*UNLOCKED* LIVE SHOW: The Voyage of the Damned (Live in London 2024)

Hello, Lions Led by Donkeys fans.

Please enjoy this unlocked episode of our live show from January 2024 in London, England.

It just so happens we're doing another show this Friday, April 11th in London.

It's going to be at Rich Mix in Shoreditch, and tickets are still available.

In addition to the live event in person, we've also got a live stream available for people who can't make it, and there will be a video on demand available if you purchase live stream tickets on Eventbrite.

Check the links in the show notes for how to get tickets.

And if you want more bonus content like this live show recording, please consider subscribing to our Patreon.

It is patreon.com/slash lionsled by donkeys.

And as you probably can imagine, there's a link available in the show notes.

Thanks and hope you enjoy.

Obviously, Joe.

Joe

Joe is shiny.

Nay is Osuka because he's red.

I thought it was for other reasons.

I'm Ray because I'm neurodivergent.

Surely I'm the dad yelling at you sternly.

You know what I mean?

That's also fair.

Yeah.

Constantly yelling at me to get in the robot.

Nay ain't fit in the robot.

He's too fucking tall.

You couldn't even fit in a fucking tank.

The paperwork that the government gave me said I could.

thank you everybody for coming out tonight for the first ever lines led by donkeys live show

thank you thank you thank you if there's any vibe we're going for it's wwe

hey listen we did have a plan last night that I was going to play Shawn Michaels Sexy Boy and hit Joe with a sweet chin music so like and then we realized that neither of us have insurance here.

Yeah, no.

You know, it's just a 15-hour wait time in AE.

You know, it's worth it to get hit in the head with a chair on stuff.

It'll be fine.

It'll be fine.

What's another concussion to you, Joe?

Come on, man.

Going for high scores.

See, if I go back to Armenia and get healthcare, they'll just saw my head off.

They'll just use it as like a cinder block because your head is like a perfect rectangle.

It's what peak athletic performance looks like.

You're like a Minecraft character with hair.

Slightly less hair than you can.

They have to invent polygons with angles for Minecraft to make Armenians, otherwise, how are they going to do the nose?

Glass houses, mate.

Glass houses.

We are the weird nose podcast.

So Joe's got a script and he's going to start reading.

But thank you before we start.

Thank you so much for coming out.

We're going to do our best to make this as entertaining and ridiculous as possible.

You are all wonderful.

And thank you for coming.

Of all the places in the world for us to do this, London seems like a surprise, but you know what?

It happened.

So thank you so much.

And Joe, the floor is yours.

But most importantly, before we start, who's Irish in the room?

Yay!

Fuck yeah.

I would ask who's Armenian, but it's just me.

There's a guy shooting a gun in the air outside who's really disappointed in you right now.

His name is

Gunzabian.

Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcasts.

I'm Joe and with me live in fucking London is Tom and Nate.

I can't believe I actually said those words.

It only took six years.

So interesting thing.

Years and fucking years ago, we did a series on the Russo-Japanese War.

Now, compared to any of the series that we've done, this one is probably the weirdest, not just because of the content itself, because its reception, first from our fans, of course, but Nate, because he led me through this weird wormhole of

how hentai was invented through the woodblock cuts.

Clarification there, how anime was invented, because hentai is an eternal thing.

You can go back to the earliest scratchings and you'll find some artwork involving enormous phalluses and so on and so forth.

Don't pull the GoPost back on me on this one.

Listen, listen, listen.

Where are the furries at?

Silence!

For the fans,

the reason why this specific episode became such a thing is because 90% of the series nobody gave a fuck about, except this episode in particular.

They wanted one thing and one thing only, and that was the Voyage of the Damned.

Woo!

And through the years, it's probably become our most popular episodes ever, which is fine because it's actually one of my favorites as well.

And good news because that's what we're talking about today.

And the Voyage of the Damned might be one of, it's probably not the worst naval defeat of all time, but it is certainly the funniest.

So it's probably the most notorious story in naval history, and I think it goes down to one probably because it's one of the biggest fuck-ups in military history, naval history or otherwise.

And when I say fuck-ups, I don't mean like there is some unknown thing that fucked them over.

Like it was just a terrible, unforeseen storm or something that they were surprised and surrounded.

This isn't the Battle of Kanai or something.

The Japanese Imperial Army had virtually nothing to do with any of this.

This happened on its own.

It's just like guys

having fun thinking they're like, let's just attack the Japanese, and it goes in the worst way possible ever.

It's the dumbest tour of

all human history.

Like the worst world tour that anybody's ever devised.

And I should point out here that the entire Russo-Japanese War series started off as me just wanting to do an episode on this, and I kind of got lost in there.

That doesn't happen, Atla.

So, for anyone in the crowd who wonders behind the scenes, what happens is Joe will either text me or Nay with, it starts with, I have the stupidest idea.

It's true.

So, long story short, we just did an episode recently about guys trying to go by submarine to attack Erwin Rommel in the middle of Egypt and getting completely wiped out.

And that is not the dumbest naval battle in history.

This is.

No.

So, it's a very high bar to clear.

That's a side note at best.

Like a naval battle that featured the single most northern Irish Unionist man that he wanted to invade Egypt to stop the Italians making it Catholic.

And yet, not the most ridiculous story we've ever talked about.

We've got something better.

For some context, the Russo-Japanese War started in 1904, and due to massive amounts of racism, the Russian Empire thought they'd be able to steamroll the Japanese.

That was not, in fact, what happened.

Russians being racist?

That certainly never happens to anyone ever.

Russians are only just like racist against other Europeans that they seem wrong.

We now go live to 50% of the Russian Federation that could say otherwise.

We're pulling up the

Soviet ethnograph chart, you know?

How big is your nose and how hairy are you?

It was, we all looked the same on the ethnograph, except some of us had mustaches and other ones didn't.

Yeah, fair.

And bigger eyebrows.

Fair enough.

Russia immediately got its land and sea forces bogged down in Port Arthur, which is in today China.

Now, the real worrying part for the Russian commanders was not his soldiers.

It's Russia.

They don't give a fuck about their soldiers.

It's a nation that never once gave a single fuck about an infantryman's life.

For them,

it was the trapped Russian naval squadron, the Russian 1st Pacific Squadron, giving them the most concern.

And it was the largest naval fighting force they had available to them in the entire region.

Most of the Russian commanders knew that if they couldn't free this squadron, they were doomed.

However, freeing the squadron would require winning a sea battle against the Imperial Japanese Navy, which was parked right outside of Port Arthur.

Now, the admiral of the squadron was a man named Wilhelm Wittoff, a name you might notice as it's not Russian.

And finally, answering the question of what if a German man was also Russian, which I'm sure is something we all were incredibly fucking cursed energy.

And so, what if you had an intense sex nightclub that only serves cigarettes and vodka?

It's like, oh, yes, I love bleeding.

God damn it.

Also, somewhat hilariously, only a few years before these events, he was fighting in the Boxer Rebellion side by side with the Japanese, and they awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun.

Listen, it wouldn't be like a German guy to just like flip-size fight with like an ethnic conflict, and then be like, well, you people aren't white.

Yeah, it's like couchsurfing.com for being racist.

And good news for everybody.

We have a series on the Boxer Rebellion coming soon.

So you you can hear all sorts of that dumb shit.

Coming out in March.

By all accounts, Vitoff was a decent commander that knew his weaknesses, something that no officer ever has.

ACOBE.

Don't ever get one.

ACOB.

All commanding officers are bastards.

Except when they fix your fucked up microphones and then you're like, oh, I love this guy so much.

Cool, he's great.

I'll put it on your ORB.

Calm down.

If you're reviewing me, something's gone really wrong.

I've been demoted like no one's ever been demoted before.

It's past like.

Welcome to this podcast, motherfucker.

It's past like three layers of review, and then it's like, it gets to Joe.

I remember this years ago because there's some kid and a lieutenant in my unit got

a DUI, and one of the junior soldiers was like, yeah, yeah, they hemmed him up.

I heard they busted him down, like they demoted him.

He was the second lieutenant.

And then not even thinking about what this would sound like, I was like, bust him down to to what, Sergeant Major?

And then they looked at me and they're like, Sir, I can't believe you fucking said that.

I'm like, oh, yeah, that is kind of bad, isn't it?

Your officer was like the heirly version of Blue Face.

Well, it's also one of those things where the K-fave and the fakeness of it all comes out when it's like the world's crustiest warrant officer five has to salute a second lieutenant who looks like a fetus.

His name might be second lieutenant Nate Buffet.

You never know.

And he might salute, like,

what for all the Irish in the crowd?

What if you got like a fourth-year student from Lisburn who's incredibly ginger?

That's what Nate looked at when he was first an officer.

I don't know what the fuck that means, but I'll take your word for it because I know what I looked like, and y'all love to make fucking emojis of it and share it.

So, you know what?

To be fair, you know, you were like early on the wave in terms of like look.

I hate to derail the situation,

but we have a fucking podcast to do.

So, for anyone in the credit who's wondering what this is, this is a water pistol filled with piss

that I ordered three days ago, and I typed in water pistol on Amazon and saw one in the shape of a Glock.

And I was like, this is perfect.

And he knew that he co-hosted a podcast with two Americans.

Yeah.

Also, Joe was like, is it okay if we bring this in the venue?

Or I was like, yeah, it's fine, dude.

Don't worry about it.

I suppose, because that's the American in us coming out and it's just being like, yeah, you bring this thing.

And even if it's shaped like a super soaker and is neon pink, like a million cops will descend on you and kill you.

What you don't realize is that Joe has a zombie knife in his boots.

I still don't know what that means.

It's like a big machete designed for killing.

Have you played Call of Duty?

I'm unaware that

the bridge, that Call of Duty and the British laws,

where they meet.

The leader of the opposition in this country just made a big statement about banning katanas.

If that tells you where we're at in this country, i mean i i also support the british i want to support the restoration

i would like to recognize that you went to parties

i would like to recognize that you went to parties but when you were at parties i was studying the blade

right kier starmer studying the blade is basically it's like finding a way to find a guy with a pocket knife and sentence him to a 10-year custodial sentence so it's like

no

Don't make me pull out the fucking gun again.

Okay,

fuck it.

Shoot me.

Web Keir Starmer.

Do Do you think it's incredible energy?

Do you think there's still water in it?

Surely you know that's not the first time an Irish guy's been soaked in piss, okay?

You can't harm him.

Do I have to name it?

Do I have to aim at your kneecaps for you to get the point?

I don't mean that in the German way, Tom.

I mean it's like to go to the pub and drink 18 pints way.

My kneecaps are fucked and I have two brain lesions.

So

where were we?

Now, Vitov knew that the entire...

Oh, you bitch.

The other difference between me and you is, I make this look good.

Yeah, see, unfortunately, I was never in the American military, so I have terrible trigger discipline.

That's okay, we do too.

It's funny because it's sad.

Now, Vitov knew that the entire Japanese fleet outside of Port Arthur would punch him so full of holes holes that he would get connected to Poseidon's Wi-Fi faster than he could do anything about it.

So he was better off staying in port and using his naval guns to support the Russian ground forces in the area.

And that obviously, you know, that's going to be ignored by the Russian military because it makes sense.

And with his specific squadron trapped, the Tsar would have to find another fleet of ships at his disposal to send to Port Arthur to rescue the first squadron.

Fortunately for the Tsar, the Russian Empire was a very large place and kind of had a large navy.

And it did have another squadron lying around.

Though unfortunately also for the Tsar, that other Russian squadron could be found in the Baltic and Black Seas.

So you essentially just have like an entire sea of fishermen that's like Pietr Pietor, who's like the most ramshackle boats on the planet.

Hold that thought.

Oh, fuck!

I hate when this happens.

I'm just imagining them being like, ah, we'll just load them all on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

It'll work somehow.

We've got a lot of serfs we can just fucking exterminate this way.

Who cares?

That would somehow make more sense than what happens next.

It's like the Volga boatman pulling the boat, but it's pulling it all across the entirety of Eurasia.

What if we Fitzkeraldo, the entire Russian Empire?

You see, the Russian fleet, it has to go in and fight the Japanese,

but they are facing an incredible enemy.

What is this voice?

It's Werner Hartsov.

Oh, excuse me.

Who directed FitzCaraldo?

I just thought you were doing sexy talk for some reason.

I know I'm turned on.

Yeah, when I hear a German guy kind of murmuring to me, I assume that either I'm about to get a fucking fine for not paying the right fare on the subway or it's sex related.

Who hurt you?

I lived in Germany.

Listen, just wait until I hit you with the ooh.

I don't even want to know.

You know what?

I've been on paternity leave for like a couple of months.

I didn't even know what the fuck y'all talked about.

And I don't want to know.

Now,

for anybody who is looking at a map right now, and I don't have one, but

you might be thinking to yourself, wow, strange podcast, man.

The Baltic and Pacific Oceans are not even remotely close to one another.

And you would be correct.

The fastest way to get to the

other side of the earth would be an 18,000-mile journey.

So, in case you can imagine, there's quite a few problems that come with sending a large naval fleet around, and this is not hyperbole, the entire fucking world.

I'm sure they don't do this.

Well, Russia doesn't.

They can barely put fucking vessels in the Black Sea today.

I was going to think, what would be like the archaic coal-powered steamship, but in 1905?

It has to be similarly archaic.

And all I can think of is like Polynesian canoes, but Russian.

I don't even want to think about that.

And, you know, the Russian South Pacific is a wild.

Sunburn's like you've never imagined.

You should never give these motherfuckers boats.

Now, this would require a large logistical effort on behalf of whatever Navy that would be doing this in 2024.

And we're talking about 1905 and the worst Navy in the fucking world.

And this might surprise you, but everybody actually thought that this was the dumbest idea that the Tsars ever thought of.

And they said that.

I mean, like, at this stage, like, Tsar Nicholas II was like sucking and fucking all over Japan.

He was, for anyone who doesn't know, Tsar Nicholas II has like an incredible dragon tattoo.

Well, he did until he got air rated by, you know, good people.

But he has like a very sick like dragon tattoo that he got done in Japan.

The czar with the dragon tattoo.

You can tell you're a fucking author.

My bank account can't.

can't.

Now, anybody who has even a little bit of military experience in the Russian Imperial Palace was like, no, you absolutely should not do this.

You should do anything but this.

And the Tsar is like, I'm sorry, I'm the fucking emperor around here.

I'm going to slap a fucking fleet together and send it around the world, which the Russian Navy had never done before and hasn't since.

And it's a trip, but it would have been hard for like the Soviet Navy to pull off, which was also largely held together by duct tape conscripts and vodka.

And second thought, they're the same empire.

And pedophilia.

That's also the British Navy.

The Russian Navy by early 1900s is not exactly a juggernaut.

And the first problem that he ran into were the ships themselves.

42 ships, including 11 battleships, nine cruisers, and supported by a wide variety of torpedo boats, gunboats, and destroyers, would make up the squadron.

But because the Tsar was literally running around in circles trying to find anything that floated that he could attach a gun to, the ships that he found were not exactly mission-ready.

So we're talking like technicals, but boats, boat technicals.

Actually, yeah.

Yeah.

Dinghies, lifeboats, things of that nature.

There's yachts involved.

Does this mean that the Russians are spiritually Afghan?

I think the Afghans would have a very vivid recent memory as why that's not the case.

Most of these ships were built and designed for sea duty, like the Baltic or the Black Sea, where it's calm.

It's not the open ocean.

They're not globe-trotting, world-going naval vessels.

And certainly not for this kind of mission, tens of thousands of miles of open sea.

Not to mention, after you complete all of that, you have a major naval battle to engage to to defeat the Imperial Japanese Navy.

They're not ready for that.

I mean, in a way, it's like, all right, make fun of them if you want, but the U.S.

Navy recently put out a boat that breaks when it gets wet.

So

only having boats that can handle the seas and not the oceans, while a problem is not the worst oversight in naval history.

Say what you will about the littoral combat ships, but they also break when they're not in water.

That is true, yeah.

Now, all of this meant that these ships that built for closed sea duty would carry weight differently.

Their guns were in different places, they were mounted lower because they didn't expect rough seas, and they all around handled rough oceans differently.

And by throwing these ships into the open ocean, that meant that they would almost continuously have their shit rocked by waves while being manned by sailors and officers that had zero training whatsoever about being anywhere near these places.

I am kind of baffled by the idea because Russia has, obviously, you know, Arctic Ocean, Baltic Sea, and Pacific Ocean coastline in the Russian Empire, so whatever modern borders of Russia.

And yeah, I get what you're saying about the boats, what they're built for, but the idea that no one in the Navy had ever bought into the ocean ever, like the guys whose job it is to be on a boat, is like, wait, what?

There's bigger bodies of water?

You're telling me that there is sea?

Wait,

there's a body of water and there's not Turks surrounding it anywhere, anywhere, right?

Not one that I've ever heard of.

You can sail beyond Finland?

Like, it's just, that to me does seem like, I mean, okay, it's the Russian Empire, so whoa, a big oversight.

Who would have thought?

But seems a little problematic.

The Russian Empire is one continuous line of oversights.

And the Chechens are like, I wish they had just done one more oversight.

And the Dagestanis, and so on and so forth.

We all wish that.

Look, you've got a personal relationship with them.

I just, yeah,

I'm just spitballing here.

Now, we'll talk a little bit more about these sailors in a bit, because you might be thinking these ships are rated for calm seas, and that's not what they're going to be doing, but at least they're functioning ships, right?

Right?

Right?

This is where I get to say the line, you can hold up the sign.

It gets worse.

As I've repeatedly pointed out, the Navy was scraping so low into the barrel that the Russian Navy had dug clean through the bottom, had found whatever was buried underneath of it.

I assume Chechen skeletons.

It's just a guy with the worst bowl coat in the world.

Like, find the most landlocked Eurasian people and put them on a boat for some reason.

He's like, Tatars get on the boat.

Hold that thought.

Oh.

I didn't read the script before, so like, anything that I say that's accurate is just spitballing, and yet somehow it always happens this way.

So they had to settle for anything that might kind of float, and that isn't fair.

They also found a lot of things that didn't float.

Now, fun fact for you people like me that are not big naval history people, an important part of being a ship is being able to float.

Where are my big wave heads on?

Who's into naval history?

Waveheads?

How many of you in the crowd tonight are displacement-pilled?

How many of you are at Dallas Maxing?

How many of you like large wooden structures that maybe bob and weave in the waves?

Oh.

I like one.

Every now and again.

We found the one person in the crowd who lives on a houseboat.

Ah, I see someone else that came from the Netherlands.

Oh, yosh, we very much like living on the houseboats.

Every German guy with a list.

Sean Connery.

They're all the same.

It's like, you know,

Dutch is speaking English with a head trauma.

So you should be speaking Dutch is what you're saying.

Yeah.

That's why I'm speaking it so accurately.

You know, like, I love my household.

Every now and then, you know, like I pull up a bike.

You know, I pull up a car.

I don't.

Open it up.

Shoot me.

I don't fucking care.

Ah, that's the Irish in you coming out.

Now, this included several older ships.

And by older, I mean decades out of date that needed to be emergency retrofitted just so they could maybe possibly make the journey.

Unfortunately, those retrofits were not done by anybody who happened to know what they were doing.

These weren't like dry-docked shipwrights at work here.

They were floating in a harbor while these retrofits were going on by just some guys who said they could do it.

And some of the most important things that some of these ships didn't have was armor,

generally thought of as being important.

And so, in one case, the shipwrights, I guess some guys who said they could work on ships,

said that, you know, let's call him Pavel.

The guy who owns the blowtorch simply cut through one of the walls of a ship that he thought he needed to cut through in order to install armor.

And remember, it's important to remember, they're still in the ocean when he cuts through the side of the ship.

And then it sank.

Well, we've assessed the situation and determined that being watertight is gay.

This is the real, you know, like a Russian uh swimming lesson.

You you're on a ship and it sinks.

If you si Now you sound Dutch.

What if a Russian guy was dying?

If you can swim,

fine.

If you die, gay.

Look, it's not meant to be objectively homophobic, but Russians do find a lot of things nowadays, especially with the political culture there, too, up to point to and say, they have a problem in the West.

Their toilets are gender neutral.

This is a very serious issue.

It is causing weakness across all Western countries.

And it's just like, guys, it's a toilet.

Yeah, it's all right.

Welcome to all of the Russians that moved to Armenia.

We have decided to make Armenia less tolerant.

You have ordered food.

You are gay.

Look, at the end of the day, I have the feeling that

soldering and/or welding your own boat to the bottom of the ocean is the least ridiculous thing we're going to encounter.

That's fair.

So, yeah, you know what?

We'll ascribe whatever intention we want to it.

Now, you know what would be great?

Say you're a Russian sailor, conscripted, ready to go do your duty for the czar.

You walk up to the port and the officer is sitting there like, this is the ship you're going to be serving on, but it's just like only the sails are kind of bobbing above the waves.

Get on.

Now, it quickly became apparent to everybody that the Russian Navy was running running out of actual ships meant for combat.

So they had a fix for that.

And that was several ships from the Imperial Palace's pleasure yacht crew.

Oh, so we got like the Jeffrey Epstein flights early?

I mean, it was the Tsar of Russia.

That's probably fair to assume.

Yeah.

So they started strapping naval weapons to pleasure yachts.

And this caused these pleasure yachts, which are meant for like, you know,

the unspeakable things that occur upon any yacht.

like imagine the unspeakable things that happen in like what 1905 it's best we don't yeah i think i feel like even talking about that is a crime especially here

it might implicate the king listen list this is the country that produced you misavil you know like

now

so they install all these cannons right

And anybody want to guess what happens next?

I'm going to guess that they explode.

oh they don't even get that far i'm gonna guess that the cannons aren't properly bolted down they can't be bolted down and when they fire they sink the boat with puncture holes so when they install the cannons remember ships handle weight distribution much differently and when you attach hundreds of pounds thousands of pounds or however many fucking stone that is i don't know um onto a side of a ship it just tends to just flip right over.

Oh, see, see, that's, that's...

I get what you're saying.

Yeah, okay, so it affected the balance, and the ship tipped over.

That's less funny in my mind than if it worked for a while, but then when they fired it, it like did a fucking somersault and went straight to the bottom.

That would be funnier.

Starts doing this in the water.

It's like the viral videos about like this is what happens when a pallet of wood crushes a car with like sun gravity and it just immediately gets crushed.

The ship just looks like it's doing like Jackie Chan, like wing chun and just like fucking flies through the air.

Yeah, Admiral Wiley Coyote really fucked up his plans.

That's how it works.

Yeah, they really fucked up by buying all their boats from acme

anyway the only good yacht is a sunken one anyway so fuck him all yachts are bastards now you might be saying why didn't they just install them on fishing boats right like they handle weight better than like the weird imperial fuckboats well they did that too

those did not randomly sink on their own so that was good

for now

there's also another small problem an 18 000 mile long problem of supplying these ships.

And

there's normally problems that come along with this supplying a navy that actually functions, but all of these are actively falling apart.

So they have to get coal, repair supplies, food, water, ammunition from point A to point B.

And remember, they're all coal-powered.

And Russia was not exactly well-liked in the world at the time.

Thankfully, something that has changed, right?

Also, stepping off on a long journey and shit immediately breaks and fall apart.

That has never happened to Russians, Russians, not at all recently.

I didn't think of anything.

Once again, the union between the Russians at this time and the British right now.

Now, so they had to think of things.

They didn't think of a fix for this, right?

And

one of the problems is that there was a rule at the time that nations neutral in a war did not have to let you stop there to refuel a resupply.

It wasn't banned, but they didn't have to let you in.

And there wasn't really anywhere for Russia to stop at this point because everybody fucking hated them.

This led Russia to contract out to a private company known as the Hamburg America Line, a transatlantic shipping company with a proud history of horrific shipwrecks that killed hundreds of people.

In a 50-year span, they killed 800 people

for fucking up their job.

I mean, I reckon that with a record like that, this must be some sort of like Eric Prince ancestor, you know?

So it's just Michigan representation is so important.

Yeah, I'm very thankful for this representation.

So, so happy.

And, well, they killed the people on the ships.

The ships don't kill other people at random.

That's more of an Eric Prince thing.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just...

He just pulls into a port and accidentally blows up an elementary school.

That's got the Prince family written all over it.

I mean, it sounds like these boats would do that, but it wasn't because it was deliberate.

It was just it's like...

It's because they accidentally crashed into the elementary school.

Now, this kind of long-distance coal resupply had never been done before with the Russian Navy or Hamburg, the Hamburg-America line for that matter.

Another thing is that Russia was pretty much broke.

So they begged the shipping lane for a discount, which Russia was able to secure because the Kaiser,

they related.

This also meant that while Hamburg agreed to the discount, they were not going to give them anything good.

Instead, they'd be supplied with the lowest grade coal possible.

It burns badly, it burns dirty, and of course it had been stored like shit for a long period of time.

There's just like one Dutch guy who's delighted to be the coal shoveler because he's covered in soap

all the time.

Finally, I'm where I need to be.

He inherited the mantle of Svarte P.

He gets the Svarte mandate of heaven in that case.

He's getting the fucking Zvarte purple heart.

He heard the Japanese have really good cheese sandwiches, and he's just like, I don't care what it takes to get there.

I'm going to try.

Now,

this is to say nothing of the ammunition supply situation, which is important because remember, at the end of all of this, they still have to fight a war.

And we've talked a little bit before about the Russian Empire's dire supply problem, just in general, over the course of the last several years of podcasts.

And that all kind of gets included here, but that has the additional problem of facilitating the transport of pretty much everything and anything.

This includes the ammo for various ships going on the mission.

And another one of the problems added in when you're tacking an entire Navy together out of bullshit is that all of the cannons are different sizes and therefore require different ammunition.

There was no standard at all.

Listen, everyone has different size balls.

That's all I'm going to say.

So I'm just.

What?

Welcome to the Free Association Hour with Tom Samani.

Listen, you know, like, I'm into jazz.

I'm into free jazz.

We're doing free jazz podcasting right now.

So you're the guy from a B movie now, is what you're saying.

A B movie or the B movie?

Well, yeah, more of the latter.

But so what's the solution then?

I mean, do they have to just stock every possible unit of measure sized?

You got it, baby.

Okay, cool.

All right.

I picked the most absurd example I can think of.

And you're like, oh, yeah, that's actually the mild case of what's it.

Now, the czar appointed Admiral Zhinovi Rostovensky to lead this incredibly dumb suicidal mission.

Rostovensky was chosen by default because nobody else of his rank was actually standing there and ready to go.

He was also a violent, unhinged drunk who would get incredibly hammered, begin beating the shit out of his own staff when they made him unhappy, which we call the Russian gold standard.

So he was culturally British then.

No, he's Russian.

He's very Russian.

Yeah, but like he's culturally went to Sandhurst and was like doing the T.E.

Lawrence voice.

Russians are just Slavic British people.

I mean, there is a handshake between the two.

Let's put it this way.

It's like...

It's dark, it's miserable, and we love it.

If you don't, get the fuck out.

Yeah, exactly.

Handshake.

The goal of life is to be miserable and suffer.

And also, it's like, it's great when you can kind of peg your way out of things.

And, you know,

we like weird food with mayonnaise on it, you know?

I mean, okay, let's be real.

That's also the American Midwest.

That is true.

So the three-way handshake, a strange handshake that's very uncomfortable between the American and Midwest.

That handshake got way too close to Chernobyl.

So it's about

hand.

Though I did always say that Britain is just big Indiana, so this is all starting to line up.

Though it should be pointed out that his sailors actually liked him

because he was when he win he wasn't drunk, which was very rarely.

He was actually nice, which is actually the same thing that my family said about my father.

I didn't want to be the one to make the joke, but I was fucking thinking it.

I was thinking it.

I was like, it's not appropriate for me to say, oh, so he's just like your dad, but I was thinking it.

Now, like,

he was...

He wasn't corrupt, which was incredibly rare at the time.

His sailors got paid on time, and he actually argued with the Imperial government to give them a raise, which is good because his squadron happened to be the dumping ground for the Imperial Russian Navy because they were all fuck-ups.

Also, like my father.

I am somewhat curious.

So, wait, the squadron was the dumping ground for bad sailors because they knew they were going on the

Death March 30-30 or whatever?

Or was it just that their Baltic Fleet was where they put...

Which would be weird, but that's where they put their...

The answer to both those questions is yes.

Ah, okay.

Okay.

Now, most of the sailors were untrained conscripts from the interior of Russia and had never even seen the ocean until they arrived for duty.

And this is a problem,

obviously.

And even more at the time, Russian Navy generally, pretty much every Navy in the world is ran where like the conscripts, the sailors, the volunteers, whatever, would come from

areas with a naval history, whether it be fishermen or something.

They knew what a fucking boat was.

Never so much now.

The proud sailors of the Aral Sea, and they still would today, except there's one weird problem going on.

Hey, they're doing their best.

Well, one side is, and the other side is just like, fuck, what's water?

Most navies were staffed with like people from coastal areas because they were familiar with sailing.

They'd have to be taught how to fight a war at sea, but they wouldn't have to be taught, like, this is in fact what an ocean is.

And none of these guys knew that.

Also, he discovered that most of the officers just left their ships and went to shore to drink all day,

returning only to assault their sailors or bring sex workers ashore.

I feel like you saying that he was liked by his men makes sense because you said he also loved to assault his own staff, which typically when you're at his rank means they're other senior officers.

And I feel like there is

like macabre sensibility that like the Joes may hate their lives and their officers, but the guy who beats the shit out of their officers, like, nah, I like this guy.

I can work with him.

I can work with him.

I'm already on board.

Well, we'll see what happens.

I heard it was good.

The voyage of the successful.

The only lines led by Donkeys episode where nothing bad happens.

But wait, it gets better.

There was no commanding in this fleet going on.

The state of what would become known as the 2nd Pacific Squadron is probably best put by one Russian officer who said, quote, Half of the slot needed to be taught everything because they knew nothing, and the other half also needed to learn everything because they had forgotten everything.

Now, seeing this, the new commanders knew that they needed to train all of these drunken and untrained idiots up to the task of how to fight the Japanese Navy.

A Navy which, remember, at this point, has ethered the Russian Navy at every turn.

Then that brings us back to the ammunition problem.

The Tsar had only located enough ammunition for the coming battle at Port Arthur.

No extras were added for training.

at all.

So no training would be conducted.

They would simply be sent into battle, despite many of them have never even knowing how to pilot a ship, use a cannon, or how to do both of them at the same time.

I feel like this is a real logistical problem.

Yeah.

It's one of those things, too.

It's like an everything problem.

Every military organization that winds up having to actually go into battle has a very steep learning curve, but it feels like you're really at a disadvantage when you have to start with some.

Well, so this is the ocean, and this is the principle of combustion,

and this is a projectile, and then you're going up against people who are just like

mecca battle, destroying everything in sight in the Pacific.

Like the reason you need to do the world's longest non-pleasure cruise from the Baltic to the Russian Far East is because the Navy you had in the Russian Far East is now at the bottom of the ocean, just kind of hanging out.

Imagine talking to an infantryman, like, so these are legs?

I feel like I had those guys in my formation.

I was in in 2000 from 07 to 14, and I legitimately had,

let's put it this way, the Army always had this principle of like, okay, you might be a fuck up, but your unit will fix you.

And if you imagine that, but done like multiplied times a thousand during the worst years of like the surge plus before the American economy collapsed in 2008 and then military recruiting for some reason was fine.

I wonder why that happened.

We had soldiers.

I had a soldier who didn't understand that his wife.

He didn't understand what menstruation was.

So he thought his wife was having miscarriages every month.

And I'm dead serious.

It's It's very sad.

They don't even say to that.

But he would cry when people would give instructions in PT formations, like, for example, extend to the left march.

Like, very basic, we're going to exercise.

And he would literally not just cry, but fall over crying.

And somewhere out there is the fucking backbone of the army, infantry drill sergeant was like, that guy's a killer.

He'll do great.

Move him on.

Go ahead.

And if that was my experience in 2008, I can only imagine that in the Russian Navy of 1905, a famously functional country and military, you probably had about, well, not quite, maybe not quite as psychologically destroyed, but like guy who had to be taught, like, yes, so this is a foot, and you put it one in front of the other.

And water is wet.

Except the Russian sort of military training system is less to do with that sort of gentle voice and more like, we're going to put your balls in the toilet seat and smash it for some reason.

This builds a spree decor somehow.

This art demands it.

So on October 15th, the glorious 2nd Pacific Squadron of the Russian Imperial Navy set sail for battle.

And then their flagship ran aground while another cruiser's anchor broke off and they drifted into the distance.

This is the real version of Master and Commander.

The oceans are battlefields, but now you just have to fight your own ship.

The ship attains sentience.

It's just drifted up.

Yeah, that sounds like bullshit.

I'm leaving.

You guys can say that I'm leaving.

Now, generally, the flagship should be the one ship that knows what it's doing because it's, you know, the one with the admiral on it if that wasn't bad enough the second day a destroyer ran into a battleship well like

the two warships they had like the two actual warships they had they ran into one another but they damaged both bad enough where they had to return to port for repairs spiritually british confirmed

and they would never return to the fleet

There's also like a really good chance they didn't know how to return to the fleet and then got lost.

Well, I mean, in a way, it's kind of weird.

It's like, well, the fleet left, they couldn't find them, and then the fleet no longer existed at the end of this for reasons.

And so they're like, where are we supposed to?

We don't have orders.

Yeah, we're just going to stay here.

Something else.

Yeah, whatever.

We're in, I don't know, whatever port of Cal.

Portugal.

What's it called Portugal?

It's too nice.

They didn't even make it out of Russia.

Okay, so they're in like somewhere bad in Poland.

Now, after a few hiccups that nearly tanked the entire mission, the squadron finally got moving again.

And their first resupply mission went about as well as you can imagine.

The contracted coal ship sailed out to meet them, and the clueless Russian sailors ran directly into them.

Well, good thing that was the bad coal that didn't combust, right?

It doesn't combust when you want it to, nor when you don't want it to.

It's actually the rare twofer.

It's the actual root of always be bolsting.

Can you take the gun out, please?

Oh, you you have the gun.

Shit.

You know, I have a British passport because my mom's British, and this is like, oh, an Irish guy's got a gun.

Things are going great for me.

Genetically, spiritually, normally this works out really well.

I've seen the Long Good Friday.

Try your best, Twink Pierce Brasn, with zero speaking lines.

Now,

in another case, the Russian supply ship began floating off into a different direction, ignoring the Admiral's order to return to the fleet.

So he shot at it.

He damaged it bad enough for it to also have to turn around and go home.

Now, if that wasn't bad enough, soon rumors began to run wild.

They spread through the ranks of the ship's inexperienced and probably terrified sailors, and then there's a big, weird, wavy thing they've never heard of before, that the Japanese Navy is waiting for them and they're going to ambush them.

Now, that might sound like it's a real worry to have, but they were off the coast of fucking Denmark.

Look, the Japanese Navy likes Legos, all right?

They wanted to go to Legoland.

They figured they could stop along the way and just obliterate the entirety of the Russian Baltic fleet.

They probably could have, to be fair.

That's how we solve the conflict.

We send every conflicting army to Legoland.

Well, that's the thing.

I was going to say something.

Well, what are the Danish thing can I think of?

It's like, hug it.

Well, I can't even say that right.

Pornography.

The Japanese have that fucking covered.

Oh, so listen, the Japanese pornography, fuck me.

They invented it in the 60s, perfected it in about 1963.

I don't know what that means, but I know that Japanese pornography stretches back to time immemorial.

That's when they started blurring everything.

They carved that shit into wood.

I mean, you joke, but yes, literally.

Like the guy who was admired the artistic ability of a guy who's

chipping this into a wood block.

Famously.

Everybody's looking at it, like, yeah, I jerk jerk off to that.

Pokusai, famously the guy who made the wood block, the Ukio-E print, the great wave off Kanagawa, also has a famous work of art of a gigantic octopus going down on a lady.

Like on the

dream of the fisherman's right wife, don't Google it in public because people might put you on a list, but I'm telling you, it is real.

Like, imagine being so horny, spending like

24 hours of total work chiseling into a piece of wood an octopus going down on a woman.

Yeah, it's like doing a Warcraft or a Warhammer figurine, except then it's also a fleshlight.

Yeah.

Now I know this has probably been done, but

it does take dedication, patience, so on.

Now, the Admiral himself.

This is an American voice when an accent is encountered.

Now, the Admiral himself thought of the idea that the Japanese attack was also imminent.

And so, like, the Admiral fell for this.

Now, acting on these fears, an order was given that the squadron that no ship would be allowed to pass between the ships of the squadron, no matter what flag they happened to be flying.

And they would be forced to go around them or get shot at.

Pretty much as soon as this order was given, a fishing vessel approached the squadron, leading the crews to open fire on them.

Thankfully for the fishing vessels, the Russian gunners did not know how to do their job or aim, so they missed entirely.

Now, the vessels happen to be contracted by the Russian Navy to carry a message from the Tsar to the fleet.

And that message was carrying from the Tsar to the Admiral.

He had, in fact, been promoted to Vice Admiral, and he had been shot at for it.

He had nearly killed his own promotion.

Don't shoot the messenger, but if you're going to shoot like a Russian conscript,

fire badly, hit the water, so on and so forth.

Just aim for the ocean.

It's like National Guardsmen doing warning shots, except at least no one was harmed, a thing none of them can ever say.

Yeah.

Now, the next day, the Russian armed supply ship, the Kamchatka, was the last ship in the squadron during travel.

It opened fire on the Swedish fishing vessel, claiming it was under attack.

It was not.

And thankfully,

they also couldn't aim at all, and the Swedes were able to escape without ever being hit.

But after this, the squadron seemed to actually get its shit together just a little bit.

They went a few days without a boat exploding or shooting at anyone at random or whatever other cartoonish insanity that would be inflicted upon them the next day.

And then they got to Dogger Bank off the coast of Kingston upon Hall.

I'm just thinking to myself, okay, so they fired at...

Russian messengers and completely missed.

They fired at Swedes and they kind of missed, but they were getting better.

They got a little bit closer.

So if you're a Norwegian sailor, you are fucked.

Because they just, as you crack westward, they get better and better at it.

They're just training in live fire.

I was going to say, are there Norwegian sailors?

And then I remembered every northern accent in England exists.

So here, off the coast, they ran into a fleet of British fishing trawlers.

These ships were well-lit and flying British flags and were very clearly unarmed.

They were immediately confused for Japanese torpedo boats.

Well, they just saw the blast lines on the Union Jack and figured it was the same thing.

I mean, Vodka blurs your vision, you know.

Yeah, it's fine.

I mean, they're all drinking.

It's it's totally cool.

And the Russian Navy opened fire on them.

While the Russian fleet descended in absolute chaos, sailors reported that their ship had been hit.

They were taking on water.

Other sailors grabbed life vests, convinced that their ship was going down, and jumped into the fucking sea.

They had never once been shot at.

Still others grabbed rifles, knives, and other weapons that they could find and screamed that they were being boarded.

One guy was shot.

I'm just laughing.

What if there was like an ulterior motive?

There's like, I've heard Hall is really nice.

I heard it's fucking great there.

Chop ship, guys.

Who has ever said that?

I don't want to get run out of this building on a British rail, so I won't say.

But yeah,

famously great part of the country.

Honestly, they could have been taking on water, but like

that's just part for the course.

Yeah, they were already leaking and they were shooting at one another.

Though through all of this, they did manage to sink a single British trawler and damage four more, but they also managed to shell themselves and kill the squadron priests.

Well, like, were they

like, were they shooting like straight up or something?

Oh, it was just an absolute cluster fuck of ships getting lost, turning around and shooting at one another.

And nobody knew what the fuck they were doing.

I mean, but there's a part of it that's like, okay, you have the naval standards, you have the flags, you are in a formation with all these other boats that you've seen before.

There's a part of me that's like, it's not like, oh, you're clearing a room in the dark with a handgun.

It's like you're very deliberately loading a cannon and pointing it at a boat and firing it.

It's like, you'd think they would be like, hey, isn't that that boat that I saw back in Arkhangelsk and wherever the fuck?

It's broad daylight.

Yeah.

Whereas isn't that boat with a union jack and a guy screaming invective and pointing two fingers up at me like I don't think he's Russian.

I mean spiritually he might be but he's not actually nationality-wise.

Now, this whole madness went on for 20 minutes before the Admiral was able to get the fleet under control.

And to his credit, he immediately knew something awful was happening and was running around trying to control everything, but quickly learned he could control nothing.

In the end, one British civilian was killed, along with two Russian sailors.

It's completing the Russian tactics of, you know, one person killed, 46 Russian soldiers killed.

Yeah.

Yeah, the famous one is the, what is it, the opera house in Moscow in 2002.

It's like, it's like, yes, 180 prisoners, 20 terrorists, 200 bodies.

Mission successful.

Now, if you do the math, that means even when an unarmed group of people accidentally finds themselves in front of the navy version of a firing squad, the Russian Navy is still a bigger threat to itself than anything they happen to be running into.

The Russians apologized for the incident, but nobody was buying their excuse of they thought they were Japanese torpedo boats.

Hey, listen, you know, the British and the Japanese both have arguments about the age of consent, so.

Well, you know what?

I'm just going to stare off into the distance and just dissociate for a second.

We're going to have a moment of silence.

One newspaper summed up the situation very accurately, saying, quote, it's almost inconceivable that any men calling themselves seamen would be as frightened as they might be and could spend 20 minutes bombarding a fleet of fishing boats without discovering the nature of their target.

Have you ever met Russians?

But also, I'm just like, what if they could plausibly create a story about why the Japanese patrol boats would be off the coast of North Yorkshire?

Open Steinsgate.

I don't know.

Yeah, it's just the Japanese, they're so depraved, they want to eat smack barn peewee.

Or alternatively, it's like we're in Yorkshire, like they have, they want to get pies and all that sort of stuff, and they're bringing sushi to Yorkshire.

You know what we really missed?

Beans for breakfast.

Let's go there.

I mean, the Japanese do eat beans for breakfast, but it's just a slightly different thing.

It's called natto, and it's a little wild because they're fermented.

Uh, just

once again, Japanese and Russians and Brits, all handshake.

Weird pornography.

The British was not quite as weird.

I will get, grant you all of that, but you know, it's still odd.

And beans for breakfast, Asian consent, debates, things of that nature.

All I'm going to say is.

I'll take your word for it at this point.

All I'm going to say is R.I.P.

to Cock Destroyers.

What?

What?

Is this some punk band that gets like 20 fans at a concert that we're supposed to know about?

So neither of you know about the Cock Destroyers.

No.

Why do you?

So the Cock Destroyers were a pair of adult.

and there were a pair of adult actors who like would be like tweeting like

absolutely go and destroy this cook.

And like, but like, why did you use a grandma voice for that?

I don't fucking know.

I don't know how to talk when I'm having sex.

But like, I'm Julie Birchill.

So essentially,

imagine

the two women with the world.

Don't worry, I'll drink

spiritually German.

I'll do it execution style.

I didn't know you're ancestrally Turkish.

I do love kebab, I'm not going to lie.

But it was essentially these two

pornography actresses who imagine

the people

with this is the first tangent of this show.

So with the most filler you would imagine possible.

And like, the thing is, they were so like socially aware as well.

You know, like they supported like Jeremy Corbyn back in the day and all sorts of.

Oh, is that why the guy did the weird painting with the woman with the enormous breasts on Jeremy Corbyn's shoulder?

Yes, yes, yes.

There was a painting of an insane Tory guy who clearly had something wrong upstairs who painted a kind of almost primitive painting of Jeremy Corbyn.

And then one panel was him and Diane Abbott kind of making out.

It was Jeremy Corbin, Diane Abbott making out.

And the next one was the labor rose with a woman with enormous breasts resting on his shoulders, but it's painted in profile.

And it's the most

just confusing thing if you don't know anything about the politics of this country.

And even if you do, it's like, but why would you paint that?

This is a horrible day for being able to hear things.

It's like when those people do, like, you know, support the Tommies, never forget, remember in Sunday-themed like crocheting, but they put it on top of a post box, but the sexual version of that.

It's like British sexual twee, which is, once again, I wish I couldn't speak out loud.

I I wish I couldn't hear it.

Poppy with like a heaving set of tits.

I mean, that's, I gotta be honest, that starts like us trending towards spirits in Japanese, let's be real here.

Anthropomorphic inanimate object that's very horny.

That's just really, yeah.

But so essentially, the cock destroyers were these, like,

why on earth do I have to hear that sentence?

So essentially, the cock destroyers were these like

really progressive pornography actresses.

One of them is dead, R.I.P.

I think I could taste blood.

And they like had just these incredible tweets.

And like one of them was about, you know, Poppy Day and like the cenotath.

But like they were also part of this like pornography cycling clone as well.

Nobody asked.

Nobody asked.

Which I could imagine, you know, having like

gigantically enhanced breasts would not be very aerodynamic.

Not with that attitude.

I mean, like, look, Liker can do a lot of things.

Yeah, fucking the worst.

There's the limit.

The sign is correct.

Yeah, it gets worse.

It gets worse.

It gets worse for me.

So anyway, the cock destroyers were...

The cock destroyers were on the fleet of the damned.

At this point, the Russian Navy had shelled British fishing vessels that were not, in fact, the cock destroyers.

And they were obviously very, very mad.

And they mustered the entire Channel fleet to shadow the Russian squadron.

The Channel Fleet also happened to be larger than the entire Russian Navy at the time.

The British commander joked that he would only use four of his battleships to destroy the entire squadron just to make things fair.

The fleet then stopped in Spain after and then left the Spanish port.

The convoy pulled out of Tangiers.

And that is when one of the ships dragged its anchor across the sea floor, severing an underwater telegraph cable, severing all communications between Algeria and mainland Europe for four days.

There's just one Spanish guy who's like super angry.

He can't get his telegrams.

He's like, ahivinha.

No, no, no, no.

Think of the time period.

It's 1905, severing communications between Algeria and France.

Algeria at this time is part of France.

That means that there are thousands and thousands of

French citizens of Algeria, French colonists in Algeria who can't get their specialist anti-Semitic newspapers for the week, and they are losing it.

You think I'm joking, but a friend of mine is a professional historian, and he one time found a list of subscriptions, and the name is just like 150 different titles.

It's like socialist anti-Jewish combat, revanchist anti-Jewish combat, monarchist anti-Jewish combat, you know, the Jew hater, things along these lines.

And there's just like loads of like...

As long as you have a choice, you know?

There's loads of like French guys who are like super angry that their grandchildren can't get their deliveroo order on time

Now now we have to go back to the Kemchaka

The supply ship because the convoys lost contact with it for days and while the rest of the fleet was accidentally trying to start a war with England the Kemchaka was busy accidentally trying to start a war with the rest of Europe

Over the next three days the supply ship would fire wildly at anything that came near it, including a French, a German, and again, a Swedish ship.

They fired over 300 rounds and apparently hit nothing.

I'm just imagining the Swedes like trying to figure out this situation.

It's like, we're being fired upon.

What are we actually doing?

It's happening again.

Yeah, I mean, but there's also this sort of like Swedish Lutheran brain activation.

It's like, wait, are those Russians?

Are those Russians?

Do we have an excuse to kill Russians?

They had one, but they didn't take it.

They're just playing the long game until the invention of ABBA.

God damn it.

Now,

after this, the ship was ordered to take the lead in the entire Russian convoy because nobody trusted them not to wander off and attack something else.

And now at this point, they're off the coast of Africa, where they met up with...

more contracted coal ships and because this process was costly and time consuming the ships were ordered to take take on as much coal as they possibly could to fit on board anywhere.

And it badly overloaded them.

And because they were not designed to take this much coal.

And when I say anywhere, I mean anywhere, not just like in coal storerooms.

They're piling coal up in the fucking hallways,

which is incredibly dangerous on top of being very stupid.

Now, like you said, that Dutch guy is just like, such a terrible waste.

So the hallways, the bunk rooms, the kitchen, everything is full of coal.

And now, in case you're not aware, because I wasn't, when coal is not stored properly, coal dust is explosively famous.

Explustive.

It's basically like, hey, guys, all of our soldiers need fuel for their Zippo lighter.

So we just dumped Ronsonol and filled the entire boat all the way in the cabins, bathtubs, showers, kitchen, etc.

Nobody make any sparks between here and the other side of the world.

Hey, dog, I heard you like lighters, so we turned your ship into a lighter.

I'm just imagining like Dutch Yukio Mishima just like...

Why did you say those words out loud?

Covered in coal dust, waiting to be ignited.

Just writhing around on the pile of coal dust on the floor.

Come coming out of every pore.

What is Dutch Yukio Mishima commits, Dutch seppuku trying to re-establish, like, what is it, the Dutch West Indies or East Indies trading company?

They don't really have a monarchy.

I guess they could just go for an absolute monarchy with the guy who just got drunk on the bottom of the bottom.

What's Dutch seppuku is my question?

No, it's cutting off

cheese.

No, it's cutting off your head and slicing up your abdomen with a stroop waffle.

A very sharp stroop waffle.

Yeah.

I don't know why you said those words, Tom, but you know what?

I'm going to be haunted for the rest of my life.

These words are not in the book.

More than regular Yukio Mishima.

Well, I think he's a known quantity, but when you start factoring in, like, how do you imagine what weird central/slash/northern European Yukio Mishima would manifest as, it starts to just, it's like, oh, God, I have to get really into Dutch lore to understand that joke.

Nobody should understand that.

And it has to be sexual by default.

And it's just, yeah, I don't want to think about it.

Yeah, sure.

I can only

commit Shekbuku with a stroop waffle while I'm covered in coal dust.

So speaking of coal dust.

Still trending towards German in a way.

It's like

it's like when the British would have that.

Speaking of coal dust.

So it leaks out and covers everything in a fine layer of dust.

And this effectively turned every ship of the squadron into a bomb waiting for a spark.

This had another downside.

The squadron was making its way through the African coast and hit very humid air.

This mixed with the coal dust and created a thick, tar-like substance that covered every inch to include the sailors who were breathing in coal dust for weeks and that were now dropping dead from respiratory failure.

Yeah, they were just spiritually Dutch.

You know, they're covered in coal.

I mean, I was gonna, yeah, I was gonna say the exact same thing.

It's just like the blackface that kills you is Dutch Zeppelin.

Now, don't worry.

Thankfully, they were immediately hit by a giant storm that killed dozens of people.

Now, I don't know what that fixes, but there's less people suffering from coal lungs.

I'm also imagining that, like, you get rained on sweet relief finally, but it doesn't wash off the, like, the permitar and even govern the goo.

Yeah.

My mysterious navel goo.

But that's just a period.

That's just achieving Dutch nirvana that the cold will just soak so far into your pores that you're just like permanently black.

You know, I got to be real with you, a lot of other European countries are getting off real easy tonight.

Germans,

where are my Germans at?

Y'all know about the three wise men and fucking Balthasar at the school play.

Okay, everyone knows about it.

Like, why is that child?

Please don't dress that way.

And yet, they always do.

The Spanish, the Spanish.

You know all about the Spanish.

Like, everyone, no, the parade is supposed to celebrate.

We're just American.

Yeah.

No, we have no, we have no problems about racism in our home.

No, no, we solved it.

It's fixed.

I mean, to be fair.

Just never go there.

I will say.

Go ahead.

I mean, to be fair, we are in the country that wants Gollywogs back on the jam.

Yes, and once had a big gollywog hot air balloon until like 2002, yes.

I mean, like,

what the fuck is that?

What is a gollywog?

You're not speaking English anymore.

You're speaking British.

Okay, so it's a polite.

Were the golly wogs involved with the cop destroyers?

It's a very racist figurine that they used to have a brand of jam in this country until about 2002 that had the very racist figurine on it.

It basically looks like

it's horrendous.

It's bad, but also Britain was so unaware of this that not only was it on the jam you could buy in the supermarket, but there was actually that brand, if I'm not mistaken, had a hot air balloon with just the golly wog, just the racist character on it.

So for everyone

in the crowd on watching the video, I'm about to show Joe for the first time a gollywog.

Why?

Are you ready?

Imagine you were

when you were in middle school in america if you had been in britain you could have gone to a grocery store and this would have been on the jam okay

yo what the fuck yeah because because normally we have we used to have this stuff in advertising in america but you you find remnants of it when you're like oh an antique store in like north carolina it's all just those kinds of things but people are we're we're great about pretending that we didn't have a problem with this i I came to the country that had the only minstrel show jam.

Well done.

Once again, there's probably a Dutch person out there like, wait, just wait.

Although I will say this is very funny because my wife is black and she told me, she date a Swiss German guy years ago.

And he one time said to her, racism is a new world problem.

And she's like, I laughed so hard I literally had to leave the room.

Now, at this point, Gollywogs aside, forever.

The ships were all ordered to keep their gun ports closed because of the imaginary threat of Japanese torpedo boats.

It makes them harder to sink.

So now these ports were the main way to cool a ship during travel as well.

And now they're traveling through humid, hot air and all these other problems.

And, you know, air conditioning hasn't been invented yet.

And it's Russian, the Russian Navy.

They probably still don't have air conditioning.

So soon that meant everybody on board was butt-ass naked and covered in several layers of coal dust and ass sweat.

Listen, listen.

Sounds like fun.

Most of the time you have to pay for this experience.

Tom was saying, yeah, it's spiritually Dutch, but it's starting to creep over the Rhine towards Germany very slowly.

Using liquefied coal dust as lube.

So you got one fan.

You know, I thought about being a doctor once.

I could be doing that right.

If I was good at chemistry, I could be doing that right now.

I thought about being a doctor once too, then I had to stop because I'm a fucking idiot.

Yeah,

it didn't really do me any favors either.

I mean, like, they have charcoal-based everything.

Why don't they have charcoal-based lube?

That's self-explanatory.

I feel like my, I feel like, why isn't there charcoal-based lube?

My shirt is

bringing more questions than it's answered.

I mean, it might be, you know,

probably benign in terms of health reasons, but I feel think about what charcoal-based lube would look like in practice after years.

That kind of answers the question: black lung?

What if you had that in your cola?

It's like, I got topped by a giant squid.

Don't fucking ask me.

It's like, what if you gave black loan to your dick and bowls?

Questions and ask these Russian sailors, man.

They know.

So soon it became to get so it got so hot the men began getting rashes.

And now this probably made worse by the filth everywhere and their only means of getting fresh water for like drinking or otherwise was from the rain, which was not nearly enough to go around.

So nobody was bathing.

Soon were drinking water from the sea and getting violently ill and dying.

And now at this point, the Admiral began losing his fucking mind.

Whenever he got mad, he'd go to the edge of the ship, point towards a ship that happened to be mad at, and throw his binoculars into the sea in its general direction.

This feels like a real tactical failure.

No, don't worry.

This is something that happened so often that his aides made sure to bring a crate of 50 binoculars just so he had enough to throw.

It's like, oh, he's after throwing the binoculars off the ship again.

Get the next ones out.

Just get him the new ones.

Now, he would also only refer to ships over the radio by curse words, as in every ship had a very specific curse word that their name was.

Curva.

Yeah,

that's Polish.

You have to give it like numbers at this point because otherwise you get confused.

Like, which SS Pirast or Pizzdiets are you referring to?

Yeah,

we have like three fucking INS sukas out there.

Yeah, exactly.

It's Pisdiets 1, PSDS 2.

We're getting resupplied by PDF.

And it was no longer whatever their name was.

He would fly off the handle and begin screaming at anyone for any reason, as well as physically assaulting people that just happened to be walking by him.

And while randomly renaming ships, like after people's buttholes or whatever, they eventually arrived at French Madagascar, where they finally learned that Port Arthur had

fallen.

The entire first squadron had been wiped out, meaning their whole mission, for which they've been at sea for months now, was completely pointless.

King Julian!

The Russians have arrived!

I'm just going to say, so what you're saying is they just went and saw some cute, weird, furry animals, some marsupials, and had a good day.

Yeah?

That happened?

No.

This caused the morale of the men to plummet because being covered in seven layers of shit and cold hust wasn't bad enough.

So the commanders had to think creatively about a way to bring morale up.

And that was for some reason shipping tons of exotic creatures aboard the ships from the surrounding islands.

This included a talking parrot, which the Admiral befriended and began flying around screaming swear words at everybody.

Just the pirates going, you fucking can.

But like, it's so funny, like,

with at this time, the way animals were classified, that like you had to bring a living specimen back to England so it's like...

So you could inevitably eat it along the way.

Yeah, so you could take measurements of it and like, okay, this is in a book.

But the problem with like the turtle was the turtles were so fucking tasty that

they kept eating them for about 100 years before they actually got a living turtle there to actually like, okay, we're going to measure it.

I mean, it's like 1905, not 1805.

They know what a parrot is.

But

they decided to make it the petting zoo on top of like the boat in which you're covered in tar?

Like, this is like

because I mean, look, it's like, okay, you've just suffered a pointless mission that sucks.

It's awful.

You're physically, you're ill, you're malnourished.

You're dehydrated.

You're covered in sores.

You're basically permanently painted with fucking the stuff they seal highways with.

And someone's like, do you want to touch a lemur?

Imagine house.

Thank you.

What if I said it gets worse?

Imagine house.

So what is that?

You want to let a lemur touch you?

Imagine how scary.

Imagine how scary it was for the lemur.

You just see loads of Russian guys on the shore with hungry eyes.

Hungry eyes, caked in blackface.

And they're like, God, I hope the Royal Dutch Navy is friendly.

It's like, we've been at sea for 18 months.

That strange monkey meat looks tasty.

I didn't know we were talking about the origin story of Gert Fielders, but here we are.

Now,

on top of finding a parrot, they also included large amounts of venomous snakes.

Which one then immediately turned and bit one of the captains and killed him.

There was also a large number of chameleons that quickly bred and overran one of the ships.

Yeah, I mean, you can't see them like.

Yeah.

Those must have been the most bored chameleons on the planet They only had to ever be one color

The chameleons are in blackface.

Oh And there was a fucking crocodile

Like you know what make the snake infested metal floating casket better a crocodile just loose that motherfucker aboard now

Not only do we have to worry about the plague and the coal thing, we have to worry about the wildlife.

The crocodile was stalking through the ship hunting people.

It was aboard the cruiser the Aurora, as well as, you know, a few venomous snakes.

Unfortunately, they ate the ship's rat population pretty much overnight, and that left them with nothing else other than sailors.

I mean, like, look, that's effective pest control.

I mean,

also,

at the end of the day, you'll have less sailors.

That's kind of a medium.

Like,

you don't have to feed them anymore.

Everyone's getting more rations because more sailors are getting eaten.

The crocodile uniform.

The crocodiles have this incredibly great card, like, you know, charcoal-based toothpaste.

Their teeth are clean as hell.

I mean, at least the crocodile knew what the ocean was before this.

They're already better trained.

Listen, all I'm going to say is, thank God this crocodile was around before Steve Irwin.

How dare you?

R.I.P.

King.

Now, This led sailors to be so afraid of sleeping for fear of being eaten that they jumped overboard and slept ashore meaning they ceded control of an entire cruiser to a crocodile It's just something like Guido goes like hey he's sleeping with the fishes now

Fuck that the crocodile can have it.

I mean I don't want it anymore I was gonna make the joke earlier when you were talking about the boat having the entire like like fucking you know nature exhibit on board that it's like this is starting to seem like they've taken every animal you can eat in Metal Gear Solid 3 and brought it on the boat but the boat being abandoned because a crocodile is stalking sailors at night is just hidey Okojima shit like this crocodile's name would be like Solid Lizard

genuinely it's like the man makes the man makes a video game where like one of the bosses is like an overweight guy on rollerblades who you can only attack him when he's eating a snack of burgers and that seems less ridiculous than this exception wait did that really happen yeah middle gear solid too it sucks but

but that But the only way he could physically manifest an American was a guy on roller skates.

The crocodile.

With Snake's accent, that would imply then Snake has to be Canadian.

And I don't want to think of Canadian Solid Snake.

Oh, wait.

Canadian Solid Snake is just losing in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

I mean, like, look, if the crocodile is bringing,

he's actually got beef with you guys.

My only Canadian beef is that one of my co-hosts is Canadian, and I don't think you can blame his problems on Canada.

You don't know trash shoes, you know what I'm talking about.

Listen, if the crocodile is bringing Hideo Kojima energy, then we are experiencing an intensely bisexual crocodile.

From witness statements, it doesn't seem to be picky.

Listen, no straight man would design Raiden that way.

Now, the tropical environment is pointing.

I'm moving on.

We're pulling out the guns coming out again.

It's being pointed against all of us.

Now, the tropical environment, animal infestations, and a few other things led the Admiral and his second command getting violently ill to the point they were kind of in a coma for a while.

And I mean, that's probably the best thing that could have happened to anybody here just sleeping through this.

And that's the least bad way that anybody on this ship has died yet.

And while they were sick, nobody was left in command.

So the squadron just kind of stayed at port without leave and without leadership.

So the sailors were just deserting the ships to run through the brothels of Madagascar and soon acquired countless untreated STDs that swept through the crew of every single ship of the fleet.

The brothels of Madagascar is a terrifying phrase.

It's the newest Disney film.

I don't know, man.

I mean, you've heard of Madagascar.

Well, they're completely taking over, like, Gort in Ireland to like completely remake the village.

You've made me hear the phrases, but on the topic of the cock destroyers,

it must be a bisexual crocodile.

So honestly, like, I'll do your worst.

On the topic of the Madagascar cock destroyers,

only on Disney Plus.

You do have to pay extra for that.

Yeah, you gotta pay.

Now, at this point, the sailors, for lack of a better term, kind of went feral.

Different ships, hallways of different ships rooms etc came in the control of different sailor gangs each trying to steal from one another and I assume the crocodiles and the snakes formed their own groups at some point because they're still there.

They're unionizing.

I support that.

I mean, the fact that the crocodiles going on strike.

The fact that it took this long for them to go feral is like you're saying they were maintaining military order and discipline this entire time when they were like, hey, we're inside one big butane lighter and also everyone is covered in just in the goo that kills you and they were like yep stand in formation.

All right, but man your stations do your thing like why haven't you shaved?

Yeah exactly.

I have malaria

My skin is falling off hold that thought

So eventually these floating disease animal and sailor infested slums called several caused several men to die of various sicknesses.

During one of the funerals aboard the Kimchaka they use a live round to fire a salute to a dead sailor which hit the ship Aurora, killing a few people and taking out the crocodile.

Not the crocodile!

Listen, I got Requiem Pache, crocodile.

You're going to kneel for the crocodile.

The crocodile was Catholic.

He's been buried in a nice funeral.

I was going to say the Shema for the crocodile, but the problem is this is Russians that it was eating, so

don't want to say anything in Hebrew out loud around it.

You know, even the notion of the Russians wrote about it.

I'm convinced this is some kind of inside job.

The venomous snakes of the Kamchatka took over and just fired at the crocodile trying to take the ship back.

There's too many, too many, like, who benefits?

Quibono.

Yeah, listen, the crocodile was taken out by a very proto-Ian Paisley for being a Catholic.

We will not have any Papist crocodiles on this ship.

So, are all snakes Protestants?

Snake?

Well, listen, I'm not going to say much more, but listen.

Protestants.

Which one of these are Orthodox?

I feel safe.

If it isn't Orthodox, it's the chameleons.

No.

The lemurs in Madagascar are Orthodox.

Why?

Just be

just because?

Yeah.

Listen, if anyone in the crowd has met anyone who's Eastern Orthodox, you understand why Eastern Orthodox lemurs make sense.

Fuck off.

Also, there's just chameleons everywhere during all this.

I feel the need to point that out again because there's just so many chameleons.

Like, people are eating them.

There's so many.

And I was stranded in the tropical heat and being driven mad by untreated syphilis, which did happen.

The men began to revolt.

One man claimed to be God and they began randomly murdering one another.

There's accounts of one naked man running through the ships, wildly slashing at people with an officer's sword while giggling and asking people if they're afraid to die.

It's like, heh, you afraid to die?

I don't know.

It's just when you think of Event Horizon, you don't think sexual and hot.

And yet, in 1905 in Madagascar, that sounds like Mad Libs, but it's apparently it took place.

He's just very slippery as well.

You can't catch him.

He's greased up with his own moisture.

He's moist.

He's covered in wet, cold dust.

What can you expect?

Yeah.

Even the crocodiles, like, boys who survive the shelling is like, we got to let this one go.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the Russians also discovered something else that Madagascar had.

A flourishing opium trade.

So add crippling opium addiction to the list.

Hey, listen, what are you going to do?

You're on a ship for months at a time.

You're going to smoke some opium.

You're going to lay on some bench.

You're going to chill out.

I'm just said the crocodile missed out on it.

Like, imagine how good it would be to smoke opium and stroke a lemur.

Normally you have to pay a heavy fee for that.

That's not a euphemism.

I'm talking about the fur is soft.

You're smoking opiates.

You're just stroking lemurs.

Just nodding out with your fingers in the lemur fur.

Yeah.

Yeah.

As soon as you go unconscious, you're just covered in chameleons.

I was going to say exactly.

In reality, like in the Midwest dream, it's like you're like smoking fentanyl.

You're stroking a rusted car.

I was going to say something along the lines of, yeah, like you, you.

My family represents that.

Thank you.

Somehow you've managed to melt crushed up Viking and then someone's got a pet ferret.

Not the ferret

sting.

Biting the shit out of you.

Well, I mean, look, we don't really have lemurs running rampant or as pets in America, but there's always the weird dude who had a pet ferret.

That's just a thing.

Joe knows what I'm talking about.

We all knew a ferret guy.

There was always a ferret guy.

I bought my weed from him.

His house smelled terrible.

Well, I mean, it is a ferret.

Yeah.

Who in the crowd knows a ferret guy?

Who in the crowd is the ferret guy?

Nobody.

I don't believe you.

So, have a, you know, I mentioned that this whole time the Admiral is in a coma.

So, all of this is what he wakes up to.

The squadron was meeting up with the surviving Russian first squadron, which were there actually wasn't one.

Like, they're like, oh, we're supposed to go here.

This is where the remnants of the first squadron, the one that escaped Port Arthur, is supposed to be.

But

it doesn't exist.

What happens is Imperial Command simply thought there would be be one.

So they were meeting up with nobody.

And

that is where

they run into the Japanese fleet.

Wait.

In the Indian Ocean.

Am I out of my mind?

No, they're closer to Port Arthur.

Okay, okay.

I'm sorry.

I was a little confused there.

I thought this was happening just off the coast of Madagascar.

They were actually on their way to Legoland.

I wasn't wrong.

I mean, like, listen, if there's anyone who wants to fuck a lemur, it's going to be the Japanese.

Yeah, the big split down the middle culturally is, do you want to fuck a lemur Japanese?

Do you want to eat a lemur Chinese for sure?

I'm not saying that in any sense of prejudice.

I've just, I've just...

Look, I'd eat a lemur if it looked at me wrong.

I don't give a fuck.

I would probably eat a lemur if it was the difference between living and dying.

And if you put a lemon.

We're going to pan some of it.

Some vinegar on it, you know, I think it'd be good.

Soy sauce, et cetera.

Yeah.

I mean, like,

a million.

To be honest, if you want to try some lemur, probably go to Burr Market.

There's probably a stall there that sells lemur but that's not it's not a chinese food market it's guys basically with more tattoos than you selling lemurs for some reason it's like all right raw you know like we got Bear Lemur tail you know like we got lemon meat just in case there's any questions in in your mind's eye the guy saying this is white like oh yeah so he's not making a racist caricature he's just representing a guy who's real the guy is white he's wearing the smallest beanie imaginable he has more tattoos than me like all right calm you know like you you want lima meat we do it deep fried battereds you know like you want it raw

he's from st albans

his parents are lords

now

before the the the the russian fleet it meets for battle they they run into another problem

They'd actually fired off most of their ammo before they got there.

So they needed to wait for resupply before they could, you know, go to the war they're supposed to be taking part in.

So when the supply ships did show up to the cheering and of the absolute crack-brain syphilis-infested crocodile soldiers, sailors, whatever, they were depressed to find that the supply ships did not, in fact, have ammunition.

Instead, they had fur coats.

Listen, all I'm going to say: shout out to everyone in the crowd.

We've all shot early.

Speak for yourself, Tom.

Speak for yourself about Dutch Hideyo Kajima slash Yukio Mishima and bisexual crocodiles and all that shit.

I'm not associated with it.

You're the only one on this stage who has a kid, so you know, yours work.

I just.

Hey, I'm not complaining.

I'm fine with this.

You're just reminding me that a recording of this will exist, and I have to make sure my daughter doesn't know what a podcast is ever.

Listen, if Joe had a kid, it would be the most mid-sized person ever.

Good.

At least they'd be able to find pants that fit.

Yeah, but have you tried living in Europe my size?

It's fucking impossible.

Yeah, but your kid can't bawl out.

Like, I'm just, I'm just taking it back to the idea that you.

Ball out?

What am I bawling out on?

I'm just imagining you struggling to find clothes that fit in the Netherlands.

Somehow, yes.

Really?

Yeah, which is like, I'm not like.

Your ass isn't fat enough somehow.

No, it's the Ned was

Okay, he was donating to the Patreon because of my voice.

The Netherlands, funny enough, the third tallest country in Europe.

As my mother said, I haven't asked for radio.

God, I hope my mom doesn't watch this.

She's like, so what's a podcast?

Don't worry about it.

Yeah, it's like audiobook erotic fiction only fans.

Someone's doing it, I'm

So, as the squadron leaves, the crew begin to refuse to follow orders, and some of the ships just start to wander off, eventually being brought back to the convoy under threat of being shot at.

And that is when they're joined by the so-called Russian Third Pacific Fleet,

which were parked in French Indochina.

Now, when the Admiral saw the third squadron, the third fleet, he was horrified.

It was even older and more obsolete than his own.

And though that probably had less snakes, if I was the guess.

Upon hearing the state of his reinforcement, the Admiral tenured his resignation from the Russian Navy to the Tsar while still out in sea in his decrepit shitpile, and the Tsar refused to acknowledge his recognition, meaning he was forced to stay there and in command.

Knowing he had no choice but to tackle this mission with the ramshackle pile of shit that the Tsar called a fleet, he did so in what would become known as the Battle of Tsushima on May in 1905.

Now, I'm not going to go into much detail here in the battle because that's not the fun part.

It's really not a lot.

The battle went so terribly

that it can be summed up as the Russian Navy pulls up and then dies.

It wouldn't be like, you know, the Russian military in general just to show up and die in mass numbers.

It hasn't happened ever.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

100 hostages, 500 soldiers dead.

Anyway, I have this AK that I found in Armenia from a Russian soldier.

Never fired, dropped once.

See, that seems like the Iraq war jokes that Americans would make about French people.

I feel like the Russian one would have to be like...

Well, the difference is that the Russian one is fucking accurate.

Never fired.

Found on eBay.

Sold by a Bulgarian or a Belarusian somehow.

Bought on VContakta.

You want to buy AK?

Yes, Alexander Lukashenko has a side project selling stolen.

It's firemen for the

last paragraph of a very long script, and we're just going to just torque.

Like, the AK is built out of stone.

More of a tweak, you know?

The AK is built out of stolen panels from a tractor.

That would still work, probably.

Now,

just so people know how bad this defeat was, the entire fleet is wiped out.

At least 5,000 Russian sailors are killed.

The Japanese Imperial Navy loses 12 people.

Non-combat injuries, all sexual.

We're here to talk about the Japanese Navy, not my family reunion.

I mean, this is basically like, yeah, the Japanese military.

The Japanese fleet loses 12 people.

It's basically when they're like, oh yeah, 100, you know, more cops than ever have died in America last year.

And it was like, all of the excess deaths were either COVID or autoerotic asphyxiation.

I didn't know David Carradine was a cop.

Hey,

hey, listen, that's the one, you know.

ACAB includes in excess.

That is the one.

I'm sorry.

I like in excess.

It was a sad story.

I just had to make a joke.

This is the one Venn diagram.

That's the circle of like people who die of autoerotic asphyxiation.

It's like cops and Japanese soldiers.

And British pop stars.

Australian pop stars.

American actors.

Actually, fuck.

That Venn diagram is pretty big.

Yeah, it's not even a Venn diagram.

It's just a big blob.

Big circle.

Fuck Bob Geldoff.

So...

The Battle of Tsushima ends in horrific defeat.

The only weird side note here is that the commander of the future attack on Pearl Harbor is very nearly killed, not because of anything the Russian Navy did, but because his cannon randomly explodes while firing it.

After that,

the Russo-Japanese War effectively ends in crushing military defeat for Russia.

It immediately leads to a revolution, and I don't know how that ends, if anybody could remind me.

Yeah, the famous revolution of 1905.

Yeah, it doesn't end the way you think it does.

But what happens is Russia survives long enough to limp into World War I.

but all of the lessons learned from this war of Japan just horribly crushing Russia are all completely ignored by the rest of the world.

Like the machine guns, indirect fire, all the horrific body count that we would see in World War I are all completely ignored by everyone else because it's like, well, Russians aren't Europeans.

Couldn't happen to me.

We're bringing out the calipers.

You know, we're measuring...

That's not even a bit.

That's exactly what happened.

Like, because

the Americans, the British, they all have military advisors there to see what's happening, and they all back Japan because they fucking hate Russia.

And they're like, these Slavs don't know what they're doing.

I can't imagine this will happen to us in 10 years.

So, like, in reality,

this battle leads to Gundam being made.

In a long enough timeline, it leads to a lot of things, and the small side of that is also

Gundam, I suppose.

It leads to Yukio Mishima, Gundam, and the age of consent being 14.

That is kind of a good thing.

I feel like that would have happened regardless of naval defeat.

Okay, that last one, probably, yeah.

But there's only so much butterfly effect you can do on that shit.

If Japan loses this war, we don't see the Empire of Japan as we see it in World War II, which means there probably is no atomic bombing of Japan in World War II.

And we don't...

Thanks, Russia.

And we don't get the incredible novel Confessions of a Mask.

And we don't get Neon Genesis Evangelion, which we plagiarized, or Tom did for this video.

We put that

on YouTube, and YouTube immediately took it down.

Hey, as the only member of this podcast who has an Evangelion tattoo, he sure does.

You say that like it's a flex.

It's covered in shitty tattoos.

I know.

I mean, this is in in a way

to a specific audience, you're like, oh, what a cool guy.

Whereas to most people, it's like, as the one member of the show who hasn't fucked his dad.

So, gentlemen, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

We do.

First three rows will get wet.

Who wants to get a question?

This guy does.

Someone does.

Someone wants to raise their hand.

You've been conscripted into the Legion.

Please do not resist.

What is your question from the Legion?

It's Jesus.

Fuck.

Come on, man.

I don't know.

If someone else has one and you want to take the mic from them, that's fine.

We got one.

So, you've been in London a couple of days now.

What has surprised you about the city?

So I've been to London once before this,

but it was also only for a couple days.

I think the thing that surprises me, so coming from the Caucasus and now I live in the Netherlands, is that Yell's public transportation system is like fucking Calvin ball to me.

I do not understand it at all.

I just ignore it.

I just use taxis, man.

Like I'm getting fucked for so much money because I cannot possibly decipher this shit.

Well, I mean, you could be the most expert user of it and you'll get fucked for money.

That's kind of the thing about TFL.

But I mean, coming from New York, I find the map, it's like, it's, it's like a child's coloring book compared to understanding.

And I lived in New York for a long time.

So,

Tom, you're a more recent arrival in London than me, which is weird.

Yeah, like

one in London that

you can get your stone, your stone, your phone stolen off you.

Oh, yeah, someone tried to steal my phone last time I was in London, right out of my hands.

Yeah.

But I guess he saw my face and said, he looks like an easy target.

But my biggest one is good kebabs.

Like, good kebabs in London.

Like, when you're in Ireland, it's like you're getting your kebab.

It's whatever they handed you.

Doesn't fucking matter.

Eat it.

You cunt.

Like, you've paid for it.

Fucking eat it.

But like, where I live in London, there is like a kebab shop that is fucking banging.

And last summer, it like went viral on TikTok.

So there was a specific situation.

My girlfriend's in the audience, so she knows this.

But

I went in, ordered chicken shawarma, and I was standing outside.

And there was like a very

London term is called a neek.

It's like a nerd.

And there was these neeks inside, like taking footage for their TikToks of, like, oh, you know, you need to.

You can immediately get the wall.

It's like, you need a fat trad, the best kebab in London, you know, like, is boss down, best kebab.

And it was like these guys who like

full carhard outfit, you know,

men who are like 25 experiencing like nuclear grade male pattern baldness.

Okay.

And

they're there like taking footage of these kebabs.

I was like, do you know what?

If you haven't had five points and you're in this place, fuck off.

Get your kebab and fuck off.

Okay, so we have time for one more, but I do have to end here.

My surprise, because I've lived here for six years now.

But we'll take another question.

You had your hand up in the beginning, so yell it out loud.

I'll repeat it.

What's your question?

Hey, guys, love the show.

Just wanted to ask: what are each of your sort of unpopular popular culture opinions that music?

God.

Do you want to be here until tomorrow?

Can we speedrun it?

The question for the recording's benefit was, what is our unpopular popular culture opinion?

Yeah.

I have an easy one, I think.

I guess it's like the popular culture of like unrelenting criticism of popular culture is inherently bad for you.

I think.

Because it just makes people overly cynic and hate everything.

I think the better option is, yeah, to not be a hater if you can avoid it.

Just enjoy things.

Just enjoy things sometimes.

You don't have to be overly critical of everything.

You can enjoy things that suck.

It's fine.

It's called being on our podcast.

Wait, no.

So normally,

very quickly, not too long-winded answer.

I would just say that my unpopular, popular culture opinion is at a certain point in your life, you just kind of like the stuff that you like and you don't worry about like, oh, am I supposed to be listening to this album that sucks?

So I don't know.

The sooner you get to that, the happier you'll be.

It might have taken me about 30 odd years to get there, but I did get there eventually.

So I I would say, be faster than me at it.

Tom?

Uh, I would argue that

never listen to other people's opinions about music because, like, at the end of the day, it only really matters what you enjoy.

And, like, it doesn't matter if you enjoy stuff that people think is shit or whatever.

The fact that you enjoy it is the most important thing.

Yeah, when you said the cock destroyers, I just figured that was a band you were into.

I did too.

I 100% did.

Yeah, me too, man.

I genuinely did.

You heard it from Tom first.

Attack, Attack is a good band.

Oh, fucking stick, stickly.

All right.

Get the crabdons going at the merch table.

Listen,

we got to go because

we want to be able to have a chance to say hello, meet people, also sell merchandise.

You've probably seen the prizes and stuff up there.

If you still want to get merch, we're all going to be working back there.

But otherwise, thank you so much for being a wonderful audience.

Thank you.

Thank you.

He's been cut off.