saturday night show and when people would come over from the festival, they'd spike them in. You remember this? Hannibal Burris came over.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And I was up and they got a call that Nate and Eric Andre were going to come over and do sets and they would just spike him in wherever you go. And they were like, they were like, hey, like Nate and Eric Andre on the way over here. And I just started being like, please God, don't get here before I go on stage. Because if they got there before I went up, I would have to follow them. And I was like, this is going to be horrible. And sure enough they showed up. Up. And, you know, to this day, I think about what a great comic Nate is, because I assumed Nate would go first and then Eric would go. Yeah, but actually Eric. Andre went first because I think if you've ever seen him live, you know that you can't possibly match that energy or follow him. And I was like, how's Nate gonna follow this? And this was. I mean, this was 10 years ago. So Nate walks on stage and goes, I'm just gonna run through the set. I'm doing on the Tonight show this week. And that's how you follow.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, that will do it.

[Aaron Weber]

So then you follow Nate on this show.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

[Brian Bates]

He opened for you. You.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It felt like a slow roll down a hill instead of a drop off a cliff. And it felt so. That felt great.

[Aaron Weber]

How about that? Look at it 10 years later.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It was not good, but hey, it wasn't terrible.

[Aaron Weber]

Ten years later, here you are, you took over his podcast.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's great. Yeah, it's great to be here.

[Aaron Weber]

That's. That's quiet. I had no idea about that. Yeah, that's really fun.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, that's super awesome.

[Aaron Weber]

Well, as you know, Neck, we're coming up on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Well, we're a year and some change away, but. Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Well, this weekend is the 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War.

[Aaron Weber]

And we didn't even know that when we picked the category.

[Brian Bates]

No, I just noticed it right before I left the house. I was doing some last minute research, and then it said April 18th. Paul Revere wrote. I was like, April 18th. And it said April 19th.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Battles, Lexington and conquered.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. And I'm like. I did the math. I'm like, it's 250 years ago.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

So how about that?

[Aaron Weber]

And we have a historian here. I'd like to talk. So just. Can we just talk about the Revolutionary War for a little bit?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I would love to.

[Aaron Weber]

So you were. You're for it?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I'm. Well, I'm for it now. Took a while. There's some years where I was like, I don't know, we could have. You know, having a monarch, you know, it's really hard to. To turn against the idea of having one guy who's just born and everybody goes, well, I guess he owns everything, you know?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. What. What do you think? First of all, we learn about the Revolutionary War as Americans. How different is it? Do you know? How are British people? If you grow up a child in England. Are they even taught about this period of history or is it just kind of a. You know, they've been in Empire for so long. Who cares about that little. Those colonies.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right. You know what's funny is that, like, I don't know how to answer this question because I'm from North Carolina, but. And, you know, you would think I would know because I've had several British friends and actually hung out with them around the 4th of July, but most of our relationship consisted of me just screaming at them, we won. And so I never really asked them how it felt.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. I'm just curious if they even. They even talk about it.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. They've had a lot of war, so maybe it's not real. How.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And they.

[Aaron Weber]

They've been around forever.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

You know, and we're only. We're not even 250 years.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, I was. To me. I know. 1492, when Columbus came. It's not the official.

[Aaron Weber]

Sailed the ocean blue.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Sail the ocean.

[Brian Bates]

But that's the. That's the date we have in our head for when America was discovered.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, discovered by Europeans, maybe not you. People who lived here knew about it. They were right all.

[Brian Bates]

Where's Dusty?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Does Dustin think there is that old.

[Aaron Weber]

I'm not even sure that's a good question.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I wish he was here. I want to do this to him.

[Aaron Weber]

Come on.

[Brian Bates]

That's a good question, though. Anyway, Europeans discovered 1492. In my mind, the country kind of got going almost right after that. But there was more time in between that and the Declaration of Independence than it has been since Declaration Independence to now.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, that's a good point. I never thought about that.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's the kind of thing I should be saying when I teach. That's a. That's a good point. Yeah. Because, I mean, it's the Spanish. The Spanish and the Portuguese, they're the ones who dominate the whole world. And the. The English basically get started up as, like a complete upstart, and they don't even have a navy. I mean, at first they just. I mean, mostly was. I mean, they have, like, some ships, but mostly what they do is.

[Aaron Weber]

Well, they were an island, so they had some boats.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. Yeah. So that's the thing is, if you're an island, you got to protect yourself. But they would hire, like, basically pirates. Like, they would get privateers.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And be like, hey, like, you fly under our flat and we'll let you pirate. And we'll kind of endorse that. And you can keep your stuff. The stuff that you take so they.

[Brian Bates]

Liked that guy in the parking lot in Detroit a lot.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Actually, he did wear a Union Jack shirt the whole time, which is way weird because this was much later when they got that.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, that's interesting. So I read that. First of all, I'm so embarrassed how much. Either I didn't know about the American Revolutionary War or forgot. I'll just say forgot. Some of it hadn't happened when I was.

[Aaron Weber]

90% of mine is from Mel Gibson's the Paper Patriots. So we have to wash some of that off.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's. That's literally my job at MTSU is trying to back people out of what they think they know about the revolution you sent us.

[Aaron Weber]

It's a good movie, though. I mean, it is. It is a fun ride. I'll say that. A fun ride.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It is. And some of my friends actually were extras, so you can see my buddies running down there.

[Aaron Weber]

Is that real?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, they shot it, like, just in the border of South Carolina. North Carolina, I think it's that one. Or Braveheart. I can't remember. They're all the same movie anyway. I just. Everybody just turned it off.

[Brian Bates]

Your history professor, you're like, ah, it's.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

All the same to Mel Gibson person running downhills. That's the whole. Most of the movies, either the Patriot or Brave.

[Brian Bates]

I can't remember Scotland, he's fighting for.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Some kind of independence and people were running downhills. Some of them were my friends in one of them.

[Aaron Weber]

So did the British at the time that this is all going down? Did what. What was. What was. Were they called Britain? Were they called England?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

What were they called England? I can't remember all this side of things. I mean, like, red coat, United Kingdom comes later.

[Aaron Weber]

But yeah, okay, so they're not the British.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, no, no.

[Brian Bates]

That's like Great Britain, the.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

When they. They form with the other ones. I'm not a British historian, you know, they only appear, but they're a major.

[Aaron Weber]

Player in this war.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They are British. Yeah, they're British at this point. British are coming. I was trying to make a point about how that's not for 30 years. Like, everyone's. It doesn't even work.

[Aaron Weber]

The UK is coming, the Soviet Union's.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Here, and they're like, what is that, Communism? Like, no, we don't know what that is yet.

[Brian Bates]

I was trying to make a point of how ignorant I was about. If you asked me, when did the Revolutionary War end? I would have said, well, it had been before 1776, because that's when we signed the Declaration Independence. But I think I had to confuse the Constitution.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yes, you did. This is. All right.

[Brian Bates]

Well, I know I did now, but I think that's. Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Dude. One of my favorite things is. And I've, like, tried to campaign against this is like, you drive past somebody and they've got, like, a sticker on their truck, and it says, we the people. Underneath it says 1776. Yes, sir, but we the peoples from the Constitution, which was written in 1787.

[Brian Bates]

And I appreciate when you tell them that.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I don't. They usually. People have other stickers on their truck that make me. Yeah. Believe that they don't want to be correct.

[Aaron Weber]

Hold on. What's the first line of the Declaration of Independence?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Because that's when in the course of human events.

[Aaron Weber]

Ah. It's not nearly as catchy.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's not. You're right. It's. I mean, it's a beautiful.

[Aaron Weber]

And that would not fit on a bumper sticker.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

So we the people doesn't appear in the Declaration. Declaration at all. But Life, liberty, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yes, it does.

[Aaron Weber]

So you can put that in there. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And look, I appreciate the spirit. You know what I'm saying? Somebody has that on their truck. To me, it's like they appreciate this place. And that's what I appreciate.

[Aaron Weber]

That's what it's about. Yeah, okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Absolutely. But it's just. It's really hard when you're driving by with your pen, trying to mark them wrong, the window of your car, you veer over and hit the trees in the median. All right.

[Brian Bates]

So what I read was that we'd been fighting some other wars. French Indian war, things like that. It was really getting. It was financially draining on Great Britain's economy. So when those things kind of got settled down, they're like, well, we gotta get our money back, start taxing these colonists. So they started putting on a ton of taxes. Is that right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So, like, here's the thing. It's not necessarily the taxes, like, paying the taxes themselves. For a lot of Americans. It's the principle of it all. Like. Yeah, you got to go back and realize that, like, the. The English colonies that were set up, they were set up for, like, so many different reasons. You got, like, religious freedom with, like. Well, I wouldn't say it's really. The Puritans were nuts, and it was the freedom to have their own faith. And you are. I thought you. That. Either that or you were Amish. I didn't see what you drove here, but. But so like, they're. The colonies have nothing in common. They have, like, nothing in common whatsoever. They're all kind of their relationships with Great Britain. So, like, one of the things that happens in the American Revolution that you see a huge change is that, like, Pennsylvania newspapers are talking about what's happened in Boston, which, like, they didn't care before.

[Aaron Weber]

So that was not the case before this guy.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Quakers, like. Like, I mean, you've got the earlier colonies. You know, the first one is Jamestown, Virginia. Right. I mean, that's just. That's a corporation that's set up to make money. That's what it's for. It's a. It's a crown charter colony. And so, like, that's the reason they start sending, you know, the stories about them trying to grow tobacco and people starving and everything.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

The whole idea is they're just trying to give people land so they'll go move over there and they. Actually, what they do is they give out head rights. So if you're a single man and you can get over there, they'll give you two head rights, which I think is like 40 square acres.

[Brian Bates]

What is that?

[Aaron Weber]

That?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's like 40 square acres, but if you.

[Aaron Weber]

Good amount of land.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But they'll give you one more for anybody you bring with you, because they want you to bring, like, your wife and kids so that you won't go there, just go nuts looking for gold and then starve to death.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So you, like, you'll be invested. Right. And then, you know, England's an island, so there's, like, no space.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So there's tons of people. The population's growing. Where do you send them? And then colonies have demonstrated that they can make you incredibly powerful. Right. With the Spanish. So the English went in on that game, and that's why they set that up. But the Puritans that establish what is Boston and Harvard, and they set up in 1630, it's a completely different game. What they want is the freedom. They're breakaways from the Church of England. They believe they've got the proper way to do things, and if they go get their own town, they can show everybody exactly how God wants them to live. But it also makes them really kind of nuts. I mean, like, they. They believe that, like, most of them are going to hell even if they live the right life. So it's very stressful. But one of the things.

[Aaron Weber]

It's a tough way to live.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It is a tough way. There's some crazy stories about, like, apparently one woman threw her baby down A. Well, because she said, at least now I know she knows what she knows she's not going to heaven. Like, she doesn't have to worry about it. I was like, I don't know if you know where you're going now, but I would like to have at least a coin Tower Sauce's chance.

[Aaron Weber]

You know, I would maybe park illegally or something.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I'd maybe eat chips. I'm gonna try Bugles during Lynch.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aaron Weber]

But.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, so. But they're just completely different. And. And like, even when Quakers show up in the. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they're not down with other people's religious freedom. They just want to do their thing. They run them out. So they.

[Brian Bates]

Georgia, like, Sec. Scc.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Georgia was a prison colony. I mean, it was like they sent prisoners there.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

This guy James Oglethorpe, thought that he could take the debtors prisoners from the old world and bring them there to be soldiers, and they would appreciate that. And they were not very good at it. So pretty quickly became a slave colony. Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. That makes sense, though, that. I mean, we talked about. A few weeks ago, we did an episode of Virginia and we talked about Patrick Henry.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

And give me liberty, give me death. That was about Boston.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Or.

[Aaron Weber]

Or give me death.

[Brian Bates]

What did I say?

[Aaron Weber]

Give me liberty, give me death.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Give me liberty, comma.

[Aaron Weber]

The or is the operative word.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

True freedom comes through death. It's like, wow, he was goth back then. That's pretty. It's pretty ahead of the times.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Just give them both to me, dude. I don't care.

[Brian Bates]

What if you just went, liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty. But that was talking about Boston. And. And to your point, it was very rare, I guess for once colony almost at state to care about what's going on in another state. But that's how big it was getting the problem.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's the. It's the fact that the British, first of all, they passed us on all the colonies at the same time. So, like, for the first time, they had something in color common. And what they had in common was nobody asked them about these stamps.

[Aaron Weber]

Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

First you get the sugar tax, and then you get the Stamp act, which is really what makes people very mad, because it's like the sugar tax is like an excise tax. You don't see that you're paying it. Right. It's like what's happening with the tariffs. When you have tariffs. Right. You don't see that. But with like the Stamp act, it's like a sales tax. Right. Where you go in and you see that Line at the bottom.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So you saw that it was on there. So it made everybody mad, and they. They went nuts.

[Brian Bates]

The Stamp act was any piece of paper.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It was like playing cards, legal documents, like, all that kind of stuff. So of course, it, like, hit people in cities more than it hit people outside of it. Right. So that's the reason you see the big riots happen in the city.

[Aaron Weber]

Were these things designed to. Were they punitive to us or were. It was just a necessity. They just needed the money.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Here's the thing about it all is that, all right, so when the British win the. The. The Seven Years War, the French and Indian War, it's like all part of the same thing.

[Aaron Weber]

It's like seven years, they get like, all this.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They get. They get control over all this land, land to the west. And in order to not start a war with the Native Americans out there, which, I mean, they're still powerful at this time, they have to agree that no American colonists will cross this demarcation line.

[Brian Bates]

And what is this line? What was considered the west then?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's kind of the Appalachian Mountains crest there, right? Yes. This is where we are right now. We're far west. Yeah. And so the thing is that, like, American colonists are going to listen, so the British literally have to start policing this, which, like, jacks up their costs. And so a part of the reason, it's not just the debt from the American Revolution, it's like they literally have to maintain a presence here to stop these colonists from going across and starting a war. That. This is the thing. It's like, it's really a miscommunication, a lot of it, because you can't. I mean, it takes months for a message to get across, right? So the American colonists see the British taxing them, and then all of a sudden, there are these red coats everywhere, right? And they're like, so you passed a tax on us without asking us, and now you're going to shoot us if we don't listen? But from the British perspective, they're like, we're trying stop you guys from starting a war that could basically destroy your colonies.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So that's a big part of it. But the debt is another thing, too, because you didn't have a long time to pay back debt back then, so you kind of had to, like, pay it back quick. Or if the French started a war and you burned your credit, like, you'd lose the next one.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. It's not funny. I'm sorry.

[Brian Bates]

Now I'm sitting here thinking, when we go To Mars and colonize it.

[Aaron Weber]

Yes.

[Brian Bates]

Every country will eventually get the technology to go to Mars. And then is there going to be another war breaking out? It's people that even from our country go to Mars. You know, on SpaceX or whatever, after a while you're like, guys, we don't need this United States taxes on us.

[Aaron Weber]

Right, Right.

[Brian Bates]

And we'll start an intergalactic war with Mars.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, my thing has always been, like, if you know anything about colonies, like, if you study them at all, let's assume we don't. Okay. You don't want to be, you don't want to be a colonist. Like, you just, just like, people starve, they die. Like, if you, if you look at, like what it's like when you first, they first go to Jamestown. Like, you wouldn't want to be that. Anytime somebody says the word colonist, don't. Don't go along with them. Yeah, it's a, it's going to be a long time.

[Brian Bates]

Okay, before, before you want to wait it out and let them get some stuff.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, let them get some. Yeah, let them get the tobacco growing. I'm assume that's what we're going to do on Mars.

[Aaron Weber]

It'll be legal up there that way still.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. A lot of them do think of themselves as, as Englishmen, and that's the reason they're so mad whenever they just start passing taxes on them. Parliament starts passing these taxes.

[Aaron Weber]

Taxes, okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Because they're like, we're supposed to be members of this whole thing and you didn't ask us. Like, the British just come with the understanding. Well, we fought a lot of this war to keep the French from taking your colony. So, like, you're going to pay that back. Right. But again, when you pass a tax asking and a bunch of soldiers show up, that doesn't look like it's being done, like, with your interest at heart.

[Brian Bates]

Taxation without representation.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Taxation without representation, which, by the way, the stamp tax gets. Gets repealed six months later. It doesn't even last that long.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, really?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, yeah, they realize it. But the problem is that when Parliament decides to stop the stamp tax, they have a new prime minister. And this guy's like, well, the reason what happens. Well, I should back up and say that what happens is that mobs form and destroy property, like after the stamp tax is announced, before it even gets put into place.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Like, they bash out windows, like, tear things down. They're like hanging effigies of people by nooses and town squares where's.

[Aaron Weber]

Most of this app is it happening everywhere.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Boston is the hotbed of it.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay, okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, Boston. Because those Puritans. Those Puritans, yeah. They all believed you had to read the Bible to. As a part of your faith. So the literacy rates in Boston are like sky high. Oh, so they can read all the pamphlets. Right.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Brian Bates]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

There like some estimates, like, literacy rate in Boston's as high as it was.

[Aaron Weber]

So they're down in Charleston. Like, if we knew what was going on, we'd be upset.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, Charleston, there are people who are mad different places, but it's really the cities. Right. Again, because like the stamp tax is going to hit you if you're like, what they do is they, they. They directly put this tax that people have to deal with. It are like lawyers and people who own printing presses. Right. So the, the, the people who control the law and the people who control the media.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And those are the wrong people to make mad.

[Aaron Weber]

Right, right. Literacy rate, 1776 is. It was about 60 to 70%. So that's lower than it is now.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Crazy lower than it is.

[Aaron Weber]

What, wait, what is it, what is it now?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, in most developed countries, you're the person percent, like 90, 99%.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, global, it's 86.3.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, you gotta, you know, there's a lot of countries where they're like, women shouldn't read, you know.

[Aaron Weber]

Right, right, right. That factors in for sure. So the U.S. were. U.S. were pretty good developed nations often exceeding 96%.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. No, but that's crazy impressive for the time. So what ends up happening is the mobs go nuts. The new prime minister realizes six months later that it's a terrible idea, the Stamp act isn't really going to raise the revenue, and he decides to cancel it and they're going to reintroduce something different. But he also knows that from the colonial perspective, they're probably going to think that it was being nuts that made him cancel it. Right. So he's like, we can't let that happen.

[Brian Bates]

Reinforcing bad behavior.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. So they, they crack down harder. Right. And what have the colonists learned? They go, well, when we were nuts, that stopped the stamp tax. So they send more people. We'll act crazier.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And the British go, we can't let them think crazy. And it's just a vicious cycle. And with like an ocean between you back then, with a ship that would take like months to get across across, you can't really have like a sit down and talk, you know?

[Aaron Weber]

Did, did the co. Did people in Boston, what were Their accents. Like at this point, did we know, did they have British accents?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I have. That's a good question. No clue.

[Brian Bates]

I thought that too. I wondered could I even understand because in the Patriot.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. I'm just curious. I. I wonder like when that I'm guessing with these kids didn't grow up in England. They grew up in Boston.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Like, but I don't know if they have British accent.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And there are people who come from all over the world there too, so.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay. Okay.

[Brian Bates]

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[Aaron Weber]

It was a wrap.

[Brian Bates]

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[Aaron Weber]

Deodorant.

[Brian Bates]

Solid, deep and smoky.

[Aaron Weber]

It's good.

[Brian Bates]

It's awesome. I give criminals Palo Santo deodorant a try and now it's. I'm a customer. This is what this one is, but it's Palo Santo. But it's deep and smoky is the. What flavor? What would you call that?

[Aaron Weber]

Well, the persuasion.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, Persuasion. That's why Aaron makes the big bucks.

[Aaron Weber]

I think it's.

[Brian Bates]

I think it's the scent I use my Cremo. What are you doing Palo Santo this morning? I am still sitting here this afternoon and smelling great. Cremo offers two options for odor protection. A deodorant and a combo Deodorant, deodorant and anti perspirant.

[Aaron Weber]

There you go.

[Brian Bates]

That's the move I like. Oh, it is?

[Aaron Weber]

I think so.

[Brian Bates]

Okay.

[Aaron Weber]

I think so.

[Brian Bates]

I like that I can choose the best one for me. Aaron does both. Yeah, you can decide whatever you want. Crimo is amazing sponsor because they care about men's grooming needs. And let's face it, we deserve grooming products from a company with high standards. Head to target or target.com to find Cremo new line of antipers, antiperspirants and deodorants.

[Aaron Weber]

That's why you don't use it. You don't like Trying to say it.

[Brian Bates]

Sweat resistant in the Italian bergamot and Palo Santos sets. Once again, that's Target or target dot com. Do you think if you went back in that time and just overheard a conversation from 1770s, you we could easily understand what they're saying?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I mean, probably just. I mean, I don't know. I mean, the thing is, I've read what they write and that's pretty hard to read sometimes, but I get it.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. They use Fs as Ss.

[Brian Bates]

Stupid idiots.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's why we're better now. The future is better.

[Brian Bates]

It's always better.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. They're congref. Don't they write that?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yes, and it is.

[Aaron Weber]

What's the F in the S thing all about?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I have no clue. I really don't know.

[Brian Bates]

George Washington told us what we're fighting for. He's done two sketches about it. Yes. So then the Boston Massacre, it kind of led up to that, right? It was bowling. Bowling, bowling.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean, this was years later, right? So I mean, this, it's. It's. It's such a slow process, right, because you go from like these riots happening, happen, and then the first battles are like 10 years later.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Brian Bates]

Chris Crispus Attucks. Another name I heard. I forgot who he was. I couldn't. I know now, but I couldn't have told you yesterday.

[Aaron Weber]

It's a cereal.

[Brian Bates]

Oh. Do you know Crispus addiction?

[Aaron Weber]

No. I know Crispix.

[Brian Bates]

I bet you did.

[Aaron Weber]

Who's Crispus? Who's that?

[Brian Bates]

He was the first person to die from the, from, from the war. The Boston Massacre was some British soldiers. Things were getting out of hand. Somebody got a little loosey goosey with a gunsy, got some. Fired some shots. This guy died. And it was kind of a rallying cry for the colonists, like, they're killing us now.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. It was also an incredible, incredible example of like propaganda of a propaganda mill for this because. Pull up Chris Pigs.

[Brian Bates]

What does he look like?

[Aaron Weber]

I'm just trying to give some context to what we're talking about here. This is original cereal.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

This is way funnier for all. You guys don't know what's coming anyway, so, like, I mean, yeah, Christmas Acts was a black man. And it's fascinating because we don't know much about him. Like, the thing about port cities at the time was people come from all over the world and just end up there, right? Because these, I mean, there's like Star Wars. Just like Star wars.

[Aaron Weber]

Because if you miss your boat or something, you're just Stuck there.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Really? Mose Eisley is a. Well, no, it's not necessarily that. It's that people are in dock. Right. And so you don't really know, then people will stay behind. But anyway, so, yeah, you end up with this interesting mix in these cities, and he's the first one shot. But. And the story, really, a lot of people don't know this, but what happens later on is that the question is, were these guys just awful and they just opened fire because they hated colonists?

[Brian Bates]

Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Or were they reasonably scared because colonists had, like, assaulted people, like, literally tarred and feathered people, destroyed property? I mean, these mobs will be drunk and out of control.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And if you're in the British army at this time, like, there's no sense of patriotism. It's a job.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And this is not the job. Yeah. You're a mall cop, and this is the worst mall.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right. Like, if you have any say. So you don't want to be there in Boston.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right. So, like, you're probably, like, no experience, likely lower experience, and. And probably, you know, not getting your first choice. And so what ends up happening is there's a. Apparently, like, there's a scuffle, and one of the soldiers thinks they hear the order to fire. Then everyone fires because they thought they missed the order to fire. And. Yeah. I mean, same outcome. But later on, John Adams actually defends those soldiers in court and has them found innocent of malicious intent.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. He was the trial lawyer. Yeah. Because I've seen John Adams on hbo, which is a great.

[Brian Bates]

Paul Giamatti.

[Aaron Weber]

It was Paul Giamatti. Yes. Unbelievable show. Yeah. That's. That's how I knew that. Were the. Were citizens allowed to have guns at this point, or was it just the British soldiers that had guns?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, I mean, people would have guns because it was just a part of your life. I know less about, like, the details, but I know it was in the early colonies. There's this idea that everyone had a gun, but you were actually less likely to have one in a lot of places, especially if you were poor, because they were expensive, offensive.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But, yeah, I mean, they had them, but by the time you're out in the field, by the time the actual revolutionary, revolutionary army is formed, like, a substantial portion of Washington's men don't have shoes or guns.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I don't know the exact numbers.

[Aaron Weber]

Trying to think of which one I'd rather have. I think it's pretty close, dude. I think shoes so I could run.

[Brian Bates]

All right, so then when did the Boston Tea Party happen?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So the Boston tea party is 1773.

[Brian Bates]

I mean, is that in the, in the, in the order in the story?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So it happens after the Boston Massacre.

[Brian Bates]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And the story with that is what ends up happening is like, all these taxes have been passed and of course it's amping up. Right. You get more and more like both sides are getting crazier. The British are passing more regulations. They try to, try to like, target Boston specifically. I'm thinking that that'll stop the other states from, or other colonies from like, you know, feeling the, feeling the pain. By that point, it doesn't work. But what they do is they actually, it's not because they increase taxes, it's because they lower taxes, but only on the British merchants.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And they're like, colonists love tea, man. They're going to love this.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But they're mad because they're like, this is just another act of favoritism towards you.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, interesting.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And so that, that enrages them. And at that time, you're only supposed to trade with Britain. You're not allowed to, like, you know, sell some tea to the Spanish because they, they really want it.

[Aaron Weber]

You know, this might be a dumb question. Are average people, people concerned about this and upset about it, or is it just like high level people doing business that are. Because I'm just trying to think of like an, like a, like a commoner. Is he that affected by these taxes that he would resort to a mob in the streets? Or is he like, what, what do you, what do you think?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, it depends on where you are. Right. I mean, if you're in a city, you're more likely to see it.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

If you're out in the countryside, I mean, you know, you, you and you still, this is another thing. You still have tons of loyalists. But even in Boston, you know, when this whole war, when it's clear it's going to be a war happens, I think it's a. Is it a thousand loyalists who lived in Boston just leave. They leave with the British because they know, they see what's coming.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So like a big part of this thing is like, you don't know who your enemy is. Right. Everyone looks the same.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And you don't know if they're a spy. You don't know if they're on your side. I mean, the whole Benedict Arnold thing is just one big example of how this, like, plays out.

[Brian Bates]

He's another person that I knew a. If you said, who's Benedict Arnold. It's like, I'm pretty sure he's a traitor, but I couldn't have told you who he was until I researched last night. He started with almost an Americans, but they. The colonists, I guess they call. And then he defected over to the British.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. Yeah. In a pretty stunning act of betrayal where he was planning to give over a fort. Yeah, yeah. No, he's. Yeah, But. But. But it's just. It's. It's part and parcel of the fact that, like, a lot of these folks, even the officers in the Patriot army, they had been in the British. British Army. Right. So, like, that's. I mean, that's all there was before. I mean, there's not even an army until they just make one up in 1775 and say, Washington, you're the leader of it. And even, like, several colonies don't like it. They're mad. They're like, no, we're colonies. We're not, like, partisan and bigger.

[Brian Bates]

So we have a navy.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, not at all. There is zero navy. It is. We picked a fight with the world's biggest naval power.

[Aaron Weber]

No. Y'all come over here. We'll fight over here.

[Brian Bates]

Bring it over here, buddy.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, like, AP Poles, like, coaches poll number one. Number one navy. British.

[Aaron Weber]

They're the Alabama of. Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They're like, we're going to build some ships. And you know what they do get is they get a. They get a submarine out of this. They do build one of these.

[Brian Bates]

It's called the Turtle dude. Yes.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yes. It's.

[Brian Bates]

It's about this, Aaron.

[Aaron Weber]

No, but the submarine and the Revolutionary War.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I mean, made out of wood. Made out of wood.

[Brian Bates]

So how does it even sink?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I don't know. I didn't.

[Brian Bates]

Keeps going up. Like, what's the problem?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Once they told me it was made out of wood, I agreed. I said, I'm not getting in it. Yeah. But, yeah, it's like, basically, the guy. The guy who invented it had done. Had studied at Yale, and his project was trying to figure out how to make gunpowder explode underwater, which has got to be the coolest college life ever.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Just like, what are you doing? You're in a scuba diving outfit and you got a whole bunch of. A bunch of fire, but he figured out how to do it. So he built this thing that could go under. And, like, no, the thing is, like, nobody's looking for it, right? Nobody. Nobody's going to be like, oh, there's a submarine, because that didn't exist.

[Brian Bates]

Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But his whole thing was like, he's going to, like, crank this thing over to the ship and, like, essentially, like, stick gunpowder to it and then get far enough away from it and ignite it. And it's supposed to blow a hole in the side of a ship because they're wood. Yeah, he never pulled it off. Never. Never worked for him.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. So he was supposed to scoot over, get closer to the ship, stick it on, and then get out of there.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, yeah, that's the idea. But apparently, like, the gunpowder pack, like, I think he stories like he ignited it, but he couldn't get close enough, so he had to just let it go down the river to explode somewhere else.

[Brian Bates]

Because I was thought it was called the Turtle because it was slow, but it says because it looks similar to a turtle.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, two turtle shells. And one of my favorite things was when I was sending Bates, like, some of this information about maybe topics to work out, I realized that in 2007, there was a Brooklyn man who was like an artist. He was detained by the nypd. NYPD boat because he built a replica of it and was out in the Hudson River. Like, he's like, over. He was trying to get near the Queen Mary, too, with it.

[Brian Bates]

Not good.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No. And he was like, I just wanted to take a picture with it. And it's like, that's not why we made the Turtle. The Turtle and the Queen Mary 2. Also seems like something you would want to sync with the Revolutionary War submarine. There's tons of terrible ideas for submarines. We should talk about terrible Confederate technology sometimes. Or Civil War technology. They had one too, and it. It worked out even worse.

[Aaron Weber]

George Washington in a letter to Thomas Jefferson called the. The Turtle an effort of Genius in 1785.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So it's like Fire Festival gave it.

[Brian Bates]

The old college try.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Like Fire Festival. Yeah, I gotta get in on that. I mean, they keep on trying it a couple of times too, but I don't know, I guess, like, it could work, but it just never did.

[Aaron Weber]

So did we develop a navy during this war, or do we just rely on the French? French.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, we heavily rely on the French, but we do. We do get ships. I don't know. I don't know all the details of naval history, but we do get, you know, we get some. And then, you know, you have, like. You have privateers who come in on our side and things like. Which are, like, independent ship owners. So, you know, they. They join us, which is a terrible idea.

[Brian Bates]

Okay. So things are building up. Building up.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

And then April 18th, which would be this Thursday.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

1775 Paul Revere rides now. I read he probably did not say the British are coming because back then they wouldn't know what that meant.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, I don't.

[Aaron Weber]

I'm not sure cometh or something like that.

[Brian Bates]

It was more like, did he say.

[Aaron Weber]

The British doth cometh?

[Brian Bates]

What did they think? He said probably the loyalists are coming. And. And because everybody was British basically there. So they'd be like, why? Yeah, we're here, dude.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. And then they all saw themselves as British first.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Then they saw themselves as being from interest.

[Aaron Weber]

Interesting.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's why whenever the colony, whenever the British identity goes away, they don't think of themselves as Americans first. That's a new thing.

[Aaron Weber]

They think of themselves as Virginians.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. Which is why it's so remarkable. They all came together.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow. The United States is not. The United States are.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right.

[Aaron Weber]

That was a big moment. I can't remember the context for that, but I remember. Wasn't that a big moment with the first time they said the United States is versus the United States Patriot?

[Brian Bates]

That's actually.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's one of the more mind bending moments at Moneyball.

[Aaron Weber]

The US Is not mentioned in Braveheart. Once. I would say that that would be.

[Brian Bates]

All right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

There needs to be a sequel to Braveheart where he takes on the Soviet Union.

[Aaron Weber]

Can I ask you, Ben, are there. What is a historical movie that you think does a good job of.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Of telling the history of something?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, that's a good question.

[Aaron Weber]

Because all. I feel like all the blockbuster historical film are anachronistic and silly and just get things wrong. Right. But what's one that gets it right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Okay, so movies. Yeah, I would say. Have you ever seen Enemy of the Gates?

[Aaron Weber]

It's a World War II movie.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

World War II movie. It's about Vasily Zaitsev the sniper. The Soviet sniper.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, is this Tom Cruise? Oh, it's Valkyrie.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No, this is.

[Brian Bates]

I can't remember.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's Ed Harris, I think. All right, Valkyrie. No, that's vanilla Scott.

[Aaron Weber]

Is this Tom Hanks or is that big?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, no, man, that. That. That sniper showdown, like between Zaitsev and the. And the German snipers.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

In that tank factory which actually Henry Ford built in the Soviet Union for the Soviets. Crazy story. But that. I think that captures the opening scene where they're pulling in and they had these train loads of people and they're just dumping them out at the Germans.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And the guys, they're handing them a gun and they're going. They hand the first person a gun and the next person bullets. And the guy's going, when the person in front of you gets shot, pick up the gun, put in your bullets and keep shooting. Shooting. Yeah, that's how they, that's how the Soviets fought their way out.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Out of Stalingrad and that like that. That scene is epic. And you know, someone who spent a lot of time studying Soviet history as well in World War II, that, that is, that's really.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, that's cool.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Of course it's dramatized. Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Well, it's got to be a little. We gotta make it a movie.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Saving Private Ryan.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, those. I mean, those movies are good. I haven't seen Glory.

[Brian Bates]

Really?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, sorry. I'm the same. Obviously I haven't seen the Patriot or Braveheart of some sketches.

[Aaron Weber]

John Adams. I wish you'd watch John Adams.

[Brian Bates]

Were these. All right, so the shot heard around the world, right, is when the war started, right?

[Aaron Weber]

Lexington and Concord.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, Concord. Well, but we weren't.

[Aaron Weber]

We weren't conquered.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Ironic, isn't it?

[Brian Bates]

And now that phrase has been used so much in sports.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

World Series Bobby Thompson, a home run shot heard around the world.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, she's every.

[Brian Bates]

Every. You know, but that's the original shot heard around the world, right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. I mean, it just, it's going to change everything. Because they had spent the last 10 years wondering, is this going to be a war or what?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And when, even when the shots are fired, this is what a lot of Americans don't get is that nobody thought, well, they've started shooting. This is going to be a full scale war between the British and the colonists.

[Aaron Weber]

Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They go, well, a couple of rednecks in Boston got upset and got a hold of some guns. And so still, I mean, it's, I mean, that's like you pointed out, that's April 1775. We don't even declare independence until July 4, 1770. So there's a whole period of like, actually the first one of the first things the Continental Congress does is writes to England and goes, hey to the King. And they go, hey, you probably don't know how bad the Parliament's being to us. Could you stop them? Because we love you and we want to be loyal citizens. That's the same. That's the same body that later on writes the Declaration of when they, when the king ignores them and actually passes even worse stuff on them.

[Brian Bates]

Okay, so I read that no one called it the shot heard around the world. Old at the time. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem years later called Concord Hymn where he called it that okay. And that's how it became popularized.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

There's a lot of that. I mean, like the Washington crossing, the Delaware painting. That's the. Painted in 1851. Right, that's. But people imagine that's the way it was. It was way worse.

[Brian Bates]

Think of it. For starting out live again.

[Aaron Weber]

It's way worse. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Brian Bates]

What? We're like, all right, so George Washington becomes the leader of the army.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. That doesn't exist. Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

The Continental Army. Army. What are these famous founding fathers doing during the war? Benjamin Franklin, is he on the front lines?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, he was actually fighting. He fought with just knights.

[Aaron Weber]

He was like. Was he like, 70 when this works?

[Brian Bates]

Yes.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

He's so old. Samuel Adams just holding a beer and people was drunk. Ben Franklin was actually. Actually behind him. He lines trying to sleep with everybody's wife.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Me and Weber watched the Ben Franklin doc. The Ken Burns.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, the Ken Burns Ben Franklin documentary. That dude was a dirt bag. He was.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But he was awesome.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, he's a very cool figure, but man.

[Brian Bates]

Watched it together.

[Aaron Weber]

Scoundrel. Yeah. Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

It's a little weird.

[Aaron Weber]

He's friends with Ken Burns.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I'm not friends with him, but they.

[Aaron Weber]

Hang out all the time.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

He's been on our show, and because I love their stuff, a lot of times they send me the screeners and we'll have. We'll either have Ken on before we've had the writers and stuff like that. On the road to now, my podcast that I do with Bob Crofton, David Brothers on SiriusXM post on weekends and on all podcast players streaming right now live in D.C. may 29th. Anyway, so.

[Brian Bates]

So y'all watch the spin. Franklin, what kind of snacks y'all have?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, I would have said chips before now, but Cheetos.

[Brian Bates]

Crispix.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, Crispix.

[Brian Bates]

All right. But like Alexander Hamilton, guys like that, are they fighting the war?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, Hamilton's a. Hamilton's a kid, basically. He's like a teenager.

[Brian Bates]

And is he fighting?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. So the war breaks out. Like, he all. He. He realized he's from, like, he's his father. He's an illegitimate child. His mother's dead. And he, like, by a crazy fluke, wrote. Wrote a description of something he didn't see, which was a hurricane in the Caribbean that raised money. And all these people were like, who wrote it? And they realized it's just this orphan kid who works in this import export firm. They send him actually to New Jersey to finish high school, and he applies to Princeton, and he really wants to go there, but they reject him. So he ends up going up to New York and when he's there, he realizes, like, maybe he could rise up this revolution. Like, revolutions open up opportunities for people to, like, get places they never were before. So him and his friends insanely steal a bunch of cannons from the British. And now he's. Honestly, he's one of the most well equipped guys, like, around there.

[Brian Bates]

He's like a teenager, 19 or something.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like he basically, like, he has very little military training. Yeah, he may have had some from the, from the colonies where they always. All the white people drilled in case there was a slave insurrection. So you kind of like, knew some basics.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But yeah, I know he, like, reads books and decides, like, I can run this. And so they end up. They end up taking him out. Like, he ends up showing that he's incredibly brave. And that's when he joins Washington's men to get whipped across the state of New Jersey. And after 1775, when the British show up, so he's there. Thomas Jefferson serves as. I mean, he's in Continental Congress. Then he's the governor of Virginia for a while. Franklin goes abroad to be our diplomat in France because he's the guy you want there. People love him.

[Aaron Weber]

But they did love him, right? Wasn't he kind of like the suave. Like, he would, he would hold court and, like, was he well liked by people?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Dude, yes, he. I mean, like, look, this guy. You remember in the documentary, the thing, it's like going across the ocean was the worst because it was just like months of being on a wooden ship.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Benjamin Franklin looked forward to it because he could do experiments. Like, remember that, like in that documentary, there's like all the things this guy did. There's just a line where they say in passing, and during this trip, he discovered the jet streams. And they don't even stop to appreciate that. Like, if any of us did that, we would. They would have been like, it'd be on a plaque. This guy, he just did it on the side. So. Yeah, so he's over there. And so a lot of these guys are in the trenches. I mean, this is where Marquis de Lafayette shows up. An unknown kid who just wants to kill British people because they killed his dad. Wow, that's a movie. It is like a movie. It's a funny story too, because.

[Brian Bates]

Sounds like it.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So, like, during the revolution, the Americans were broke, but the French would, like, never join us because we were going to lose. They were, like, pretty sure of it. And they didn't Want to make the British mad. They just whipped them a couple years earlier. So the way they make money is like, the French are really. They're really, like, in. They're just really the imagination that they have of the Americans, which Franklin plays up. It's like really big. Franklin walks around with a coonskin hat on, like a raccoon skin hat, right?

[Brian Bates]

Oh.

[Aaron Weber]

Just to play into the mythology of.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Really?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. And the French are like, whoa. These, like, rednecks are, like, smart, and they're reading, you know, like, philosophy. So the French, all these wealthy people, they go over to Philadelphia, where the capital is, and they will let you. They will be like, oh, you're an officer in the colonial army now. And they'll go get, like, these uniforms made, and they will like, okay, here's your official commission. And then the rich people will, like, give them some money they need, and then they go back home. It's like a parade, right? It's a charade. It's a game they play. And that's how Lafayette ends up coming over, and they're all like, oh, look, this kid wants to come, like, hey, look, I'm a real. Go back with your army. But he gets there, and he's just like, where's Washington? And they're like, he's in the field, buddy. He's losing real bad. You don't want to go out there with him. And he's like, I want to go to Washington. And they send him out there, and Washington, like, writes back shortly after. He's like, what did you do? Like, did you not tell him he's not really an officer?

[Brian Bates]

Right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And so it's only when he gets cornered that he, like, lets Lafayette go. And he runs at the British like a maniac, gets shot, and keeps going.

[Brian Bates]

So it becomes a hero.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

He becomes a hero. And I probably my single favorite person in all of his history.

[Brian Bates]

You know, this weekend in Detroit, people told me, you got to go eat at Lafayette, Coney Island. And it's a hot dog. Famous hot dog place in Detroit right down the street from a hotel. Yeah, I went in there. So then I googled, well, who's Lafayette? Coney island, they said, was named after the street Lafayette. And I googled that, and the street was named after your guy Lafayette.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

This is the 200 anniversary, also his tour. He came back. He was the longest living officer from the American Revolution. He came back after serving, and he went and brought the. He could have joined the Freedom French army, which was like a. A big deal. But he stayed an officer in the American army. And he. He's the ones who was like shadowing the British as they were getting cornered at Yorktown. Yeah, he brought his resources back and afterwards he went back home. He got arrested during the French Revolution, but he was the longest living officer in the American from the American Revolution. So in the 1824, he came back and did a farewell tour of the United States where he went to every state but one. And that's why things are named after him all over the country.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, wow.

[Brian Bates]

How about that?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

He went and visited Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage. Took a boat down the Cumberland river through Nashville.

[Brian Bates]

There's a Lafayette street here. We call it Lafayette.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I know we do. That's a problem.

[Aaron Weber]

Lafayette. Yeah, that's how Alabama is called, the fet.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But they're all named after Lafayette.

[Aaron Weber]

That guy.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And to this day he goes back to France and he passes away. But to this day, Lafayette is buried in a French cemetery under an American flag.

[Aaron Weber]

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[Brian Bates]

I don't know that people listen to this podcast, are going to be happy that we have someone on who actually knows what they're talking about. They like to laugh at how dumb we are.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So sorry. I thought about that when I came on. I was like, should I pretend like. Because.

[Brian Bates]

But the people on Reddit are always like, these guys are idiots. I can't listen anymore. So maybe now they'll be happy.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, we'll get them back. Yeah, you really want those listeners. Finally some people who have some standards for us. I remember early on, Aaron listening to the show and you, I know how smart you are and just listening to you try to hide it.

[Brian Bates]

Well, he does a good job. 250 episodes in. You're a great actor, Aaron.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry to everyone listening right now who's just like, you know the reason we don't listen to your podcast, Ben?

[Aaron Weber]

No. This is why this is great. I've learned a lot.

[Brian Bates]

No, I think it's so interesting. I read that the biggest killer of soldiers was not bullets, but disease like smallpox. And George Washington was revolutionary, no pun intended, had his soldiers inoculated and that really helped save them.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yep. Had him bury elated. It was like an old timey thing where so you know, the whole idea of like a vaccine is that you, that you introduce someone to a small amount of that thing. Well, back then the way you did that was you got somebody who was sick from smallpox and you literally went and cut the, their, their wounds on their arm and you would cut it open and dig out the pus and blood.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And then come cut somebody else's arm and just rub it in there.

[Aaron Weber]

There's a scene of this in John Adams on hbo.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Oh, really? Yeah, I tried to watch that so many times.

[Aaron Weber]

Abigail Adams does that to all her kids.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. But it's risky. Obviously it's not exactly precise, like how much do I use? It's like one knife blade.

[Aaron Weber]

Just cut off a little piece, throw it in there.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But yeah, because there was, there was actually.

[Aaron Weber]

Were they wear socks back then.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I mean, do you think they didn't have Shoes. You think they were.

[Aaron Weber]

But did they wear. Because it was all leather shoes. Did they wear socks?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Oh, no. I mean, they wore knee socks. If you were fancy.

[Aaron Weber]

Google that. I'm just wondering if they're. Because I. Because if there's one thing I know, Forrest Gump, is that, you know, they tell you to wear socks in battle, so maybe if they would all wore.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Socks, then we would have won.

[Brian Bates]

We don't remember that we did.

[Aaron Weber]

We would have won fast. Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

If. That and machine guns. That and flamethrowers.

[Brian Bates]

All right, so George Washington crossed the Delaware and pushed back the Hessians.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, he didn't really push him back, though. He just caught him off guard.

[Brian Bates]

Who are the Hessians, though?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So they're just mercenaries. So, like the.

[Aaron Weber]

It's a. Stockings. They were stockings. Stockings made of wool, cotton, linen, or silk insulation and comfort. So they were. Yeah. Okay. Probably not as comfortable as modern socks, but they had stockings on just for everybody. I mean, it's one of the dumbest questions I've ever asked somebody. I'm glad we figured it out.

[Brian Bates]

This guy plays it so well.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I don't know, though. I feel like if we had had those.

[Brian Bates]

He gets good. Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, I know. Really?

[Aaron Weber]

Somebody told me. I think it was. Somebody told me they were leather shoes. You're not supposed to wear socks with leather shoes because leather can't smell bad.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They were starving. I don't think they were like. But the problem here is you're not wearing any stockings under your pantaloons.

[Aaron Weber]

But I think you can get foot disease.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's.

[Aaron Weber]

You can get gangrene.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You know what.

[Aaron Weber]

Like that.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Can't. Foot. As. He's about a foot, you know, so that's a kind of a luxury for a lot of people.

[Brian Bates]

The Hessians were mercenaries.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. They're, like, from modern Germany. Like, all these states form together to form modern Germany. But they were. They were just basically like. They had.

[Brian Bates]

Why were they fighting? Why do they care?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Money.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, they just.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They pay.

[Brian Bates]

We'll come over and fight for your side.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, well, they're just like. You have an army. Right.

[Brian Bates]

Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It's expensive to maintain an army. So the British would just come to them and be like, send your soldiers here. We can't maintain enough of them. But if you'll send them, then afterwards you can, you know, you don't have to worry about them. They go back home.

[Aaron Weber]

Are we using British pounds at this point? Do you think we're using their money?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. I mean, the global. The global currency is the Spanish milled coin. For a long time. But they're using British currency. And then we start printing our own, which has absolutely no value, which is kind of hilarious. Yeah, it's worthless. And that's what we pay soldiers in. And they were not real happy about it afterwards when the country's broke and they're like, they start taxing them and they're like, okay, we'll pay with the money you paid us. And they're like, we won't. We're not going to take that. Makes you think.

[Brian Bates]

Somebody gave me a movie pass.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. Only an idiot. Yes. Only, by the way, I still own a thousand shares of Helios and Matheson stock movie pass. If I want to buy them, just send me a nickel.

[Brian Bates]

Diamond hands over here.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Coming back are.

[Brian Bates]

Who were the Native Americans and the slaves? Which side were they for?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I mean, it depends on where you are. I would say a lot of the enslaved people were. Were actually for the British. Because the British say, if you'll come fight for us, we'll free you after the war.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So that's a.

[Brian Bates]

Whether Americans. Not Americans, but call it a say, like they come fight for us and then go right back to work.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, it's, it's interesting because slavery doesn't work the same way as it does later on. So it's, It's. It's a hard dynamic to get across to people because most people think of, like, slavery as the thing that it is right before the Civil War, which is a totally different thing than what it was back then. You have plantations like in South Carolina and places like that. Yeah, but. Yeah, no, so. So a lot of enslaved people run away and go join the. Join the British. And then you're not going to believe this, but the British do a pretty lousy job of living up to their.

[Aaron Weber]

Their promises.

[Brian Bates]

Well, they lost.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. They're like, hey, I guess you guys were any good, we'd free you. But yeah. So in the Native Americans, they like. It kind of varies by group. Right. So some side with the British, some side with the. With the Americans, but a lot of them stay out of it.

[Aaron Weber]

Uhhuh.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

So, yeah, it would seem like they would side with the British because the British want to keep them kind of close to the coast. Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. So the. So I, I think. And I'm. I'm not an expert on Native American history, but. But yeah, I mean, there are some in the north especially where, where, like in the south, there's so much distance between the coast and the Appalachians, kind of that line.

[Brian Bates]

Right?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And. And there's just less settlement because the land's not as easy just to. Like, South Carolina is a nightmare to, you know, to. To a lot of that. To. To farm at the time. So there's plenty of space. Right. But if you're up in New England, man, the mountains are right there.

[Aaron Weber]

Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And so, yeah, there's definitely more of a sympathy there.

[Brian Bates]

Ethan Allen. I swear, I thought that was just a furniture store, but apparently he was a pretty big deal.

[Aaron Weber]

I've never heard of Ethan Allen.

[Brian Bates]

Heard the furniture stories.

[Aaron Weber]

I have heard of.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

The Ethan Allen, the person made pottery bar. A little less time than the. Than the company has.

[Brian Bates]

Who do you guys think is the most famous person in American history?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

George Washington.

[Brian Bates]

I would think either him or Lincoln. Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I think. But I think Washington's just like. He's. He's a part. I mean, I don't think there's anybody who goes. Who knows about George Washington. And you go, what about Lincoln? And they go, who?

[Aaron Weber]

Right.

[Brian Bates]

Well, that's my point. Like, it's one or the other. Right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I mean, yeah, but I think. I just think it's Washington. And the thing about it is nobody knows anything about him, which is kind of fun. Johnny, they got a cherry tree. He didn't cut down a cherry tree. Look, I don't want to get into. I don't want to get into a story. I do. But that story is a psycho story. It's nuts.

[Brian Bates]

Oh.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

It starts off with a child with an ax. And we're just supposed to accept that.

[Aaron Weber]

Different times back then. And then kids had axes.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

He goes and chops down his father's favorite thing. He destroys his father's favorite thing with it. And then his father acts like he's not sure who did it when there's only. Only probably one ax. And it's his son's holding it.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And he walks over to the kid and goes, did you cut down the tree? And then the kid goes, yeah, I did. Like, that's kind of crazy. Yeah. I cut it down. Like, what else do you love? What else do you. I mean, that's not. To me, that's not leadership quality. That's the sign of someone who should be institutionalized. But what do I know?

[Brian Bates]

But he's honest.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

He was honest.

[Aaron Weber]

Why did his dad love a cherry tree that much?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That's what I'm saying, too. It's also very creepy. Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

It's just a weird family.

[Brian Bates]

He's like, Dusty.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

But does Dusty have a one tree that. He goes, that one's my favorite.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, they're all his favorite.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, yeah, they're tight.

[Aaron Weber]

He might. Man, he's trying to put them up in the medians on the interstate.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

These kids are gonna have to get some lats if they're gonna cut down all these trees. You know what I'm saying?

[Brian Bates]

So I was having this debate with myself today, thinking about it. George Washington.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, sounds like I just pictured you.

[Aaron Weber]

Pull up next to Brian at a stoplight. He's just arguing with himself.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Himself, literally switching seats. People are beeping at him.

[Brian Bates]

Guys. What I do in my own time.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You're both gonna lose. Just go.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

So George Washington's on the $1 bill, right. Very prominent. He's on the quarter. Very prominent. But Lincoln, he's on the five.

[Aaron Weber]

Not his penny.

[Brian Bates]

But the penny, which is.

[Aaron Weber]

But the penny, which is worth less than a penny, is going to be discontinued.

[Brian Bates]

But worse throughout history, it's probably the most popular coin in America.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Popular coin again in 1873. Winner of most popular coin, the penny.

[Brian Bates]

I looked as I was arguing with myself. I Googled most famous Americans, and NBC did a show in 2005, the 100 Greatest Americans All Time.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Brian Bates]

Hosted by Matt Lauer. Yeah, he's out. And then one of the top 100 was Bill Cosby.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, really?

[Brian Bates]

All right, so some of these did not age well.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And that's why you don't kind of put people on coins by fiat.

[Aaron Weber]

Was Ben Franklin on this list? He had to be, right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

That's one of the things I remember from the documentary is that what's lost and all is Ben Franklin was a legit celebrity.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

At the time all this is going down. He's not just some old guy who's into science. He's well known, respected, liked. He's. He's the greatest American celebrity at that time. So it'd be like, I don't know. Who's the equivalent of that now?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Dolly Parton.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah, that's pretty good.

[Aaron Weber]

It'd be like if Dolly Parton was also an inventor and scientist and.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Signed the Declaration of Independence.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. Kind of beloved.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. No, I mean, that's. That's kind of the crazy thing is that, like, at the time, people didn't know who anybody was.

[Brian Bates]

Right.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You know, and that's why when you get to the Constitution, everyone knows that if you're going to. Which was written basically illegally, if you're going to have anybody back it, you have to have the only two people that everyone knows in there. And that's Washington and Franklin.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And Washington did not want to go. They just showed up at his house, and they were like, congratulations, Virginia has elected you to be our delegate. And he's like, no, thanks. And, like, one of the reasons he decides finally to go is, like, of course, if he feels like the country wants him to do something, needs him to do something, and they're right about it, then he will go do it. But also, he had, like, a reunion of his friends from the Society of the Cincinnati that he wanted to go to.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay. So he was. After the Revolutionary War, he was, like, kind of a legend. Okay. Okay. Well liked, respected.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

This guy led one of the most epic upsets.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

In history.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I mean, epic. And when he was done, was well poised to just take over. And this guy, not because they asked him to, but because he starts contacting Congress. He hands over his commission. He just goes, I don't want it. Like, I'm done with it. And he. He basically is like, hurry it up. Hurry it up. I want to be done. I want to hand this back over and go home to Mount Verted. Yeah. And nobody, like, nobody can make sense of this. Nobody's ever like, you. You have this power, and you just want to go back home. He wanted nothing to do with politics. He was like, I want to be remembered as a unifying figure. I don't want to be involved in politics. Politics. But Americans couldn't stop dragging him to do things.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And so, I mean, he's a life of service.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Brian Bates]

It's funny to think about how different it would be if, say, the British had won. But we wouldn't know any different. Like, this would just be the world we live in here. And we'd be. We'd probably be glad they won. We, like, you know, it's just funny.

[Aaron Weber]

How that poster probably wouldn't be here.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

No.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah. Yeah. George Washington wouldn't be our first president.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Be a sketch of how funny it was when they drawed and quartered him. You know, look at him hanging. Snap, crackle, pop when he burns like this. Because they would have done that. Man, they weren't kind to the traders.

[Aaron Weber]

They did that in Braveheart, too.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Did they?

[Aaron Weber]

They draw and quartered people. Yeah. Is that where they tie ropes to and they pull you apart?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay. Yeah. They did that in Braveheart.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. Fun doesn't. Doesn't kill you right away. That's the fun part.

[Aaron Weber]

It looks like it feels good for about a second.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, my back.

[Aaron Weber]

Don't you kind of want a chiropractor? To do that to you kind of pops a split second and then put you back down.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I've got an idea. Okay. It's that service, but they tie your hands and arms to goats.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Those are like goat yoga, Right? Aren't we, like, into. Are we, like, into bringing, like, smaller barnyard animals into our healthcare regime now? Yeah, let's get them in there. Right? We whip them or we show them some food, and they all run different directions, and you walk away limber.

[Brian Bates]

Okay. How did the Revolutionary War end? Like, what was the final straw?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So the final. The final thing is it's Yorktown, right? Cause they surround him there. But the whole thing. And this is a weird thing, like, Washington's greatest asset was that he knew how to escape. He knew how to keep his men together on the battlefield. He shared the sacrifice, but he knew how to get away. Like, deception was a lot of his thing, because the thing is that, like, the Americans know how to win the war. They force the British out, but the British have really have no clue how to win. Do you win by I cat? You catch Washington. Okay. That would matter. You catch Congress, they take Philadelphia, and Congress just runs into the woods.

[Aaron Weber]

Really?

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They just go set up in, like, bunk houses somewhere else. They're like, normally, you take the capital, and you're like, game over. But they. They were like, we got your capital. And they're like, we live in the woods now. Like, what do we do? So, like, the whole American strategy was just make it cost so much and make it last so long that it wouldn't make any sense to keep going.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Because the British only cared about it because it was profitable.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And so once you make it cost and you go, it's. You're too far gone. Once you invade, like, inland, like the British do following the siege of Charleston, they go inland, north. People who didn't really hate the British now hate them because they've showed up. You know how it is in the South. Somebody from another country shows up, and they're like, get out of here.

[Brian Bates]

Like, right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Like. And so. And so they. They. They've stirred up people so bad, and they realize, like, okay, okay. They surrounded us at Yorktown. We surrendered there. And the French are now involved heavily, and there's just no way we can win this. So they finally go, all right. But they don't. And this is a side story that's really important. The British don't think it's over. Like, they're ready to come back. They're like, you guys go, try this Experiment. And we'll be back whenever you're, whenever you're ready, like. And they're totally. It's not until after the war of 1812 they accept it. So the Americans are broken and they're trying to figure out how to pay their bills. And they know that if they can't pay back the money that they borrowed, then they'll be, they'll have no loans again. The British will come back and that's the reason they actually write the Constitution is because they need to be able to raise revenue. That's a whole nother story. One of the big reasons. Whoa, was this funny? Was that funny? We, the people, we the people of the United States broke.

[Brian Bates]

I feel like we've seen four movies. We kept referencing the Patriot John Adams films.

[Aaron Weber]

John Q. Might as well throw that in there.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And.

[Aaron Weber]

He'S at the hospital. I'll find a way to bring that up.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I was like, yeah. And the fourth one is a movie about World War II, Enemy of the Gates.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, Enemy at the Gates. That's right. That's right. All right. This is fun. I. This is, you know, people are going to be like, wow, this guy knows what he's talking about. I don't know how to take this.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. You guys just know I won't be here for the comments to respond.

[Brian Bates]

So you guys, we'll have Dusty answer the comments.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

That'll be great. And I, and I won't listen to the next one. How about that?

[Aaron Weber]

We want to go through maybe one or two of those fun stories that you sent over. A couple of those. Like the, you sent over a list of some of those. I read through them. They look great, just like the fun.

[Brian Bates]

Let's see, there was a duels.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

Group of folks try to get Georgia, Washington, Austin replacement Horatio Gates.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah. They try to replace him. And the best part is Horatio Gates.

[Brian Bates]

I don't know.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I guess you guys were like, he might still be likable. Let's keep going.

[Brian Bates]

I was trying to wrap up, but.

[Aaron Weber]

Oh, I thought you were just gonna run through him real quick.

[Brian Bates]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So like Horatio Gates is basically this guy. They try to oust Washington. And Washington's men are furious. And one of his kind of like right hand men finds this guy, Thomas Conway, he was one of Gates's right hand men in. And Washington orders everyone not to duel anybody. But this guy like leaves the military. So he's like, I'm exempt. He goes and finds this dude and shoots the side of his face off. Like the thing like duels back then Usually you. Usually you went out there and were like, I'm man enough to stand here for my honor, and shot over each other's heads if you had something to lose.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

And this guy, John Cadwalader, just goes out and just aims and shoots him in the face. Face. And normally you want to walk away, right? You want to be like, I don't even know what happened. Right? You just turn around and you go, I saw a bullet flying and then I heard something drop as I was leaving, like for deniability. But. But God Walleter, apparently upon shooting, it went through his mouth and out the side of his face. And apparently he walks over to him, looks at him on the ground and goes, well, that should silence the fool's lying tongue. Anyhow, these cats are cold blooded.

[Aaron Weber]

It absolutely is. That's wild. Wild man.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

People are just built different back then.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

They were. Some of them didn't have cheeks. I mean, they did and then they didn't. It's a real bad time to run a giant co. Wallet. Or like, I thought you couldn't do me. He's like, I'm out. Yeah, I'm off. I just got off my shift.

[Brian Bates]

Let me ask you this. When I was in school, American History, there was no Internet. So you had a book.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You had a book, you had a phone where you picked it up and you were like, susan, connect me. All right, Ben, I'll stop now.

[Brian Bates]

Guess getting cocky at the end here.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Feel like I belong.

[Brian Bates]

But anyway, you had a history book and maybe encyclopedias at your house, but now with the Internet, you can look up anything. Like, why do we need you? Well, I don't think we do.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Well, first of all, we need you so I can produce the audio of this stuff. So Weber doesn't put a laptop on the front seat of his car and try to read stuff and scroll while he's driving. So one life saved alone, right here. The reason, I mean, why.

[Aaron Weber]

Why?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Is what I do important in teaching?

[Brian Bates]

I was joking about you personally. But has it changed now for students now that I know, you know, that's probably more grade school, I guess, where they would use the Internet. Because you're teaching more than just facts. You're teaching the why instead of just the how come. Right?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, I mean. I mean, the thing is we're human beings and human beings understand things and stories and the random facts don't make any sense unless you put them in. Into a story. I mean, this is literally how we've evolved to think. And, you know, I tell my students I'm like, if I gave you a list of every character from the Avengers, how long and like, their traits, how long would it take you to memorize that list? And they're like, forever. And I'm like, yeah, but I could show you a movie that's an hour and 45 minutes, and you could answer every question that I asked you about, Right? So it's the story there. It's also because, I mean, I try to mentor my students a lot, right? Help them with their writing, help them with scholarships. I got incredible success stories. So, I mean, I mean, from my perspective, teaching is not something that's just about going in there with facts. You tell the stories. And I think that if, you know, in a democracy, you need to have people who are grateful for what they have, and we're willing to sacrifice for it. And you don't just get that from being like, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Right. You know, the way I try to teach it is like, this is an inheritance that we've all that we've all got. We didn't earn it. It. It was passed down to us. And like, every generation, we have to decide whether or not we're going to be good stewards to that and pass it on to the next generation as good as we've got it. And I think when you understand that you're in the story like that, it means something better. And I can't teach them everything, but what I try to do is teach him a little bit of love for this place we live and a little bit of appreciation for what happened before.

[Aaron Weber]

Wow.

[Brian Bates]

Wow.

[Aaron Weber]

How about that?

[Brian Bates]

That was well said.

[Aaron Weber]

That was powerful.

[Brian Bates]

I try to put in your face and you've like, wow.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I hope if you're listening, mtsu, don't fire me. That's why. That's why.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

That's great. That is. I agree. That's awesome.

[Brian Bates]

That's so awesome.

[Aaron Weber]

Thank you so much for coming on, Ben. This was fun, man. It's good catching up with you.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

Haven't seen you in a minute.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, thanks for having me. And next time we come on, I come on. Which this is my podcast now, so next time I invite you guys on.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

We'll talk about something you guys know. So good luck with that.

[Brian Bates]

Dumb movies.

[Aaron Weber]

What do you think? Real, real quick, Real quick. Biggest misconception about the Revolutionary War, Something that you think is taught wrong or something that people believe that isn't true? Is there one that jumps out to you?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

People believe that folks were like, rah, rah, America. They were not. They didn't know what it was. It was introduced to them. They spent a lot of time refusing to cooperate with Washington in the States. Washington's constantly writing back to Congress, being like, yeah, I've told them, I'm the commander, chief of the Continental Army. And they refuse to acknowledge that that exists. The local militias won't participate with him. He sees this country for what it could be, and so do a couple of people. But most. Most people are fighting for Virginia or Massachusetts. It's only after the War of 1812, when we whip them. Andrew Jackson whips them down in New Orleans. Right. It's only after that unlikely victory. Americans have been born here for a while.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Right. So you think about it, like, by the time you get 1815, there are people who have been born in the United States at this time. There were people that were born British citizens. They were born into their colony. But once you got enough people who have born here and then you have a huge win like that, that's when people start thinking of themselves as Americans. It's like the Carolina Panthers where I'm from. It absolutely is. Right when they first showed up, I remembered it was everybody's second team. Right. But what happened by the time you get to, like, 15 years later, kids have been born there. We go to the super bowl where we're gonna lose terribly blown kick. And that's the point where everybody becomes Panthers fans. Right. And so it's like a little analogy, but, like, that's the way it was. And then after that, you have really, the first era of American nationalism.

[Brian Bates]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

That's great. It's a good question. I've always said the US Is the Carolina Panthers of the world.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Don't ever say that.

[Aaron Weber]

Thank you, Ben. You're the man. Anything? We're gonna plug something real quick. Where are you gonna be, Brian?

[Brian Bates]

April 26th, I'm gonna be in West Bend, Wisconsin, at the bend theater.

[Aaron Weber]

Beautiful.

[Brian Bates]

May 9th, I'm in Madisonville, Kentucky, at the. I think it's called the Ballard Convention Center.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Brian Bates]

It's a fundraiser, but it's a full comedy show. I'm taking Paula because it. Because I can't say her name.

[Aaron Weber]

Paula.

[Brian Bates]

I'm taking Paula and her husband John.

[Aaron Weber]

Okay.

[Brian Bates]

And it's May 9th and Koshinsky. Is that right?

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

As you can tell, she's a listener to this show.

[Aaron Weber]

I know you kind of. You kind of say it quickly, so you don't. Paul Kizzen is good.

[Brian Bates]

All right. There you go. Anyway, that's May 9th in Madisonville, Kentucky. You got your Yazoo show coming up.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

I got Yazoo comedy hour First Fridays. But the things I really wanted to promote here, if that's all right, if that's okay. Aaron, please.

[Aaron Weber]

No, no, please.

[Brian Bates]

This is not your podcast.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

So my podcast, the Road to Now, if you like history, that's what we do there. And we're doing a live show in Washington, D.C. on May 29 at the Hamilton Live. Guests are Major Garrett from CBS News, Margaret Talev, who's a great journalist, and then Doug High, who was. Ran the whole communications for the Republican Party in the country and is now, like, regularly on cnn. And we're going to tell. It's going to be funny. Like, if you like this, you'll like that. So it's going to. We don't normally do that stuff, but it's going to be tales of murder and mayhem in D.C. and then locally, if you're in Nashville. Perfect timing. My live comedy game show kicking back off here May 22nd. I've been doing it since 2015.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Weber once hosted for me, wrote the show, lasted 20 minutes.

[Aaron Weber]

Apparently I did the wor job ever hosting.

[Brian Bates]

Dude, I remember that.

[Aaron Weber]

I hosted Perfect timing. And Lucy came out to me in the middle of the show, was like, you have to slow down. The show's gonna be over in 15 minutes. It was not good. It was. It was. I still feel bad about that. I'm sorry, Ben. But, Ben, you do a great job with it, and it's a fun, fun little something different for people to.

[Brian Bates]

You know, one time, Aaron and I were teammates on the show here at Z's. And two things I remember one. One, you convinced me to take a bite out of your disgusting shoe. Do you remember that?

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

You weren't supposed to get that one, Bates. I was doing trick questions for a while, and he picked one on the game board, and it said theoretically at the top, said, if you were to put this shoe in your mouth, would you put this flip flop in your mouth for 200 points? Right. And of course, no one was going to say yes to that. And the surprise was, was that the answer on the next slide, where you reveal the answer was, of course you wouldn't. You're too good for that. Here's 300 points. But Bates put the flip flop in his mouth as the crowd counted to 10. Yeah, you got no points. I'm still. I still feel terrible about that. It was supposed to be for one of the younger comics.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah.

[Brian Bates]

And the other thing. So at the end you go off stage. One of the two participants goes off stage. Right, right. That's where we used to ask some questions and they come back out. I developed a system, foolproof, I thought for Aaron and I to. Basically I was going to game the system. But we got confused somehow and it went. Do you read this?

[Aaron Weber]

No, not really.

[Brian Bates]

It went terribly wrong. Like I, I can't remember the way I figured out. Like, Aaron, I say this, say this or whatever, but we tried to cheat.

[Aaron Weber]

On your game and it didn't work.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Yeah, well, then you, if you had, if you had succeeded, you would have won exactly what you got anyway.

[Brian Bates]

But Aaron's so good at playing dumb, he. He couldn't do it.

[Aaron Weber]

Yeah, it was fun. Check out, check out Ben. Ben's the best. Thank you for coming on. May 16th, I'm in Greensburg, Pennsylvania at the Live Casino. May 31st, South Bend, Indiana. June 1st, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Just added that. Come on out and see. This is Aaron Weber. By the way, come see one of my live shows. You guys are the best. We love you. None of us is lost on us. Dusty's back next week, we hope. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see.

[Brian Bates]

Yeah.

[Aaron Weber]

God bless America. Give me liberty, give me death.

[Brian Bates]

Boom.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

We the People 1787 Nateland is produced.

[Aaron Weber]

By Nateland Productions and by me. Nate Bargetzi and my wife Laura are on the AudioBoom platform. Recording and editing for the show is done by Genovations Media.

[Dr. Ben Sawyer]

Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to catch us next week.

[Aaron Weber]

On the Nate Land podcast.

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[Brian Bates]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest. For Albertsons and Safeway. Spring is in full swing so take.

[Aaron Weber]

Some time for self care this spring.

[Brian Bates]

Now through April 22, buy two self care items and save $2. Shop in store or online for self.

[Aaron Weber]

Care essentials like Tom's Toothpaste Soft Soap Liquid Hand Soap, Colgate Optic White Toothpaste.

[Brian Bates]

And Colgate Total toothpaste and save $2 when you buy two participating items. Offer ends April 22. Promotions may vary.

[Aaron Weber]

Restrictions apply.

[Brian Bates]

Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.