The Discussions With 'Dark Enlightenment' (So Far - Updated) - Part 2

Summary

The Pete Quiñones Show

Episode: The Discussions With 'Dark Enlightenment' (So Far - Updated) - Part 2
Date: August 7, 2026
Host: Pete Quiñones
Guests: D (Dark Enlightenment), Thomas777

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Episode Overview

This wide-ranging episode features Pete, recurring guest "D" (Dark Enlightenment), and frequent collaborator Thomas777. They address current world events—specifically the high-profile Oval Office blow-up between Trump, J.D. Vance, and Zelensky—then shift into deeper explorations of US foreign policy, the impact of historic and ethnic grievances on warfare, the bankruptcy of American institutions, elite theory, and the enduring cultural legacy and function of sport (especially hockey). In the second half, the discussion pivots to history and theory: the origins and ramifications of fascism in the 20th century, infrastructure and aesthetics under the Third Reich, and the state of Western civilization compared to its competitors.

The tone is unapologetically provocative, challenging mainstream narratives with revisionist history and "dark enlightenment" insights, blending personal anecdotes, biting critique, and sweeping historical perspective.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Trump–Zelensky Oval Office Incident and Its Implications

Timestamps: 00:12 – 04:56, 07:15 – 14:27

• The show opens “about an hour” after Trump, J.D. Vance, and Zelensky have a “blow up” in the Oval Office.
• D characterizes Zelensky as “a puppet,” “literally an actor, a comedian who got put in the presidency because people watch too much television and are stupid”—tracing the roots of the Ukraine conflict to ethnic/religious grievances going back centuries, especially between Jews and Russians.
• D argues Zelensky’s regime is used as a proxy for “international Jewry,” and the US is manipulated to support corrupt foreign interests.
• Pete: “He just basically spanked an apparatchik for international Jewry on, you know, basically the world stage.” (04:44)
• Both guests compare the geopolitics of Russia–Ukraine to Israel–Gaza, arguing both are means for powerful regimes to destabilize and expand territory.

2. Understanding the Russian Strategic Perspective

Timestamps: 07:17 – 11:32

• D gives a primer on why Russia cannot give up Crimea or Black Sea access—it’s about survival. He analogizes: pushing Russia on Ukraine is as if “Mexicans said, hey, we’re going to work with the Cubans and we’re going to take Puerto Rico from you and we’re going to prevent you from exiting the Gulf of America... There’d be war at the drop of a hat.” (10:00)
• The hosts stress that Western policymakers ignore the existential realities driving Russian behavior.

3. America’s State of Decline and Occupied Government

Timestamps: 13:34 – 22:18

• The bankruptcy of US power: “Our military is not capable of going up against the Chinese or the Russians and winning.”
• Discussion of the debt ($37 trillion), decadence, and internal rot—“We just can't carry it anymore. We can't.”
• The “Epstein operation,” Mossad influence, and elite corruption—guests allege Western governments are occupied and run against their people’s interests.
• Pete: “If you are to believe that these documents will come out… there are people who don’t want to be exposed as traitors to the country.”

4. Collapse as Opportunity: Elite Theory and Agency

Timestamps: 32:33 – 44:09

• They discuss how the removal of “rot” may present opportunity for new elites (“vanguard”) to rise.
• Pete: “You see more people being like, okay, yeah, I’m going to have to do this on my own. We’re going to have to do this for ourselves. This is not something that we can rely upon.”
• The show repeatedly rejects populism as a false solution, arguing the “vast majority of people don’t want to be free” and only elites can deliver real change.
• Critique of Steve Bannon and "populism" as controlled opposition: “He’s lying. And you know he’s lying.”

5. Lifeboat Strategy and Self-Reliance

Timestamps: 49:08 – 64:49

• Repeated urging for listeners to prepare individually and form resilient networks rather than hope for national salvation.
• D: “If a prep doesn’t make your life better in general, it’s useless… being in shape and having friends is, like, not a bad thing, no matter what. So just do it.”
• Pete: “Suck it up, keep going, and do what you need to do to take care of you and yours… you have to start doing things for yourself.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• D [04:43]: “It’s just my Jewish handlers just love it when Eastern Europeans kill each other… because they’re still salty about a pogrom that happened in 1648. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
• Pete [04:44]: “He just basically spanked an apparatchik for international Jewry on, you know, basically the world stage.”
• D [17:05]: “Your cousins used my tax money to coerce and abuse kids that looked like my kids... into blackmailing politicians... into supporting a war that got kids that look like my kids killed in Iraq... And then when they came home, messed up, your cousins sold them drugs that killed them...”
• Pete [34:46]: “10 organized guys can control 10 million people, right? And the vast majority of people don’t want to be free. It’s too much work.”
• D [64:49]: “So right now, if you’re a white man under the age of 30, you’ve been hiking with a bunch of other people’s food in your backpack… What the Trump administration has just done said, well, you don’t got to carry that anymore.”

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In-Depth Thematic Segments

The Historical Roots of Fascism and Societal Change

Timestamps: 70:40 – 109:11

• D references the “Fascist International Conference” and Gottfried’s work as key to contextualizing fascism as a real, organic response to the collapse of old world order post–WWI.
• Thomas: “Fascism... was as much a radical tendency as communism was… the ideological soil, if you will, from where like communism emerges, that is the working class.”
• The group agrees that the current collapse is unprecedented (“there is no parallel”), and mainstream conservatives or leftists alike misapprehend the nature of the crisis.

Infrastructure, Aesthetics, and the Legacy of the Third Reich

Timestamp: 137:51 – 183:04

• Deep dive into Germany’s infrastructure transformation between the wars, led by visionaries like Fritz Todt and, to a lesser extent, Albert Speer.
• Admiration of the Autobahn’s aesthetics (“Our roads have to be beautiful and… reflect us as a people”), contrasting the German and American road-building philosophies.
• Thomas on the “ruin value” in architecture: “The ethos was we've got to think about 3,000 years from now... to have our great works leave ruins, like that of the [ancients]...”

National Decline, Elites, and Future Direction

Timestamps: 184:07 – 188:56

• Critique of American government and societal decay: “What has the United States built in the last 25 years that you can say that that's gonna matter in 50 years?”
• Thomas ridicules contemporary moral attitudes and the American left’s support of the warfare state; D asserts “The only salient political conflict in the world today is Zionists versus everybody else…”

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Sports, Culture, and Identity: The Case for Hockey

Timestamps: 192:14 – 305:28

• Pete and D close with a long, enthusiastic segment about hockey’s cultural role—its demands, demographics, why it remains a “white sport,” and what that reveals about society.
• D: “It’s the only sport I can think of where I can look at the teams and be like, I'd have those guys over for a barbecue… they look like guys that I would have known growing up.”
• Pete explains hockey culture’s emphasis on teamwork, discipline, white ethnic roots, and the role of the family—contrasted with the “bread and circuses” of other pro sports.
• D: “A society that can produce… lots of big, coordinated, quick men… that’s a reserve in terms of like a prosperous, functioning society."

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Essential Timestamps

• 00:12 – 04:56: Ukraine, Zelensky, and Middleman geopolitics
• 07:17 – 14:27: Russia’s strategy, existential Black Sea imperative
• 13:34 – 22:18, 28:04 – 32:33: US decline, elite theory vs. populism
• 44:09 – 64:49: Self-reliance, lifeboat strategy
• 70:40 – 109:11: The birth of fascism, breakdown of old order
• 137:51 – 183:04: German infrastructure, aesthetics, comparison to US
• 192:14 – 305:28: Detailed discussion of hockey as a white, elite sport and its broader cultural meaning

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Concluding Thoughts

This episode fuses barbed, revisionist social critique, sweeping historical analysis, and grounded, personal takes on culture (via sport). The hosts urge a retreat from reliance on corrupt elites and institutions, championing self-reliance, group agency, and a return to elite-driven rather than populist organization. Throughout, sports—especially hockey—are held up as a paragon of the kind of societies, values, and cultural camaraderie the hosts seek to restore.

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Further Reading/Listening (Mentioned in the Episode)

• Paul Gottfried, "Fascism: The Career of a Concept"
• Frederick Spotts, "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics"
• Jim Kunstler, "Geography of Nowhere"
• Murray Rothbard, "Betrayal of the American Right"
• Peter Brimelow, "Alien Nation"
• HBO “Citizen X” (film)
• 1986 film “Youngblood” (hockey movie recommendation)

Transcript

[Pete]

I'm not talking about that on the air.

[D]

Okay.

[Pete]

But yeah, should be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll talk later. But hey, what's going on, D?

[D]

Not much, man. How are you doing?

[Pete]

Doing good. Doing good. Yeah. Just wanted to do. So we're literally recording about an hour after Trump and J.D. vance and Zelensky had a blow up in the, in the Oval Office. And so just give people a timeframe for when we're recording this. And we have other stuff we can talk about. But you've seen the video. You want to say anything about what you saw?

[D]

Well, I think it was a little bit clownish, but the whole situation is clownish. Right. This is something that any serious person could have told you two years ago. Like, this was. This guy was a puppet. It was literally an actor, a comedian who got put in the presidency because people were watch too much television and are stupid by, you know, this, this thieving oligarch who basically wanted a frontman, and he effectively started the war. Like, you killed 10,000 people in Novorossiya by shelling them with mortars. And you expected Vladimir Putin, for his own sake, he can't just let that slide because the people in his country won't stand for it. You know this because you've seen the example in Georgia, you know, when Shexvili did basically the same thing, tried to join NATO. John McCain showed up, stirred a bunch of crap up. You know, you have people in the United States Senate, like Lindsey Graham, talking about how, well, this is the best money we've ever spent because, like, we just get to kill Russians and it's none of our troops, and it's just our. I mean, it's cheap money. You know, it's the most wonderful thing in the world. Dead Slavs. It's just my Jewish handlers just love it when Eastern Europeans kill each other. It's the best thing in the world to them because they're still salty about a pogrom that happened in 1648. It's the most beautiful thing in the world. I mean, that's basically what this guy's doing. And it's not like a clown show and laughable and disgusting. This entire thing has been a disgusting mess. You know, maybe because I've followed, you know, Dr. Raphael Matthew Raphael Johnson for years, I knew all this stuff. But everybody in Washington should know this stuff. You should. You know, if you're on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, you should at least know why people don't like Russia. Why are all these shuttle pale of Settlement Jews? Why do they Hate Russia so much. Well, why do they spit when they hear the name Bogdan Kymonitsky? And then these are the people that have been running everything for what, 70 years, you know, the occupied government you always correctly talk about. Is anyone surprised that Zelenskyy's this entitled little worm? I mean, he is what he is. Why would you expect anything different?

[Pete]

Well, I think one of the interesting parts of this is that, you know, if you listen. If people listen to the three episodes Thomas and I did where he talked about Syrian Russian relations post, you know, post Nuremberg. I mean, you understand that this is basically the same war and that, you know, you've already mentioned that this is really about ethnic grievances from centuries ago. Trump treating Zelensky like this, and if they just cut him off, he's basically saying, we're not going to help you fight your wars anymore. So you can make Trump out to be a Zionist. Scott Horton calls him a Lechudnik, but I mean, he just basically spanked an apparatchik for international Jewry on, you know, basically the world stage,

[D]

live on national television, International television.

[Pete]

I've always said this about Trump. I don't think Trump's a Zionist because I don't think he knows what a Zionist is. And I think if you, like, gave him a dictionary definition of Zionism, he'd be like, that doesn't make any sense to me. He just seems like that kind of guy. I think he's a guy who likes Jews and likes Israel and, you know, his family married Jews, and he's been dealing with Jews his whole life in New York. And I think he likes some Jews, and I think he just doesn't like this international bullshit, that he knows that his legacy, if he ties it to his legacy, it's going to taint it.

[D]

Well, he's already dealing like you and Thomas said, and I strongly urge people to give it a listen. The conflict in Israel and the conflict or the conflict in Gaza and Israel and the conflict in Ukraine are basically the same thing. They are attempts by the regime to destabilize enemies and gain territory. And once you understand that, that effectively, you know, Vladimir Putin's a lot of things. No one who's like a nice person gets promoted colonel in East Germany in 1987. It just doesn't happen. But he's a serious guy, and Russians are chess players, and he knows the world system just as much as anybody. And he saw that the weakness of the world system that was freezing him and his people out of the national economy and making them poor and trying to undermine him at home. Like, okay, well, I cannot attack on this part of the board, but I can attack on this part of the board. And so he supported the Syrians and that caused a bunch of problems for the regime. And so they counterattacked in Ukraine, right? Because the central fact of Russian life is

[Pete]

that

[D]

the Volga river that flows through Moscow and is basically the heartland river of European Russia, the way like the Mississippi is to the United States. That river empties into the Caspian, which is a landlocked lake that can't give you access to world markets or allow you to have a navy. That's why one of the first Russian capitals was Novgorod on the Baltic. Right? But the Baltic is lousy because it's frozen part of the year and, and it's shallow and it doesn't. And you have to get through the Straits of. In Denmark, I forget what they're called, but, you know, like, you can't control that. There's all these other powers, Sweden or Denmark or Norway or the UK who might bottle you up in the Baltic or the North Sea and keep you from. Or of course, you could go all the way to the Arctic Ocean, but that's, you know, barely tenable because it's only open a few months of the year. So the Russian nation needed a access to the Black Sea that was stable and year round where they could conduct international trade and have a navy. And for them that means, like, they can't give up Sevastopol in Crimea, they can't give up the Rostov, you know, on the southern Russian cities, that they have to have those. It's a matter of life and death for Russia. If their economy is based off of exporting energy and agricultural products, mostly to places like India and Africa and elsewhere, they don't have the ability to do that. They're dead in the water. They're going to starve to death in the dark and in the cold. So when the United States says, we're going to threaten that by making Ukraine like an outright enemy of yours, is it any wonder that they reacted negatively? Put the shoe on the other foot. If the Mexicans said, hey, we're going to work with the Cubans and

[Thomas]

we're

[D]

going to take Puerto Rico from you and we're going to prevent you from exiting the Gulf of America, like New Orleans is no longer like a viable port for you, like, people would freak out, but you won't be able to export grain down the Mississippi, through New Orleans and out to wherever or Energy or whatever, whatever else. Your LNG tankers won't make it from New Orleans to Rotterdam anymore. There'd be war. There'd be war at the drop of a hat. You can't do that to the United States. Just like there was war when the United States basically prevented the Japanese from importing oil and food. Like, what are they going to do in 1941? They have to. And pretending that, you know, Zelensky is anything other than a puppet of the regime is absurd. This is not complicated. I mean, it is sort of complicated in a way, but, like, if you threaten people's lives, they react. Simple as

[Thomas]

well.

[Pete]

I mean, just make it simple. I like to make things simple just for my brain to start with before I can jump off somewhere. I mean, literally, if you come into the administration, if you start your administration realizing with a whole bunch of people around you are like, if we don't start taking care of ourselves and if we don't look after our own interests, and even if those interests do become like Monroe Doctrine type interests, where Central America, South America, our coast, our west coast, especially maybe even Greenland, you have to trim the fat. You have to cut the ties. And, you know, I. I honestly think that there are. The reason why you've seen so many of the, you know, formerly hostile of a certain formerly hostile members of a certain tribe basically changing their tune is because they feel like they have to, because everything's falling apart and what they have is falling apart. So, yeah, just as you know, if you listen to, we're up to episode 15. We have 17 recorded of 200 years together. You see this over and over again. They're going to, for a time, they will switch their tune and the message will be very clear about how, oh, we're in it with you guys 100% and everything. So this is a time when you have to not only take advantage of it, but you have to do everything you can. And especially in a time when information can travel halfway around the world in a half a second, this has to be a time to not only take advantage of them doing this, but do everything you can to push the narrative that they were responsible for this in the. You know, they were responsible for a lot of this in the first place.

[Thomas]

Right? Yeah.

[D]

Well, Trump and Trump and J.D. vance, or Zelensky and J.D. vance, you know, arguing, and then Trump saying, this is going to be hard to do business. Like, we're $37 trillion in debt. Our military is not capable of going up against the Chinese or the Russians and winning The United states Navy is 12 carrier groups that are loading targets that can't actually attack those near peer adversaries. They just get shot down. They're billions of dollars that are just a hole in the water.

[Pete]

So.

[D]

And whose fault is it that we ended up here? Of course, everyone knows. And if you're listening to this program, you're listening to me, you know whose fault it is. But, you know, one of the good ones, I guess, Milton Friedman.

[Pete]

Right.

[D]

The system that works is a system that doesn't, you know, empower good people. It forces bad people to do the right thing even though they don't want to. So when Marco Rubio has changed his tune, that's because he has to. There's no rescuing the present order. Like, we just can't afford it anymore. You know, like you can't have, quote unquote, unmanned planes where, you know, they flipped upside down like, no more women pilots. Sorry. Like when billionaires are like, oh, I'm going to die when I get on my private plane if the pilot isn't like, you know, a 45 year old white dude with a little bit of gray in his hair and it looks like the aviators were welded on his face. Like, those are your choices. You have to empower the people actually capable of running the system and. Right. You know, for the last 50 years at least, it's just been like, let's just take from these people and add more and more burdens on them and destroy them with drugs, with opiates, with useless wars, with, you know, super high taxes, whatever. That, that's the. Well, we just can't carry it anymore. We can't. And Zelensky is this, you know, this clownish burden to the tune of how many billions of dollars has it been? 300?

[Pete]

Some say 350.

[D]

Yeah, 350 billion. Do you know what I could do with a tenth of that? I could rebuild all of America with that much money.

[Pete]

Those days are over and really going forward now. What needs to be done. And what we saw yesterday was basically a clown show where everyone knows that. Everyone knows what Jeffrey Epstein was. And anyone who's arguing against that is arguing it's survival mode for them. Even, even Dave Smith had a tweet yesterday where he said, I'm starting to think that handing the Mossad pedophiles to a bunch of Zionists might not be the best way to get the truth to the public. I mean, you're.

[D]

Yeah, well, Dave, Dave, here's what happened and you know it. And I know it, and everybody knows it. Your cousins used my tax money to coerce and abuse kids that looked like my kids, like my daughters, into blackmailing politicians that are working, supposed to be working for me, into supporting a war that got kids that look like my kids killed in Iraq for no damn reason. And then when they came home, messed up, your cousins sold them drugs that killed them or ruined their lives. And they've been doing it and running everything into the ground for the last at least half century. More likely in 80 years, with the nice even number at 1950, say, 75 years this year. Okay, so, Dave, when your family does this sort of thing, and to his credit, he talks about it, until you do that, until you talk about that, the fact that we're occupied, you're not dealing with reality. And what Zelensky was doing was sitting in the White House saying, well, yeah, I mean, I have a natural right to occupy you. And Donald Trump saying, like, we don't have the money anymore to afford to keep paying you guys. And he lost his mind. He lost his mind in public. It's crazy that anyone should conduct themselves like that in public.

[Pete]

Well, we've been talking about an occupied government. And our forebears used to use the term ZOG back in the 70s and 80s and get arrested and get their homes, not their compounds, which is a propaganda word, raided and their families killed. Like Randy Weaver who went and hid in the woods because, well, people have seen him, the shirt he was wearing. This just has to end. And if you are to believe that these documents will come out. You know, most people, I think, have a tendency to believe that the reason they're not coming out is because, oh, there are people who don't want to be exposed as pedophiles and things like. It's like, no, there are people who don't want to be exposed as traitors to the country because the penalty for being a traitor is being treated like. Who were the last people who were. Who were killed for being executed for being traitors in this country? Were they the Rosenbergs?

[D]

Well, that's the way we celebrate Juneteenth. It's Julius Nathal Rosenberg Day. That's why I celebrate Juneteenth. Anyway, but there's huge numbers of people, basically everyone in Congress but Thomas Massie and maybe a couple others.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

Who have you dug into it? They're traitors. Virtually the entire Democratic Party, most of the Republican Party, they're traitors. This USAID thing, Mike Benz, for all that he's done good work and talk about he's steam control. He's trying to get people to be like, well, it's bad. But, you know, like, no, no, no, no. It's just all bad.

[Pete]

He always has been meme, you know, because even when he was frame game, he was trying to direct you away from certain things, right?

[D]

Yeah, well, yeah, because he's a member of the tribe and he was like, well, yeah, you might have a point. But, you know, Paul Gottfried were Ron uns. Like, well, okay, so Paul Gottfried and Ron uns get to be in the last caller out. Like, I don't know, like, not my problem. This is.

[Thomas]

You know, we were on the verge

[D]

of nuclear war because Victoria Nuland was salty about a pogrom from 375 years ago. Like, that's insane. That's like me being mad about a nuclear, like, pushing us to the edge of a nuclear war. Because, like, Oliver Cromwell, like, oppressed the Irish. Like, yeah, I'm not happy about it. Yeah, I don't like Cromwell. Yeah, I don't think that he's a good guy. But nuclear war,

[Pete]

well, and I think people think you're being hyperbolic with that. I don't think most people realize just exactly how far and how hard Putin was being pushed in the last year to react in a way that would. They're trying to basically make him on the world. Some of them are trying to make him on the world stage, you know, look like. Look like a maniac, because all they can do is say, he's a maniac. Oh, he invaded another country. Great. That's been happening. The whole of our existence is one country invading another country, or one peoples or tribe invading another. There's nothing new about that. But there are some who wanted to make them know, and there were some. There are some who want us all to die. I mean, there's a thread on Twitter that. That I shared yesterday, and it shows it has in it a paper, a submitted paper, research paper, by someone who used to work at the NIH and had an office right across from Dr. Fauci, who said that Covid and the COVID vaccine were a Mossad plot to kill a billion people. This was a legitimate, like, medical paper.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

You know, one of the reasons RFK was opposed is he brought up the fact that, you know, the COVID 19 virus attacked whites and more than others, ethnic groups and didn't attack, what, Asians and Ashkenazi Jews.

[Pete]

Ashkenazi Jews and Asians. Yeah.

[D]

Right. So we're dealing with a bioweapon that was. That Was again, using my money. Anthony Fauci and members of the tribe went to a racially hostile communist shithole and said, help us build a bioweapon to destroy our own country in case they get mad at us for destroying their country.

[Pete]

And notice, notice. I'll just interrupt you for a second. I'll let you keep going. Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, all the other kinds of. No, these are the Galicians. These are the Pale. These are the Pale Settlement Jews who are responsible for this. They're. They're targeting everyone else. Yes, except the people who. Except the people who help them build it.

[D]

Yeah. And not only did they do that, but, but, you know, the entire Covet operation was just, just a bust out operation from Goodfellas. All you need to know about politics is, you know, watch enough mob movies and understand that these people are just the difference between the Colombos or the Genoveses and the Bushes and the Clintons is who, who cuts their suits. They're not any better. Or, you know, different people. They, they run rackets. They, they kill people. It's what they will do. Now, you know, Justin Stam just wrote a really good book about mafia power. Like, that's just how power works. I'm not trying to, trying to sugarcoat her or anything. Like, that's just. This is just how the game is played. But okay, if. If the difference between the Bushes and the Colombos is who cuts their suits, then when they use these tactics, you shouldn't be surprised. So the Covid operation, it was just the bust out scene from Goodfellas. It was, you know, because all of these mom and pop restaurants where, you know, they've got a restaurant, spending a family 30 years, they do a pizza place or maybe a diner or something, right? Dad runs grill. Mom, mom runs the front of the house. Kids act as waiters or waitresses or buses or whatever, and then they hire a few folks and then they've got a family restaurant that, you know, does a million dollars a year in revenue and the building is worth $250,000. And, you know, after expenses, the family makes a nice modest, you know, 110 grand or whatever. Well, that family has, you know, the land and the building and the business worth millions of dollars in assets. And that person might not have, you know, $100 million to where they can go up against, you know, the Walton family, but if 100 of them get together, they can, they can go up against the Walton family and they might actually be able to get something that they want because they have the capital to be actually, you know, Thomas Jefferson, not my favorite philosopher after I learned how the world actually works. But, you know, property owners, yeoman property owners, whether they're small restaurant people or small business people, guys who own a machine shop or something, if they have that money, they can stand up for themselves.

[Pete]

And

[D]

it doesn't matter if it's in Iraq or in Ohio. Coherent societies full of people who can stand up for themselves is the thing that the regime does not want. That's why Springfield, Ohio got flooded with all those Haitian refugees, because they don't want you to be able to, like, be in Springfield and look around Ohio and go, man, we're getting screwed and we should do something about it. They don't want you to be able to resist.

[Pete]

Yeah, they've created. I. I interviewed a gentleman that Jay Burden interviewed, recently, introduced me to, named John Moody, and he's a guy who. He puts on events with Joel Salatin.

[D]

Oh, yeah, I think a lot. Yeah, it was a great show.

[Pete]

Oh, thanks. Yeah, he's. You already listened to the one I put up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's a Kentucky guy, six kids, living on 25 acres, producing his own food. You know, one of the. One of the takeaways, one of the things you can take away from that episode is. Yeah, that, you know, was this malicious? Was it. Was it, you know, stupidity? Well, whatever it was, I mean, it weakens people. It takes our strength away. It also takes away our ability to rationalize. I mean, people can say whatever they want about lower testosterone, weakening men and also making them more leftist, but it also damages lower testosterone is shown to be something that affects cognitive ability. So if you're taking away people's not only physical strength but their cognitive ability, the argument can be made that a certain tribe doesn't. The majority don't exhibit physical strength, but they still. Their cognitive ability to rationalize and scheme and do things is still there. Well, I mean, that's even trying to be taken away from. That's trying to be taken away from us, right?

[D]

Well, because they don't want you and I to be able to argue with them. Why do you think you got demonetized? Wasn't because you were wrong. Because they don't want to. They don't want to have to deal with this obnoxious Spaniard. Like Spaniards defeated us once. We don't want these people to be a problem again. Take his money, take his wallet, take his coat, kick him out. That's what they did.

[Pete]

You Know,

[D]

Thomas should be a professor at the University of Chicago or the Ivy League or Oxbridge or like a major

[Pete]

law

[D]

academic, something. And to his great credit, he's built a life for himself outside of that after the system took all that stuff away from him. But if it was just pure ability, why isn't this guy, you know, teaching at Harvard? Why isn't he teaching at Yale or Princeton or University of Chicago or Stanford? Why not? Well, because he's against the system. And the system was like, well, we don't want to give you a shot. You'll make us look like fools. He did it anyway. But that's, you know, they don't want us to be able to organize because they know they've got a losing hand. You know, like, hey, do you want to be, like, weak and dumb, independent and not having industry in your country and not be able to get married and not have any kids and be gay? That's not a real. Like that sound like no one's gonna. No one's gonna sign up for that.

[Pete]

I guess more than what you would want, more than seeing the government fixed and, you know, seeing the deep state or the administrative state dismantled is, you know, and I'm not. This isn't coming from a populist kind of standpoint, is you want to see people just making the decision that, okay, I can't rely upon these people and I can't rely upon the system that's been built. I need to take care of myself. I need to take care of me and my family. And I think that there are definitely. You've seen since Trump started in 2015, with his rhetoric. If nothing else, Trump's just a wrecking ball. And I think he's managed to help a lot of people have a reset in their own mind. And you see more people being like, okay, yeah, I'm going to have to do this on my own. We're going to have to do this for ourselves. This is not something that we can rely upon. And, you know, to those people, I know there was a lot made of, oh, you know, Trump, if you. Trump is just. He's going to be a pressure release valve. If he's a pressure release valve for people, those people are lost. And those people, they're just sheep and they need to be led. So you need to step in and you need to tell them how they need to live. I mean, after 2020, anybody who thinks that the overwhelming majority of people should be left to their own devices, I mean, you're. You're not even in the anymore. These people need to be told how to live. And hopefully more people when they're seeing what's happening. And things like realizing, oh, the Epstein thing, no one's ever going to pay for what Epstein did. It's like, well, then you can't rely on the government. You have to start doing things for yourself. And we can do things for ourselves if we make that decision instead of waiting around or fucking making excuses like, the Jews control everything, so I can't do anything with my life. Well, there's a lot of people. There's a lot of people who know what we know, who are very successful. Why are they very successful? Because they fucking try and don't make excuses. Right.

[D]

Well, it's. There's a couple things that you mentioned there that I think are worth talking about. First of all, 10 organized guys can control 10 million people, right? And the vast majority of people don't want to be free. It's too much work. If you still believe in, like, being free for the majority of people, like, no, that's not what they want. They want their beer cold and their football on. That's what they want. Which is fine. Like, you can want that. Me, personally, I want to be free. So I do what I do and I, you know, incur all these risks because I think it's worth telling the truth. Now, with those two things in mind, the only people who can actually deliver something where those people who just want to. Just want to grill, want to watch football, want the beer to be cold. The only way that those people can live decent lives is of someone who cares about them, is in charge. Right? People who would flood their communities with opiates don't care if those people like that. That's not good for those people. Destroying marriage is bad for those people. Making it so they can't afford a house is bad for those people. Okay, well, how do we get things in such a way that we can be in charge, we can have some agency in our lives and we can just start to change things. Well, I mean, it starts with, you know, the first rule of, you know, getting in a group conflict is have some pros reach out to the old gory club and an active club or whoever it is that you feel most compelled to reach out to reach out to them because the lone wolf dies alone. And if you know what we know, things aren't going to get better. Trump is trying to bring this in for a control like the landing gear is stuck and it's moving too fast. And Trump is Trying to bring it in for a controlled landing that's gonna hurt and gonna break a bunch of stuff, but it might mostly be intact and not kill everybody. Who's. Who's he going after? Usaid. Well, everything that they did was bad and evil. You know, the entire useless, you know, Shade Neuqua industrial complex, well, that. That's just a money laundering operation for our enemies. Why. Why is it acceptable that there are tens of trillions of dollars of real estate that are just wasting in all of our major cities where decent people could live and work and have families? Why is that? Okay? Why is that acceptable?

[Pete]

Well, I think you know the answers to that.

[D]

Yeah, you and I know. Most people listening know. And the answer is, of course, that we live in an occupied government. And the first step to unoccupying that government is having enough people with some agency and some ability to do things in their lives, recognize that occupation and start to organize against it. You know, Pete, you've done great work talking about elite theory.

[Pete]

Well,

[D]

you know, the first step to any political fight is having elite on your side.

[Pete]

Yeah, if. If the Old Glory Club was about populism, we would just let anybody in. That's not what it's about. And the sooner people figure that out, the better. I was listening to Steve Bannon with Tim Dillon this morning. I made it about 20 minutes. He's just all populism. All populism. Oh, the people this. People that we had to do this. This is a guy who acts like people will make the right decision if you just give them the proper circumstances. That's. Where has that ever been shown? I mean, it's been proven wrong in this country because they had the chance to be like, no, in 1880, they had a chance. No, we're not going to take. We're not going to bring in this group of people who has been causing problems throughout Eastern Europe for centuries. Oh, no, we'll just let them in. Yeah, we'll let them in. Yeah, sure. I mean, so much of a problem that German Jews who had been here for, you know, 80 years prior wouldn't even let them into their golf clubs. They were like, we think these people are. These people are a problem, but. Oh, okay, sure. Yeah. Well, just. All the pale. All the Galicians. Bring them in. Yeah.

[D]

All the Pollocks. Well, and here's the thing about Steve Bannon is he's lying. And he knows, like, you know he's lying. He knows that you know he's lying, and he's doing it anyway because this dude's Red Evola. He's. Yeah, he's. He's Red. Back in the first administration, they were always like, oh, Steve Bannon reads this dangerous stuff like Carl Schmitt. And like, he knows. He's, you know, he's a former spook. There's no such thing as, of course, as a former spook, but, you know, like, he knows. So why do you continue to talk about populism, Steve? Who's pulling your strings such that you think you have to justify yourself with populism of the multiracial working class?

[Thomas]

Well,

[D]

maybe I don't want to be solidaristic with people who aren't my people and don't share my interests and consistently vote against those interests whenever they're given the chance and constantly take from me. And their entire middle class is a fabrication of federal government spending and they commit all the violent crime in our country. Maybe I don't want to be forced to be solaristic with those people. And you know this. I know you know this because you work for Breitbart, and they touch it, sorta. And in order to know where the line is and go right up to it, you have to know what's on the other side of the line. Otherwise you would have blundered. You'd have blundered across it ages ago. So if you're constantly tap dancing on that line, you have to know what's on the other side to not cross it. So why are you lying, Steve? Well, Breitbart conceived in Israel, born in America.

[Pete]

I had Tom Luongo on a week or a week and a half ago. And I told him, I said, I want you to listen to this episode I did with a guy who's a hedge fund manager, Ron Dodson. And I said, oh, he talks in the beginning about how Trump negotiates. And he listened.

[D]

Those were fantastic, by the way.

[Pete]

Yeah, Ron. Ron's wonderful. He's going after Osint OS I N T on Twitter this morning. I told him, I said, listen to this, about how Trump negotiates. And he got past that and he started listening, and he's like, you know, he listens to what we talked about right after that. And he. He got with me and he said, I want to thank you for sharing that episode. And then he went on like, a couple podcasts and actually mentioned the episode. Because what we talked about after that was that the fact that we. The. The age of consensus politics is dead, which means that populism is dead. We are not in. Nobody cares. Nobody really cares about what the people wants anymore. It's about who's going to get power and who's going to do a thing. And if Trump has proved anything by getting rid of, you know, the cash cows, who, you know, I said today with him slapping down Zelensky was basically him slapping down a branch of international Jewry. Him cutting off USAID is a way of basically defunding a branch of international Jewry. And he's doing this without taking the

[D]

gold from the city of London is defunding.

[Thomas]

Right? And

[D]

Jews are just criminals. Like, they're just mafiosi, right? Beami Netanyahu is a hard dude, but he's just a mafiosi, right? He's corrupt. He's constantly engaging in shady deals. That's what he is. And they've all been that way. Every single one of you know, what was it? The former prime minister who was Dawson's talked about this? The guy who was former Israeli intelligence, who was neck deep in the Mossad or in the Netanyahu or knee deep in the Epstein thing.

[Pete]

Not Ehud Barak.

[D]

Yeah, Barak. Yeah.

[Pete]

Ehud Baraka.

[D]

Yeah. Yeah. So these people are just criminals, right? The only difference between Congress and your local mafia is who cuts their suits. Right? Stormy's talked about this a lot. It's worth, you know, former senator from Washington State, Henry Scoop Jackson.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

The joke was that he was the senator from Boeing all through the Cold War. Right. We need more appropriation for, you know, like, he's just never met, you know, Defense Appropriations Bill he didn't love because he was Boeing's man in Washington. Well, everybody's that. Everybody you see on Capitol Hill, they're all somebody's somebody. They're all like a walking wallet for somebody. They're a mouthpiece for somebody. They're their legal guy, whatever. You know what you call CBS, CIA broadcasting system, right?

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[Pete]

100%

[D]

Washington Post. How did Bob Woodward, former intelligence operator, like, go from, you know, junior cub reporter to the man on the biggest story in the history of the newspaper? I mean, we've. We've basically found out that, like, Operation Mockingbird never ended. Like, Politico is just a Mockingbird operation. Like, you think Bill Buckley left the CIA to found National Review? Or do you think the CIA told him to found National Review? Which one? What do you think really happened there?

[Pete]

Rothbard covers that in Betrayal of the American Right, which is basically a pretty good. If you read around the obvious libertarianism and things like that, it's a good history of the neocons. One of the better History of the Neocons actually.

[D]

Yeah, it's a wonderful book. But yeah. You think Politico is any different? You think the Washington Post is any different? Like, oh, RT is not available in this country because it's, you know, propaganda state media. What do you think NPR is? It's just, it's just state media for shitlibs, you know, pbs. It's not any different. The BBC. And the receipts are there. Like this is, you've been paid by, you know, left wing of Zionists to promote their narrative. And they don't want Western nations to be full of free people who are capable of standing up on their own because they might stand up for themselves against the occupiers. Simple as like they, they didn't want the Ba'ath party cap, you know, in Syria and Iraq because the Arabs, due to their own civilizational deficiencies require like a strong man, central, central power to like keep, organize them and get them to do anything. So the Ba'ath parties couldn't stand because that had enabled Arabs to organize and assert their own interests, contrary interests of Israel. Just the way that Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania doesn't want those white coal miners to be able to organize successfully in their own self defense because then Storm Harris pretty much, dude, what's going on? Well then they could oppose him. So they don't want that.

[Pete]

I guess that brings us back to talking about, or we've never finished talking about just, or it's just a continued conversation about what we do for ourselves and that's what it's always come to. We can't. As much as I would love to see Trump just absolutely dismantle the administrative state, sitting here and expecting him to do that or sitting here and hoping he does that and then hoping it somehow benefits me because I think one of the things that we got strawman on was when we started Talking about the PayPal mafia last year that we were like, oh, you want these guys to be in charge? It's like, no. What I'm thinking is there is a quite a possibility that these people don't want me dead as compared to the regime that's in charge. And considering some of the things that I know that they, that I've heard that they want to do, maybe there'll be some things that'll line up that I'll be able to take advantage of. It wasn't, oh, we think these people are going to be in there and they're going to be our friends and they're going to be at 100%, no one ever said that. But, you know, if you're a dyed in the wool ideologue who, you know, needs everything to be 100% their way, which you're never going to get, then you hear one thing while we're saying another.

[D]

Okay, well, Mark Andreessen is a lot of things. Stupid is not one of them. Okay, Mark Andreessen knows that in a world without reliable electricity, his billion dollar fortune that's built on computers and technology and we're deadly squat. I don't know what his day to day life is like, but I imagine being able to take a private plane wherever you want and have multiple houses and cool locations is pretty cool. It's kind of nice to be able to like, oh, the Metropolitan Opera, New York is doing La Traviata this weekend and I really like that opera and they've got a really good soprano playing the main part. So I'm going to go, I'm going to go la CI La Traviata on Saturday night, tomorrow night. So I could be in Florida, be like, I'm going to go see La Troff tomorrow. And you call your guy up and you get on your plane in the morning and you fly from Florida to New York and you land at your private airfield that only other really rich dudes go to. And then you go to your New York apartment, that's nice, it's quiet. And you change into your nice outfit and you go see La Traviata and you go to your nice restaurant after the opera that's exclusive, and you crash nice New York place. And then the next day you fly

[Pete]

home

[D]

to your nice sunny place in Florida in the Keys in the wintertime. And it's fantastic. Well, in order for all of that to happen, Mark Andreessen's got to have people who are capable of flying his airplane and maintaining his airplane and maintaining the airport, maintaining the roads and maintaining the power stations so that all of that stuff works. And maybe, just maybe, Mark Andreessen wants to be in charge because Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel or whoever wants to be in charge because they want to be in charge. Well, guess what? They have billions of dollars and they want stuff. Stuff happens. If Peter Thiel wants to be in charge of things and he wants there to be functioning electricity because PayPal doesn't work when there's no electricity. And so he doesn't have any money if there's no electricity, well, then I benefit because, hey, I like electricity too. That not only enables me to talk to my buddy Pete, but it means I Don't freeze to death. So I'm a fan. And what I think these guys have seen is that. We white Western civilization, particularly the men were carrying such a parasite load that it was going to kill the host. And they were like, oh well, I like being King Parasite. To use an analogy. I like being the guy at the top of the heap who has my billions of dollars and my nice tech fortune, all which, you know, they've genuinely done things to earn, right? PayPal, PayPal is handy. Netscape Bowser revolutionized everything. Elon Musk is no dummy. Like these people are genuinely doing things. But what they've exposed is just how much of everything else was dragging us down. Millions and fake Social Security. Millions of fake Social Security numbers. Millions, billions of dollars in fake influence ops. You know, 10%, 10% of the country is working at some sort of non profit that is mostly just a government money laundering operation. You know, you and I talked about the teachers unions in our, in the series on Brace Warren High School. That's just a money lender operation.

[Pete]

It's funny when, when I started reading that book and I think I'm, I think I re released it recently or I'm getting ready to re release it the, in the big file and everything. You know, we didn't realize, we thought we were just going to find out about, you know, a bunch of kids, you know, a bunch of kids quote unquote chimping out in high school. And we found out that. Well, no, we were good. We were going to read about the Jewish, the Jewish takeover of a public union. And it laid out exactly how they did it. I mean that's the craziest thing about that book is you're like, oh, okay, well blacks are beating people up, doing drugs and raping teachers. Wow, I did not know that. No, I kind of knew that. I just had never really seen it spelled out in such detail. But what we really found out was we found out why nothing was ever going to be done about it. Because a heist was happening, Right?

[D]

Yeah, because Randy. Randy Whitegarden or is the, you know, aft head, right? And she's a Jewish lesbian married to a rap quote unquote, married to a rabbi or something. And basically right. Was just the same USA ad scam, right? They're going to take a bunch of these people's tax money, they're going to splash it out to all their friends and those friends are going to be like, well, you know, you just gave me a thousand bucks, I'm going to give you a Hundred dollars back to continue to splash out that money for me because, you know, I'm getting, you know, summaries off huge, you know, and it's. And they knew it was going to like it. They could read an actual aerial table in 1976, they knew it was going to bankrupt the state of New York, you know, 50 years from now. In the 2000s, they didn't care because they were getting paid. Now it's like, well, you know, again, Peter Thiel, Margaret Dreeson, not dumb guys. They read that actuarial table and said, oh, well, if we want to live in a society that functions well enough that we can enjoy it and do things like go to nice restaurants and go see the opera and go see the symphony orchestras and have nice houses with, with functioning electrical systems and clean water and all that stuff, like we're gonna have to put the ship alright, because there's no other elite around to do it. We said for years, hey, maybe you should fix this. Maybe you should fix this. Well, lo and behold, you know, old cocaine Mitch, whose wife was the former Transportation Secretary who's from an oligarchical Chinese family. She's not real interested in fixing America. Well, why not? Well, because she doesn't, because she's not American. Elaine Chao is not an American. Why was this person, you know, this Transportation secretary under W. Bush. Why are all these federal judges who aren't Americans being put in place where they can like block the Trump administration and say, well, I mean, I'm not an American and my wife works for, you know, an open borders ngo. But I'm going to tell you guys how your constitution works. What? No, like this can't work. It will not continue to function. How Many? There's probably 100 million fraudulent illegal immigrants in America. If you, if rounding up like it might be 80 million, it might be 75 million, but tens of millions, certainly that many if you include their offspring who shouldn't be citizens.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

But are because or temporarily are because of our ridiculous system. Have you been to a public emergency room lately? They're unusable. The streets look like the dark side of the moon.

[Pete]

Yeah. If you're anywhere near a city, it just look, it looks like an airport in Africa.

[D]

Yeah. And so no matter what, right? Trump just telling Zelensky, hey, we can't do business like this. I'll believe it when I see it. But whoever's pulling Donald Trump's strings understands that. We're at the end of the Runway. There's no more room now. The national debt. Interest on the national debt exceeds our defense spending. And that was already bloated by three or four times too much.

[Pete]

Basically, at this point, what we're hoping for is you're just hoping for more of the rot to be cut away. Because the more rot that's cut away, the more opportunity that is for you, the more.

[D]

Can't get this removed. Yeah, that's.

[Pete]

Well, I mean, people need to understand. There's too many people looking at this, and I get them coming into the comments on my live stream or leaving comments on Twitter, I'm willing to do something as soon as everything's perfect. It's not ever going to be perfect. So you have to be able to recognize opportunity when it presents itself. And it's presenting itself right now. Things are being put in place now. We may have a quote unquote correction coming in the market very soon. So I don't know if that's the place you'd look now when everything goes down. If you have some extra, you know, you might want to ride the wave back up. But no, what I'm talking about is, I'm talking about tangible goods, employment, starting your own business, all of these things. Starting a family, going and, you know, seeing if you can find some land somewhere, you know, and it doesn't have to be. Make sure it's not in the.

[D]

It doesn't have to be in the

[Pete]

greatest zip code we've been sold, that it just someplace where you're comfortable, someplace where you're safe. All of these things can be. All of these things can. Should be had. You should have been able to do this under the Biden administration if you had your head on straight. But now a lot of that rot is being torn away. And if you're just sitting there and you're complaining and you're like, well, I don't want to do anything until everything's perfect. Well, that's not going to happen. So you're just going to be lost. I used to think like that. I used to think like that. It's like, well, why should I even bother really trying when, you know, if you own a house, you never really own it because of property taxes and the more money I make, the more income tax I'm going to pay and everything. And I mean, that's just a loser mentality. It's just a. It's just a loser mentality. And I hear it. I hear it all too often. And it's one of the reasons why I ran away from libertarianism, because you'll Hear that? I remember in 2021, people were complaining about, you know, it's like, oh, well, what do we do? And Matt Erickson said, make more money. And immediately I. There was like five comments saying, oh, so that I can pay more taxes to pay for the war in Yemen.

[D]

Yeah, it's like, so. So you have more power, dumbass. Because money is power. That's why. I mean, the people who don't want to win just don't want to win. And you can't help those people. So leave them behind and do whatever you can to help yourself and those that want to help you and those that also want to win.

[Pete]

Yeah. You know, when Thomas. People still contact me all the time and go, when Thomas says, you know, we're not Jehovah's Witnesses, we're looking for a vanguard, what does that mean? It means exactly what it means. It means that we're putting information out there. And I know that a lot of the people listening to this don't want to be a part of the vanguard. They're looking for information, they're looking for education, whatever can help them. But, you know, one of the good things that has come out of this show is a lot of people joining the Old Glory club and us getting to meet a lot of young people who are eager to be elite. They want to know how to do that. They want to know how to get power. They want to know how to get. That's what this is all about. You're looking. It goes back to what we were talking about, populism. Not everybody's going to be able to. That's one of the reasons why Jesus said, you'll always have the poor, because people, some people are just not going to want to do for themselves. They'll always find an excuse to not. And yeah, I mean, what we're doing, what this was always all about, was trying to. Trying to lift people up who want to be lifted up. And now some things are being. Some rod is being stripped away that might even be able to make it a little bit easier so that you can maybe some. Some regulations will be gone. It'll allow you to do things that you would. You never thought about doing.

[D]

So right now, if you're a white man under the age of 30, you've been hiking with a bunch of other people's food in your backpack and expected to, you know, when you want to send. To stop the camp, you're expected to hand them their food. Well, what the Trump administration has just done said, well, you don't Got to carry that anymore. You can hike farther and faster and take care of yourself more when you're not carrying other people's stuff. Now, if he actually does it, or if it's just all talk, we'll see. This Epstein rug poll was pretty disappointing, but nevertheless, he's exposing the brat, and that might give people the moral courage to understand just where we're at. I don't know if that's his play. I don't know if that's their plan. I don't know what the ultimate goal is, but I know for a fact that no matter what happens, I'll be better off if I find guys that I know I can trust that are also working to improve themselves and improve their own situations, as I'm trying to do myself. So no matter what. Like, there's a wonderful old prep blog, probably from the 2010s used to call the Wood pile Report, called the gentleman, called himself Old Remus, and he said if a prep doesn't make your life better in general, it's useless. So having a case of MREs, good idea. Spending every last dime you have to have a year's worth of MREs, bad idea. No matter what you're doing in your life, if you don't have any debt and you're in good shape and you're looking to network with bros, like, do any of those things make your life worse? No, of course not. Does it mean you're putting together like a, you know, Mad Max apocalypse Squad? I mean, maybe, but, like, being in shape and having friends is, like, not a bad thing, no matter what. So just do it. Do the. Do the prep that makes your life better no matter what, you know, instead of just endlessly, you know, suppose it's a little bit hypocritical guy, you know, guy who does a bunch of podcasts telling people to stop just endlessly listening to podcasts, but go out and do something, you know, use this knowledge you've been given that, you know, those of us who give it to you, you know, incur great risks to do it. You know, not only do you. Should you use that knowledge to improve your own life, but, you know, support the people that support you and go to, you know, Freeman beyond the wall slash support to enable Pete to, you know, keep doing this so that you have more. More of a larger network. Because right now, if you're an OGC guy, you can go just about anywhere in America and find a broken. And within a year from now or two years from now, I would be very Very surprised if there weren't OGC guys in every state,

[Pete]

at least getting chapters up in every state up and running, because I believe we do have OGC guys in every state now, spiritually. We just. We're doing this officially. So, yeah, I got to cut it there because I got another one coming up this afternoon. But I do appreciate you coming by, and I really hope people got the message today that there are some good things happening. You will be disappointed. It's politics. You have no control over it. You're going to be disappointed. Suck it up, keep going, and do what you need to do to take care of you and yours. And, you know, don't buy into this lie that collectivism is socialism or communism. And then when you say that people are like, well, no, only if you use a state. No, if you're local and you get one of your people elected, I mean, one of our people is a state's attorney right now. One of our people, like a bunch of our people are working in this administration, you know, and that's. That's something. That's something to celebrate If. If that can happen. There's no reason why your local area, you guys can't get together and take over and, you know, defeat the enemy in your local area and try to work on making it what you want it to look like, what you and. And your people want it to look like. So I'll end on that, and I'll give you the last word if you have anything.

[D]

No, just, you know, support the people that support you. Rebrand me on the wall slash, support.

[Pete]

Right. I appreciate that, man. Well, thank you. And until the next time, take care of yourself, Rhett.

[D]

Thanks, man.

[Pete]

Want to welcome everyone back to the Picanha Show. I have two frequent beloved guests here today. So, Thomas, how are you doing?

[Thomas]

I'm well. Thanks for inviting me.

[Pete]

Dee, how are you doing?

[D]

I'm fantastic, man. Thanks for having me back.

[Pete]

All right, D, this was your idea for a conversation, so have at it, man.

[D]

Mikasa Tsukasa, thank you so much. So everyone should totally check out. I mean, everything that Pete and Thomas have done together, but the Mosley series in particular, I found really fascinating. Just because Mosley shares a cultural milieu with us. And in, I think, episode four or five, you guys talked about the Fascist International Conference. The first one. First and only one. And we mentioned all the different nations that were there. And if you haven't read Paul Gottfried's Fascism the Career of a Concept, I think it's a really good book. Despite Dr. Gottfried being of the tribe, I believe he's an honest man. And it got me thinking that, you know, in 1916 at the Somme, if you'd gone back a century to the Congress of Vienna where Napoleon was or the, you know, Hoppe recently called it a gentleman's peace, right? You have this where despite firearms, most of the people in the world were still agricultural peasants. And despite advances in things like reap the McCormick reaper binder in the 1850s,

[Pete]

or

[D]

improved yields and crops and other things, right? Like, like an agricultural peasant from like a Roman Latifundia would fundamentally understand. Like a guy who was growing food in Mississippi in like 1855. But in the 19th century between the Somme and Vienna, you had cars, trains, refrigeration, canning, telecommunications in telegraph and the telephone. I mean, just literally everything in normal life, everyday life, changed 100%. And in a very real way, like World War I represents like the death of the old world. And fascism is this opportunity. There's like, there's three kind of semi coherent ways to deal with this new changed world that happens after the war, after the great war of capitalism, Bolshevism and fascism.

[Pete]

And

[D]

really to me, the only one that actually kind of makes coherent sense

[Pete]

with like human beings as they are,

[D]

that have particular loves and attachments and you know, it doesn't destroy religion and what, whatever. Fascism was the one coherent way to actually address all these changes without like just rejecting them entirely.

[Pete]

There are people who will, you know,

[D]

larp as Catholic monarchists or whatever and like, we just need to go back to the way it was in the 13th century. Like, that's a nice thought, but that ain't happening. So I couldn't think of anybody better than Thomas to like actually elucidate how fascism was this just very real attempt to grapple with the world as it now found itself. And I think that people need to understand that like those are your alternatives, right? You can have Bolshevism, you can have Judeo usurious capitalism, or you can have some sort of state socialism and, and that's it. So.

[Thomas]

Well, it's also, it's important to consider, I think, I mean, I invoke the term capitalism because just for intelligibility. And people like Schumpler, they invoked it for the same reason, even though he didn't think that it was particularly useful as a descriptor in absolute terms. But like, the important thing to keep in mind is that the New Deal revolution, it was its revolutionary, as would happen in Germany in 1933 or what had happened in the Soviet Union. Okay. Like it wasn't. Roosevelt wasn't just this guy. He was like, well, you know, there's a structural crisis underway, so we need an executive to step in and you know, and kind of manage the, the, the crisis situation. Like the New Deal was this top down ideology of retooling the entire way of living of, you know, millions and millions of people. And I make the point again and again that like what became the civil rights revolution euphemistically that started under Roosevelt, like forced racial integration, this kind of trying to forcibly strip people of their identitarian characteristics, you know, that was one of the kind of secondary imperatives of the military draft, was the kind of condition people towards those, towards those imperatives. You know, so it wasn't, it wasn't this kind of like neutral administrative apparatus that was implemented, but that also, you know, had sort of like a war profiteer sensibility, you know, in terms of power political affairs. So that's fundamentally important and it's not in these people were very much adjacent the, the communists. I mean that, that's why they, it wasn't just that they hated the fascists and the national socialists and it's not just that they were sympathetic to Zionism. Like first and foremost, I, Roosevelt himself didn't particularly like Jews. I mean, that's just a fact. Like his, his primary sympathy was for communism. You know, like in the, in the view of people like him, you know, this is an inevitability. This is the way the world is going. You know, and for context too, because I've people to this day, they still talk about guys like Burnham as being neocons because you know, in the 1920s they would, they would bandy socialist ideas. People don't understand that ontologically, every single person thought that way because there'd been a total collapse of the nascent world economy. And in the absence of information tech, that situation is unmanageable. Like laissez faire is not possible in a true sense if there's no such thing as situational awareness up to the moment. You know, really the situation kind of endured until the late 1980s. Like the reason now, like there's not true economic crises. Part of that is structural and part of that has to do with the, the, the deep integration of capital. But primarily it's the elimination of uncertainty. Like I can tell you right this moment, like what's happening in European markets, okay, even like 40 years ago, 30 years ago, I wouldn't know for hours. You know, in the 1920s, I wouldn't know for days. So this idea that people, you know, who weren't inclined towards New Dealerism or towards communism or towards utopian socialism, whatever, that they were just advocating status models of, of, of the planned economy or whatever, or that they were like bandying Keynesianism, they weren't doing that because like they had some ethical disposition in that way. It's because that's the way every single person thought. You know, if you'd been, if you started talking about laissez faire economics, people looked at you like you were an idiot or a crazy person. Like, how would that even have worked? You know, so there's that. I tend to agree to change gears back to the main subject matter because that was kind of a tangent. I generally agree with Ernst Nolte. I think fascism, like true fascism as it emerged, you know, in Italy, it was a radical tendency. It was as much a radical tendency as communism was. It just didn't have the same political orientation, obviously. And a lot of that was born a future shock, you know, but also the international situation had to do with it. You know, I make the point again and again. One of the reasons there's the alibi of conservatives and other midwits that, oh, you shouldn't be too hard on Churchill, because the UK had to prevent the ascendancy of a rival power in Germany that was dead like cabinet warring. And you know, this kind of sensibility of, oh, we've got a, you know, we've got a, we've got to strangle geostrategic rivals in utero to like preserve, you know, our ability to manage these captive markets and things like that. Died in 1914. You know, by the time of the Great Depression, this superpower era was emerging. You know, so Japan and Europe and Germany specifically. But I mean, I say Europe because the Axis wasn't just Germany. That's a misconception that this was some German nationalist enterprise. But Japan, through what they called the Greater Asia Co Prosperity Sphere and Germany, slash Europe would become superpowers. They would perish, you know, and, you know, I, I, I put it to people who invoke that sort of ethical alibi that I just invoked, you know, the UK obviously lost the war and it became like a third rate power, you know, that's now like overrun with, with, with aliens and is, you know, quite literally Airstrip One. So like, obviously like that victory was the most Pyrrhic victory that's ever, that's ever been had.

[D]

Yeah, Mosley was completely Correct. Right. Like we have to secure the empire. We're going to lose it. You know, just to briefly bring up like Dununzia's cult of speed, right? We didn't have paved roads until like 1820. McAdam didn't invent the process till 1820s. So think about this, like Roman transportation In like the first century was the best road, Scott, until the mid 18th century. And 40 miles an hour was the fastest any human being went more than like a second or two and lived to tell about it for, for centuries. And as you pointed out. Right. Like there's was just no alternative.

[Thomas]

Well, the two key. The two key. The two key aspects to future shock that translated that both informed and were the catalyst for and, and were most significant to the political situation. It was, it was the crisis of labor and it was the, the military and strategic situation. The emergence of, of, of wartech, Devastating wartech at scale. And also what's significant is that massive warfare at scale basically never ever happens. So the, so the 20th century, the fact that this became the reality constantly, that's completely abnormal. Those conditions happen maybe once every thousand years. And obviously the, again, the war tech that emerged in scale capacities, that was totally unprecedented. But also I make the point to people a lot. You know, the crisis of labor and the, the fortunes of millions of people being bound up with labor imperatives. People can't conceptualize that anymore. That's the reason why I'm always telling people, don't use the term working class. There is no working class. There hasn't. Like the last of it in structural terms went away in the early 90s. Like we say working class, we don't mean people with jobs or like guys who do work. We're talking about millions and millions of people doing pretty much the exact same job in factory settings. They're almost all young, they're almost all men. Their jobs are dangerous. They're very, very low wage. There's basically no, no room for advancements. It's, it's a totally urbanized setting for this kind of labor that is the working class. Okay. It's conditions that don't exist anymore really anywhere on this planet. Like even in places like China where there's these like, mass, like Apple factories. I mean, don't get me wrong, those people have like a really brutal lot of life and they, they don't have like the right to organize or anything. And they're very much like exploited. But that's, that's different than what we're talking about in, you know, the early 20th century. Like that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the ideological soil, if you will, from where like communism emerges. That is the working class. If you read up in Sinclair's the Jungle, which I think is a great book, you know, I'm not, I know, socialist like Sinclair was, but what he describes in the Chicago stockyards, that's the way that it was. You know, every day people die on the job. Like going to your job is like going to war. And there's always men who want to work. Like if you, if you age out of the ability to physically do your job, if you get injured on the job, you'll be thrown away like garbage. There's a hundred other men who want to do your job who are younger, stronger, and will do it for half of what you do. Like, why do I need you? That's the working class, okay? And there's a, there's an ontological aspect to it. Like people emphasize a lot the fact that these people lived in poverty, often grinding poverty, and in the cities that were dirty, dangerous. These people have been ripped out of the, out of their kind of natural patterns of living in rural or semi rural environments, know, to go work there because they had to, to survive. But also there's, you know, there's an ontological aspect. Like in one of Younger's, I mean Younger dealt with this directly in their arbiter, but he and a lot of his fiction, it fe like the protags or some of the secondary characters. They're great war veterans who find themselves in factory environments and those experiences like bleed into one another. You know, like fighting with these dangerous machines, you know, to like earn like a paltry wage is like being in the trenches again, you know, that's. It's not, it's not just an accident or it's not just a flex that these guys on the street in Weimar who fought under the communist banner called themselves, you know, combat group of the working class because that wasn't hyperbole, you know, and those conditions are psychologically devastating. You know, like basically you're forced into conditions where it's like I, I've gotta, I've got to do this dangerous, dirty job, otherwise I'll die, you know, and I have no recourse. You know, that's, that's a lot of what underlay. I mean, that's what underlay all revolutionary imperials, you know, including fascism and Mussolini's background in like the communist movement, despite what a lot of communists said and what a lot of a lot of left revisionists say today. It wasn't just like some cynical ploy like, oh, I'll start donning the. This, this, this kind of guise of, of. Of national or racial pride or something. Like. Most likely believed everything he said, you know, but he, He. He wasn't putting on airs with defining the fascist movement. It's like a movement of like, workers and soldiers and artists. That's what it was kind of the. It was also responding to. It was also responding to tendencies like the action of Francis, who are very much reactionary. Like, Moras himself was like an atheist and very much kind of like a 20th century modernist. But he believed in like the. He. He thought that, you know, the Roman Church should have, like, retained like, a fundamental role in French political life. He believed in like, the monarchy. He thought these things were like, essential to the sovereign authority and, and like symbolic, psychological aspects of culture. Mussolini was responding that in large part, he's like, no, that's. That's nonsense. We're done with that. You know, like, Mussolini kept. Obviously Mussolini didn't oppose the monarchy. Part of it in Italy, part of that was tactical. A part of that was, you know, he thought those kinds of things were important as a matter of, you know, like, you know, like Latin heritage and stuff. But he. The. The National Fascist Party. I agree with Ernest Nolte. It was largely response to that, like the National Social. The German Workers Party was like, very much like a synthesis of those things, you know, not entirely consciously. It was like a discursive process. But I think that's the way to think about it, frankly.

[Pete]

Let me jump in and ask a question here. When you look at the 19th century, with the 19th century basically being a. I mean, you had seminaries who were. Seminaries who were formally reformed adopting Darwinian, Darwinian models. So basically the metaphysical has gone away. How much of an effect does that have? Just basically, I mean, on the culture? We know what it does, but how much of an effect does that have on the political culture, even outside of Marxism?

[Thomas]

Yeah, it's tremendously impactful. And that's why. That's one of the two things. It was that it was the death of metaphysics and things that were things like transcendent aspects of the culture. But also, you know, people. People took for granted that, you know, religion is dead. You know, even if that thing. Even if that kind of thing is value, nobody believes in that anymore. You know, human affairs are reducible to the material and the biological, and that's what underlay like a lot of racialism. Okay. I wrote a whole essay for my dear friend Giles who runs the Asylum mag. I wrote, I wrote an essay for it that he asked me to. Because people have this idea that, oh, you know, this kind of racialism was some German obsession. That's the way everybody thought. You know, America was probably the most avidly, like, racial eugenicist country that existed then. I mean, people thought that way in England, in Japan, in France. Like this idea that, you know, well, the reason humans behave the way they do culturally is because of your race. Like, like, I'm not saying, like race is a real thing. I'm not saying that, but it's not. You're like your DNA or your blood as they thought in those days. Like, doesn't make you like, act Jewish or like act German. Like, that doesn't make any sense. But in those days, everybody thought that way. Like, honestly, that's why these like, Internet guys, like, I mean, yeah, there's like an ethnic component to any sectarian belief structure. And obviously, like, obviously, like Judaism is an ethnos as well as like a, a sectarian cultural structure. But these guys, these weirdos, like, bandying like, oh, Jews are a race. Like that. Nobody thinks that way anymore. That's the way people thought in, in the 1920s, like on both sides of the divide, like, oh, like you're Jewish because you have this kind of, you have this kind of blood, you know, like that, you know, and if you're, if you're, you're European or Iran, like, or Japanese, you know, your blood makes you behave this way. Like, that's, that's not the way things are like that, That's Darwinist nonsense, you know, Like, Darwinism is nonsense. I don't like people on the right can't like, let that go. But that's, that's as much, it's as much like an enlightenment, you know, kind of secular humanist lie as, as, as the rest of it, you know, like, you don't, you're not, you're not somebody. You're not some like meat robot like running a program. Like, that's not what a race is, you know, like, yeah, there's a biological aspect to it, but that, you know, but no, that, that's why, that's why people, they kind of cherry pick. They'll look at something like some guy like, some guy like Serrano Suner or somebody like Mussolini or somebody like Adolf Hitler like, said or wrote about religion. They're like, see, like, these guys hated religion. It's like everybody thought that way, you know, and honestly like people like Hitler, Mussolini, they had like a softer view. I mean first of all communities wanted to literally like murder people who were you know, still clinging to the old ways. But you know, the, the, the national soldiers and the fascists, I mean they such that they're views of, of religiosity seem punitive which in the case of the way I really don't think they did. They were like, look at, look at like the conversations like Himler and got Love Burger like burgers talking about how like yeah, you need to like cultivate like among our Islamic allies we need to like cultivate their like belief and like in, in Orthodox and Roman Catholic territories we gotta like cultivate like religious belief. They were doing the opposite of anything but it like cynical is a way of better not like the point being it, it wasn't even like for a lot of people it wasn't even like a, it was a value neutral thing. Like this is the way it is. People don't think that way anymore, you know, so why, why would we talk about that stuff? It's irrelevant.

[Pete]

Go ahead.

[D]

D well I, I, this is all gold, but I, I, I do think that it's important for listeners to remember that in the span of three generations Downton Abbott was actually good at this. If you were like a poor peasant and you needed a job, you could go to the local burger, the local Ritter, the local gentleman in pretty much any country in Europe right before 1914 and be like, hey, I need a job. And he'd like oh well I guess I could use another gardener. Another this, another that. And you know, between the revolution in industry and the revolution in the war, right, that killed that for a lot of reasons. Like the entire upper crust of Britain, of France, of Germany, like they all died in the trenches. Russia and the entire, the aristocracy bled itself white all across Europe. And you know, the natural leader class just basically got slaughtered in, in 1914-1918. So the, and I was, I was incorrect earlier. It wasn't Zenunzio on the condescetas Marinetti, I'm sorry but that brutal work environment that you talked about and you know the, effectively the factory being no different than the trenches. Was there any like precedent for this in history that we know of? I mean like I, I'm, I'm struggling. I find with some kind of parallel here where like the entire economic, social, religious, you know, sociological, familial paradigm just, they all just shattered.

[Thomas]

There is no parallel. And like despite this one was making the point that like only morons say history repeats itself. It absolutely does not. You know, like only idiots think that. Plus consider this man, the, the Ford Motor plant. I mean Henry Ford was a great man and in part because he, he humanized labor and, and he, and he, he did, he did, he took heroic measures to elevate the quality of life of his workforce. So that's, that's relevant, but just in overall terms. But my point is the Ford motor plant employed 100,000 people. That, that's utterly insane. Like literally tens of thousands of people working on one site and thousands and thousands of men literally doing the same job. But that's also why general strike could bring the economy to its knees. You know, because these value added manufacturers, you know, if you could, if you could halt production on them, you know, they, you nothing, there was no business was being done. You know, it wasn't at all like today. And when you're talking about, when you're talking about a true working class where you have, you know, people integrated with productive machines, like literally, you know, all doing the same job, they become part of that machine and they can, they can stop that machine. And like, that's why, that's also why scab labor became a thing. Because you can, if you got like a, if you got like a young man literally with a strong back, if he can physically handle it and endure it psychologically and physically, you can teach any strong young guy to do this job. Like, that's part of, that's part of what was critical to this paradigm is that we're talking about physically very difficult, but unskilled labor. You know, it's basically, you know, it's like a labor army. That's why Spangler talked about how the city is a barracks, because urbanization at scale, that's why it doesn't make any sense anymore. And like since the 70s when the federal government stopped bailing out cities, which was a huge deal under the Ford administration, Gerald Ford, like the, the whole, the mad scramble has been to like find a way to like make cities profitable because like they don't make sociological sense, you know, other, I mean I, I think cities are important for sociological and historical reasons, but they exist. The reason why cities exist as we know them is as worker barracks, you know, and finding a way to make them profitable when that paradigm went away has been a very difficult thing and it's still, it's ongoing.

[Pete]

Something you said there that just triggered something right in my brain was about general strikes. And you know, a lot of people will say, oh the Reason why you ship your manufacturing over to China is because you know, it's cheaper to manufacture there and ship back here than it is to manufacture here. Yeah. You also don't have a chance. There's no chance of having a strike

[Thomas]

and a shutdown because it's illegal and you'll get thrown in jail or you'll be shot. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[D]

Right, well. Or sabotage.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

Like think about the average Ford plant today. How many billions of dollars in human or in capital is there at a Ford plant? Every robot's probably 25, 30, $40,000 or more. I have no idea. Right.

[Thomas]

More like I worked at a machine shop as my first job, and there was these machines that literally had been made in World War II that were valued at like 75, 75 or $100,000. It's insane. Yeah, go ahead.

[D]

And that was a number of years ago. So they're probably even more now. Right. So you talk about an army of labor. Well, armies can go towards the other guy or they can mutiny. And so like if they, your workforce mutinies and they destroy a bunch of your stuff or sabotage any of your stuff or. And it doesn't even need to be much. Right. Like if, if one of your lathes is like a tenth of degree of a degree out of spec, like every single part it puts out is going to be wrong. And when you have to have tolerances of thousands of an inch in order for something to work. Like, think about how crazy it is talking to my friend Sandbach about this. Like, if anyone understood what a car is, it's. It's a. It's a metal tube filled up with highly explosive volatile gasoline. And you light it on fire and you go down the road at 90 miles an hour. Like, that's crazy. And in order for that not to just fall apart or break, you have to have very tight tolerances. And we're not talking airplanes, which are even tighter or anything like that. This is just cars. And they have relatively loose tolerances compared to something like a airplane or let alone anything involving space. So you've got these where you. Everything has to be up to spec.

[Thomas]

No 100%. I'll also add to talking about the labor situation and the radicalization of the laboring classes as well as World War I and managing conflict at scale. You know, this kind of thing, it's like trying to ride some out of control animal. Like this idea that every step of the way the stuff can be controlled or that there's like discrete kind of temporal snapshots Whereby if you're in an executive role, you can somehow put the brakes on things like. That's nonsense. Like these things get out of control rapidly. And trying to, Trying to bring a labor revolt under control or trying to end. They're trying to bring a conflict to, you know, to cease fire, as was the case in like 1916, 1917. That's. That's almost impossible. You know, like, once these things start, they can't really be stopped. They have to run their course. And I, I mean, that was the case. If you're talking about. If you're talking about, you know, some, Some. Some local lord in, in the 1500s. If you're talking about a national state of 80 million people, you know, involved in a war that's rapidly becoming mechanized, you know, where. Where, where. Where 20 million men are mobilized fighting it. It's impossible to stop it. You know, and that's why. And there, there's in. And, and the leadership element was uniquely ill suited to do that. You know, I made the point again. Again, there's a reason why Hit Hitler actually personally hated very few people. I mean, he wouldn't have gotten very far as. And he certainly wouldn't become the most single powerful man in the world if he sat around hating people. He hated the Kaiser Wilhelm and many, many veterans did as they should have because he was a piece of shit. And Holvig was, Was the real Hovig and Franz Josef and the Hasbury Empire were like the real heroes, the central powers, in my opinion. But. And both of them understood that if this war begins, we won't be able to stop it. You know, I mean, while the Kaiser was carrying on and with. He was like some kind of money python character or something, just like oblivious to these things. I mean, as were like a lot of his counterparts, to be fair, across the continent. But, you know, the German empire was a mixed system. It was, you know, the Bismarckian system. There. There was a genuine separation between state and government. But at the end of the day, I mean, the Kaiser and ultimate war authority, you know, I mean, people, the general staff, the, The Reichskonsler, you know, these, These guys had a lot of power and they had independent power to negotiate within reason. But I mean, it was in the hands of the Kaiser. And like, if you got some, if you got guys, you know, guys who were born in the mid 19th century who've been kind of cloistered within palace walls, like both physically and conceptually, and a modern mechanized war is in their hands like that. That's That's a nightmare, you know, I mean, so that's part of it.

[Pete]

Yeah. Well, go ahead.

[D]

We're talking Hitler was born in 1889 and Mussolini was 1883, I believe. Right. So they were young men when, like, the world had changed in a crazy fashion. But all the guys you'd mentioned, you know, the Kaiser was born in, what, 1853, I want to say. I can't remember, but, you know, like the 1850, like, he was an old man by 1914, and he was a literal prince. Right. So he's in this. He's never had to work in industrial. Even the kings of France who, you know, quote unquote, worked for a living, they were taught a trade as part of their regal duties. Right. They were. They were never taught, like, okay, be careful. Don't stick your finger in this or lose an arm. Like, that was never a thing that any of these people ever had to deal with.

[Thomas]

I think Franz Joseph was an exception. And to be. He was. He was probably elderly by the onset of hostilities, but he'd. Franz Joseph, he'd regularly, fast. He slept on a military cotton, like, would forego luxury. He was a career soldier. Like, even when he was out of active service, like, he. He'd still, like, wear a uniform every day. Like, he. He didn't like having to put, like, regal finery. But. Yeah, go ahead. Generally. Yeah, that's. He was the exception that proves the rule.

[D]

Yeah, well, he's. He's. There are people who want to canonize him. No one of Catholics in particular who want to canonize him because he was just such a. He tried so hard to stop this, you know, and you, as you mentioned, like, it had a momentum all its own where, like, no one could stop it, you know, like perhaps in 1913, like, if all the cousins had met and been like, this is insane. Like, if. If they'd gotten together and perhaps done a demonstration of, like, this is what a modern machine gun can do and, like, had a bunch of cows in the field or something and watch.

[Thomas]

That's. That's critical, too. Like, after. After Waterloo, there wasn't a real European war. Like, there was the Franco Prussian War, which was like. Which was. It was like an incredible victory. And that's like, what put the Prussians on the map. And there was. There was the Crimea, but the Crimea was, like, very much restricted to localized theaters. But there, you know, there wasn't a real, like, modern war. There was guys and the guys who'd served and as mercenaries in the War between the States And America, like some of them tried to sound the alarm bells, like look like this is going to be a slaughter. But yeah, they people had no idea what like modern war tech was like because it had been a century since most people had been exposed to that kind of thing.

[D]

And everything changed so much too. I mean.

[Pete]

Yeah, well that's one of the things I wanted to bring up is you go for, you go from the Franco Prussian War to World War I, which is less than 50 years. And World War I you have planes that are flying around and they're dropping, manually dropping bombs at them, them. And then just less than 20 years later the Condor Legion is friggin lighting cities on fire in Spain. I mean how, how do you not. How does humanity and people who are of a high culture thinking people who are looking towards the eternal and looking towards doing great things, how are they not all over the place in trying to figure out an ideology when you, in 20 years you go from oh, here I'm dropping a bomb out of a plane with my hand to I just lit Guarnick on fire.

[Thomas]

Yeah, no, and things like, and things like, things like chemical warfare. I mean it's not just like poison gas is disgusting and it's, it's just like awful to contemplate. That's a, that's a terrible way to die. But this idea that, you know, I can, I, I can, I can fire poison at you like well outside of visual range through like indirect fire, you know, and within seconds you'll be like, your lungs will tread to pieces and you'll die like choking on those pieces or you know, like you'll, you'll scratch your, you'll, you'll, you'll scratch most sensitive areas of your body bloody because like a blistering agent is, is, is, is like tearing your skin apart, you know, like that kind of stuff. It's like something out of like science fiction that'd be like if guys went to war tomorrow and like the Ians or like the Cies had like found a way to like launch like xenomorphs at you that like grab your face and then like pop out of your chest. Like, I mean I'm being obtuse, but that's like what it would be like. But people just like what the. You know, like I, that, I mean not like people were, I mean people were habituated to violence unfortunately very much in those days of a non cool like noble sword. But stuff like that is just like the horrors of technology kind of, I guess is my point.

[D]

Like the largest the grand army got was like 600000 people. And that was only very briefly. Right. And then like World War I, that's not even, I mean that's like casualties for a couple months, you know.

[Thomas]

Yeah. The burn rate is, was unbelievable. And what's also too the, some of the, some of the exigencies that emerge in game theory and like reach their zenith, you know, by the, the final cycle of the Cold War where there's conditions of strategic parody and planning for nuclear war fighting. You know, you're like you as commander of or as part of the command element of strategic nuclear forces, you're charged with identifying potential war indicators like before the enemy's even started to act, arguably before he even understands that conditions are moving towards war. You know. And then you know, you've got to be able to read those indicators and decide whether to like preemptively assault or not. Like stuff like that was though those kinds of variables were already emergent in 1914. And that's why I believe I agree with A.J.P. taylor. When, when the Russian empire, when the czar gave the order to mobilize, Russia had a two phase mobilization paradigm. And once it was implemented, even if the, even, even if the czar or I don't know if the Russian Imperial army had a general staff or not, whatever their command element was, even if he or them had put the brakes on mobilization, you know, if, if, if the German empire and the half empire like hadn't assaulted, they would have been dead because they would like rolled the dice and been like, okay, well we'll not mobilize in kind know taking like the Zara like his word. But it's like if this is a war ruse, like we're dead, you know, because you, you don't have force. Even if you have forces in being and even if you have like a properly trained and outfitted like reserve system of like able bodied men, they're not like sitting around mobilized, you know. So essentially it's the equivalent of like de loping, metaphorically speaking. Like well you're dueling opponent like has his weapon trained on you, you know, so this head, I'm sure people listening are going to think I'm, I'm being punitive and mean to the Russians. I'm not. There's not like a moral component here. I'm saying like in causal terms when, when the czar gave the order to mobilize forces, the die was cast. They couldn't be stopped anymore. When a wholeig approached the French at the 11th hour and begged them to stand down. If they had done that, I think that that would have. That would have stayed the hand of the Russians because then they would have been fighting. They would have been fighting both the German Empire and the Habsburgs on like a single front whereby like the bulk of both forces could be thrown at the Tsar's army. But that's. That's a bit abstract, but yeah, that. That's important to consider, man. And it. Play it. It also relates to, like I said, like, like situational awareness, particularly as regards the window decision temporally, you know, as to responding to world market conditions. There's a parallel. Not just, not just a similar. Not in terms of similarity, like structural similarity, but there's a parallel. And in terms of causality, you know, between military and geopolitical crises and an economic events at scale, you know, and this is. These are the things that really created kind of like the. The late modern state, you know, like the managerial state, if you will, as. As James Burnham called it, you know, like, in some ways we're very fortunate, man. Like, I'm not. I don't want to pontificate or derail the conversation, but I, you know, especially if you're old enough to remember the Cold War. I mean, I was like a little kid and like a very young teen when the Cold War was going on, but it was just something you live with. I think people these days are like. Are compared to even 40 years ago, are like unbelievably safe. That's why it's bizarre. They act like a bunch of hysterical old women all the time, are scared of everything. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, compared to somebody 150 or 40 years ago, you're like unbelievably safe. But yeah, I didn't mean.

[Pete]

Well, it's like. But. But it's also like you say, Thomas, the US military is designed just to fight the Cold War. So is our political. So is our political thought. That's what we're taught. We're just. I mean that our philosophy now is we're just continually fighting the Cold War. Everyone's an enemy, everyone's out to get us. And then it's just come home. And now it's. We're fighting the Cold War on our home. On our. On the home front.

[D]

Yeah.

[Thomas]

It doesn't make any sense. And you'd think that like, again, I, you know, I'm the first to admit, or first to emphatically state that history doesn't repeat itself. But when you're talking about. But I mean, human activity is basically like a closed loop, you know, like, there's like limited numbers of like, outcomes, you know, and there's like, there's like, there's not like infinite variables of like, human behavior. Okay. So there's like, parallels. So if you're trying to, you're trying to like, identify. If you're trying to like, identify potential courses of action, like in any given like, emergent scenario of a political nature, you know, you, you do go to the historical record, like, trying to find parallels. I mean, like, obviously, particularly on things related to like military questions. The. It's really unprecedented for that, that level, like kind of structural senility the way like America is. It's like, it's like total inability to like, adapt after November 9, 1989. Like Bush and Baker were adapting, which is, it's fascinating how like the Deep state totally and completely sabotaged, like their vision moving forward of globalism. Like, I'm not saying you got to think like Bush was like, like Bush 41 was like a good guy or something, but, but he did deserve a Nobel Prize. What's that?

[D]

His management at the end of the Cold War, how no one got nuked is. I mean, like, it's, it's really truly. Yeah, it's a remarkable diplomatic achievement. I'm just.

[Thomas]

Yeah, the, the Gulf War coalition that was. The Prussians would envy that, like, in terms like how the war was executed. But the way he, he corralled literally, you know, the, the Syrians, the Saudis, he had that. He, he, he had the Soviet Union, which was in its final days then like sign off any operation, you know, like, he had like, he had a literal like, army of the nations, like a raid against Saddam. That's, that's completely insane. Like, I, the guy was like a historical giant of a US President in post war terms. Like, even if you don't like him, like, some guy the other day on the Internet was like, yeah, Bush 41 was. He was what a gray man. Idiot. I'm like, what the are you talking about? Like that. That's so like, delusional. But, but no, but the, the total inability of the Deep state to manage like the post Cold War environment. And it shows you like, how like the rot was deep. Like, even people. This idea that like the Reagan era was like really based and the government really had its together. And don't get me wrong, that cadre that, that filled out the Bush 41 administration, like James Baker Castle, Weinberger, Lawrence Eagleberger, Like a bunch of these guys, like, those guys were like, very serious guys, especially Baker. Baker's somebody I really admire. Okay? But the wider kind of national security apparatus, it was a bunch of goofs and, and idiots, you know, like, I mean, people who just couldn't handle, you know, the, the, the changing of the guard, figuratively and literally. And, and, and they didn't want the Cold War to end because, like, they, they were. It was, it was, it was like basically like a condom. It was just like a way of like, you know, being able to kind of live off the public coffers and, and profit by the ongoing threat of, of Don.

[D]

Of war. Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, just.

[Thomas]

Yeah, guys like that. Exactly.

[D]

They just treated the entire thing like this existential struggle. And I'm, I'm just old enough to remember, like, the Cold War when it was serious. And I grew up next to, you know, a military base on the West Coast. And so there were times when I was a kid where like, you know, the F16s would come screaming, you know, off their, off their base. And like, you know, you knew some serious shit was going down or, or something.

[Thomas]

Like, when I was in elementary school, we'd still. We'd have. They called them by then, emergency drills, like, euphemistically, you know, like, we'd have to. We'd have to go to dates, like, the bell would ring like, three times over and over again, and we'd have to like, go single file to the lower level. And then you'd like. We're like. That was. It was struck. The reasoning being, like, it was structurally more robust, I guess. And like, every classroom had, like, a number that was posted where, like, you'd have to. And like, that's where you'd, like, assemble. And then, like, you'd get down on your hands and knees and you duck and cover and like, put your head, like, against the wall, and we. You have to hold the position for 30 seconds. It was. Oh, this is the emergency drill. Yeah, well, the only emergency you do that in is nuclear war. Okay? And so this. I felt like slapping people. I mean, even not just. Not, not just. I mean, I give kids a pass. Like young people. I mean, people like my age and older. Like, when the Kobe thing was ever, like, we've never faced a threat like this. I'm like, what the are you talking about? Are you insane? You know, like, I, I, I, I and every other kid in America grew up with the reality you might become counter value attrition, you know, I mean, like, it was. The seasonal flu is like an existential menace, unlike anything really. Like, it's. But that's, that's a digression.

[D]

Well, it is, I think, a good illustration of just how fundamentally unserious our, our elite have become. Right. Like, I've talked about this on pizza before, and everyone should check out like a series of Dr. Johnson on, on 200 years together. But like, fundamentally this whole Ukraine thing is just because, like, a bunch of American neocons are still salty about the Hominitsky program pogrom from 1648. I mean, that's, that's why the war in Ukraine is a thing. Right?

[Pete]

And

[Thomas]

I mean, the tribe absolutely hates Russia. Like, the degree to which they hate Russia, like, can't be overstated. Like, just anecdotally, I kind of like Ralph Bakshi, even though he's like a huge Jew. Like, you know, the animator, he made this really interesting movie called American Pop. And I really like that movie. And it's basically about this family. It follows these four generations of these guys. Like, one of them's like this vaudeville performer. Like, one of them's just like piano prodigy, gets killed in World War II. One of them's like this songwriter who's kind of like a cross between like, Lou Reed and Dee Dee Ramon who becomes like this huge heroin addict and his son then becomes this, like, this a huge rock star, you know, like in the 1980s. It's. It's a cool movie, but it opens up where the Cossacks are like, programming like, the Russian Jews. Because, like, even Baxter used like this like New York City guy. He's like, oh, you know, the Russians are like, you know, they're those anti Semitic bastards like that, that's. That literally like their number one enemy. They hate the Russians. The Russians have no love for them. But the Ukraine war is complicated. It's. It's in large measure, it was returning the serve for the Russians and Assad's forces levying a huge defeat against IDF and their. And their tech theory proxies in Syria. Yeah, but I mean, it's all. Yeah, like, anybody, anybody doesn't understand, like, the dynamic between Russians and, and the Jews as a people, like, it's not in the game.

[D]

Right? But. But we're, you know, we're dealing with, right, Both, both world wars start over, like, border disputes in Eastern Europe that heavily involve Jews. Right? And we're supposed to just sit here and like, be like, this is fine, and, and get more involved in like, wait a minute, didn't World War I start over a border dispute with Slavs. And.

[Thomas]

Well, just this idea too. I mean, it's just like the monumental ignorance. Like, I made the point to people before, you know, like, the American left, like, guys like Peter Arnett and. And the like, and in media especially. I mean, I thought those guys were terrible people, but there was, like, a consistency to them. And, you know, they. They. There. There. There was an internal logic to, like, their perspective. Like, the American left now, like, they want to. Like, they. They're basic. It's cheerleading section for. For like, the warfare state. Like, it's bizarre. These people are totally illiterate. You know, like. Like, if the. If, you know, it's like that scene in the movie Caligula, which is probably apocryphal, where it's like, Caligula, he. He orders the Roman legions, like, assault the sea, to, like, conquer, like, Poseidon's kingdom or, like, Neptune, I guess, his kingdom. Okay. Like, if Joe Biden had, like, ordered, like, the U.S. marines would attack the Atlantic Ocean, like, these faggots would have been like, yeah, we hate the Atlantic Ocean. They're, like, racist and stuff. Like. Like, they're. They're literally, you know, like, they. They couldn't find Ukraine on a map, but they. You know, it's like, if you're gonna pretend to, like, care about some other country, Ukraine is literally. It's. It's a failed state and order of Somalia, like, run by a literal, like, homicidal criminal mafia. It's like sitting around saying you love, like, EDM means Uganda. Like, you know, it's like, you really. You love Ukraine. Like, you think, like, the Zelensky mafia is awesome, and it's like, your idea of, like, a good government that needs to be defended. Like, it's. You can't. You can't make this up. These people are. They're literally insane. And they're literally.

[D]

Well, and I mean, of course you're right, but this. This notion that, like, individual rights or

[Pete]

that

[Thomas]

a.

[D]

A society where your, like, weird devotion to transsexualism as a religious value, absolute personal autonomy to the point of. Of, you know, like, shedding male and female and, you know, total liberation from any kind of. That's possible in any kind of society that actually functions.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

You know, these people will talk about, like, well, you're a gender fascist.

[Pete]

What?

[D]

Because I think boys are boys and girls are girls. Like, if. If egalitarian rallies and liberalism leads you to the point where you think, like, cross dressing is a major political issue as opposed to Like a very weird, very niche fetish that should be, you know, put in.

[Thomas]

Yeah. That's why you're like people. I make that point of view all the time. It's like, don't. It's like, what the are you doing, like, arguing with like, sexual paraphilia. It's like first, all these people are insane and those. Them that aren't insane, it's like they're, they're. They're basically like, they're A, making fun of you and they're B, like running after give sabotage. You don't like, engage people who like, say crazy things. That's like arguing with some hobo on the subway with like, in his pants, you know, like, you know, it's like, I'm not going to argue with these people, you know, like, not just because I don't argue with my people's enemies, but it's like. Yeah, it's like you just said. It's like if you're, if, if. If what you believe is politics is like talking about like parrot sexual paraphilias, like, like I, you know, traditionally, like, the remedy to that would. Would be to have you shot. Right.

[D]

And with good reason. Right. Like, and this is, this is why, this is why, like, you've seen.

[Thomas]

Yeah. I mean, we're. I'm not going to advocate murdering people, but I'm also not going to argue with them and pretend like they have some position that deserves being hurt. Yeah.

[D]

I'm just enough younger than you. I think that everyone. I'm in my mid-40s, so everyone younger than me has no coherent memory of a coherent society and why they're constantly talking about fascism and why the resurgence in interests today. And I think one of the great services you provide Thomas and I, kudos and plaudits for this. You know, in, in the dark years in the 70s, 80s and 90s, when all the men who'd actually been there were dying of old age and there were a few people like yourself, Mark Weber, a couple others who kept the light alive around 2013 or so it was the 2012 election where, you know, you had like, literally movie star, handsome, like graying temples, Mitt Romney.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

Like, you know, he's like central casting Republican.

[Thomas]

No. Yeah. He had great hair. Yeah.

[D]

You know, like, that's about it.

[Thomas]

That's not all he had, but.

[D]

Yeah, right. But, but you know, conservatism, like, they saw that like it had failed. Like, like we lost to Obama again, you know, like this guy, obvious lightweight, probably a homosexual.

[Thomas]

Like, well, he's Just like, an empty suit.

[D]

Yeah, just an empty suit. And, you know, the 08 crisis, he'd done nothing about, you know, done nothing with that. And he just. He was two of the banks and

[Thomas]

this random guy, like, it didn't. His candidacy didn't make any sense. It's like, if you're gonna, like. If you're gonna take I'm dating Myself this reference. But people remember J.C. watts. He was. This was a Canadian Football League jock, and he was kind of the Republican's token, like, black guy. He was this kind of, like, slick black dude who always, like, wore really nice suits. And he came up as kind of corny, you know, because, like, oh, I'm J.C. watts. I'm like. I'm like. I'm, like, handsome in, like, Hollywood terms, like, polite black man. It's like, okay, if you're gonna draft a guy like that and, like, make him and, like, install him as president, like, okay, get it. Or if you're gonna draft some, like, Spanish guy is like, you know, this is like Mr. Immigrant, like, Spanish guy who, like, bootstrapped himself into success and, like, basically makes candidacy like a reality TV show, however fake that was. It's like, okay, get that. It's like Obama. It's like, here's this random guy who's, like, from Hawaii. You know, we're gonna pretend he's from Chicago, and then we're gonna pretend he's black. Like, the whole thing was, like, very.

[D]

And the.

[Thomas]

And random and weird.

[D]

Straight and pretend. He's like, all but it made.

[Thomas]

But it's like, why? It's like, why are you gonna pretend he's black? Like, why? If you're gonna, like. Yeah, it's like, either draft an actual black guy or make the narrative he's this, like, citizen of the world colored person. Like, why? It made no sense. And that's also why the guy's, like, totally forgotten now, because that had no context, you know?

[D]

Yeah, he has CIA connections. That's why he ended up. But anyway, the thing that thing to think about, right, is. And this is where I came in. I came in. It came into the movement about 20 years ago after the failure of the Ron Paul revolution. And, you know, you really only are given these three alternatives, right? How do you deal with this mass society where millions of people are, you know, turning wrenches in a car factory, or millions of people are, you know, driving to and from work every day? Millions of people are, you know, logging into computers. Millions of people are doing all these things. And, you know, the coherent Alternatives are like capitalism as we know it, which is. Which has failed people my age and younger, like, spectacularly. They can't afford houses, they can't get married, they can't save. They can't. They can't afford to live anywhere safe.

[Pete]

They.

[D]

They have to live in vans. Like, you know, that was a joke when we were a kid, you know, Chris Farley. And then you live in a van down. Right? Yeah, well, now that's, like. That's, like, aspirational. Like, oh, you live in a really nice van down by the river. You know, like, wait a second. Like, when I was a kid, this was, like, not a good thing. And now, like, it's all that, you know, younger. Like older zoos or younger, but leaders can afford.

[Thomas]

And so it's been going on for a minute. I mean, absolutely. Right. When I was. When I was homeless, I mean, like, much of that was, like, my own fault. I'm not. Not saying that, like, conditions, like, macroeconomic conditions made me homeless, but I'd meet, like, other homeless people, and a lot of them were. Yeah, they were like young guys and girls where they couldn't. They literally. I couldn't afford rent or whatever, or, like, I'm certainly not a mortgage. And they had, like, up parents who basically threw them out. There were like. Or were like, who, like, wouldn't let them stay with them while they got on their feet. And it was, like, eye opening. I'm like, wow, that's terrible. But.

[D]

Right.

[Thomas]

I'm gonna. I'm gonna raise up in a minute. I don't want to be abrupt, but I figure I've been going for an hour and I'm still kind of not feeling great. We can take this up again sometime in the next few days or like, in a week, if you guys want to make this an ongoing thing.

[Pete]

I. I think.

[D]

I think it's been really great, but I. I just. And I'm happy to hear. To listen to you talk anytime, but I think it's important for the listener to realize, like, you know, there's a reason, like, hardcore bolsheviks after the 2008 crisis, like, did the Occupy Wall street thing and then it failed because they were obsession with, like, DEI stuff. And why the resurgence of influence or interest in. In, you know, fascist alternatives. Why. Why there's a bunch of guys who were 30 years old and who Stan Hitler is. Because you've seen the same kind of conditions that, you know, created the revolution in the first place in Weimar. Like, you know, there's hyperinflation and trannies and like, Jews are in charge and like.

[Thomas]

No, I, I think young people are awesome. Like, not just because, I mean, young people are the future. I mean that's who we should be focused on anyway. But young guys and girls generally have their together. That's why I, like, I, I don't like when people trash zoomers because, I mean that's, that's stupid anyway and like a shitty way to be. But zoomers have a lot of, they got a lot of dynamic energy and, and even like a lot of the zoomers on the left, like I was talking to some of these kids that I, I ran across at the, at the DNC protest and like other places and like a lot of them, they're kind of naive in, in terms of their utopian concepts, but a lot of them are, are kind of. They read guys like Emmanuel Wallerstein and they read like, they read serious left wing stuff and they realize that they, they realize that like pro regime, like perverts, like, are pieces of and like they're their enemy. Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying it's great if kids read Marx and Lenin, but I, at least that's serious stuff. It's not, it's not, it's not like regime pornography and like bougie garbage, but yeah, that's true.

[D]

And I was talking with a friend today, like the most depressed people in the world right now and for probably the last 50 years at least have been like indigenous Christians in Israel, in west bank and Gaza.

[Thomas]

Oh yeah, Palestine.

[D]

Yeah. And like to give those guys on the left at least credit, they're, they're at least serious about, like, these people are oppressed and they're being murdered by the thousands by this regime. They might call it fascist. They might call it. And there's some truth that because Jabotinsky was a fascist, right. Lola Coup founded the La Coup Party, like basically just stole, stole Mussolini's notes.

[Thomas]

And so we know Leakudism is like, it's like a pastiche of, of, of, of all kinds of things that don't really make sense in, in the context is implemented. But yeah, it, no, there's. These are, these are amazing times and, and things are incredibly. I'm incredibly optimistic. And anybody who's not, doesn't. Anybody who's not. So they're like addicted to their own. Addicted to like the stink of their own failure and misery or they're just like not engaged with, you know, what's, what's happening around them. But no, I think a lot of.

[Pete]

Yeah, I'll, I'll I'll help us. I'll help us close out here. I think, I think just a lot of people too are. Their whole shtick is nothing's going to ever get better and that's. And they're just selling it and monetizing that. So. All right, let me let you guys. Let me let you guys get out of here. Thomas, do plugs and then D, you can promote whatever you want.

[Thomas]

Yeah, the best place to find me is on my sub stack. That's where all kinds of good stuff happens. It's real. Thomas777.substack.com that's, I mean that's the place to go. You can find everything I do there. There's hyperlinks and stuff to what else I do. My social media is alt is at capital RAL underscore number seven HMAS 777 and. Yeah, well, we will reconvene whatever you guys want and just give me a couple days notice.

[Pete]

Cool. D, you got something.

[D]

Thank you for. Yeah, thanks for having me, Pete. I just have, you know, the fundamental principle on substack. Fundamental principles.substack.com and you know, gumroad of fppodcastgunro.com so people are interested in my religious project. That's what there you can find me. And of course I'm privileged to be here once a month with Pete with the flat crime syndicate. So please give that a listen and I'll do my standard sign off of like go to Freeman the building on the wall slash support kick Pete a few bucks. It's, you know, he does so much work behind the scenes, folks. Like he helps so many people, you know, not just me, not just Thomas, but, but dozens of people all the time. And so please support the people that don't lie to you. You know, all of us work pretty hard at this and you know, a couple bucks if you can spare it helps a lot. So thank you.

[Pete]

All right, thanks a lot guys. Have a good night. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pican Yono Show. So the interesting thing about this episode is this episode is a year late. We had this episode planned for July 13th of last year and then something really weird happened in Pennsylvania. Butler, Pennsylvania. And we ended up talking about that and well, what better time than on the year anniversary to revisit the subject of the infrastructure of the NSDAP and Germany of the 1930s and yeah, especially as our infrastructure is crumbling around us. So Thomas, how are you doing today?

[Thomas]

Yeah, I'm doing pretty well, man. Thanks for including me.

[Pete]

Cool. De. How are you?

[D]

I'm great, man. It's always a pleasure to be on with you and always a pleasure to be on with Thomas. I've learned so much from you guys, man. College classes, Every single one of you guys. Series or a series of college lectures. It really is fantastic.

[Thomas]

That's a great compliment. Thank you.

[Pete]

D. This is. This is your subject, man. This was your idea. I'm. I'm just gonna interject to ask questions. Why don't you take off and. And go where you want to go?

[D]

All right, well, I'll try to. Try to keep the autism to a minimum here, but just as a. A brief aside, I'll give you a brief sketch. The road network in Europe wasn't as good as it was in the time of the five good emperors again, until, like, the late 19th century and McAdam invented his McAdamization asphalt paving process. And I want to say, like, 1830. So imagine like, a road network where nothing is paved or hardly anything is paved. And only, like, cities might have cobblestones and maybe, maybe, maybe like major highways between, say, like, Rome and Austia might be paved. But that's not normal now. I mean, like, you can get, like, lightly laden carts and stuff, you know, to and from places, but really, like, in order to keep the road from turning into, like, a mud bog, you got to pave it to keep the water off. And the most efficient way to transport anything is, of course, via water, which is why Germany is richer than Italy, because Italy has one real river valley, the Po, in the north, and it enter. It outflows into Venice, which is, you know, a decent port only because of the heroic efforts of the Venetians themselves.

[Pete]

Right.

[D]

It's normally very swampy and not a difficult or a very difficult place to make a living. Only the heroic efforts of the Venetians have made it someplace prosperous and livable. And, you know, France has got six huge river valleys. Basically, nowhere in the UK or nowhere in England itself is more than 25 miles from water from. From like, a. A port that'll get to get to water. So that's why those two countries were the. In Germany were the most prosperous countries in Europe. You know, spraying Spain only has the Ebro. So in a world where, like, heavy transport has to be done via water, basically because the roads aren't up to it, like, how do you develop internally? Right. And Germany had only been united since, what, 1871 was that.

[Thomas]

I want to say 79. Right.

[D]

Okay, 1879. So like. Like four years after Uncle Is born. Is, you know, like, you know, is. Is or four years before, right?

[Thomas]

Like this is not 1889.

[D]

All right, I'm sorry, I was thinking Mussolini. Right? So.

[Thomas]

Oh, okay, yeah.

[D]

So, you know, Mussolini's born in, in 1883, right. He's only 13 years before is when Italy was, was. Was again a whole political entity. And you know, Hitler was only like 10 years before Hitler was born is when Germany became a whole nation again. So you have these. What had been, you know, how do you. How do you integrate like the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies road network into the Papal states road network into the city states in the north road network, you know, do you have the same standards in Bavaria and Pomerania? How does that work? So you've got this huge coordination problem that takes forever to figure out. And at least in the Holy Roman Empire, a big part of what made like little baronies economically viable was their traditional right to tax. So you'd have these locks all along this river network in Germany where, you know, this baron of this one little spot would charge a toll. There's this massive increase in internal costs. You know, just shipping something down the Rhine. There'd be a stop here and a stop here and a stop here. So improving the transportation network and essentially internal free trade, right. Like what list says, right? Internally free trade.

[Thomas]

Internally.

[D]

And, and development allows you to greatly decrease your transportation costs, your friction, right. And allows you to ship things over land between rail, which is 10 times more efficient than roads. That's why the 19th century was a century of just railroad mania, right? The United States, Germany, France, the UK all over the place. Rail was the name of the game. But that rail network that build out of the rail network allowed you

[Pete]

to

[D]

build out the road network because your transportation costs for things like, I don't know, gravel all of a sudden drop by 50, 60, 70, 80% when you can throw it on a train.

[Thomas]

And just, just as a quick aside, you know, one of the things that the British wanted to do when they, when they for all practical purposes won the scramble for Africa, they wanted to build a railroad that started in North Africa and ended at the Cape. So basically, like, they wanted to have like a Trans Siberian railroad that like spanned Africa, which is totally insane, but it would have been, it probably would have been viable, man, if they could have held it, you know, and if they hadn't detonated their own fortunes. Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.

[D]

Well, and that's actually part of the. You bring it up, but like, there was a conflict with the Portuguese. Because the Portuguese had Angola. Yeah, Angola and Mozambique.

[Pete]

Right.

[D]

And they wanted it, they wanted a Trans African railway to control their, their holdings on the east and west coast. And the British wanted theirs going north, south. And they, they almost got it. I mean, I, I can't remember if they actually finished the, the African railroad or not, but

[Thomas]

yeah, that was Cecil Roads. Big, that was his big ambition. You know, in some ways, Roads, Roads kind of reminds me of Blackjack Pershing in some ways. I mean, I, I think, I mean, obviously Rhodes was more. Rose is of a certain type. He was one of these, he was one of these kinds of imperialist characters who came up through the crown charter system of, of wealth management and adventurism. I mean, Pershing was very much, you know, like kind of a, a logistics and engineering genius and a very effective combat commander. But yeah, these guys are really extraordinary in terms of their, in terms of their intellect.

[D]

Well, and that, that leads us to I, I, if he hadn't died in an untimely fashion. I don't know what your personal opinion of Fritz to is, Thomas, but I, I am a, a massive admirer of tot personally.

[Thomas]

Dr. Well, he, and he and Helm are shocked. Helmer Shocked is a reason why the UK delegation to the international Military Tribunal basically intervened and said, you know, you're, you're going to cut this man loose because we need him. You know, Tote was much more a patriot than Shocked was. But Toad and Helmar Shocked were responsible for the, the economy of the German Reich becoming what it was in, in terms of such that, such that centrally planned efforts. I mean, all banking systems are going to be somewhat centralized. Okay. I mean, like that, that's not an ethical question. It's a, it's just the reality. But yeah, I think they're, they're both personages who are essential understanding the, the economics of the German Reich. And they were both, you know, towering intellects in different aspects of macroeconomic practices. Definitely.

[D]

So for those of you who don't know, Dr. Fritz Todt was the head of organization Tote, which was the, and please, Thomas, correct my pronunciation because I, I'm, I'm terrible at this sort of thing. He was succeeded by Albert Speer, who was the guy who designed the Volks hall but ultimately turned traitor. And after the war and, and a low opinion of that anyway, Dr. Tot goes to, you know, Technical University of Munich and gets, gets a PhD in civil engineering on, on effectively paving roads. And he is the one who's responsible for the autobahn for the Atlantic Wall from, for, for honestly most of you know, the, the Third Reich's construction projects. He was the Inspector General for water and Energy, the Reichs Minister for armaments munitions. I mean.

[Thomas]

Yeah, that was the key, that's what I mean. The key role he played was as, as armaments minister, you know, in terms of the war effort and, and some of these projects that were essential to national defense. To be clear with the Autobahn too, it, this kind of mass highway system, I raised Pershing because you know, Pershing was, Eisenhower was a disciple of Pershing and that's basically where he inherited the idea what became the Interstate system and like a mass highway system, among other things on a continent sized scale, you need it to be able to deploy forces and being an event of general war. And that was one of the reasons for the, you know, the Eisenhower Expressway system. You know it's that you can deploy east and west rapidly. And the Autobahn obviously when a rice commissariat Moscowin was realized, you know, had the Soviet Union been defeated and assimilated into the greater German Reich, you know, the, the, the Autobahn was going to go from Spain to the earls, you know,

[D]

probably even by call. Really? I mean, why not? Yeah, why not Vladivostok? No, I, I think it's.

[Thomas]

Oh, go ahead.

[D]

It's important to, to realize that like the U.S. interstate system is, is directly. Eisenhower got to Europe, got to Germany and was like wow, these roads are fantastic and basically just stole the plans. And

[Thomas]

the, the

[D]

early, the early days of World War I with all the mobilizations and all the difficulties and the logistical problems right of, of feeding people were so ingrained in the German people that they just didn't want that sort of thing to happen again. And by building this network of really good highways, you could distribute the food. You know, if one section's bombed out you could rebuild that and have, and route the food around. So the problem with, with rail is it's way more efficient in terms of how much energy is needed to move, you know, a ton of stuff from point A to point B. But you mess that one switching yard or that one track up and you know, the line is, is cut. Whereas a road network is more.

[Thomas]

Yeah, compatibility too of the rail gauge and stuff causes issues. I just wanted to see a real quick too. I've got almost nothing nice to say about Spear, but some of his design concepts I think were pretty brilliant. And one of the things he insisted upon and that the Fuhrer very much approved of locally Speer said that, you know, we need to source materials locally as much as possible in building the Autobahn, you know, so. And we need to incorporate natural features into things like bridges. So, you know, like in a section of the Autobahn that, you know, like stretches through the Rhineland or whatever is, you know, gonna, gonna reflect the natural environment there and like the local ecology, you know, like ditto for, you know, East Prussia and what have you. And a lot of these, this had really great optics, you know, and that, that can't really as an imperative priority to the German Reich at, you know, the highest levels. That can't be overstated. I mean, Hitler was an artist. That's one of the things he had in common with Spear. I mean, you know, Hitler's primary interest was architecture and things, you know, and Spear obviously was kind of a pure architect. I mean, he had, he had keep. I mean, I stipulate he had capabilities, you know, that were remarkable.

[D]

As an architect, he was a genius.

[Thomas]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

As a political soldier, he, he left a fair bit wanting even.

[Thomas]

It's a cynic. I mean, I think he Spears the kind of guy who, you know, he, he finds a way to insinuate himself around powerful men and impress them and he, he doesn't care about the politics and he will do an about face as soon as it becomes expedient to do so, you know, Which. Yeah, which he did. Yeah.

[D]

So Dr. Todt, right, he dies in a plane crash. He himself won the, the Iron Cross under the German empire in the first World War. So. But the internal road network of Germany, I mean, they're still using the same autobahn that Fritz Top built in like 1938. Right.

[Thomas]

And

[D]

not only was it a massive internal improvement project, but it's one of the ways that, you know, that the Reich was able to, to kill unemployment in the Reich was just. They didn't have trucks, you know, I mean, the SS was invading Germany or not invading Germany, Invading, invading Russia with mules and stuff because they didn't have enough trucks. Well, because they didn't have the earth moving equipment because they didn't have enough trucks. A lot of this construction got done by hand, right? And you had large gangs of laborers that were relatively low skilled. But they get told like, dig this out till it, you know, this, this slope matches here. And you could, you can have lots of guys using picks and shovels and stuff and you can build this road network internally. That enabled, you know, the Germans to shift entire divisions from east to west relatively quickly. And in terms of, you know, building the German economy, right. If you're, if your shipping costs go down by. I saw something. By the time they were done taking something from the port at Hamburg to Munich, the cost had dropped by like something like 25% I want to say, but that could just be, that's tickling the back of my brain. But if you're, if your costs are going from Hamburg to Munich, go that far down, right? That's, that's obviously a massive, just go to the internal economy, right? There's gonna be more jobs once you're, if you're no longer working on like the Tut gang, right? Or you maybe you take those construction skills you learned building the, the building the roads to other projects, which is what, how they ended up with the, the Atlantic Wall and you know, like the Channel Islands, forts and all of these other interns. Yeah, yeah, the Siegfried line. Right.

[Thomas]

Like much later.

[D]

Yeah, but right, you have all these experienced personnel and you know, before the call we were talking, right, the notion that like, oh, you know, it's socialism. They're, they're using the government to, to build all these projects. Does anybody really think that like a Bechtel or a ConocoPhillips or a GM are really a private company?

[Thomas]

The whole point, I mean, the reason why, the reason why the one thing that the Warsaw Pact excelled at was military hardware, you know, and things like space faring vehicles is because obviously like the spontaneous ordering of the price mechanism isn't essential to like building a good tank. And you don't require, I mean, I don't even know what those inputs would be like. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna accept bids on who can like build the best autobahn and then we're gonna take a hands off approach, however they want to devise it. I mean like I, Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. And all, all capitalism in the industrial era is state capitalism. So yeah, it's, it's neither here nor there to suggest that there's this like public private distinction. We're talking about fixed capital. Definitely.

[D]

I think that as you built. Completely correct. There is no such thing as like particularly things like roads or canals or anything like that. Right. Like the notion that like, oh, this is a private enterprise, like. No, it's not, it's not. It's one of those things that the libertarians get completely, completely wrong. The free market is going to build, you know, this, this highway system. Something you talked about earlier, Thomas, is, is the aesthetics, right. I have a quote from, from Hitler somewhere from. I Think it's from the book Hitler's Engineers. But he said, you know, our roads have to be beautiful and as, as they reflect us as a people. And I'm paraphrasing here, the autobahn as envisioned by Hitler and tot reflects that German artistic soul that's very ordered, but also has this kind of longing for beautiful things and spontaneous harmony.

[Thomas]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

But the interstate highway system in America, particularly as you get west of the Mississippi, is the most brutal, utilitarian, like, just like massive project you've ever seen in your life. Right?

[Thomas]

And yeah, yeah, Route 94 through Chi Town is not beautiful.

[D]

Right. Well, and the reason it's not right is because the Reich was using mostly hand labor and what, what lengtherous explosives they did have had to be saved either for wartime or for something where like you're blowing a whole, a tunnel or something, right. Or clearing canal. So they just didn't have the, you know, the massive amount of explosive and the personnel to use it just willy

[Thomas]

nilly the way they really fancied at me. There's this book called Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics by this guy named Frederick Spots and Spear designed and built a lot of these projects with an eye for what was called ruin value, you know, and that's, that's why the Germans had certain ideas about, you know, discrete building materials like feral concrete. Because the ethos was we've got to think about 3,000 years from now, you know, we've got, we, we've got to have our great works leave ruins, you know, like that of the Valley, the kings in Cairo or like the Parthenon or like the Coliseum. You know, this is a deliberately historical enterprise that spans millennia, you know, and that's, that underlies, you know, very much like the ethos of the Reich. And I find that very compelling.

[D]

Yeah, it does. And just to give you an idea of why that's actually better to, to, to elaborate here for a second. So the United States after 1947, right. Has effectively what is unlimited manpower, unlimited expertise, unlimited resources. And so they build out the federal highway system and they just make it straight because that's the most efficient. And if there's a little hill on the way, they'll just throw a bunch of dynamic. They've got a bunch of guys who did demo in the war. They can absolutely, you know, just, just blast. So you'll have, you know, sections of, of road in the United states that are 5, 10, 15, 20 miles long just in a straight line. And as you're driving across like North Dakota, Dear listener, no offense intended to any of our listeners in North Dakota. It gets really hard to pay attention when you're like just going 20 miles straight. Right. Even, even at 80 miles.

[Thomas]

Tailored for highway hypnosis.

[D]

Exactly right. So because the Germans didn't have all that access to easy blasting pattern, they had to, you know, roads have to follow the, the path that is most flat, relatively speaking. And so if you've got to go like and make a slight curve to the left or you know, gently kind of rise and follow the terrain a little bit more, that's actually makes a better drive. You don't, you don't do things like fall asleep the way you can. Like, you know, if you're driving from i90 from like Chai Town to, you know, Seattle.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

There's places where you're just gonna fall asleep because there's nothing for.

[Thomas]

We realize too like if you like automobiles and you know, I always, I mean, I don't drive these days but you know, I was really like, I was really like driving and cars and stuff when I was young, you know, like driving them and working on them and the, you know, the, all these Carol Shelby designs, you know, that were grand touring designated vehicles, you know, like a touring vehicle. I realized like Ford and all kinds of other American companies took on that designation. But doesn't make any sense in America. Maybe it doesn't like redwood country somewhat, but you know, driving, driving a Porsche, like around these like winding roads through Bavaria or like through the elves, you know, it's a totally different experience.

[D]

Right.

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[D]

I would like the only places in America where like a GT type car makes sense. It's like on the Pacific coast highway or something like that.

[Thomas]

Yeah. And I've been. Yeah. And I've driven not just 101, but I've driven these mountain roads through like Oregon, you know, which are like incredible. So then, so don't be wrong like America and being at the wheel of you know, like, like a comfortable like big block, you know, Cadillac or something. Oh, it's awesome. It's dope. But it, but it's not at all the same thing as you know, the, the European experience. And even there's a, this footage like over Salzburg, you know, Eagle's Nest and stuff. You know, like that's a perfect example. And there's a, there's footage of what amounts to, you know, the kind of work what became kind of the war council. Von Brauch was. Have been sacked. But this, this had to be like at the latest, like very early 1942, you know, like, convening it over Salzburg, and you see, like, these. You know, you see these. These, like, stately vehicles, like, pulling up, and it just looks like an incredible drive. Like. Looks like something from another planet or something.

[D]

Oh, yeah. Could you. You even imagine like, in a. Like the Mercedes SK and you're driving from Frankfurt on Main up to Vienna in, like, one of those bad boys. You know, they're just the. Just the aesthetic experience. But because. Because they didn't have that ability to just blast straight through. Right. The road actually doesn't do the whole road hypnosis thing where you're gonna fall asleep because there's just nothing to do and nothing. You know, I've driven through, like, South Dakota and, you know, like, you gotta have. You gotta have somebody, like, sitting with you to, like, punch you in the arm so that you don't end up driving off the road, you know?

[Thomas]

No, it's crazy. You know, I take the Greyhound so much. I see a lot of, like, American highways, you know, and. Yeah, they're very flat. It's crazy, too, when you get out west, like, the hills, the foothills and some of the smaller mountains, they just, like, blast these huge tunnels through them. And when I was a little kid, that really, like, zoned me out because they don't have that here in Chicago, but I'd be out in California, and it's like, yeah, you're just, like, driving through this, like, mountain tunnel for, like, freaking, you know, like 45 minutes. Yeah.

[D]

Or, you know, driving through this tunnel in the Rockies. Right. That. That is two miles long, you know, But. But that's. That's something that is, I think, by. By caring about the aesthetics, by making sure that everyone had to have something beautiful to be able to. To look at something that they could be proud of it, really. You know, you can. Not only. Not only people are more likely to maintain it, but it ultimately ends up being easier to maintain because you're not fighting nature all the time. You know, you can drive nature out with the pitchfork, as the saying goes, but it always comes back. So how do you. If the. If the road itself, like, is part of the nature. It's not as difficult to constantly be fighting nature to get the road accomplished.

[Thomas]

Oh, yeah. No. 100%. Yeah.

[D]

I mean, I'm expressing myself poorly because I'm retarded, but.

[Thomas]

And.

[D]

And by making that something that is the most important thing as you're doing

[Thomas]

it,

[D]

do those beautiful roads not only become more likely to be maintained and more likely to function longer, they, they also become an advertisement. And this is, this is, this is why, I mean ultimately this is, this is why Reich had to be destroyed.

[Pete]

Right?

[D]

Is, is that just allowing them to be free was, was an advertisement against the capitalist system?

[Thomas]

Well, yeah, it was totally, it was a totally different ethos on potentialities and it, it, it transcended conventional politics. You know, I mean in like, like in some ways like the Stalinist did too. And I mean, I think Soviet cosmism is sort of a callback to that sort of transcendental mysticism of, of Byzantium stuff. But no, I mean, but that, that was somewhat incidental obviously and it was a result of a dialectical process that very much sort of deviated from the core ethos of Marxist Leninism. But no, the something that the, the fascist, the National Socialist Axis Europe was disposed towards as an essential aspect of the politics of the era. And specifically the revolutionary mandate that they were abiding was, you know, something that was epochal in nature and purely historical almost and was, you know, partook of the highest possible forms of human action and cultural productivity. Absolutely.

[D]

Well, that I think that something else that, that needs to be. I think I've talked about this. Like the entire world changed like in, you know, in. The Rome of like Commodus, right. Like after the period of five good emperors, you know, Marcus Aurelius, even then most of the population was still agricultural peasants. And you could take an agricultural peasant from the time of, of Marcus Aurelius and there have been some very, very good alternative history time, you know, time travel type stuff. Like you could take someone like that and take them to the world of say, I don't know what point the break would be like the 1860s. And aside from like firearms, like most everything is like readily apparent. And still even into the 1860s of war between the states, most of the people in the world are agricultural peasants. But you know, in the Psalm in 191915 and the, you know, Waterloo in 1815, like the world changed so completely in that 100 years that nothing was the same afterwards. And the National Socialists, the fascists, whatever, like that, that organization, those, that aesthetic idea, like those were the of the three choices or three ways to confront that massive change where there was Bolsheviks, there was Judeo Masonic capitalism and then there was this, this national, you know, organic, aesthetic, romantic nationalism. I don't know how else to describe it, but of all those three, no one is going to care about like if you know, the United States government falls apart. No one's Gonna care about like I90 in 100 years.

[Thomas]

Or like. Or. Yeah, exactly. Or, or like some random federal building, you know, downtown. The. A film that I like. You know, this seems crazy now, but HBO actually used to make really good original movies. Like they made this film about Andre Chikatila, the, The Soviet serial killer called Citizen X with Donald Sutherland.

[Pete]

One of my favorite movies.

[Thomas]

Yeah, it's dope. They. They made this, did this biopic of Stalin with Robert Duvall. They did a film version of Fatherland, the alternative history counterfactual where the German Reich is victorious in World War II. And you know, there's. In the film, it's the. The German Reichs Preparing for Hitler's 75th birthday celebrations. Joe Kennedy is the president. Joe Kennedy's trying to end the Cold War that exists between America and the Reich. But it opens in the year 1964 and this American delegation is touring Berlin, which is now, you know, the, the European, like the capital of nation Europa called Germania. And it's, it's a combination of early CGI and matte paintings, but it looks really cool. And the centerpiece is the foxhole which would have held 180,000 people. Hitler would have been able to access it from what would have been the Furor's palace by way of an underground access road. And he would emerge by elevator behind the podium. And the folks hall would have been so massive that it would have had its own weather inside. Clouds would have formed and it's speculated that it would have occasionally rained within the dome. Like stuff like that is.

[D]

The best thing Amazon has ever done is they did the. The Philip K. Dick man in a High Castle. Right.

[Thomas]

Yeah. The. The show is silly, but the optics are brilliant.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas]

Like I've appropriated the flag that they utilize for some of my own purposes because it's that good.

[D]

Oh, the aesthetics were on point, but to give you just a. Here's. Here's a quote from that. The book I mentioned. Hitler's. Hitler's engineers Fritz Todd and Albert Speer, master builders of the Third Reich, Tot started developing detailed plans in July 1933, keeping Hitler closely abreast of the developments. And then inter.

[Pete]

Quote.

[D]

Although the entire road plan was Hitler's and although he took the first step in organization of the plan, he allowed the general inspector and his staff, that is tout to make all decisions he considered a good policy to be in agreement with those in daily contact with the problems of highway construction. He did, however, offer suggestions when the problems were brought to him. The bridge Symbolizes furious approach to construction. He is concerned with beauty and appearance, but the primary goal is durability. As he has often stated, quote, we must build what we build, must stand long after we're no longer here, unquote. So, you know, do you build a society that is concerned with the future and with aesthetics? And, you know, Tucker Carlson's talked about this a little bit like. But, but the people who build ugly stuff in America's cities hate you. They don't care about you. You know, if they build, you know, people who build ugly stuff for you, they're telling you they don't care about you. They're telling you that your kids don't deserve to have beautiful things in their lives.

[Thomas]

When you. Well, it's also the. Yeah. And I. The concept of the geography of nowhere.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Thomas]

You know, because I'm not. Because I. Because I don't drive, I'm always on foot. And thankfully, you know, Chicago is one of the few places you can live and not have a car because there's public transportation everywhere. And one of the reasons I like it here is because there's a lot of dedicated nature preserves and things. But like most of this country, it's just built up ugliness. And like, you can't, you can't be a pedestrian a lot of places because there's nowhere for you to walk. And you know, architecture and the design of living spaces, it physically dictates your movements.

[D]

Yes.

[Thomas]

You know, so there's that. And yeah, if you live amidst totally ugly surroundings, you know, it's. It beats you down psychologically. You know, like I, when I get out west and I'm not trashing. People live in the west suburbs, like Westerville park and stuff, you start when you get far enough away from like Cook county, it becomes like geography and nowhere. It's like these like endless flat highways and you just pass like Buffalo Wild Wings and like Target and these like Walmart.

[D]

Yeah. Old Kmarts.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Thomas]

No, I mean, yeah, it's awful, man. Yeah.

[D]

I've talked about Jim Kunstler's, you know, Geography Nowhere a ton. Because it's really important actually that, you know, Chicago is the, the last city, like furthest west city where you could actually live like a European style city. There's a really good book, William E. Crone in Nature's Metropolis, about Chicago. You should check it out if you get a chance about the development of Chicago. But if a society that cares about itself and cares about its future is going to build things that make that society stronger internally and A better place to be. And I think that, you know, what have we built? You know, I've been a political adult, basically, since 9, 11. What has the United States built in the last 25 years that you can say that that's gonna. That's gonna matter in 50 years?

[Thomas]

Yeah, it's.

[D]

I can't think of a thing. I can't. I literally cannot think of a single thing.

[Pete]

The United States has.

[Thomas]

No. And even. Even these, like, dedicated monuments where you have, you know, people who at least have some rudimentary idea of aesthetical sophistication and, you know, how things should be harmoniously devised, you know, to kind of comport with the natural features of the setting in which it's situated. Like, a lot of this stuff just looks bad, you know, Like, I. The. The. When. When I was in D.C. last, you know, I. I went by The World War II memorial, which I thought was kind of tacky anyway, because the Iwo Jima Memorial is The World War II memorial, if there is one. And there's nothing, like, patently offensive about it, but it. It just looks bad. It. You know, something just, like, tacky about

[D]

it, and, like, it's just aesthetically not well done.

[Thomas]

Yeah, it's just, like, totally unremarkable. Yeah, it's, you know, no. The only decent beautiful architecture here. And that's kind of my reference point for America. I mean, stuff like Mount Rushmore is fascinating, you know, but. Yeah, you'd think that especially. Because you think that especially in the years immediately after the Cold War, that would have been, like, a priority, you know, not. Not in some crazy, crude, triumphalist way, but, you know, kind of America saying, you know, we defeated the communist enemy. You know, now sort of culture can reign of an elevated sword that we're the standard bearer of. Like, whether that's true or not isn't the point. You'd think there'd be that impetus and that sort of desire, even if it's exploited for reasons of political expediency in ways that are somewhat impure of motive. But there was none of that. Yeah.

[Pete]

Like, where was.

[D]

Where was, like, the great symphony that. To celebrate, like, the end of the Cold War and, like, the triumph of freedom, Like.

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[D]

Or a great. A great opera or something like that. You know, that.

[Thomas]

Yeah, there's nothing. There's only. There was only, like, an operatively good song by the Scorpions. And, I mean, obviously, they were, like, from the Bundest republic.

[D]

Yeah. I mean, Winds of Change is a banger. Like, I'm not Gonna, not gonna knock it, you know, in terms of what it is, it's great. But like, yeah, there's, there's no.

[Thomas]

And

[D]

you know, Hitler was a pretty talented draftsman himself, but yeah, he was great. The built environment, like if, if, if you build a beautiful built environment, it's no, no coincidence that like Mozart and the Strauss family and like how many great composers, like, spent all their, their great time in Vienna.

[Thomas]

No, and yeah, that's why, and that's why people gravitate towards Prague these days because Prague partakes that same sort of Habsburg Baroque beauty. Like, I'm always telling people one of my destinations if I happen upon a time machine would be Habsburg Vienna. Because then, I mean, I'm, I'm very, very Protestant, you know, like, but I find myself taken in by that kind of baroque grandiosity, you know, as much as, as much as a Roman Catholic person would be, man. Like, it's just incredible. Right? But yeah, but, but, but the reason,

[D]

the reason Vienna produced so many, including, you know, our Chancellor. Right. Like all of these people were inspired by the beauty that was everywhere around them in Vienna.

[Thomas]

Oh, 100, right. Yeah. Joseph Schumpeter made that point too. I mean, he was, you know, you don't associate economists with the same sort of creative aesthetical endeavors. But you know, it's, but the, it's. Everybody who came out of that milieu was, you know, shaped by it in terms of their, you know, habits and the conventions they gravitated to and you know, the, the things they drew inspiration from.

[D]

Sure.

[Thomas]

You know, and yeah, that's what great civilizations are made of, is those sorts of, those sorts of, you know, aspects.

[D]

And it's funny because I like, in preparation for this episode and just in general, right. You know, I've, I've tried to find everything I can in English about this pro. This movement of construction and infrastructure and. Right. And I can't find anything in English that doesn't just attack, Right. Attack the Third Reich. There's nothing out there. I mean, maybe, you know, Thomas, maybe you've got like a book from 1946 or something that they might have and if you do like DM me later. But.

[Thomas]

Well, yeah, you can't, you can't take this stuff seriously. It's the same as there'll be some like, middling college professor from some fourth rate university like talking about how Hitler was a loser. It's the same thing. It's like, it's like, okay, bro, like I, the guy conquered Europe from France, the gates of Moscow Defeated the British army, defeated the French army, conquered Poland, conquered Czechoslovakia, conquered the Low Countries, Stop the American army dead in its tracks. But he's like a loser compared, he's a quote unquote loser compared to some middling college professor. Okay, like, you can't, you can't. I mean, it's so preposterous. It's, it's like some hobo living around a curtain rod declaring he's the emperor of the universe and expect you to take it seriously or something. Like, you're all beneath me. No.

[D]

And, and Joseph Stalin. Right. Like, I don't think people, I mean, I've talked about this enough so that people would know, or certainly this audience is well educated enough to know this, but the Iranians are not pro American because American trucks and American bullets were given to British and Soviet soldiers in 1941 to invade their country from four different places.

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[D]

Right. So that they could secure the Persian supply route which deployed 45 divisions worth of troops to the Soviet Union, the United States sent 10,000 aircraft from like Montana up through Canada, through Alaska, all the way across Siberia. We're talking like, we're talking like a third of the way around the world.

[Thomas]

Yeah. It's insane.

[D]

And in addition to like, you know, constant convoys over the North Atlantic to like the White Sea and the, the worst ocean in the world and we, we just lost tons of shipping and you know, the. Right. And if it hadn't been for that kind of heroic effort, you know, the Soviets would have lost the war. They say themselves that that's why they would have lost the war.

[Thomas]

Well, yeah, that's why, you know, I mean, I, it, I'm supposed to listen to some, I'm supposed to listen to some 4th rate self styled propagandist tell me that I'm a bad person because I won't accept it was an absolute moral imperative to exterminate Western civilization in alliance with the communists. You know, I mean, like I, I, I, these people are beneath me.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[D]

Thomas, if you don't support supporting the communists, you hate freedom.

[Thomas]

Yeah. And like I, if I don't go, if I don't hate Muslims for no reason, if I don't hate my fellow Christians in Palestine. Yeah. And go around pretending that I'm Jewish, I'm a bad person. Yeah, that's, well, like I was one of the, I was always under the impression people acted that way, were mentally ill, but I apparently, like, no, they're, they're, they're just really, really bursting with, with moral integrity and I'M I'm like a. I'm just like a bad person.

[D]

Yeah, no, that's, that's absolutely true. Right. And I mean we can talk about.

[Thomas]

I don't go to parades either where guys like pee on each other and stuff. Like apparently I'm supposed to do it in June, you know, like that, you know, and I do things like honoring like, you know, the heroes of my own race instead of like going to like pee parades.

[D]

How dare you, Thomas? How dare you. You know, the, the. I suppose we could talk about this just a little bit, you know, a year later, right? The, the Trump skeptical anti Jewish people have been completely vindicated. You know, like there's. I only want to bring this up because the, the only salient. And this is something I got from you, Thomas, so I'm going to just steal it. Right? The only salient political conflict in the world today is Zionists versus everybody else. Like those are the, those are your options. You're either on team Zionist, you're on team like Civilization. And it's the same conflict in 1941, it's the same conflict today. Like you're on team Zionist or you're on team Civilization. Those are your, those are your teams. You know, like Charles and I always used to tell each other, like it's always January 1936 in Spain. Like, you got two teams. You got teams.

[Thomas]

Yeah. The thing that surprised me about Trump, I mean I, I never had any illusions about Trump or thought he was a good guy. The, the way in which he crashed out kind of surprised me because it, it was really, really stupid. And he continues to kind of cook himself in the court of public opinion when he doesn't have to. Yeah, I think he's slipping mentally.

[D]

Yeah. You think a narcissist would have more self respect, you know.

[Thomas]

Well, he also trumps a master manipulating the psychological environment. I mean, that's really. That, that, that's really how he's gotten to where he is. And it's like he totally took leave of, you know, his, his Machiavellian sensibilities as well as his instincts for how to proceed an index with the media cycle. It's. He's been doing incredibly dumb things. And I mean, not to derail us. I gotta raise up in a minute too. Sorry to be abrupt. I got like 10 minutes. But the, you know, the way you handled this Epstein matter was just incredibly stupid. You know, it's not like he got, it's not like he got murked because he got put on the spot. And you Know, didn't really see a way out. So, you know, he kind of, he kind of issued some, he kind of made a declaration he couldn't deliver on to get, you know, a hostile interrogative media off his back. And then he came back to bite. It was like, nothing like that. Just, he's doing dumb, you know, and the, the way he's responded, you know, he could have, he could have basically placated his masters. Well, at the same time, put on errors like he was, you know, demanding that, you know, U.S. sovereignty be respective vis a vis Israel. And he did the opposite. You know, it's like, what the hell's wrong with you? Like, you especially considering the current environment conceptually and the way people feel about Israel, that, that was about the dumbest possible thing you could do. But that's a subject for another day. Forgive me. And, yeah, forgive me for being abrupt. I, I, we can, we can reconvene and continue this subject matter if you guys want to. I mean, obviously, I'm sure you guys are going to continue with it, but I'll, I'll, I'll rejoin you guys at a later date if you want to continue this subject.

[D]

Anytime you want to talk about whatever you want to talk about. Thomas, I'm always happy to, to listen, you know, if you got to rise up, that's.

[Thomas]

No, you should. I'm doing this series now with the World at War guys, Nick and Adam, which is great. I'm very blessed they wanted to include me, but I, you know, I also, we like Pete and I with, with a couple other guys. You know, we, we do the Inquisition pod. You should, you should. Yeah, you should, you should, you should dip in there sometime, man.

[D]

Anytime. I'm, I'm, I'm a big fan of Astrals and Nick and that. I've been old friends of mine for years. You know, my first.

[Thomas]

Yeah, no, he's a great dude. Okay. Yeah, you, you're aware of it.

[D]

Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]

But that, Yeah, I, I'll be in touch. And I'm always, At long last, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start live streaming on the regular. And if it would help if you'd be willing to collab with me on that sometimes too.

[D]

But you call it, you call and I'll, I'll jump on, man.

[Thomas]

Like, get my phone number from Pete, man, and like, shoot me a text.

[D]

Okay.

[Thomas]

In the next couple days and just like, identify yourself when you do and, yeah, we'll talk about it over text, if that's cool.

[D]

That's fine. Yeah, let's.

[Pete]

Let's close. Let's close this one down then.

[D]

Yeah, it sounds good.

[Pete]

All right. So Thomas give plugs.

[Thomas]

Yeah, you can find me. I run a charity for autistic LGBTQ children. No, I don't do that.

[Pete]

That's my live stream.

[Thomas]

You can find me at thomas777.com. It's number 7 h o m e s777.com and my sub stack is where I direct people to as well, because that's where my podcast is, a lot of my long form writing. And we got a very active chat there. It's real. Thomas777.substack.com and as I kind of restructure my content, I though I'm active on those two platforms every day. So go there and you shall find te.

[D]

Well, I have my own show, Fundamental Principle. It's also on substack. I gotta give a strong recommend to following Thomas's telegram and his substack. I follow both of them. And of course, everything, everything Pete Canon is, you know, give, give Pete money, listen to his shows, do his live streams. You know, get your help through ogc. Support the people that support you. You know, the, the, you're given. You're given, you know, what amounts to 300 or 400 level college lectures by Thomas and Pete or by, you know, Dr. Johnson and Pete or, you know, Pete. Pete enabled so much stuff to good things to happen and he works really hard behind the scenes that you don't see. And he helps people all the time. So, you know, the stuff that Pete does in front of the cameras, only a portion of the hard work he puts in. And on top of all that, he's like a really great friend. So please, you know, support the people that, that don't hate you.

[Thomas]

Yeah, well said.

[Pete]

I appreciate that. All right, gentlemen, have a good evening.

[D]

Thank you.

[Pete]

Want to welcome everyone back to the peak and Yano show. DE is back. What's going on?

[D]

DE not much. Pete, so good to talk to you again, my friend.

[Pete]

Good to talk to you. So let's talk about something that hold has had a hold on my interest since I was very young. Probably like, oh, God, probably five or six years old. Watched my first game and became obsessed and wanted to play it. People have probably heard me talk about this before. It's the sport of hockey. You know anything about hockey?

[D]

I know that Wayne Gretzky was a really great defenseman and there's a dude in the goal.

[Pete]

Well, you, you got one of those, right?

[D]

Okay. Yeah, that's about as much as I know about hockey. I mean, really, you know, I, you can't be a sports guy, which I was for a bit, and not know at least a little bit. Right. But, but basically I'm completely ignorant, so.

[Pete]

Yeah, well, Wayne Gretzky was a, he was a forward, he was a sensor. Sometimes he played wing, not a defenseman. But I actually have a video queued up of who I consider to be one of the greatest defensemen of all time. We can talk about that later. But yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons why I think it's the greatest, the greatest sport on the planet. And probably the one reason that it is is because of where it's played, the cold, how much it costs to play, the times you might have to wake up to play, and how much equipment costs.

[D]

Oh, it's total weights.

[Pete]

Yeah, you're. You're basically keeping out the worst, the worst of all elements of every, of every group out there. You know, most of the, when I was growing up, the, the schools that had the, had the better teams were schools that had like the highest tuition in the Catholic League that I, that I played in. So it just makes sense.

[D]

I mean, again, I don't know much, so, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong about any of this, but it's overwhelmingly played by Canadians, Americans and, and not just Americans, but Americans from like the upper Midwest and the Northeast and it's played in Europe and that's about it

[Pete]

pretty much. Yeah.

[D]

I mean like total white supremacy. And I know that when I was growing up, like ice time was a thing and you'd have to get up at like 5 o' clock in the morning to go get ice time. Is this, is this correct?

[Pete]

Five o', clock, sometimes four o'. Clock. If you were in a, a league that was outside of like a high school league or something like that, sometimes your league games would start at 11 o' clock at night or midnight or something like that. Yeah, it's one of those things that, one of those games that you're, they can actually make more money from an open skate, of people, of couples walking, you know, skating around to music and holding hands than they can for people coming in and paying to play, to play hockey. So couples aren't going to do that normally at 11 o', clock, 10 o', clock, 11 or 12 or midnight and 5 o' clock in the morning. So that's when you get ice time. You get ice time. Like in New York, there was a place called Skyrink and if you wanted to play open hockey you would normally have to get there around 6, 6:30. Laskers rink, which was basically in Harlem In Central Park, 110th street, you had to, there was a open skate on Saturday and Sundays from 7:30 till 9. Where you, where the rink would be like an advanced game going on, media, you know, a beginner game going on and then like guys who you know, been playing for a little while going on all on the same gigantic rink. So yeah, it, basically it, there was just the way it was structured, the gatekeeping was pretty amazing.

[D]

Well, and the, the sports, I mean sports occupies such a huge place in the culture that you know, like I, I personally am start, I've started. One of the reasons that I wanted to do the show is I want to get more into hockey because you know I can occasionally I can make the drive and like go see a Krakens game and you know like going to see a Seahawks game is way too expensive. It's, it's everything I don't like about American culture in like one specific spot. You know, Mariners games aren't much better. You know, it's a several hour drive for me to go.

[Pete]

So

[D]

I just, of all the professional sports teams out there, I would much rather go see like to crack it. But I don't know anything about it, you know, because it just wasn't, was. I wasn't raised with it, I didn't, didn't grow up with it. So like explain it to me like I'm a retarded five year old.

[Pete]

Okay. So I mean, you know that there's, there's a rank and everything. God, it's been so long since I like, like I can't remember the length of the rank and the 210ft, I can't remember but, and the width of the rink. But the rink is split into sections. There's a center line. Your team will be on one side for, for the first period and team be the other. Then you'll switch after there's three periods you'll switch sides after which really what that does mostly is, is your bench in the first period is going to be on your side of the ice. But in the second period your bench is going to be all the way on the other side of the ice. So if you're gassed and you're huffing and you can't continue your shift, you have to make a longer trip to the bench to change, to switch out and get somebody who's, who's fresh on the ice and Everything there's. There are zones. You have center ice, you have blue lines, and then you have goal lines. Goal lines are all the way down. That's where the nets. The nets are set up on the goal line. You want to get the puck between, you know, score, goal. Got to get across the goal line, and it's got to be in the net. The blue lines are to prevent icing, I mean, or to prevent offside and so. Or to not prevent offside, but to regulate. So the easiest thing you could do in hockey is. Is you'd have one guy who would stay all the way down by the other team's net, and you just throw the puck down to him, and he'd be alone with the goalie. That line. The puck has to go over that line to go into the other zone before any of your players do. That prevents that from happening. So that's probably the hardest thing. When people first start getting into hockey, they don't really understand what offside is. If they. If they've ever watched soccer, they might have an idea of offside. But offside could be manipulated in soccer because, I mean, it's just basically a bunch of hooligans and they're not to be trusted. But in hockey, that line basically prevents you from hanging out over down here. Hey, hey, throw me the puck. I'm all alone. No, the puck has to go over that. Has to go over that line before any of you guys do. And the center line is basically where you centerize, is where the game starts from or after a goal is scored, where you drop the puck and you have a face off who, you know, you try to get the puck back to your guys. So that's basically. I pretty much just explained the hardest part of people first watching hockey. They're like, okay, why did the whistle blow? Well, the person was offside. They went across the line before the puck did. Puck has to go across the line. It's more sportsman like that. There's more sportsmanship according to it. And that's another thing about hockey that I love is. Is it's very. It gets a bad rap for fighting, but the fighting is essential to the game. And as you had mentioned before we even started, we've seen a lot of problems in hockey since they took. Since they basically tried to try to eliminate fighting, because fighting was really a way to police. Police the other team if somebody was getting out of line. If somebody went after your best guy or, you know, a cheap shot at one of your guys, and a fight would be a Good way to the enforcer would go after that guy. Or you know, if a game needed. And this happened a lot back in the 70s, if a game just needed a little more excitement, both teams would throw their enforcer out there, enforcers out there at the same time, and they would just pick a fight with each other and then, you know, it was off to the races. Especially before they started mandating helmets. It was all. It was a lot more fun. And I would argue hockey was a safer game before they started mandating helmets because people took more care. They knew the guys weren't, weren't wearing helmets, they weren't as. They wouldn't be as dirty and they'd be a little more hesitant to like really crash a guy into the boards head first or something like that. And you know, it just. It's always been a gentleman's sport. Well, I mean, it's not always been a gentleman sport, but it's, it's a more gentlemanly sport because you can fight, you can take out your aggression. And also it's mostly real white bread kids playing it. Any questions?

[D]

Well, there's that awful piece of commie adjit prop that Clint Eastwood directed with the starring Matt Damon about the World cup in South Africa, the rugby World Cup. And one line that stuck with me from that is that rugby was a, a gentleman's game, a thugs game played by gentlemen, and that soccer was vice

[Pete]

versa game played by hooligans.

[D]

Right. And it strikes me that hockey very much fits that the a thugs game played by gentlemen sort of ethos that you want in sports where that, that there is the competition, there is the violence. I mean, how fast are these guys skating? Like 20, 25 miles? Like I have no idea.

[Pete]

Yeah, some. I mean, 25 miles an hour is I would say a pretty quick player. Some players, you know, Pavel Bureau was getting probably up closer to 30. So that's you.

[D]

Car crash speeds is dangerous. Like if you hit.

[Pete]

Oh yeah. It's insane. Yeah. Oh yeah. You hit the board. You go, you go into a board. The board's head first. You know, I forget what the guy's name was. Who. It was a Boston College player, kid. He went headfirst into the boards and paralyzed in a game. Yeah, that was. I was in the 90s. Oh, by the way, you were mentioning the Seattle area. The Seattle Metropolitans were the first American team to actually win the Stanley Cup. They beat the Montreal Canadiens in 1917. Most people don't even, probably don't even know that there was a Seattle Metropolitan team.

[D]

I had no idea.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[D]

No idea.

[Pete]

I'm actually really.

[D]

This is the first time hearing, you know.

[Pete]

Yeah. There's actually a picture of them and you can imagine it's all a bunch of white kids and most. Half of them definitely look German, that's for sure. Right.

[D]

And

[Pete]

one.

[D]

One interesting thing about hockey that I think it's the only major sport where the season goes on hold for the Olympics.

[Pete]

Well, the. The season will go on hold for the Olympics. Yeah. The. Mostly because the basketball is played during the summer and that's when they're off. So. Yeah. And it's. Well, what's interesting is for a while there's pros played in the. In. They allowed pros. I can't remember the year that they allowed pros back in. I think it was in the early 2000s. It was in the 2000s. I'm almost positive. Then they took them out and then this year they let them back in. It had been a while since they had pros in the. In the game, so.

[D]

Well, I just think it's cool that, like. Because. I only know this because his name is so weird. Is it Dominic Koshik, who's like, Czech or Dominic objects.

[Pete]

Check.

[D]

Yeah, he was, you know, like maybe 10 years ago or something. I remember, like, reading about the Winter Olympics and like, he was playing for his country in the Winter Olympics. And so you get all, like, you get really the best players from all over the world. Right. But you know, what's, what's the. He's like one of the best scorers in the league now.

[Pete]

Alexander Ovechkin. Yeah. He's rushing. He's Russian.

[D]

Yeah. Did he play, like, has he played for the Russian teams in the Olympics?

[Pete]

I'm. I'm positive he did during the aughts. I don't know what his. I don't know his scoring record in the Olympics or anything like that, but I'm. I'm almost positive he would have. Yeah.

[D]

Right. So you get like, the Canadians, the Russians, the Scandinavians, the European, like, you know, Western civilization effectively, like, plays hockey is. Is what I'm saying. Or like white civilization plays hockey. And I don't know, like, you know, Australia and New Zealand have hockey teams. It wouldn't surprise me if they did, but. Right. It's the only. It's the only sport I can think of where I can look at the teams and be like, I'd have those guys over for a barbecue. They look. I think they're a good time. Right. Like, you know, like, where I'm not just visually off put and not just because like, oh, abrasives, but like what do I have in common with like NBA players? You know, my life and their life are completely different. You know, baseball, like not, you know, just, just nothing in common at all.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[D]

And so hockey is this, it's like, oh, these are, these look like guys that I would have known growing up.

[Pete]

Yeah, the hockey was, has gone through a lot of like first hockey, I think when I was growing up, 90, it was 92% of the league was Canadian and the rest were basically American. Then the, as the, the wall started to fall and everything started falling apart in Eastern Europe, you started getting more of the Eastern European players come come over and really the last to come over were, were the Russian players obviously. So, you know, hockey has gone through when it became more of a world sport. That's when the league really started to expand. Where you started, you started seeing more teams added. You know, there was, I don't remember how many years it was, but there was only six teams in the NHL for a long time called the original six was Montreal, Toronto. It was the Canadiens, the Maple Leafs, the Rangers, the Blackhawks, the Red Wings and who am I leaving out? Boston. Boston Bruins. So there was only six teams for, for a long time. And it was pretty much because, you know, well, how much is the supply and demand? How many people are demanding to see hockey and everything. And then once the game started to get some in the 60s, it started to get popular, especially after the United States actually won the Olympic gold medal in 1960. I think that was at Squaw Valley. And it started getting popular and then people had just started picking up. So you had teams that were adding on, adding on, adding on. You actually had a team in Cleveland at one point and a lot of teams moved that they had to find their places to go to where you would find a crowd. Which is why the famous line from basketball and basketball, the New Orleans Jazz moved to Utah where they don't allow music. You had all these teams that had to change their names and move around to find, find their niche. But you know, eventually with more Americans starting to play the game, especially after 1980, the Olympics in 1980, you just, the league just started to. Started to explode. But then as soon as Eastern Europeans and Russians came in, I mean now you have teams in Florida, you have two teams in Florida. So you know, mostly most of the people going to those games are obviously people who, who are from, you know, retired to, to Florida, from New York and on the west coast, the Midwest. Tampa is more of a Midwest kind. A lot of people from the Midwest. Where. The east coast, where you have the Florida Panthers down in Burr county, is mostly people from the Tri State area in New England, up in New York. So, yeah, I mean, the game started to. The game started to explode. And, you know, it's always been one of those games where I remember when I was growing up, I can't remember what the guy's name was, but there was like one black guy in the league. And you know, honestly, if there is a black guy in the league, he's the whitest black guy you've. You know, if there's a guy playing hockey in the NHL and he's from Canada, he's the whitest black guy, you know. So. What else you want to know?

[D]

Well, like, if, if you were to say, all right, like here's. If you want to learn more about hockey, like, learn about like these six players or something and watch these, like, go to YouTube and watch the, like the, you know, the night. Obviously there's the 1980, you know, silver, silver medal game or whatever is where the US Beat the Russians. Like what, what? I. I know names like Brett hall

[Thomas]

and

[D]

Grant Gretzky and like Mario Lemieux, because when I was a kid, those were like the big three names. And you couldn't be like, into sports and not hear those three names. But like, what other players, you know, like.

[Thomas]

If.

[D]

If Pete had to put together his all time, like best squad, like goalie and wings and defense, that's. That's the three big terms, right?

[Thomas]

Or.

[Pete]

Yeah, I'm gonna. God, I'll be naming people. No one have ever. My goalie would be some. Somebody most people had never even heard of is Ken Dryden for the Montreal Canadiens. Played in the, played in the 70s. I think he actually joined the league late because he went to law school or something like that. But Ken Dryden was, I mean, he was just. It was impossible to get anything by him. But in like the modern era, I mean, Dominic Koshik, Patrick Waugh, as far as goaltenders go, I mean, these are guys who, you know, took their team to championships. I mean, I don't want to say I can name people, name goalies who, you know, like won the Stanley Cups, but they didn't, like, they didn't carry their team on their soul on their shoulders, you know, And I'm not going to name a lot of current players because after Covid, I just dropped out of watching pretty much all sports. I've only Started watching hockey again recently because, yeah, I needed just another. A distraction of some sort and. But so, like, I don't know if I had a goalie that I needed to. You know, we need to win a game, like one game. It's kind of hard not to pick Dominic Koschik because the guy would just. The guy was doing a lot in Buffalo with a team that, I mean, he had some good defensemen in front of him, but, I mean, there were nights where he was carrying the team. Mike Richter was another guy who like, carried his team to the Rangers. Hadn't won a Stanley cup since like 1940, 1941. And Richter took them to the Stanley cup in 93. Or was it 94? Can't remember, but it was 93 or 94. I think 93 was Montreal and the next year was the, The Rangers. So goalie, I mean, Patrick Wa. Dominic Hausik, these guys, Ken Dryden, someone's probably screaming. Martin Brodeur from the, from the New Jersey Devils. He had it. He was a great goaltender, but he also had a great defense in front of him. Defenseman is, I mean, this guy right here.

[D]

How many, how many defensemen are there? There's two.

[Pete]

So there's two defensemen. Okay. And usually you're going to. Normally what you're going to have is on the ice at one time. You're going to have one that's right handed, one that shoots right handed, one that shoots left handed, one that shoots right hand is going to play the right side. The one that shoots left hand is going to play the left side. There's just reasons, there's your, you want your, you want the stick closest to the boards on the side you are. That's the way it was always explained to me growing up, although I played, I shot right handed, even though I'm. Normally, if you're right handed, you're supposed to shoot left handed, shoot left handed. But I was, I'm kind of ambidextrous, so I shot right handed. But the. So here, let me, let me share this guy. This guy was played in the 70s. When defenseman, when, when you talk about defenseman, he gets left out because he played so long ago and he had a short career because he played so hard. He got hurt a lot. But this is Bobby Oren. He played for the Bruins, and before he came into the league, a defenseman basically played defense. They. When the other team, when the other team was on the offense, he, he dropped back. And defenseman's job is to make sure that the forwards don't get an open shot. Make sure to. To put body. But you're supposed to just get your body between them and your goalie. And Bobby or kind of change that Bobby or led the league in scoring as a defenseman. And it. There was really nothing like him when. When he came along to the point where, I mean like videos like this are just show how legendary he actually was where he is a young kid and he's making men who've been playing the game, you know, twice as long as he has just look silly. So let me just run this video. I have. I have a few videos that are. Might be of interest.

[Thomas]

So.

[Pete]

No helmets too. This was back when the. When the game was just absolutely amazing.

[Thomas]

Drive by park goes wide or long

[Pete]

shot and it stop behind that goal line. But it's somehow some way that puck

[D]

went in behind Bryden now to or breaking comes or right in.

[Pete]

There's no reason a defenseman is going in on. On a goal on basically unchallenged. He should be back. He should be back behind the forwards waiting for the puck. Waiting for the opposing team to pick the puck up and bring it back down the ice and. Or was just like, no, I'm gonna. I'm gonna totally break that model and just become completely offensive. And people just didn't. They didn't know what to do with him. I mean it got to the point where they were hurt. Some people, some of the dirtier players would try to hurt him on purpose and actually succeeded.

[Thomas]

But now. Or breaks. Delayed call.

[Pete]

He's out to Walton or heads for the net. Walton closes, fires and misses.

[D]

Rebound. Score, Papy. Or now watch Bobby heading for the net. He's going to turn and come over to the right side just as Walton drives the puck.

[Pete]

There he turns.

[D]

Now watch this backhander right here in the top corner. Corner.

[Pete]

How does he do it? I don't know.

[Thomas]

Or gets it. Picks up speed, leaves Monahan down the other end.

[D]

And here he comes, three men back

[Pete]

or fights for it behind the net. Has it looking in front, wheels in

[Thomas]

front, locked on the pass. Has it again.

[D]

Or cuts around a backhander, scores off the post.

[Pete]

The craziest thing about that goal right there is it started with him behind the opposing net. Something a defenseman is not supposed to do. Is when I was. When I was playing, if I was playing defense and I ended up behind the other team's net, I was going to be benched. You just don't do that as a defenseman. You're like leaving. You know, you might have a forward drop back. I mean, you know, drop back to cover for you, but a forward is not going to be able to play his defense as well as you. As well as you do. Especially at this level and the, I mean as in, in high school. Yeah, maybe, you know, guy will play defense as well as you at this level. No one's going to play defense as well as the defenseman.

[Thomas]

Plant stops it behind the net for or. Or with Gould there, drives it on

[D]

an empty net, throws you out and

[Pete]

it is a score, a record. This is him. Just like at the end of a game if you, if you're down by a goal within the last two minutes of the game, you can pull your goaltender out for an extra attacker so you can try and score and tie the game and. But basically that just leaves your goal wide open. So you know, or had this habit of being all the way on the other end of the ice and being able to just pinpoint shot all the way from the other end into the incident that. On the other, on the, on the other end of the ice and that, that takes some skill for sure.

[D]

Was he actually good at defense too or is he just like this weird scoring machine who should have been playing wing?

[Pete]

Oh no, he was. He. I think he won defensive player of the year six, six times. So. So he, he could win defensive player of the year and be the, be the overall. Have the most points scored in a season which makes no fucking sense whatsoever. I mean that's why at the time it was just this anomaly where people were just like what are we seeing here? We're seeing like history. We're seeing something new.

[D]

So he would have been your all time defense. So there's two defensemen, Bobby Oren and who's, who's the other guy then?

[Pete]

Yeah, unfortunately it's. Well, well not unfortunately but if I was going to pick a defenseman who like to play alongside or it would be another left handed shooter. Shooter. It would be Scott Stevens from the, from the New Jersey Devils. The guy was just one of the most brutal son of a. Ever. Let me see if I can find this here. Scott Stevens, Eric Linden. Dross. Yeah, here we go.

[D]

Kelly off for Nedermark. He's bumped leader Meyer trying to get out of his own skate.

[Pete]

Here's 88.

[D]

Lindros makes the move. And Lindross is powered down the ice by Scott Stevens. And Lindros remains down on the ice as all concussion.

[Pete]

I mean that a lot of people say that pretty much ended his career. The other players come together. Stevens just had a frigging. If somebody put their head down and they were skating, they had the puck, you didn't want to be around.

[D]

When is it legal to hit somebody

[Pete]

when they have the puck? You're only allowed to check somebody when they have the puck.

[D]

Okay. Okay. So you can't just like, like take, take some little guy who's up skating up front and like, like, hey, shoot me the puck. Shoot me the puck who's small and then just have one of your biggest guys, like run him into the boards.

[Pete]

Yeah, no, you have to. The, the rule is you have. The person has to be. Has to have the puck. But, you know, sometimes referees don't see everything so together. This hit. Legendary. This is the worst case scenario here

[D]

for this hit for Eric Lindross Stevens.

[Pete]

Lindross was a total prick, by the way. There weren't. I think the only people who were upset at this point were Philadelphia Flyer fans. But this pretty much ended his career. I mean, he kept having. He had multiple more concussions after this, and he just had to quit at a very young age because he, I mean, he was looking at brain damage. Evens came across like he has done in the plea and he slew you with your Lindros. Here we go.

[Thomas]

He's coming through.

[Pete]

He beats Neidermeyer. Head is down and it's a shoulder right to the jaw of Lindros.

[Thomas]

And he has no clue this is coming. This is a freight train.

[Pete]

I mean, look how fast he's going.

[Thomas]

A freight train.

[Pete]

And it is a wicked hit. Even, even. I mean, even slow motion. Look how fast he's going.

[Thomas]

This is coming.

[Pete]

This is a freight train coming his way.

[D]

Well, so like.

[Pete]

And it is a wicked.

[D]

In car accidents, right, if you get in a head on car accident, it's the speed of say, car one is going 30 miles an hour and car two is going 30 miles an hour. It's like running into a brick wall at 70 miles an hour.

[Thomas]

Yep.

[D]

If both those guys are doing 20 to 25 miles an hour.

[Pete]

Yep.

[D]

That's. That's like hitting a brick wall at 45 miles an hour with no seat belt.

[Pete]

Oh, yeah. Oh, it's.

[D]

That's bad.

[Pete]

I've taken some monster hits, man. And it's. And I, I've. I've delivered some monster hits. And yeah, if it doesn't hurt you, like to the point where you're like, okay, I'm, you know, I might need to see the trainer. It takes everything right out of you and you have to get off the ice. It's hard to get up from a hit like that and like, get back into your. Get back into your groove, get back, you know, start skating again. You need. You need some time. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just. It's a brutal. It's. It's another thing I love about the game, though. It's a brutal game and you can really hit some. You can. You can really do some damage. But I mean, I don't. It's hard to know what Scott Stevens. What his motives were there. But here's some. I think it's Scott Stevens greatest hits.

[D]

Here's McLean. Holy. Did that guy just flip over?

[Pete]

Yeah, hip check.

[D]

He just did a full like. Yeah, he just did a full like 270in the air. Oh, my gosh.

[Pete]

Boom.

[D]

So we're enforcers, generally defensemen. Oh, what. So the role on the team of enforcer, we talked a little bit about it. Was that usually fulfilled by a defenseman or.

[Pete]

No, normally not. Normally it was like a fourth line wing, you know, like right winger, left winger. Somebody who wasn't going to get a lot of ice time. He would just be out there at certain times, you know, like, you know, if. If one of your best players. If. If one of your best players got. Got a cheap shot or something, he'd go out there and instigate with that person. Oh, okay. So. But yeah, so just those two guys

[D]

hit hard as part of their duties, but not necessarily fight as political game. Okay, that makes sense.

[Thomas]

Correct. Yeah.

[Pete]

So, yeah, those would be. My two defensemen would be Bobby Orr and. And Scott Stevens. Just because they would complement each other well. Because one. One would have the ability to play defense and be insanely offensive. And then you'd have another guy who was a really good defenseman who could just deliver brutal hits. And I mean, that's what hockey's about. Hockey's about, you know, letting people, you know.

[D]

Yeah.

[Pete]

Leveling people, you know, and that's, you know, really the fun part of it. So my. Well, then I guess we'd have to go to. We'd have to go to center and center it so hard. There's been so many great centers of. Center is basically like quarterback on the ice. Your left wing, your left wing, your right wing. These are forwards, obviously, one's gonna be on the left, one's gonna be on the right. They're going to attack on their side into the. Into the zone. When they come back to play defense, they're going to be playing defense. More forward in the zone, like up near where the defensemen come up into the. Into the zone and hang back. But the center is somebody who can go. Basically can go anywhere. He takes the face offs and then he is. So if a puck goes into the corner and he can go in and help the. Help the winger in whatever, would they

[D]

typically be the fastest skaters?

[Pete]

Not necessarily, no.

[D]

Or the best puck handlers? Would they be the guys that had the real.

[Pete]

They would be the guys who could probably handle the puck better than anyone else. Okay, so, you know, like, the reason why the Edmondson Oilers of the. Of the 80s were so dominant was they had two dominant sensors. They had Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier. And these were guys who were magic with the puck, and they had great wingers playing them. Gretzky. Gretzky famously had Yari Curry, who was a Finn. Pretty sure he was a Finn. And then I forget who is. Who his other winger was. I know. I can't remember, but, like, when, When Gretzky left Edmondson and went to la, like, Curry followed him like the line, just like that. That duo went. Went with them. Went. Went to LA together. So if I say Gretzky is the greatest center of all time, I mean, it's so obvious now. You can make. The arguments can be made that. What's his name? You just mentioned him. The Russian from the.

[D]

Ovechkin.

[Pete]

Yeah, Ovechkin. Alexander Ovechkin.

[D]

And the only reason I know that name is that when the Capitals won the Cup, I happened to be in Washington, D.C. at the time on like, a tourist thing and caught like a chunk of their parade. And so I was like, that was really cool.

[Pete]

Yeah, well, I mean, he's. He's considered really a left winger. I mean, if, if, if you're going to consider him a left winger, and I know he's played center before, then he's going to be the. He'll be the top left winger of all time. I mean, he's the top goal scorer. He. He beat Gretzky's 892 career goals, which no one ever thought was going to happen. Now, he's not going to beat Gretzky total points because I think Gretzky had twice as many assists as he did goals and one point.

[D]

What's. What's the distinction between goals and assists or goals and points?

[Pete]

Is you. The puck you're sticking. An assist is credited to the last two players to get you that puck. So if you, if the three forwards come across the line, say you have Gretzky in the center, Yari Curry, I think Yari played last, actually, even though he was right handed. And say McSorley was out there just to play, just to make sure no one with Gretzky, if they came across the line and McSorley passed it to Curry and Curry passed it to Gretzky and Gretzky scored. Gretzky would get a goal, Curry and McStorley would get assists.

[D]

Okay, and then. And your points are your assists plus your goals.

[Pete]

Yeah. Yeah.

[D]

Okay.

[Pete]

Yeah. So your points for assists and goals. And the. So say Yari Curry went into, say the opposing team had the, had the puck and Curry went into the zone to go after try and take the puck away from him. And he did. He took it away from an opposing player and passed it to Gretzky and Gretzky scored. Then only Curry would get an assist because he is the only player. He took it from the opposing team and put it, you know, put it on, put it on Gretzky stick. Now if Curry went in and took it from an opposing player and just took it from the opposing player and scored on his own, then that, that would be scored as a goal for Curry unassisted. No one would have an assist on it because none of the players on his team touched it before. Pass the puck to him or touch.

[D]

That makes sense.

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[D]

And then so you've got the Vechkin on the left, Gretzky at the center, who's, who's playing right wing. Then the best position it had.

[Pete]

It's going to be somebody that a lot of people have never heard of. Mike Bossi, from the, from the New York Islanders. In the late 70s, early 80s, the Islanders won the Stanley cup four years in a row from, I think it was 80 to 84. And Bossi was just, he was just one of those middle sized Canadian guys who could just do, do so much with the puck and just had a knack for putting it, for putting it in the net. So let's see. Let me, let me get his stats. He was six, you know, a guy. He was a guy from Montreal, six foot. Six foot tall. Oh, he died in 2022. I didn't know that. Oh, wow. At the age of 65. Damn. Six foot tall, 185 pounds. Yeah. He was the second of five players to score 50 goals in 50 games. I mean, this is, this, this guy was a complete beast who just knew, knew how to find the back of the net. And I'm looking for his career statistics. Yeah, so he had 573 career goals and 752 games. And he had. So he played 752 games at 573 goals, 553 assists, 1127 goal points in 752 games. So he, he averaged over a point a game.

[Thomas]

Game.

[D]

That's, that's a lot, isn't it?

[Pete]

The guy had, the guy was a monster.

[D]

Okay, so like soccer is typically a relatively low scoring game, right? Like, you know, lots of, lots of games that are 21 or 32 or whatever.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

Is, is a typical hobby hockey game. Like more like like a soccer game. Or you're like five go is, is like what's like if you had to like guess like the median score it like total like five points. Like is it like three to two?

[Pete]

Well, it just depends on the team. You know, if you have like. So the New Jersey devils of the 90s, it had Martin Broders goalie and Scott Stevens as their defenseman when they were. They had a system where if you tried to bring, if you tried to bring the puck through center ice, they had a system where they would just stop you, where it would just basically line up, line the team up across and just wouldn't give you a chance to get through. It's called the trap. It, It'll win you games, it won't win your fans. I, I used to have seasons against the Florida Panthers and whenever the Devils came, I never went to the game because I knew it was going to be boring. I knew it was going to be a two, one game or something like that. But if you had like, if like Colorado that had Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg and Chris Drury and guys like that that could, you know, five, three game, something like that, you weren't good.

[D]

You're.

[Pete]

It's very rare you're going to get like games with more than six or seven goals on one team. Mostly because you don't want to score 10 goals on a team because you're going to have to play them again and they're going to remember that shit and they're going to try and shove it up your ass next time they play you. And you might have the toughest game of the year. There might be a lot of penalties in that game and it might be a little dirty because you just don't do that to people. It's unseemly. It's considered rude. Well, let's just put it that way in a lot of.

[D]

So like, yeah, if it was 5 to 6, that would be like, okay, close game. Everyone's. But if it's like, if it's like six to two, you know, then, then people's fine.

[Pete]

Six, two is fine. I mean they'll, they'll be, they'll be butt hurt a little bit. But if you're, if your goalie is just like completely porous as Swiss cheese that night and you, you decide you want to score 11 goals and they score one or two, okay, that next game, you're, you might want to set that next game out because it can get, it could get ugly. Depending. They may, they may even do the old school, the old school thing where if they don't have an enforcer that they really think can handle the job, they'll call someone up from the minors who can just for like one game to go out there and just wreak havoc on your ass. So yeah, there's a little bit of street, street justice that goes, goes on there. It's not really street justice. It's more like, you know. Yeah, you're, you shouldn't have done that. There's just, it's rude. I mean, just. I guess the best way to say is rude. Okay, so that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean you're a lot of these guys, you grew up with you, you, A lot of these guys, if you're the same age, you may be playing against each other since you're like 9 or 10 years old. Especially if you're from Canada and you're playing in, in junior systems where they have, I mean, they have.

[D]

Okay, explain that because I don't. What does junior systems mean?

[Pete]

Okay, so they have junior hockey in Canada and somebody who's Canadian is going to be real pissed off at me because I'm not completely familiar with the junior system, but the, like Bobby Orr. So when Bobby Orr was 13 years old, he was, he was taken basically. He left his family to go play hockey. And the junior leagues were basically like a, the build up to the minor leagues where you would, where. Well, I mean it's really where you're going to cut your teeth, where people are going to see you so you can get drafted into the NHL. And some of these, some of these you could actually get. You got paid, you got housing and you got, you know, you, you were being trained. A lot of, A lot of the coaches and a lot of the trainers were former NHLers. It's basically like a farm system for, for hockey. I don't know what it's like now, but back then it was definitely like pretty much anyone who came up went into the NHL, who was from Canada, played in the play junior hockey.

[D]

And so basically like for American sports, right, like typically you'll play in high school and then you'll play in college one or two years and then you'll get drafted into the NBA or NHL or not NHL, MLB into the NFL. And then in baseball, right, you graduate high school and you might get drafted by a major league team, you might play college ball, but you can do one or one of those. Like you'll do some time in the minors and then a couple years maybe if you're really talented and then, and then get your shot in the, in the big leagues. Like is so in your hockey like, like hockey high school. And then once you're done with hockey

[Pete]

high school, pretty much you're, It's a system to get you ready for the NHL, then you get drafted. And if you get drafted, I mean if you get drafted, like I'm pretty sure like Bossy was drafted 15th overall. He went, he went right to the. I don't think he played any, Let me see. I don't think he played any, any minor league hockey. Yeah, he played, he played from 1972 to 1977. He played for Laval national of the Quebec. I think it's Quebec Maritime's Junior Hockey League, which is a, let me describe it. One of three major junior hockey leagues that constitute the Canadian Hockey League alongside the Ontario Hockey League and Western Hockey League and the. What is basically most of the teams. Yeah, it's just basically it's, it would be our version of like baseball playing, playing in high school and getting drafted out of high school and the same thing for football, football, getting drafted out of college. So. But the thing is is that the one difference is, is that you can, you can start playing in. Depending on how good you are, you can start playing in the junior leagues at a very young age. Like I said Bobby or was playing in the junior leagues at 13. So you know, they have a, they have a system up there.

[D]

They've changed the rules. I'm of an age where like Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett got drafted NBA like right around high school, like right after I like these guys are the same age I am. What are they doing to play in the NBA, right. With American football, right. Like you just can't take an 18 year old kid and go have him throw him into the NFL because he'll get killed. Right. They need that extra time to just get bigger just so that they don't die, you know, 200.

[Pete]

I think you had to be three years. You have to be three years out of, out of high school in order to be drafted in the NFL. I don't know if that's the same, if it's the same now. And in basketball for a long time, it was one year.

[D]

Yeah.

[Pete]

Be one year out of high school. And LeBron changed that to the point where there were. I remember reading articles around the time like LeBron was coming out where they, they wanted to draft him as a junior in high school. Yeah. Yeah.

[D]

He was so good so early.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[D]

So not my cup of tea, but I have to admit, he was. He's freakishly talented.

[Pete]

Yeah. I, I enjoy playing basketball more than I. More than I do watch. Watching basketball. We played.

[D]

Yeah. Well, yeah, that way with a lot of sports. So you, you mentioned. Okay, so there's six guys on the squad, right? Three. Three guys in the wing, a goalie and then two defensemen, three forwards, two

[Pete]

defensemen and a goalie. Yep.

[D]

Okay, so six guys on a squad. And you said something about lines. What is that?

[Pete]

So, okay, so you're going to have. Most teams are going to have three lines, so you're going to have. You have three forwards, so you'll have nine forwards. You'll have three lines of three different guys. So you can swap out. Because one thing that most people don't realize about hockey is, and I remember, like, talking about talking to someone being like, you get out there after about, usually 35 to 40 seconds of going balls out, you're out of gas. You have to, you have to change. You know, you need to change. And, you know, you hop over the boards and then say, I, I played left wing a lot, the left winger on whatever, whatever line the coach called to go out next. There's always a first line, a second line, and a third line. You know who that is at the beginning of the game. And so if I'm coming in, if I'm on the ice and I'm like, I'm gassed. I. I need, I need, I need to rest. He's going to call second. You know, if I'm playing first line, he's going to be called the second or third line, left wing. And then that person will jump out and will. Will replace me. But usually when I'm jumping out, you want to get my center, and the coach will start screaming for the center on my line and the right winger on my line to hop out to so that you can get the other two guys out there who have been playing together, who are used to playing Together on the ice.

[D]

Okay.

[Pete]

Each line is, is something where you're going to be practicing together. You're going to get to know your guy, you're going to get, you know, you're going to get to know where your guys going. You know, if I have the puck in the corner, I knew where Chris V. Was going. I knew he was going to the, you know, he was going to go to the top of the circle or something like that for a slap shot and I had to set him up for a one timer or just feed it into, throw it in front of the net and hopefully, you know, he could tip it in or something like that. Okay, so you're, you have three lines and there are many cases where there are fourth lines, but the fourth line is usually your least talented players. You may put them out there only if like your three, your first three lines are completely gassed and they need a little, you know, whatever line you want to put out next needs so like some extra.

[D]

In a typical NHL game, say you start, start the game starts with the first line on both sides. How long are those guys playing before they get swapped out? 5 minutes, 10 minutes,

[Pete]

40 seconds?

[D]

Yeah.

[Thomas]

Wow.

[Pete]

You cannot stay on the ice. I was talking to a, a marathon runner and he had picked up hockey later in life. I think he started playing hockey when he was like 22. And he started playing in men's leagues in South Florida when he was 22. And we were, you know, I told them I had been, you know, pretty much been playing my whole life and everything. And, and he, you know, we started talking. He's like, and he's like, yeah, you know, I've, I've run marathons for, you know, since I was like, you know, since I was like 15 or something like that. So you've been running marathons, you know, 26 miles, 26.2 miles for seven years. I said, oh, that must really help with your wind. He's like, are you crazy? Because there's no correlation. He is. I'm out there for 40 seconds, 45 seconds, and I need, I need to get off the ice. I mean, it gases you, especially if you're hitting. Especially if you're, if you're getting hit and you're hitting. I mean, you go out there and it is balls bucking out for 40 to 40 sprints.

[D]

Just like full on sprinting.

[Pete]

Oh, yeah. And then you have to get off the ice. Now a defenseman can have, if you're a forward, you're going to have shorter shifts. You can have Defensemen who can stay out there for a while because if they're true defenseman and they're not puck rushing defenseman like Bobby Orr, you can hang back and you can actually, if your team is, if, if you're hanging out at the, at the line while your team is in the offense is in the offensive zone and your wingers and your, if your forwards are up there and they're trying, you can, you can actually get, get a breather as a defenseman. But a defenseman usually isn't going to last longer than a minute, a minute and 15 seconds.

[D]

So games are what, an hour and they're three 20 minute periods or three 20 minute.

[Pete]

Yeah, three 20 minute periods.

[D]

Okay, so. So the reason a hockey game looks like total chaos is because it's an hour of every once a minute like a line getting changed out. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So yeah, you're gonna have, you're just 50 line changes in a game.

[Pete]

Yeah, Yeah.

[D]

I couldn't follow it. Like this makes no sense.

[Pete]

Yeah, people just jumping over, you know, jumping over the boards left and right, you know, swapping out, switching out. I mean, it is, it's okay. The best way I heard it was control chaos.

[D]

That makes complete sense as to why I couldn't follow it. First of all, because the puck is very small, moving very fast and very hard to follow from the television. But. And then just like it just looks like a madhouse out there because apparently it's a madhouse like that. That makes total sense. Why I couldn't follow the game is. I had no idea that like a shift was 30 seconds long.

[Pete]

I mean, it's also, it's complete insanity sometimes where. Okay, that puck, that's galvanized rubber. It's hard as man. I don't know how many times I've been hit in the face with it. I mean, it's, you know, I mean.

[D]

Well, there's a reason those guys are all missing teeth. Like.

[Pete]

Well, yeah, everybody thinks it's because of fighting. It's not because of fighting, because you

[D]

got hit in the face. Galvanized piece, whatever moves at what, 50 miles an hour?

[Pete]

Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Some there, there are guys like. God, I can't remember what the name of the, the defenseman for the Bruins, he was like xenochara. Yeah, like a hundred. Like sometimes you get up to like 104 miles an hour. Slap shot. Oh, that thing hits you in the. Yeah. Oh. I mean you, you talk about fractured cheekbones, fractured orbitals, if that catches you. Right. Yeah. Most people are Missing, like, I'm missing teeth. I lost my teeth because somebody I was playing with, somebody who wasn't as good as I was and completely lost control on their skates. Their, their feet went out from under them and they just, their hands went backwards and their stick. Just like, they lost control of their stick. I just took a stick in the mouth and like, I get popped, I taste the blood, I put my tongue at my teeth and I'm like, well, I don't have those anymore. Like, I was 13 years old.

[D]

Ow. Yeah, well, and I mean, because I hang out with racists on the Internet. There's that one game in England where that negro guy, like legit killed that other dude with the skate that he should have, should have been in prison for life for that. But, you know, you got guys moving at 25, 30 miles an hour with razor blades on their feet carrying like, I don't know what they're made out of, but like sticks and this puck moving at 100 miles an hour or, you know, probably 80. Like, I imagine everybody slapshots in the 80s. Like, that's, that's a dangerous environment. And then you've got the, you know, every 60 seconds somebody, you know, guys moving on and off the ice like it's, that's nuts.

[Pete]

The stick. You know, there were some problems with the stick for a while. So originally the stick was wood with, you know, with fiberglass cover, especially on the blade reinforcement. Fiberglass on the blade. Those, those things break very easily, break them all the time. The blades just pop off. Then someone got the idea that they were going to make the sticks, like one piece, fiberglass all the way. Then someone got the bright idea of, well, you know, so people are sick and tired of buying new sticks all the time. You got to buy a whole new stick. Let's have a metal shaft all the way down to the blade and then you can just change the blade. Okay. One of the problems with that is, is that first of all, metal. You don't want people on a hockey rink with having a metal. Basically a metal bar. I remember one player, I can't remember who it was. It was someone on Tampa and he got slashed in the hand with somebody from someone who had one of those metal, metal frames.

[D]

What is, what is slashing, please?

[Pete]

Like, slashing is you take, you take the stick two handed and you basically. It sounds like, it sounds like what it is. You slash someone with the stick either in their assault with the stick, basically assault with a stick. But slashing is the, the penalty. This is Two minute penalty if you get caught doing it. So he slashes a guy in the hand and because he had a metal, because he had one of these metal frame sticks, he takes his glove off and his fucking pinky is hanging like literally like friggin dislocated. And like his pinky, he's got a compound fracture in his pinky's hanging. So I don't know if they use those metal sticks anymore. I hope they don't. I don't think they do. But the, you know, wood, the good thing about wood is it would break. I mean you, you hit someone with a wooden stick, there's a good chance if they have good equipment, it'll just hit the equipment and break and you know, won't do too much damage. But that's just as an aside. But yeah, the violence of the game. Slashing is a penalty. Two minutes if it's gross. If it's, if it's. They consider it to be, you know, a beyond the pale kind of slash. You can get four minutes. If it's really fucking horrible, you get five minutes or a game misconduct, get kicked out for the game, possibly a suspension. Elbowing. Can't hit someone with an elbow. That's two minutes. Could, could turn into five or something like that. Tripping. Tripping is the most obvious one because tripping would be the most obvious thing you'd want to do. If someone's like skating by you, you take the blade of your stick, put it right into their skates and just give it a yank. I mean they're like you said, they're skating. You're skating on razor blades and it's just very easy to fall. Or you put your stick, you can put your stick right between their legs. You don't even have to have a pulling. You don't even have to use any force. You just stick it between someone's legs and it caused them to fall.

[D]

No wonder. Get beat up so bad. Holy cow.

[Pete]

Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean you, I mean you can get, you get brutalized out there, man. It, it really depends. It depends how. I don't know what the. I don't really know what the game is like anymore. I don't know how I know. Like in basketball you can't even like touch anybody anymore from what I understand. People are like, you can't even.

[D]

The whole like, like just elbowing people in the face. That used to happen in the 80s and 90s. Not happening anymore.

[Pete]

Yeah, I don't know how, I don't know what, what's what hockey is like, like I said, I haven't, I've watched some games and I've mostly watched playoff games. And during the playoffs they tend to let things go a little more. You know, they don't want the, you know, you don't want a playoff game decided by a penalty. Where by the way, here's something else. Say I'm out there and I elbow somebody and I get a two minute penalty. I go to the penalty box for two minutes and now my team is shorthanded. My team only has four guys and the goalie on the ice and the other team has five guys and their goalie on the ice. So that's a huge advantage.

[D]

Okay, so they, they can't just swap out like if, if you were the left wing, they could just swap out another left wing guy while you're in, in the penalty box.

[Pete]

Nope. Nope. You got to play with, you got to play play one man down and that's the other is what they call, the other team has a power play and you're playing shorthanded. And if they, if the other team scores within that two minutes, you come out of the penalty box. So if they score, your penalty is not negated, but you're, you don't have to stay in the penalty box. Now if it's like a major, like they decided that you elbowed somebody and you were trying to like really hurt them, you got a five minute major, then you'd be down for five minutes and they could score as much as they wanted. Your goal wouldn't take you out of the penalty box, but for a two minute, a two minute penalty. If they scored within 10 seconds, you're right back out. You're right back out and probably on the bench because the coach is going to be fucking pissed at you for, you know, for taking a penalty and the other team scoring. So hockey fighting is normally five minutes. Both, both guys will get five minutes and that'll just negate, it'll negate each other. I mean sometimes there are some, There are sometimes where you, it won't be four on four, where it'll be five on five, but there's sometimes it'll be four on four. I've never really understood the rules behind that, but the, so yeah, so fighting is, is five minutes and most penalties are going to be two minutes.

[D]

So like there's like 17 games in an NFL season or something like that. 82 games in an NBA season, something like 150 games in a baseball season. How many games in an NHL season

[Pete]

82, same as the NBA.

[D]

Okay.

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[Pete]

So if you have season tickets and you have full season tickets and not like a half season, you got tickets of 41 games and if you make each one of them, you don't have a life.

[Thomas]

That's a lot.

[Pete]

I've had full, I've had full season tickets and I always end up, I always end up gave. Giving them away to people because like, I just can't make every game or you know, like the one year we had season tickets to the Panthers and they won nine home games, so I have tickets to 41 games and they won nine home games.

[D]

Ouch.

[Pete]

That's, that's where you, you're just going to the game to drink and be belligerent.

[D]

I mean that drink could be belligerent is kind of a European pastime. So I guess that. No, I, I, I, I think that I don't know what, what tickets are costing these days, but I know it's like much more reasonable.

[Pete]

God.

[D]

Than other major sports like the, the NBA and NH And NFL tickets are just insane. Let me, you know, so

[Pete]

let me see. Florida Panthers ticket prices. So Ottawa. Let's see, they're playing Ottawa at home. Two tickets. So. Yeah, in the upper, in the upper rows for the Florida Panthers, who are having a horrible season even though they're Stanley cup champions. 29 bucks. 29 a ticket. That's reasonable. Yeah, up in the nice bleeds.

[D]

But. Well, yeah, but, but if you're like taking a kid to a sporting event, like.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[D]

You know the, the same ticket at like the, where are the Florida Panthers

[Pete]

play out of Broward County, Florida.

[D]

Okay.

[Pete]

I don't know area.

[D]

Where's the like big nearest NFL team?

[Pete]

Miami. Miami Dolphins. Okay.

[D]

Yeah. Like compare that to it like in those weed. Miami Dolphins seat.

[Pete]

I mean they only, they only play what, 18 games or 16 games. So yeah, it's gonna be. So like if you wanted like row 20. Row one. Well, no, not row one. So I'm looking at row 12 down by the ice. So you're 12 rows off the ice for the Florida Panthers in the corner. It's 70, 75 a piece, which I mean, is kind of not bad. Although. Although. Oh no, that's $222 each. That's not good. But yeah, this one, now this one's $76 a piece. Yeah, that's not bad. If, if you want to get really close to the ice, you're gonna have to pay. But this one's only 12 rows off the ice and, and it's $76 a piece, which isn't bad at all, actually.

[D]

Oh, like, like or something. Spending 150 on an event like opera tickets are gonna cost you that much? Yeah, right. I mean, symphony tickets are going to cost that much,

[Thomas]

right?

[D]

You know, graduation present for a nephew or something. I'm gonna take you to a NHL game. You know, that'd be kind of cool.

[Pete]

It's. It's a good game. It's a better game to see, like live. I always tell people, if they want to get into hockey, go see a game live before you start watching on tv. You'll enjoy it more on TV after you see it live.

[D]

Okay, because. Because I've tried to watch it on TV a few times and it's just. It's incomprehensible.

[Pete]

Yeah, it's hard. They. It's hard to follow. To follow the PUP for a lot of people. And plus, if you don't really know the game a lot, it's going to be. It could be. It could be confusing. But the. So what else is there? I don't know. You can keep asking questions and I don't like,

[D]

again, explain this to me like I'm a five year old. What. What other. I mean, there's the original six teams. There's what, like 30 teams now?

[Pete]

Oh, God, yeah. How many teams are there now? It's.

[D]

I know about the Seattle Kraken. I know about the Las Vegas Golden Knights.

[Pete]

Isn't there a team in Utah?

[D]

There might be. I have no idea.

[Pete]

Let me see. Standings. Let's see. Three, six. Okay. Division eight. Okay, so there are 16 in the east and 32. You know, there's 16 in the west. So there's 32 teams total. Okay. The Seattle Kraken, Vegas Golden Knights. I remember that. I mean, these are teams that didn't even exist when I. When I started watching. So like the teams that existed when I started watching hockey. The Buffalo Sabres, Montreal Canadiens, Boston Bruins, Detroit Red Wings, Toronto Maple Leafs Islanders, Pittsburgh Penguins, Philadelphia Flyers, Washington Capitals. Yeah, there's a team called the. Utah has a team called the Mammoth. The Winnipeg jets, who went away for a while and then came back St. Louis Blues, Chicago Blackhawks, Edmonds.

[D]

Is. Is New York the only team with two hockey teams?

[Pete]

Well, let's see. New York has the Islanders and the Rangers, but then right over you have the New Jersey Devils, which are. Is where they play is. I mean, not a far drive from where the Rangers actually play. Who else is there? So.

[D]

And then Boston is one of the first six, right?

[Pete]

Boston Didn't. No. Boston doesn't. No. Yeah, I think Los Angeles and. Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim. Anaheim Ducks. Okay. They would, that would be the same. Same neighborhood. Yeah.

[D]

Okay, so not a lot of double up teams and then no Florida, you

[Pete]

have, you have the Panthers and you have the, the Lightning, but they're a four hour drive away from each other. Yeah.

[D]

Florida's large.

[Pete]

It's ridiculously large. It takes forever to drive from one end to the other.

[D]

Yeah. If you were to go to, from Miami to

[Pete]

Jacksonville, Tallahassee is a holy. That's a long drive.

[D]

Well, that's the. I mean are there any, any other big cities in the Panhandle that are closer to the Alabama line? I can't really think of anything. But if you were to go. That's like a 15 hour drive, isn't it?

[Pete]

Yeah, that's a long drive. That's, that's longer than actually going from Miami to where I live in Alabama. Yeah. So yeah, 32 teams. I don't, I think there were. Okay. So when I started watching hockey, there were 21 and 16 teams made the playoffs. So there's only five teams that didn't make the playoffs. That always seemed kind of weird to me. But then you had the wha, which was the world. Which was the World Hockey association, which was out of Canada and that brought a bunch of other teams into the league. Like who was it? Definitely the Edmonton Oilers. Definitely. I think Calgary Flames. Yeah, well, actually Calgary used to be at Atlanta. Atlanta had a hockey team. Atlanta's tried to have a hockey team a couple times and it didn't work out. They had the.

[D]

Imagine my shock that Atlanta.

[Pete]

Yeah, well, yeah, Atlanta Flames, which, I mean, you want to talk about, you names it for, for an Atlanta team. And then they had the Atlanta Thrashers for a while and that didn't work out. I forget what the Atlanta Thrashers became. They might have be became Winnipeg, I can't remember. But Nashville Predators didn't exist when I was a kid and the Dallas Stars didn't exist. The Dallas Stars were the Minnesota. The Dallas Stars were the Minnesota. Nor were the Minnesota North Stars. And now it's the minutes they have the Minnesota Wild. So the hockey team left Minnesota and then Minnesota is like, hey, you know, we're like one of the hockey capitals of America. We need a team here.

[D]

Yeah, Minnesota is like. But most of the guys who played in the 80 Olympics were

[Pete]

either Minnesota, Minnesota and Boston.

[Thomas]

Right.

[D]

Like strong Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, maybe a little bit Illinois and then like New England and New York There's a great

[Pete]

line from the movie Miracle, the one where Kurt Russell plays her Brooks. The. Yeah, that's a Great Movie in 1980. And, and one of the guys goes, oh, you got a bunch of guys from Minnesota and Boston. Yeah, that's going to work out really well. Those guys hated each other.

[D]

Well, how often is the Frozen Four, like the Minnesota Golden Gophers, the Boston College, I forget what the name team and you know, like, it's like B.C. minnesota, the Wisconsin Badgers and then like some team.

[Pete]

Colorado. Yeah, the University, like every once in a while the University of Colorado sneaks in there too.

[D]

Right? But like, and even those guys, like, like, you know, the, it's March Madness. I think right now I, I hardly pay attention to college basketball anymore. But like when I did pay attention to college basketball, like you could be virtually guaranteed that like the guys who played really well in the tournament would be in the NBA next year.

[Pete]

Right?

[D]

And some of them would be big time players in, you know, the Frozen Four hockey tournaments. Right. Like the really good guys their age were already playing in the NHL and in on the farm system, you know,

[Pete]

so yep, most of the guys who played on the 1980 Olympic team did not make it in the NHL. They were, they were basically career like college players. You know, even the goalie, Jim Craig, Jim Craig played for Atlanta and played. But he didn't really have, he didn't have an NHL career. I think Mark Pavlich, Mark Pavlich played, played a decent. And there were not many guys. I think there were only three or four guys who actually had like really prosperous careers in the, in the NHL. I mean, it's 1980. You got to remember it's still in 1980. The like 90% of the guys in the NHL are Canadian, so. Right.

[D]

Well, they had a national system to, you know, like you don't produce. I mean like if you go to like Canadian hockey players on Wikipedia, right. The list is as long as my arm. It's just the national sport in Canada and you don't produce. Was Mario Lemieux Canadian?

[Pete]

Oh yeah. I mean Lemieux, right.

[D]

Like so he's, he's right. And because, because when I was growing up, like the, the, the three best players were in the 90s were like Wayne Gretzky was on the tail end of his career, but he was still, you know, he was known as the Great One for a reason. And Mario Lemieux was like the up and coming kid. And Brett hall, right, like he was on Dallas.

[Pete]

I want to say yeah, Brett hall was.

[D]

Isn't he Canadian too?

[Pete]

Well, here's a funny story about that. So he talked about it in 1996 when they had the World cup of Hockey, and it was before the season started and NHL players played in it. It was, you know, a bunch of guys playing for their home countries. Brett Hull, his dad was Canadian. Bobby Hull, Hockey hall of famer. But Bobby married an American, and Brett Hull wanted to play for team Canada, I think, in 1986. I can't remember the name of the coach for team Canada, though. But he, like, said, I don't like the kid. I don't want him on the team. And Brett Hull, I got a chip on his shoulder. He was like, fuck you. Then I'm gonna. I'm gonna use my American. I'm gonna use my American citizen citizenship to play for. For the USA And I mean, thank God he did, because in the 19, they wouldn't have won the World cup in 1996 if. If. If that. Oh, okay, so Canadian coach hadn't insulted Brett Hull.

[D]

So. So they won the 90s because Brett Hull was a joint U. S. American, Canadian, American. Okay, so, right, like the. The three best players from the 90s, all Canadian?

[Pete]

Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, well, one. One was half Canadian.

[D]

Okay, well. But. But his dad was also one of the greatest hockey players of all time, because even I know the name Bobby Hull. Yeah, right. Like, that's. That's amazing.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[D]

And I mean, and to. To that point, I think it's,

[Thomas]

you

[D]

know, like, America is getting smaller. So, like, big guys like me, I mean, you've met, I'm pretty tall. I. I'm having a harder time finding clothes that fit in the store because the population is shrinking, because it's getting, you know, more Hispanic and more Asian. And so, like, being big and fast and strong isn't like the be all end all of, like, things like winning fights, but it never hurt. And a society that can produce, like, lots of big. You know, in both world wars, right, the Canadians or the Americans or the Aussies and New Zealanders would go over to Europe and everyone would be like, holy, these guys are giants. What the hell? What do they feed them over there? And it's like, lots of meat, you know, and. And the French and the British were like, what the. Like, these guys are monsters. You know, a society that can produce those kind of guys, that's a good thing. Like, we can discuss. Neither you and I want to discuss politics at this particular juncture, but like, a. A society that produces like lots of really athletic guys that are somewhere between, you know, five, eight to six foot three and you know, 175 to 230 pounds. And they're all strong and they're all quick and they're all coordinated. Like, that's a, that's a reserve in terms of like a prosperous, functioning society that, that you want people to have. Like, if everyone, if everyone in your society played hockey, then everybody knows how to like, like, look, dude, you're a defenseman. Your job is this. And I think that a society that doesn't have things like sports in common

[Thomas]

and

[D]

is a, A less cohesive, less functioning society. So, you know, if we're going to pick a national game, let's pick one that's like socially useful. And I think hockey would fit the bill, you know.

[Pete]

Yeah, I mean, I mean, I agree. But yeah, the south is just. I mean we're. I live in SEC country.

[D]

Yeah.

[Pete]

And it's just college football. It's just college football. College football. College football.

[Thomas]

Football.

[D]

Well, yes, but, but, but they're. I mean, if you listen to. Jose just published an episode about how there are major high schools in Dallas that don't have the ability to, to feel the hockey a football team anymore because of the South Asian invasion. You know, like, this is not. I mean, I'm consciously trying to get into hockey because it's the white sport and I want to support the people that don't hate me, where obviously the NFL and NBA, like, they just completely. They want nothing to do with me and I'm fine with that. But you know, hockey, I, I can't think of a great hockey nation, whether it's any the Scandinavian countries or Russia or Canada or the United States

[Pete]

or

[D]

any of the Eastern European countries. Like, this is a place I would never want to live and I don't like their society. Like, hockey seems to me to be a sport for like places that I would like or would have like 100 formerly. You know, like, would I be happy with Malmo right now? Probably not. But like Stockholm, nice spring day, sounds like a pretty good time. And yeah, I think

[Pete]

the. I used to. Well, let's say allegedly I used to have a. Access to a lot of European channels, TV channels. Probably not sanctioned, but you know, allegedly this happened. The games, the games in the German league are great. You know, I would watch games from Germany. Just. The German leagues themselves are great. The Swedish leagues, they have Swedish elite leagues. Those are great. You know, and I mean, these are. I mean it is, it's a White sport. I mean, it's. You've had some good black players over the years, but they're the exception that proves the rule. You know, you've had like, you know, I mean, one. One Hispanic. I can really think of Scotty Gomez, and he was American, from Alaska. Really good player. But, you know, when it comes, when it comes down to it, I mean, it's a white sport. I mean, my, my high school team, we had, I mean, guys with my. My last name, another Hispanic last name, had a black dude playing on the team. I mean, it's New York City and, you know, none of us were ghetto. You know, we were all going to a nice Catholic school and you know, having, you know, paying tuition and, you know, we all spoke properly, as proper as you can speak with a New York accent and. Yeah, but the exception is really the exception. It just reminded me of something hilarious. There was this player in the 70s, French Canadian guy, Raj Gilbert. If you spelled his name, it'd be Rod Dilbert. It was pronounced Rajalbert because French Canadian. He said one of the funniest fucking things in an interview I remember. And they got so mad at him even back then. They asked him, they said,

[D]

how come

[Pete]

there aren't more black hockey players? And he said, well, because in Canada we use black people as hockey pucks.

[D]

Well, I mean, the one example I have of, Of, Of a black hockey player that I know of, you know, he committed murder on the ice in England. So.

[Pete]

Well, the goalie for that great Edmonton Oilers team was Grant Fuhrer. And he was a, he was a black guy. There was Jerome Againla. Played a, Played a long career. He was like, ha. I mean, he was like, African. He wasn't like African American. I mean, it's like, I think he was like half, like, African. His mom was born in Africa or something like that. I mean, when it comes down to it, you're. You're talking about, you're really just talking about the exception. I mean, you have, I think, less, 4 or 5% of players, like hockey

[D]

basically selects for, like, intact families with a little bit of money. Yeah, right, like, like that. Between, like taking kids to, you know, five o' clock ice, five o' clock in the morning practices, that all the gear, you know, skates and pads and sticks and helmets and all that stuff and ice fees and it's expensive. Right? So between, between all that, like you. It sounds like basically hockey. Hockey filters for, like, intact families.

[Pete]

Well, not only that, here, here's the thing. Parents that are willing to get up at 4 or 5 o' clock in the morning and take you to play.

[D]

Yeah, like involved parents.

[Pete]

Yeah, I mean you're, it's going to have to be parents who are now in the city. Like we would, even if my dad didn't take us or something like that, a bunch of us would get together and travel together. We could ride the train, you know, or do something like that. But we were together, you know, we would, you know, strengthen numbers kind of thing. But I mean, for the most part, when I was going to play at Laskers on 110th street in Central park, it was my dad driving us, you know, and this is, you got to be there at 7, 6:45 in the morning, 7:00 clock to suit up and get on the ice by 7:30. So yeah, I mean it's, you know, your parents. Parents are not only gonna have to be present, but they're gonna have to be involved and they're gonna have. And they're gonna have to be. I mean, they're gonna have to want be okay with you doing this or even promote you doing this. So it's not like the most famous

[D]

hockey parent in America, you know, Sarah Palin, like, Right. You know, she made lots of jokes about that. But, but that's the sort of thing that actually. Yeah. Like moms who have to care about their kids. Like, yeah. You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull's lipstick. Right. Like, you know, that's, that's a funny line. I mean, like, that's a funny line. That's the sort of mom that actually really cares about their kids. You know, if hockey dads are like willing to throw down about their kids not getting enough ice time or whatever, like that's a dad that cares about their kids.

[Pete]

So there was, there was a, there was a hockey movie in the, in the 1980s, came out in 1986, called Young Blood, starring Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze. Keanu Reeves was in it. Keanu Reeves actually plays a French Canadian in it and he's using a French Canadian accent and he's not bad at it. It turns out he plays the goalie on the team. It turns out he was a goalie. So like you see. Yeah. So you see him. Like I could actually play this video, but there, I just wanted to play this one clip from the movie and tell me if you would hear a clip like this in a movie today. Listen to this

[D]

game getting out of this hick town. Thank God there is still a sport for middle sized white boys. Would you hear a Line Never, never, never.

[Thomas]

And

[D]

so I mean part of the, part of the reason I'm in this is, is that I was a big sports fan of 20 odd years ago. Because it's just whatever else you want to say about it, it's a field of excellence. And like, you know, it's extraordinary. Like some of the stuff that these, you know, Shaq, 7 foot 2, 300 pounds could bench press the truck, right? Like it's, it's extraordinary. And Steve Saylor, right, just was also a guy who's interested in sports. He would just talk about the truth about this stuff. And the fact is, is that like every other sport in the world, every other big pro sport like selects four, you know, maybe five people in the NBA are under six foot, right? And, and most of them are like, not just 6 foot but like 6, 4, 6, 5 is the small guys, they're fucking monsters. I mean they're huge. They're huge. Like you know, a substantial percentage of the, of the population of the world that 7 Foot plus has played in the NBA, right. Like it's just, that's the game, right? You know, got guys that are, you know, 6 foot 5 and 300 pounds. Like a lot of those guys, you know, the really, really just not tall guys, but just huge guys. Like they're all in the NFL right on, on the line somewhere. And you know, the, the NFL or, or the NHL is the only sport where there could be like a really great player who's 5:10,170 and you know, he's just skilled. Maybe baseball. But

[Pete]

yeah, the, yeah. When I was growing up, so in the 70s, I think if I remember correctly, the average height in the NHL was 5 foot 10. It's gotten a lot bigger 6 foot. It's 6 foot 1 now and the average weight is like 200 pounds. But when I was growing up, it was a lot of skinny white guys who, you know, who are 5 foot 10. And it's just one of those things where as players came in from Eastern Europe, you know, who were, had a tendency to be bigger. Especially a lot of the, a lot of the Czech players were bigger and a lot of the Russian players came in who had a tendency to be stronger. Someone like Vladimir Konstantinov who was just this, he was a caveman, you know, it was just, I mean it had shoulders that you could, you know, were just so broad and flat that you know, players just had to get bigger. And it was, you know, you still see, you still see some players who are, they're going to be Skill players are going to be finesse players who can be 5 foot 10, 5 foot 5 foot 11. But yeah, most of the, most of the guys now are going to be in the 6 foot 1 range. And I mean they have goalies that are like 6 foot 5, 6 foot 6. When I was a kid, like goalies were like 5 foot 8, 5 foot 9. You know. So, you know, it, it's, you know, it's changed as it become more international. But then, you know, remember when it's international, it's just becoming more slob and more Eastern European. Is that like, you know, people, it's not like they're coming in from, they're importing seven footers from Africa. Manute bowl is coming, you know.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, that's not, that ain't happening. It's going to be, you know, Ivan Ivanov from, you know, like. Right. Like,

[Pete]

and a lot of those Russian players were finesse players too. Like a Pavel Beret. I met Pavel Beret and he was my height, but I mean he was so fast and so graceful and he could do things with the puck that were, I mean, that were like, it was like beautiful. Like he was like dancing, he was playing ballet. You know, it was ballet out there on skate, you know, on skates.

[D]

But yeah, I remember watching a documentary about like the Russian feeder program or something and I know that the, like the broadcast years ago is listening to or reading something about the 80 Olympics and basically like the Broad street bullies, right? The Philadelphia, That's Philadelphia, right?

[Pete]

Yep.

[D]

Philly, they just absolutely like destroyed the Russian team because they were all like, finesse. But I remember watching this documentary about the, about the Russian farm system, whatever their equivalent of like the junior hockey is. And they actually had the guys like doing like ballet in the summers. Right. Like, it's like, you know, like.

[Pete]

Yeah, I've seen that documentary.

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[Pete]

Huh.

[D]

And I, I, I understand why people on our side of the fence like, signal against sports ball. And I absolutely understand, like, the whole obsession with sports is a poison in a culture, especially the way we do sports in North America, particularly in the United States. Like, I get it, but also like, you have to have a healthy masculinity outlet. And like, you know, when some guy does something wrong on, on the field and he gets knocked into next week, like there's some justice in that, that I think that like those lines in life, there's, there's some kind of lessons you can only learn playing sports. There's a lot of, a lot of life lessons that can only Be learned playing sports. And I think that that's a good thing that did like people learn those.

[Pete]

Well, team sports is also important too because it, you know, teaches. It gets you out of that individuality mindset. You know, playing absolutely. Tennis is. And my brother was a. Oh, my brother was a phenomenal tennis player. Full. He had offers for full scholarships to, I mean 20, 25, 30 colleges. But yeah, that's, that's an individual sport and team sport is something especially hockey. I mean you, you really are. It's. It's very hard to be one guy out on the ice. You know, you, you're relying on your, on your guys out there. So, you know, it helps to build that collective kind of spirit. And you know, you're not that, that whole thing of, oh, we're just, we're all individuals and collectivism is communism and everything like that. Okay, well, you know, fuck you. But I liked playing team sports. I, I liked being part of a team even though I didn't really have a lot in common with a lot of the guys on the team. But when it came to being on the ice and in the locker room, we got along. But you know, I went to high school with these guys and I ran with a different crowd, like the jock crowd, even though I played. But you know, still everyone, you know, had a click and the. Playing a team sport like that, especially when you're playing football, you can get totally like you have linemen on opposite sides of the line who may never, you know, they're not doing anything together, you know, in tandem. But hockey, when you only have five guys out there and you're condensed into this, you know, race.

[D]

Like football is a very bimodal sport, right, at certain levels. Like if two way balls aren't really a thing anymore, but like, you know, the offense of the defense are almost totally separate teams with totally separate ways of doing things. And totally separate. There's two separate games playing defensive football and playing offensive football or completely different versus hockey. You know, it's six guys. We're out there all the time together. They're all doing the same thing, you know, trying to win a game. You know, even the goalie, even if he's slightly different.

[Pete]

I mean, the goalie is. The goalie is relying upon his defenseman as much as, as, as much as a forward. You know, a winger is relying upon his center to get him the puck. You know, the, the goalie is really. The goal is the general out there. You, you will see a lot of goalies when their team Is on the other end of the ice. On the. When they're on the. On the offensive end, there are goalies that will skate up almost to their blue line, and you'll hear them barking like, they'll be barking out orders like, hey, you know, watch this. What? You know, so goalies can actually become generals out there. And when you're backing your own defensive end and the other team offense in. In your goalie, you have to listen to your goalie.

[D]

So you mentioned, like, the center being the quarterback. Like, in basketball, your smartest players tend to be point guards.

[Thomas]

In.

[D]

In baseball, it's catchers. Our goalies, the guy, like, are more like. A lot of former coaches in baseball will be like former catchers, right? Because they were. They were the guys who were the most, like, saw the whole field or whatever and tend to be the more intellectual players. A lot of point guards end up being coaches in the NBA. A lot of quarterbacks end up as coaches in. In football. Is it like goalies and centers that end up being, like, if someone was to retire or from playing and then become a coach, is it like, would that. Would that be like, goalies and centers

[Pete]

or you have goal. You have goalies and centers. A lot of times if you go through. I'd have to go through, like, the head coaches. Like, when I was growing up, most of the head coaches of the teams had never played in the NHL. It was they. They were coaches that, strangely enough, came up through that. Those junior systems as well, you know, they started being. They played in the juniors. They weren't good enough to play in the NHL, so that they. They became coaches and, you know, trainers and stuff like that, and then they just worked their way. Their way up. I know Wa. I know Patrick Wa. Was. Was a head coach for a while, but who. Who could understand him? His French accent. Jeez,

[D]

the Quebecois accent is like redneck French. It's very difficult.

[Pete]

It's so some. I. I lived, you know, where. Where I lived in. In Fort Lauderdale, there were a lot of Quebecois. And yes, sometimes I'd be like, what I talked about. What young guys who lived in the same building I did down there. What are you talking about? Can't hear. Slow down. But yeah, I'm trying to think now, like, players and where they played. Yeah, centers. Yeah, Brenda Moore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, centers, goalies. Trying to think of defenseman, defense. To me, defenseman would be. Would be. Make a good head coach, huh? Defenseman, goalie can see the whole ice. Everything's happening on the ice. But so is the defenseman.

[Thomas]

Huh?

[Pete]

That's got me thinking now. I'm sure someone's screaming at me going, pete, come on. You know this. I just don't. Like I said, I really liked watching. Still watched. I didn't like it, but I still watched a lot of sports up until the time Covid hit. When Covid hit, I just. I. I was so pissed off at all these leagues for shutting down and everything like that.

[D]

Yeah, I understand completely.

[Pete]

I was like, you guys, you know, it's like, why would you do this? Well, you're giving up billions. I mean, you know, I. And I think I. Yeah, I wrote something at the time that these guys had to have been getting reimbursed. They had to have been promised to get that money back. And everything I'm sure they did is worse than, you know, there was. There was a strike in the 2000s to shut the league down. And, like, a bunch of people went and played in Europe, and a lot of people went and played in Russia, in the Russian leagues, everything. And I understood that, you know, it's like, you're gonna have people who are going to, you know, they're going to strike and everything like that and then be like, for free agency or for, you know,

[D]

more.

[Pete]

Mostly for, you know, we want to have more control over who I can sign with, so you don't have to wait to be in the league so long to become an unrestricted free agent, things like that. But, yeah, Covid was just the. I just. I couldn't get past that. Covid just changed pretty much everything for me. It was like, that's so. Yeah, I just dove headfirst into the political and had to figure out what the hell. And why. Why all this was happening.

[D]

Well, I. You know, that's why we're friends, actually. Is that. Is that a friend of field house?

[Pete]

Actually

[D]

was like, what happened to Pete? I was like, well, 2020 cured him of the delusion that people want to be free. Like, I remember Pete from libertarian days. Like, yeah, actually. Well, he was. And then. Then everyone was like, oh, I don't want freedom. Freedom sounds icky and hard. Like, well, yeah, that's. That's kind of the point. But, you know, it. It's having played in that team sport, Right. Knowing your role and. And doing your. Like, not everyone's got to be the rock star. Not everyone's got to be, you know, our mutual friend Mike Ferris. Right. Like, everyone thinks they're in a superhero movie now.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[D]

And everyone, you know, like, has. Everyone has Main character syndrome. It's like, that's not how life works, actually. That's. That's a very unhealthy way to let go about living life.

[Pete]

A lot of people have main character syndrome, man. You know, I don't know if you heard the episode. I haven't released it yet. With Daryl and Field House.

[D]

I was listening to it right before we got on, actually.

[Pete]

Yeah, Daryl made a really good point. He said, you know, people. Everybody wants to be a general. No one wants to be. No one wants to be able to take. No one wants to take orders.

[D]

Well. Well. And that's. I. I learned from doing certain team sports that, like, I'm not good at certain things. Like, I'm just not. But what I am good at, I'm good at. And so, like, I'm not gonna try and do, like, you do such an amazing job with this show of finding all these different guests and dealing with all these different things. Headaches that I just would be bad at, and being friendly and, like, respectful with people that I just want to be like, you're a moron. And, you know, like, hosting a show and. And being, like, a subject matter expert are two different things. And I think that, you know, playing a team sport where it's like, hey, man, your job is this. We need you to do this one thing consistently, and that's, you know, that's your day job. That's, you know, that's your family life, right? Dads can't be moms. Moms can't be dads. And. And, you know, I. I look at the kind of societies hockey produces or hockey comes from, and I'm like, this is a good sport, and I want to learn more. So. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the education, Pete.

[Pete]

Yeah, man, I'm glad I could help. I. I recommend if you want to get a good, like, an entertaining hockey movie, okay. People are going to tell you Slap Shot. Slap Shot is actually a really good hockey movie, but it concentrates too much on. On fighting. It is more of a. You know, it's. It's an enjoyable movie. I mean, Paul Newman. Paul Newman actually learned how to freaking play hockey to be in that movie. And Paul Newman was, like, almost 50 at the time, so you got to give it to Paul Newman. It's a good movie. But the. The 1986 movie Youngblood is such a good movie to, like, get into hockey with, because it's like, I was watching a video of somebody reviewing it earlier today, and what was his. He had a really good line about it. He Said, where is it? He said, youngblood actually got hockey right. So there are some things in it where if you're a hockey fan, you'll be like. And he. He points it out, but when it comes down to it, like, it's. It's a good introduction hockey movie. And, you know, I played that one little clip from it, and, you know, it really is. It just shows you that this is a sport that was, you know, dominated by Canadian white boys from small towns. Even though they're in. It takes place in Hamilton, Ontario, that they keep calling a small town. But as the guy points out in the video, Hamilton, Ontario has like half a million people. I would hate to see what Hamilton, Ontario is right now.

[D]

It's not good.

[Pete]

It's like when I found out what happens in Brampton.

[D]

Yeah, similar. Similar thing. And I only know because the late, great Kathy Shadle was. Was from Hamilton and she complained about it.

[Pete]

But, yeah, it's. If anybody, like, wants to watch a movie about hockey, find Youngblood. It's. You'll. It. It's entertaining. It has everything. It has. It. It has movie tropes where, you know, the main character, you know, is attracted to the coach's daughter. You know, I mean, you know, just that. Those kind of tropes and everything, but they're. But it's a fun movie and there are some line. You know, there are some themes in it and some lines in it that you're. You're gonna laugh your ass off and you'll be like, never get away with saying that today. Slap shots. Another one of those movies. It's like that, too. It's just like this movie is really white. It's like. Yeah, because it's hockey.

[D]

Right. Well, and that's.

[Thomas]

That's.

[D]

That's one of the things about hockey that's attractive is this. That. That it's still European, culturally.

[Thomas]

Yeah, very much so.

[D]

That's a. Something that ought to be preserved.

[Pete]

Yeah, man. All right, well, let's get out of here. I appreciate this and nice to talk about and share a little bit of videos and everything. Bobby Orr and just get to relive some. You know, I didn't do much research for this, but, you know, looking up some of the videos and watching some. Some of the things, I was like, oh, man. God, I used to love this so much. It's like, I gotta get back into it. I gotta start watching again. Although, you know, the Nashville Predators did put out their. Did you see that logo they put out the other day? No. Rainbow logo.

[D]

I was gonna say, Was it Jeffrey Epstein?

[Pete]

Well, it was like a rant. Like, they. They did their logo with, like, a rainbow. Rainbow colors. It's like, oh, God, come on. They tried to. Yeah.

[D]

Didn't Ben Shapiro move to Nashville? Couldn't you just do, like, you know, silhouette of Ben?

[Pete]

He moved his business to Nashville, and then he was like, yeah, I'm not staying here. And went to Miami.

[D]

Oh, that makes all the sense.

[Pete]

Or something like that. Yeah.

[Thomas]

Went where?

[Pete]

Where they all are. But, yeah. So he gets to say, oh, my business is in Nashville. But, yeah. Where do you live?

[Thomas]

Ben,

[Pete]

let's not. Oh, God.

[D]

In Florida.

[Pete]

Let's not talk about politics, but. Well, I promote your show.

[D]

Well, I have the fundamental principle. It's on Telegram. Pete's been kind enough beyond it. And then, of course, I'm fortunate enough to be a regular guest on the Thought Crime Syndicate with Pete and our mutual friends Charles Bedil and Jose Nino. I was just on Jose's show that should come out in the next couple days. And I did an episode of the Third Rail last week or something like that. So I'm just kind of, you know, here, there and everywhere, usually talking about, you know, doom and portents and awful things, which, you know, there's been no shortage of lately. So I appreciate Pete giving me the chance to talk about something I generally could learn something about.

[Pete]

No, man, I appreciate it. Thank you.

[D]

You're welcome.