Is German engineering really that good??
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Hello, folks. Welcome back to the Straightforward Farming Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Reid, alongside Nick McCormick. And we are not cranking out podcasts on a regular basis like we promised on the last one. But we're easing into it. Yeah, we've only missed a week, I think, roughly, so...

got to give us a little bit of credit in our defense we did come over to do it one night we got sidetracked with another project yeah and we didn't make it in here but we tried it seemed like a lot of times our wives end up throwing a wrench in this we show up to podcasts and they come out in the shed the next thing you know yeah we get zero podcasting done well we talk about a lot of stuff we just don't we just don't record it yeah i guess we're gonna start wearing microphones and yeah recording everything

Yep. So we're getting into the doldrums of winter here. Christmas right around the corner. Finally getting some precept around here. Had a little over an inch of rain last week, but it's just nasty out. Yeah. It's coming nice and slow, though. Soaking in, so that's good. I'm glad to have it. Yep. It is. Yep. Bloodbath in the grain markets. Things ain't improving there. Yep. Cost me money every day. Loving it. Yep. Same here. Yeah. So I don't know. Not a good situation, but...

We will live to fight another day, I hope. Hopefully, yeah. Got a long way between now and spring. In those days, we could just sold right off the truck and been better off, but hey, whatever. Yep, that's what I did with all my corn. Sold every stitch of corn off the truck, stored every single one of the beans, and so far, that's worked out okay. I mean, I guess beans have went down some, but corn ain't really, I mean, I ain't made the storage back on corn if you just stored it. No. Not here. No, for sure. No, no. Yeah, it's a mess.

Yep. So what's on your mind tonight? Anything good? Nothing too exciting going on. Just trying to get some stuff done in the shop and get everything squared away for next year for farming and just get through winter. December is always kind of a mess. It is. Companies are closed or Christmas parties or so on and so forth. Everybody, you know, your favorite salesman or whatever at whatever vendors on vacation, this, that, and the other. And I get it. I totally understand. But, like, December is kind of a wash. It is. It's just kind of...

You can't count on anything. There needs to be like a federal rule that you got to have all your Christmas parties done between now and Christmas. You call in January, the first week of January. Well, we're having a Christmas party this week. It's like, God damn it, Christmas has been over for weeks. I get why they do it because you can only get it in so many places. But yeah, it is a mess. Yeah, it kind of gets screwed up. So it is what it is. I always say from a business standpoint, January 2nd is my favorite day. Yeah. Because then you're finally like you don't get you can't get anything out of anybody from Thanksgiving to New Year's. Agreed.

If something happens to show up or make it or gets done, that's just a bonus because otherwise... Yep, agreed. So what do you think on this machinery market? Is it cooling off? I mean, I can't help but think high interest ain't going to be putting the brakes on some stuff. I would think it would have to on some stuff. It looks like to me that it's cooling off on certain things. Low-hour pre-emission stuff is still pretty strong. Sure. And probably will continue to be even once the dust settles, wherever it settles. Yeah. But I think...

One of these days, the combine market has to take a bloodbath. Oh, it's got to. It's got to. It seems like every dealer I – every deer dealer you look at has got 15 780s low-hour set in there. You know, it's like – There's starting to be a lot of machinery piling up in our immediate area on lots. I mean, our local John Deere dealer's got more machinery than I do. That's the most they've had since –

As long as I can remember, to be honest. Yeah, I'll agree. So, yeah, I don't know. And, I mean, it ain't like commodities have rebounded and went the other way. You know, I mean, things have just been kind of where they're at, even getting a little bit worse. So, I mean, I don't know. And, you know, I don't know of any farmer here locally that's just in the position where it's like, man, I got to trade this thing. You know, the guys have upgraded so much in the last 10 years that it's like… So over-equipped for the most part, you know. Yeah.

I don't know. But then again, nobody wants to work on stuff. Parts are hard to get, so on and so forth. So it leads you to push for something newer. But they still break down, too. Sure. So we're still going to have stuff for them. So I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. I guess it's all going to shake out here pretty quick. We're going to know. I mean, it's kind of scary to think about, you know, that really less than 60 days we're going to start setting insurance prices and corn ain't doing much at all. It ain't looking too good for that. You know, they keep bouncing this South America weather back and forth, but it's like it ain't changing the market. It's almost like what happened here this year.

you know we were in a pretty good drought i mean really in in most of illinois didn't really seem to affect the market and it wasn't just illinois indiana iowa and a lot of places didn't really affect it much and i'm not i'm not saying usda was right or wrong i'm not i'm not at that but the the fact of being a drought didn't really change nothing and i just can't help but think it ain't gonna be the same thing now yeah i don't know how much of the market's actually based on facts and reality anyway yeah it makes you wonder i mean kind of manipulate it however they want it and

I suppose there's bigger power players there than the farmer. Yeah, so I don't know. It's kind of scary. I mean, because you're kind of getting out of where interest is going to eat, which I don't know that there's a lot of farmers borrowing tons and tons of money. I mean, I could go either way. But a lot of guys are fairly flush. I mean, they're not borrowing millions of dollars, I don't think, even if they're buying land. Yeah, I don't know. You don't have to have a whole lot borrowed when it gets to over 10% before it starts to add up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You know, and we've often talked in the past nowadays, and we're just going to use simple numbers here, 80 acres, 10,000 bucks an acre, you know, 800,000 bucks. Yeah. And,

How do some of these guys come up with the down payment alone on this? And I guess I maybe throw out the 55 to 65-year-old guys that have been established their whole life. But we've got guys that are our age and younger that have bought two or three tracks of high-priced ground. It's like, how the hell are you guys even coming up with a down payment? I mean, what am I missing? I suppose they're leveraging another piece against it. I guess. It's the only thing I can think of, which is a dangerous game to play. Yeah, damn dangerous.

I get why you would do it, but still, then you end up losing two pieces if you're not careful. I mean, do you really think we'll look back in 10 years and say, man, I could have bought that for $20,000 an acre because now it's $40,000? I don't know. Maybe we will. I'm not saying we won't. I hope not at some level, but I'd still like to buy some. But, boy, I don't know. If it's to that, corn's going to have to be a whole lot higher than $450,000. I would sure think. You know? I mean...

And right now it's not slowed anything down, but we haven't had the time for the money to flush out of the farm economy yet either. But I don't foresee land coming back down a ton as long as we're pushing solar and wind. If I can put a windmill up on 80 acres and get 35, 40 grand a year off of that. Yeah, they're eating up and they're eating up plenty of acres doing that all the time. So yeah, so that makes it that much worse. Well, be interesting to see, I guess. Hindsight's 2020. We'll know eventually what we should have done. Yeah, we will.

And by then it'll be too late. Glanzoi's too high priced. Yeah, absolutely. You show me some of the cash flows, I'll buy it all. Yep. Didn't cash flow at $3,000 an acre, so let's wait until it's $10,000. Buy her then. Buy her all. Yep. No doubt. The farmer mantra. It is.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I saw a deal today where New York City in the congested areas downtown is going to start. They got cameras put up and they're going to start automatically tolling you for driving through those areas during business hours. So it'll be like 20 some bucks a day if you go through there. Are you serious? Yeah.

Yeah. Just to drive through the area that you've been driving through for 10 years on your way to work. Yep. Going to start charging you for it in an effort to reduce congestion. Save the environment. Yeah. Sounds to me like a way that we just start taxing every vehicle on the road to make up for electric vehicles and ain't paying no fucking gas tax is what it sounds to me like. Yeah. Yeah, that's very possible.

Yeah. All in the name of climate change. Yeah. This lithium mine is way better. Oh, absolutely. Way better than that coal mine or having an oil rig somewhere. It's way better. Yeah. Lithium, that's the way to go. It is. Yeah. I can't wait to get in a wreck and have battery acid all over me. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Yep. Have you seen any videos on the Tesla Cybertruck? I have not.

Yeah, they had one that took to a sled the other day, and it outpulls the power stroke, and it outpulls this, that, and the other. My question is, what's it weigh? I haven't looked it up. I should have looked it up. I just thought of this. But my guess is it weighs a whole lot more. Oh, for sure. I know that for a fact because I know of some dealerships around here that got to put new lifts in for electric vehicles because the current lifts that they have are maybe not quite big enough. Mm-hmm.

It's just like, well, yeah, it pulls it, but the power stroke spun out. Well, if that thing weighs 4,000 more pounds, that makes a big difference. Let's go drive 5,000 miles apiece and then hook up to this ledge. Let's see who wins that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I see nothing on that. Yeah, they had one with a drag race with it as well. They raced a Porsche 911.

The Cybertruck was faster than the Porsche, pulling a Porsche 911 on a trailer. Really? Yeah. Which, I mean, you can get some hellacious torque and shit out of an electric, but just the longevity, I don't know about that. Yeah, about the time it might start to pay for itself, it craps out and you need new batteries and it's not worth doing. Recycle, et cetera, et cetera. It's a great plan. Oh, absolutely, yeah. I don't know, do you think that's all part of the grand plan now is to get vehicles so high that...

They're going to force you to elect. You know, it's funny how that shit works out that, you know, new power stroke. And then, you know, I'm just going to throw it at a hundred grand. You know, I don't know what it is. It might be more than that. But then somebody slides in with this electric truck that you can get for 50. So, because you willingly normally wouldn't buy that piece of shit. But it's like, well, I'm going to save 50 grand. Fuck it. I'll try it. Yeah. I don't know. Let's make you wonder there again. We won't know till it's too late. But I'm sure there's a game to be played there. Oh yeah. Always is. Yeah. Yeah.

I thought it was funny that Tesla didn't get invited to the electric vehicle summit, even though they sold more than one quarter than the other manufacturers did cumulative. Really? They didn't invite Elon. He wasn't super thrilled about that. I'll be damned. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how this is going to shake out. Yeah. Oh, Elon, not a fan of Disney.

No, he's not. Not a fan of being blackmailed with money. He's all good there. Kind of determined he didn't need it and you can move on. That's off to him for that. We'll give him credit there. Yeah, I suppose when you get a guy in his position, I mean, can they or can't they be bought? I mean, it's going to take a hell of a price tag, I would think. I don't think he's looking to sell. No. Yeah, I don't think he's looking to sell on that deal.

Yeah, and I've never followed all that Tesla stuff much as far as what they're doing and the technology. I'm not interested in one. That's how I am. Don't even really see them. I'm not looking for newer vehicles. I'm looking for older vehicles. I'm the same way. I want a 69 Mach 1 and a 79 Ford. Yeah, that'll be my next purchase. It might be 10 years from now. I don't know when it'll be. But yeah, 79 Ford F-250 would be my next purchase, if you can find one. Yeah, I wouldn't mind. I'd love to have an 80-86 F-350.

I just always liked that body style. That's what I grew up with. Yeah. We had a bunch of them. Cash for clunkers ate up a bunch of that shit back in the day. Yes, it did. I mean, you just don't even see that stuff anymore. No, it's hard to find. And if you do, and they know what they got, it's all right. And I want something that, or when I say original, I mean...

I'm not looking for a 79 F-250 with a Cummins diesel. You know, I'm not looking to do that. I want something that's basically like it was when it was. I want a 400 Ford. Yeah. Move on. I want glass backs. I want pipes out the side. I want to listen to a cackle. Yep. Which is a rarity. Where's the last loud truck you met on the road? Like, look, that sounded good. Oh, that sounded good. Well, that's totally different. I met a Jeep Cherokee today that apparently lost the exhaust to manifold. I wouldn't say it sounded good, but it was loud. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, the last good sounding one's been a while. Yeah. I was just joking with a buddy of mine yesterday. You remember like the 92 body style Chevrolet Z71s that everybody had? Yep. They all had extended cabs basically. Extended cabs. And you hear one of those take off and they just be sounding like they're really getting with it. And you look over and they're doing 8.4 mile an hour. Yeah. It's like, huh, things must be really badass. You've been cackling for 45 seconds now and you're damn near to 30 mile an hour. Yep.

I'd like to have a 79 stick shift on one hand, but on the other hand, I don't know either because I'm just sort of to the point of just over shift. You know, I don't like to shift anymore. Yeah, I go either way. I would do depending on what I found, I guess. Wouldn't bother me either. But God, I've sent you some links on Facebook, you know, for one that's like been done right. I mean, God damn 30 grand. I'm not doing that. Sorry. No, I don't need one that bad. No, would like to have one though.

Yeah, they're getting few and far between. And I don't want one all jacked up or nothing. I mean, I don't want one that looked factory. I might have some decent tires and rims on it, but I don't need nothing. 33s or 35s. Yeah, I don't need nothing jacked to the moon. I don't need 44-inch boggers on it. No, no. Yeah, I'm good there. I'm too old to get in that shit.

Yeah. My cousin, you know him, he's got a real nice one. It was my truck for a while. His dad gave it to me and then ended up, he got it back then and redone it and whatnot. And it's a damn nice looking truck now. Yes, it is. Dressed it to the nines. Yeah. Very nice. Yeah. You just don't see them anymore. No, there ain't too many of them around anymore. No, that's for sure. Nope. So what else is new? That's what I was trying to think. Nothing super exciting. Just.

Just trying to make it through the day. Like I said, just trying to eat through the month. Got some Christmas shopping I need to do yet. Yeah, I got a little bit of that. Just a little. Yeah, I don't have a lot to do. Just a little and try to put that off to the last possible minute. Yeah, I agree. Not that I don't enjoy doing it. I'm a procrastinator on that stuff and I push it off. Then you're forced into making a decision towards the end. You're out of time.

Christmas just ain't Christmas like it was when we were kids. Back then you went to the mall. You had the Christmas tree. You had hundreds of people. Christmas trees every 10 feet. Christmas music playing. Now you just go into Walmart and nobody gives a shit. It just ain't the same. It's not saying it's bad, but it ain't the same. No, and it...

How many years in a row here have we had Christmas where you could go outside in a T-shirt or a sweatshirt? Due to climate change, of course. Yeah, absolutely. Or I should say global warming. We've got to be specific. Global warming, not climate change. Yeah. You know, it's like, well, it's hard to... I don't know. I suppose that's part of getting older, too. When you're a kid, you're excited about it because you're a kid and you're going to get some stuff. Now anymore, like, not that I'm a Rockefeller, but if it's something I really needed in July, I'm not holding off until Christmas hoping to get it. Agreed. You just...

Call the Milwaukee guy and get it and move on. I talked about this on TikTok the other day, though. I can remember looking at the Sears catalog or everything for just hours on end. All that cool stuff. Of course, back then, you didn't have the internet to go look up. You weren't watching other kids play with toys on YouTube like they do nowadays. No, exactly. You were thumbing through that thing a page at a time.

Every time looking at that 5.0 plastic Ford engine, thinking, man, I would like to have that, even though we touched on this one other time. A couple guys told me it really wasn't that good. Your brother will screw it up for you, I think was the general consensus I got from everybody. Your brother will fill it full of glue, and then you won't have anything. Yeah.

Yep. It was neat to think that that was in the Sears catalog. I mean, to think back when, like, oh, you need a house? Go to Sears. Yeah. Oh, you need a washer and dryer? Go to Sears. Oh, you need 22 rifle? Go to Sears. Yeah, they got it all. It was truly the Amazon of the day. I mean, I promised you in 1960 if you'd say, hey, in 50 years, Sears will be completely bankrupt out of business, they'd have laughed you. Just the same way if I tell you that...

In 10 years, Amazon's going to be broken and out of business. You're going to be like, no way. Yeah. And sure as hell. Sure, yeah. Sure enough, they're gone. Yep. Yeah. I'd like to know what major decisions they made that really caused that. I would, too, because, you know, and I don't know if, and I'm just shooting from the hip, I don't know, was it failure to get online quicker?

You know, once stuff started going that way, you know, I don't know what the deal was. I don't know. I'd have to research what was their Achilles heel on all that, you know. I seen a stat, or it was kind of a, it wasn't a meme, but it wasn't necessarily a stat, and it's been, shoot, 10 years ago probably, but it was really cool talking about how, like today, the largest taxi company in the world

Doesn't own a car. Uber. Yeah. You know, the largest retailer in the world doesn't own a single brick and mortar store. Amazon. And it went all the way down the list as to how things have really, they're the largest, but they have no hard asset investments in it, you know? Yeah. It is interesting how that goes.

And so, you know, that would be my guess is maybe they hung on to brick and mortar stores too long and ate up a bunch of overhead. I don't know. You know, you see that in the ag industry a little bit. Some dealership networks got a ton of stores. Some of them got a ton of service trucks. Yep. You know?

Goes both ways, but I think it's trending more towards service trucks and less towards brick-and-mortar stores and locations. I think it is. You've got to staff those, and there's overhead there and taxes to pay and all this, that, and the other. It's kind of like McDonald's. I still swear up and down in the fast food industry, within 10 years, McDonald's will be 100% drive-thru. I don't think they'll give you the option to go inside anymore because nobody goes inside. You've got your coffee drinkers that are drinking one cup of 50-cent coffee or whatever it is that are sitting there for hours drinking.

And it's like, why do we need all this overhead and headache and probably higher insurance? Because somebody could slip and fall where if you're just in your car, you're in and out and never touched the problem. My brother-in-law conned me into going into one here a week or so ago. I hadn't been in a McDonald's in years. I don't eat at McDonald's. If I do, it's only for breakfast. I never go there for lunch or dinner, you know, usually ever.

And I know now why I don't go in, but I think if they still let you go in in 10 years, there'll be a stove and all the instructions, and you'll just make your own. Could be. They'll just charge you to use their facility, and you pick it up at the end and carry it out. The few times that I've been in, they're clearly catering to the drive-thru. It's like, you can see that this car's sitting here in line when you walk in, and that son of a bitch has been gone for 20 minutes by the time you get your food, because I think they're trying to shove you away. The counter is this wide now. Yeah. Like, they got rid of all the big counter.

There's a little iPad deal over here. You order. You grab your number yourself. You go sit. Excuse me. Sit down. They bring it to you. Real estate and look at construction costs nowadays. If I could physically cut this building in half and not have to have the whole seating area, the guy to clean it, the trays, the trash cans, the seats. Think of what that cuts off of a company their size. I mean, it's a shitload. So I really do think that's what it'll be. It all started going to shit when they got rid of the playgrounds, Tony. Yep. That's right. That's exactly right. Yep. Yep.

To think they even had those now is a little bit of a mind blow. Mm-hmm. You know? It is. Yeah, that'd be an instant lawsuit today. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be hard to wash all those bouncy ball deals you've got to jump into. It would. Yeah. Could you imagine that during COVID? Yeah. But shit, back then, I know Burger Kings around here had the playground. Yeah, back when you could talk to other people, not be offended, not be upset. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, in fact, the last McDonald's I was in, it's like you said, though, the counter was literally three feet wide with only one register. I mean, there wasn't multiples. And I think there was two, maybe three kiosks, which I just went up to look at one. I'm like, I wonder how this works. I have no fucking clue. I don't know if you got to have some special app. I don't know how that worked even to use it. No, you just.

Start pressing and just go through it just like running a tablet on anything else. Really? Yeah. I mean, it was fairly simple. And then do you swipe a card through it? Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. In fact, because I don't remember if one of the kids was with me or who it was, the part that we couldn't figure out was if you wanted a number one, it was on there. But if you just wanted two Big Mac sandwiches, how the hell do you just order two sandwiches only? I didn't get that deep into it. I'm sure it's kind of a cluster, but yeah.

We went into Steak and Shake that same weekend. He conned me into that, which I hadn't been into. I've been through the drive-thru, but I haven't been inside for years. Same deal. Really? Yeah, same deal. You have three kiosks, and you type it in, and you go sit down, and somebody brings it out. No kidding. We got a local bar and grill here. The robot brings your food. Yeah, I've never been in there and seen that, and it's just a local one-owner bar. I mean, ain't no chain or nothing. Yeah, just a mom-and-pop bar deal. Yeah.

Have you been in there and work okay? Yeah. I mean, I don't know that it saves a ton. Like the cook carries it out, sets it on the robot. The robot takes off. The waitress follows the robot, picks it off the robot, hands it to you. Most of the time. If she's busy, you can just grab it off the robot when it gets to your table and press home and it goes back. No shit. But generally they follow it. But it saves them from carrying a bunch of stuff they can't carry. Yeah. You know, because you only carry so much. I mean, it's got, you know, higher load capacity as far as that goes, but.

I'll be damned. It's kind of neat novelty, if nothing else, I guess. But their bar is also two levels and it can't go downstairs. Oh, well, yeah, that kind of. It only delivers to most of the tables. There's only a couple that I can't make it to. So, yeah, you start talking two stories, then that's not going to work. Yeah. What I find humorous about that whole scenario is that same said bar has full-length urinals, but a robot. And the full-length urinal has been gone for a long time. And I'm a big fan of the full-length urinal. Yeah.

But you don't see it. And there's no recent building with full-length urinals. Hardly ever. No, never. Not in our area anyway. You know, it's like, so they've got urinals from 1918 and they've got a robot from yesterday. Yeah. I'll be damned. But I like the full-length urinal.

And that's funny, too, because we only catch a very, very small glimpse of some of this. You know, like I'm sure Chicago, that's probably standard. Most of the restaurants have a robot. It might be. I'll never know. Hopefully. Yeah, same here. I don't plan on finding out anytime soon. Yeah. What a shithole. Yeah. Try to avoid that like the plague. Yeah. So what's going on in the world of politics? Ain't been following any of it lately. I don't follow it much. Try to stay out of it. Yeah. It just makes me mad. Oh, yeah. It just makes me mad that.

The dumbest among us seem to represent us. I would like to, and this is probably going to be a fucking rabbit hole that we shouldn't go down, but so how does this work?

Like with the war in Israel. So Hamas comes over and kills all these fucking people, takes a bunch of hostages, blows a bunch of shit up. So then Israel takes it to the 10th power and kicks her ass. They're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hey, you got to stop now. God damn it. You guys can't be retaliating like that. How the fuck does that work? The same thing every time Israel retaliates. Hey, you guys are kicking too much ass. Yeah. And then we forgot how good you were at it. Hold on. Hold on. Time out.

We're sorry. We're not going to do it again for another 20 years. And then when we do it and you bomb the shit out of us and take some more of our land, we're just going to bitch about it for another 20 years. They were showing that Gaza City, when it was fucking, what the hell was it? 92% of the buildings had been fucking leveled. I mean. That's okay. I'm sure the U.S. taxpayer will get the opportunity to rebuild it. Oh, I'm sure. But it's funny how the war in Ukraine just died. I mean, ain't heard a word about that. Yeah.

Yeah, whatever. If there even was one to begin with. Yeah, exactly. You don't know what to fucking believe anymore. No, that's no shit. Like, we didn't have any news anchors over there or anything. Like, I thought about that long before this deal. Like, if Russia wants to know anything about us, easily available on the news, easy to send people in the country, easy to spy on us. You want to know something about Russia? Good luck. Yeah. You can't hardly get anybody in there.

Not being mean here, but you've got to send probably a blonde white guy as your spy. Yeah. Otherwise, he's going to stick out like a sore thumb. Exactly. You know? Yeah.

So that takes away half your agents right off the get-go. It's so hard to figure out their culture and their language and this, that, and the other because they keep it so tight-lipped that it'd be way easier to infiltrate us than them, in my opinion. Well, and if you're in Russia, all you got to do is get a flight to Mexico and then just walk across the fucking border and you can go anywhere you want and they don't even know you're here. Yeah, you'd be a citizen. Get a driver's license. Hell, you can run for sheriff now. Yeah, exactly. It's fucking appalling. You can be a cop. Yeah. What scares me about all that border shit is

It looks like to me they're moving over a shitload of 22-year-old, 20 to 35-year-old military-age men. Yep. From all descents. And that's the part that scares the shit out of me. And they're not going to be military men on our side of the fight. Yeah, exactly. And I've always said this for years. And maybe I'm looking too far into this. Maybe I'm being stupid. But you'll see National Geographic channel this. They've always got these border shows and blah, blah, blah. Every fucking guy guarding the border is a Mexican. You know, this is...

Juan Gomez fucking gardening. You know what I mean? It's like we got the Fox Garden to fucking in-house here. What are we doing? It's never fucking Bill Thomas, border agent. It's always fucking Julio Garcia. I mean, come on. That's a good point. That's a very valid point. Yeah. He just came across yesterday. We made him a law enforcement officer.

Yeah, it's unbelievable. So I don't know. I smell a rat in the hen house there, but whatever. What do I know? I'm not running the show. Yeah, absolutely. That's sad part is I'm not sure who is. No. Yeah. I'm not sure they know. No, I don't think they do and don't think they care. All I know is it's getting pretty expensive to live in Joe Biden's America. Yeah, damn expensive. Which side of the aisle you're on, I don't care. I mean, I do care, but it's getting pretty pricey to live in America anymore. With no...

No end in sight. Like, you know, used to a cartload of groceries at Aldi's was $100. Walmart was $200. Your local grocery store was probably $300. Now it's $300 at Aldi's to get a cartload. And you don't have that. It's not a full cart. Yeah. And just like we said previously in this podcast, do you think machinery is going to come down? We're not sitting here saying machinery has come down. We're just saying we think it should based on interest. But so far it hasn't. But fucking shit's expensive. I mean, everything's high. Everything is.

ridiculously high. I don't see an end in sight for some of that. No, I don't either. Building materials and all that. I think a lot of this shit now is man-made shortages in a sense on lumber, whatever else. Some of those companies learned their lessons. They got rid of all their old inventory.

They said, hey, we're not going to stock up on this stuff anymore. We'll just produce what we can sell. You know? You know, and I always remember that as a young, or not a young child, but in my teens, you know, every summer it was these California wildfires. You know? Yeah. And it's like,

How the fuck have we not burnt that whole state down to where there's nothing left to burn, and now it's just new grit? But, you know, every fucking year, California wildfires, and it's like, God damn. I mean, but they always use that as an excuse. Like this, you're the old Canadian wildfire. You can't get no lumber now. Yeah, yeah. There was plenty of smoke from something. Didn't smell like wildfire to me, but there was plenty of smoke. Yeah, I agree. Which might have saved our ass in that drought, truthfully. It truthfully probably did. Yeah. The lack of sun probably...

helped us out on that yeah and i'm like you i don't know what it was maybe it was smoke maybe it wasn't but it didn't have an ashy smell to it no it didn't smell like a tree on fire to me but it also traveled a couple thousand miles before it got to me sure hard to say and i guess the other part that i have trouble with is i don't remember a lot of north wind this summer i mean canada's north of us yeah get a fucking north wind to get the smoke down here i mean or maybe you don't i don't know how this works well you would think so but yeah you would think you would

Yeah, we don't get a lot of north wind here. No, very seldom. Very seldom. It's usually pretty shitty when we do. Yep, but those were nice, bright, sunny days and just smoke blowing to beat hell. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe that's just the regular Mexican stink blowing up here. That's kind of what I wondered. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, who knows? Yeah. There again, we probably won't get the truth until it's too late. Oh, yeah, we never do. I mean, you know.

Look at all the stuff they're still holding the truth out on us for, you know? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. With no end in sight, you know, Kennedy files are going to be released in this year. And then, well, we've got to push her to this year and then this year and then this year. Yeah. By gosh, she's going to release them. And he saw him and he's like, oh, shit, I can't tell him this. Like, this is a little worse than I thought it was going to be. We better just hold off on that. We'll let a few of these papers go. But, yeah, we probably better hold off on that.

that's a rabbit hole I can dive down. Oh, I can't do 365 days a year. That whole deal intrigues the crap out of me, and I can give you my two cents on it, which don't amount to shit, but you can convince me of a new theory I'm not about every day. All I know is Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the guy. Yeah, he got hung out to dry. Classic case of wrong place, wrong time. Yeah. And I've always said that. So let's take...

gun control here in the u.s you know everybody always talks about it and you know they're going to take your guns and this and that and maybe they will maybe well i don't know but these people that always oh you they're going to get the lead first not saying they wouldn't or you didn't have the intention of doing that but they can set you up six ways from sunday when they hold all the cards yeah they probably told that guy he won a free book drawing he's gonna get 100 free books go to the fourth floor and pick out your 10 favorite books i agree yeah and then bang he's picking them out and there he is yep

It could be something as stupid as that. Yeah. Or it could even go as far as the fact that maybe he was involved and had intentions of doing it, but he didn't get to the crow's nest in time and somebody else popped him. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he got up there and was like, well, shit, somebody left my rifle up here. Yeah. And then about that time, he was like, oh, now I see why that might have... I'm sure he had some role in it, but...

Getting that many shots off in that amount of time with a magic bullet, I don't think so. Ain't no way. And then you're not leaving the shit behind, or I wouldn't think you would. It's intriguing to me the little things that play such a role in that. Like, Kennedy was wearing a back brace that day, so he really couldn't bend over and get out of the way. You know, like, that car was set up weird. The seating arrangement, they had tried to get...

They tried to get Conley to ride in a different car. They tried to put somebody else in there. There's a hole. I mean, you just keep digging down that rabbit hole. Like, that thing is like layers of an onion. It is. You just start peeling it, and it just starts making you cry. Like, it's just one thing after another of circumstances. There had to be some pretty high power players in that. And the Zapruder film, yo. Yeah, they weren't counting on that guy. Exactly. So that just throws a whole other dynamic into it. Yeah. I don't know. I saw something a while back. Like, the guy that was leading the Warren Commission was –

Kennedy just fired him for something else, and he ends up being in charge of the investigation. He didn't see nothing. He couldn't find anything. You're all clear. And it makes you wonder when something big like that happens.

How much stuff actually was coincidental? Like, you know, that guy might have had every intention of doing that job correctly, but now it looks bad because I just got fired. Yeah. But maybe he didn't either. I don't know. Yeah, you never know. You don't know what to believe. I've seen one theory that the Secret Service guy that was carrying the M16, like, he'd never done that before. He wasn't normally on protection detail. When they hit the gas on the car, he accidentally discharged the round. That's how he got hit from the back. Yep. That's believable. It's plausible. It is. It's plausible. It makes sense. They never inventoried his ammunition.

you know, so on and so forth. That would explain why they cleaned up the car so quick. Like, there's just so many avenues you can go down on that deal, and I like to go down all of them. I like to dig into that. My gut tells me Lee Harvey Oswald was not involved. Lyndon Johnson was involved. Yeah. But that's just me. At a way bigger level, for sure. Yeah. I could be totally wrong, but that's what my gut tells me. Yeah. Yeah.

Bottom line is, if you call your kid by their middle name, full name, bad shit's going to happen. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, don't do that. We don't need any three-part names. Just stop. Yeah. Don't get cutesy with the initials. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that shit always does intrigue me, though. Just the way that certain stuff truly did play out by coincidence. Yeah. Truly did. Yeah.

happened to play into the hand of what happened that day. And, of course, you know, 40, 50, 100 years later after the fact, like, it's easy to come up with a conspiracy theory. The Titanic, like, you can convince me about that. There's a lot of circumstances there. The Challenger. The Challenger. There's a bunch of those. It's like, you know, when it initially happens, you get told a story, you believe that, and then you start hearing some other facts slash theories, and you're like...

Well, that makes sense. You know, like I, I do love a good conspiracy theory, but I'm not one of these. Every time something happens, well, it's a conspiracy. You know, I'm not, I'm not that guy, but no, but I do think there is enough of that shit that goes on that we're not being told the truth about. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And some of it, maybe they're right. Maybe, maybe we're not ready for the truth, you know? Well, they could be, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that Kennedy deal truly is a mystery because, I mean, there is literally 400 avenues you could go down. Well, that makes sense. Well, so does that. So we're going to take the guy that supposedly killed him.

And we're going to march him through a place where a known mobster gangster can get in with a firearm and walk right up to him. That's the level of security. Okay. Which I guess, you know, Epstein didn't kill himself either. This is true. You know, maybe our security on some of these things isn't that good. Yeah.

Yeah. Funny how those problems just go away when you need them to. Yeah, it is. It is. I think Oliver Stone, you know, done a phenomenal job with the movie. That's a great movie. I can watch that movie over and over. I can too. Then I get so wrapped up into it. I pause it. I'm Google searching stuff. Yeah, because I like how they did show sort of both. Yeah. You know, he was the lawyer fighting for the right thing, but yet you had the guy that was feeding him the information that.

It says it's bullshit. A lot of power players there. I don't think the Cubans had nothing to do with it personally. I don't think they're that smart. I don't think they were organized enough or had the resources for it. The mafia, for damn sure. The military industrial complex. The military industrial complex had a lot to do with it, yeah. Pretty sure that his predecessor tried to warn him about that. I think he did, old Ike. Yeah, Ike was the last...

I guess I won't call him the last, but one of the best presidents we ever had, honestly. Yeah, he didn't get much credit. He didn't get much credit for anything because he wasn't a flashy guy. Yeah. You know, he was just a, this is what needs to be done, I'm going to get shit done type guy. Yep. He was the last pre-TV president. In a TV era, Ike never wins, and Ike gets criticized a lot. Like, Ike's thing was if there's a really big problem, he'd go out and play a couple rounds of golf.

Think about it. Hey, this is the solution to this. This is what I'm going to do. He'd get crucified now for doing that. Oh, absolutely. Depending on which side of the aisle. It was on how the media was leaning that day, you know. But still, yeah, he was pretty concerned about the tail starting to wag the dog. Yeah, he was right. And I mean, this is coming from a guy who's in the military. His whole life. Yeah, he saw it coming. He knew how it worked. Mm-hmm.

I would say if I could go back in time and just shoot from the hip, I would have loved to have been alive in the 40s and 50s. And I might totally regret that. I mean, just from the outside looking in, you know, you were still a free America. I mean, you could do whatever you wanted. Nobody was up your ass. No, it wasn't a good time. I mean, it was just different, you know, especially the post-war. I mean, I think I saw a stat one time. I don't think I ever saw any combat.

Is that right? Because he missed World War I, and he was in charge by World War II. Yeah. So he never actually saw any actual. That's probably true. I think. Don't quote me on that, but I think that's. I mean, obviously, he saw a lot of the things play out. He was obviously a great Allied commander. Yeah. One of the best quotes on that I saw one time, he asked this Russian general, whatever their term for it is, hey, how do you guys get through these German lines? He's like, oh, it's real easy. He's like, what you do is you just send a shitload of people through the middle.

I was like, well, then what do you do? He's like, oh, they get killed to shit. He's like, but then you send a whole bunch more in that same path, and eventually while they're reloading and shit, then you got them. And I was like, yeah, we're going to have to come up with a better plan than now. We're not sacrificing a bunch of people up the middle all the time. And the Russian guy was like, well, that's how we're doing it. We got a bunch of people. We're just sending them up the middle. It's like, all right, well, that's a great strategy, but we got to come up with something else. You're not sending the guys in the back with guns. You're telling them to pick one up on their way. We got to have a little better plan than that.

Could you imagine today, let's go back because I love learning and talking about World War II. Could you imagine today, World War breaks out, and so the government comes out and says...

everybody's got to sacrifice your iPhone. The one you got, you're getting rid of and you're not getting a new, you know, it's just cell phones are gone. Oh my gosh. I mean, you'd have a bigger war here than you would overseas. Absolutely. But back then that's what you did. You, everybody pitched in and that's what you did. All your scrap metal, this, that, and the other. I just saw one, you know, bells were prevalent. And the frequency of a bell is curing all these sicknesses apparently. And then they melted all the bells down to make you sick. Right. And I'm like, well, didn't they also melt those down because they needed the material? Exactly. Exactly.

Like maybe sort of, a little bit. Maybe it's conspiracy theory. I don't know. But whatever. Yeah, getting people to pitch in on that and rations. And that was my father-in-law's point one time. Like the rations weren't necessarily about shortages as much as sacrifice at home to support the war effort. Exactly. Keep you involved. And that was a side of it I'd never really thought of. And that's probably a really valid point. Like now there's wars going on all the time.

That doesn't really affect my, you know, golf war one. Like, of course I wasn't super old when that happened. We were 12. I was pumped up. I remember at the end of it, my dad bought me a shirt, said desert storm. We came, we saw, we kicked ass. And I love that shirt. Couldn't wear it anywhere. Cause I was, you know? Yeah. Yeah. We were 12. We're not 12, you know, but I love that shirt, but it's like, you know, I was super patriotic about that. Well, not that I haven't been about the rest of them, but then, you know, it's like,

The Iraq war. Okay. Well, there's WMDs. We got to go get them. Okay. Well, come to find out there wasn't. Yeah. Yeah. Shit. Sorry. You know, it's like, maybe we'll find out all the facts first and then dive into some of this. Like, I don't know. I'm still patriotic about it. I'm still, I'm still super pro military.

But you just don't get that involved in it. Like, when Gulf War I happened, news coverage to that level was so new. Yeah, exactly. We watched the war on TV. We watched the war on TV. Now there's a war allegedly going on in Ukraine. You can't find actual legitimate coverage of it anywhere. Yeah. We see more on TikTok about this war than the news ever shows. And the funny part is, is there's a guy, God damn it, and...

I might say this wrong, but he's big on tech talk. I can, I can see his face. I can't remember his name on there. Got several hundred thousand followers. And he followed the heat of, you want to go on cheap vacation, go to a fucking war zone. Cause like flights are cheap. Hotels are cheap, whatever. So he went to Ukraine and this was all just within the last month goes over there.

You would have thought you were in downtown New York City, just people everywhere. I mean, not a blip on the radar, you know. And he wasn't promoting it like, oh, there's no war going on here. I mean, he wasn't doing that. That would have never been the case 20 years ago. I mean, you just stayed as far away from that place as you could have, and everybody's hunkered down and blah, blah, blah, you know.

He was just kind of making the point that maybe what you see on TV isn't always reality. Exactly. And he's, and he blatantly said on the video, you know, I'm not saying there's not a war going on in this country, but it's not just the entire country of Ukraine getting annihilated on a daily basis. Yeah. I just, my wife and I just watched the movie spy game the other day with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. Great movie. Always, always enjoy watching it or whatever. But part of that's during, you know, Beirut and Lebanon, that deal.

It's like that deal, same deal. Like stuff's getting blown up everywhere, but people keep kind of showing up randomly. Like he goes over there as a photographer and then there's these other people that are just there. Like, why would you go to that in the middle of a war zone? It didn't seem like a great plan. I mean, he was there for a different purpose, obviously it was a cover, but there's still plenty of other people there that shouldn't have been there. They could have left long before then. Right.

Yeah, that whole World War II, I mean, and we're damn lucky we won the son of a bitch, to be honest with you. There was a lot of coincidences, or not coincidences, a lot of things that fell our way. That could have easily went the other way. Could have easily went the other way, yeah. Yeah. That was God's hand in it, I suppose. But, you know, like one of the things on D-Day, and I wish I could find this again. I was watching a documentary or something on one time. Like, we dropped some paratroopers behind enemy lines. There was a bridge we needed, and we needed to make damn sure that they didn't blow it up.

And, like, we only ended up with a handful of guys there because we missed the target by a long ways. And, like, these five guys...

There was one German tank there, and he thought we had more people than that. So he left because he didn't want to get destroyed. We ended up keeping this bridge and then using it later and so on and so forth. Like, if that one tank would have just kept rolling. Yeah, he'd have killed them all. He'd have killed those five guys and, you know, a couple of rifles. And, you know, they got it. And then if they needed to blow it up, they could have. We wouldn't have had it. We wouldn't have had control of it, so on and so forth. And that was just like day two. Yeah. You know? That's one regret that I do have is not asking my grandpa and grandma both.

as to what the sentiment was back home. Did you have shitty media back then? Because around here, I see it on TikTok. All these people, fuck Israel, you know, this and that. You've always got both sides. I think everybody was pro-Israel.

Pro-let's-kick-their-ass, especially after we got bombed at Pearl Harbor. Yeah, and I'm just speaking for myself here. I can't help but think you were shunned had you talked like that in the 40, you know, that you were against the war. Yeah, you'd have been in trouble, I think. Yeah, and I could be totally wrong, but... You know, the weird part about that, I don't know if weird's the right word, but, you know, we were so invested in the Western Front and in Germany, even though they didn't attack us. I mean, they did declare war on us just because they were allies or part of the Axis power, but...

We had a ton of German ancestry, but it's like, well, the Russian part of that, ah, shit, them guys do whatever they want. We ain't got no Russians. Yeah, right. Let them do whatever they want. That's right. World War II starts because Germany invades Poland.

What do we do when we're free pulling? We give it to the Russians. Now, do you think the Polish people were better off underneath the Germans where they had unlimited technology and all this stuff, or underneath the Russian reign where they didn't have shit? No food, no nothing. Agreed. I don't know. I kind of think the Polish people got screwed over in that deal. Yep. You know? Yep. And I will say this now.

Because he's passed away. And I'm going to clarify by saying this. I do not endorse his behavior in any way, shape, or form. I'm just saying. So my grandpa, he lied to get into the military at 16. And he went to World War II.

But till the day that guy died, he hated Japanese people. I mean, fucking hated them. I mean, anything that was fucked up, goddamn Japanese piece of shit. You know what I mean? Even though it was a Mercedes Benz or whatever, it was a Japanese piece of shit. I've run into several World War II. Anybody that was in a Pacific theater was pretty much that way. That's where he was. He was in the Navy. Like, that was pretty cruel. Like, the Western Front had its battles, obviously. Right. But I think the...

The Pacific Theater was a whole other level of gruesome and bad. Well, it was Vietnam. Only the Japanese had money. Exactly. And we're a lot more brutal. A lot more brutal. Baton, death march, all that stuff. Next level screwed up over there. Yep. I'll never forget. And I'm confident it was the very last conversation I had with my grandpa. He died of a freak operation at the hospital. But we were down there. I think it was on Mother's Day.

and just was shooting the shit. And he gave me a bunch of old family pictures. And after I got them home, there was some of that stuff that I didn't know. So when we was down on Mother's Day, we was going back through some of them pictures because I wanted him to tell me who was who and blah, blah, blah. And he was always in the Navy. You know, like I say, lied at 16, got in the Navy. And he said, you didn't know I was in the Marines, did you? And my dad said, well, because he thought he was 87. But, I mean, he had a clear mind. And dad just thought he misspoke. He said, no, you was in the Navy. And he said, no, I was in the Marines.

And dad's like, what are you talking about? He's like, I enlisted in the Navy and I was in the Navy. And then when Guadalcanal come along, they come on the Navy ship and they're like, all you fuckers right here, you're now Marines. You're going in first. And it's like, we ain't trained for none of this shit. We're in the fucking Navy. And they're like, don't know, don't care. Yeah, too bad.

You're fucking Marines. You're Marines today. So, yeah. So, he was actually in the Navy. Simplify. Get up front. Exactly. So, he was actually in the Navy and the Marines. And then after that skirmish, whatever was done, I don't know if this was a two-month deal, whatever, then they were enlisted back in the Navy, and he was a CB then, and built runways and whatever, buildings, you know, whatever. But...

And it was cool because that was the last conversation we ever had. Would have never known that in a million years. And, you know, and dad just thought he misspoke at first, but no, he was keeping that secret for. Yeah. Yep. Sure enough. Yeah. And my dad would have been for 70, 65 years old at the time or whatever. Never had a clue. He was in the Marines and the Navy. Yeah. That's crazy. But that was just the way they rolled back then. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck you guys. You're Marines. Today we need Marines. Hell didn't worry about the rifle. Just stand there. Block a bullet. Would you please?

But they always said in World War II that a lot of Midwestern kids joined the Navy because they'd never seen water. They wanted to see water. The kids on the coast, they grew up at the ocean. They didn't care. They were whatever. But they said a lot of the people who enlisted in the Navy were out of the Midwest. That's probably right. My great uncle was in the Navy. Yep. Wasn't a lot of Navy ships around here. Yep. Yeah.

I don't know. The Navy would have been cool, but, man, being trapped on this. I mean, one bad hit from a fucking torpedo, and that's it, boys. That's better than going island to island with a rifle. You're right. Or a flamethrower or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think I'm all good. Maybe the Navy ain't selling so bad on some of that. I'm not saying it was easy. No. Don't take me the wrong way on that, but, yeah.

And to think back then, it wasn't any sort of technology. I mean, it was for the day, but compared to today, I mean... The sub's a whole other level of... I just watched you 5-7-1 the other day. I did, too. I did, too. I watched it about a month ago. Yeah, I just watched it about a week ago, and I'm like, trying to run one of those where everything's hand valves, there's no electronics, no nothing. Like, you got to turn this valve so far and then turn that valve so far in the heat of battle. Yeah.

I'm not claustrophobic. It wouldn't bother me to crawl under a house, whatever. But, man, a submarine, that's a whole different thing. I don't know if I could do that or not. I'm too tall for a submarine. That's what I keep going with. I can't do that. Too tall. Yeah. And, of course, the whole Ocean Gate deal this summer where they tend to implode. Yeah. Well, you can only go so deep, Tony. Anybody that looked at that thing knew it was going to blow up. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, but yeah, those World War II guys, and I'm not taking nothing away from Vietnam anymore. No, no, no, absolutely not. I don't mean that at all, but World War I especially was extremely crude. No technology whatsoever. I mean, it was fucking handy. Dig a trench and shoot back and forth. Yeah, and World War II had considerably better technology than World War I, but still was way behind Vietnam. What you got to give the World War II credit guys for is, yes, they were welcomed home as champions, but...

You know, they went, like I said, a lot of them went at 16, 17. And didn't come home for four years. Came home as men and just went right back to work. If they had PTSD, they didn't tell anybody. They just grabbed a fifth of whiskey and went to work. Yep. You know, that was just the, there was shit to be done and

Going to work was way easier than taking Germany. Correct. So we'll just push through. Correct me if I'm wrong. I wasn't in the military, never have been. But I think now, you know, if I'm in the Army and they send me to Afghanistan, I think within about a year you're going to come home, at least for a while. You might go back. Yeah. But you're going to. You rotate back at some point. Yeah. There was a lot of them guys went and were there for four fucking years. Yeah. Without ever coming home. I mean. Yeah. Yeah.

Of course, it was a different deal, too. It was, yeah. I mean, it was... It was a world war, and it was... And it truly was. We were short on people. Yeah. I mean, our military was dog shit. I mean, I don't mean that disrespectfully, but up in... You know, World War I was a joke as far as our military. And like I say, as far as we were just depleted, we didn't have nothing. Yeah.

And by World War II, we'd start to build it back up. And then once the draft started, it's like, you know, it's shit or get off the pot. Yeah, it's time to build it fast. And boy, we did. And that's how we beat them. We outproduced them. Exactly. But our shit wasn't getting blown up. We weren't having to build factories on the side of a mountain. Right. You know, we didn't have slaves to do it either. It's a miracle that war never made it to U.S. soil. Which I know there was such and such in Alaska and Pearl Harbor. I don't mean it that way, but I'm talking the mainland U.S. Yeah.

Well, the fact that we were well-armed as a country had a lot to do with that. It did. They knew that wouldn't go so well. That would be a long, bloody trip. That would be hard, though. You're living in a fucking war zone. I mean, could you imagine in 1940, you know, 44, Germany, 45? Yeah. Where, I mean, it's just... It's getting carpet bombed on the daily. Just demolished the entire city. I mean, back then there wasn't much thought about...

collateral damage. You just bomb the whole fucking city and whatever happens happens. Yeah, yeah, which in the middle of a big war is the way it should be. I agree. At some level, you know, just picking out military targets, yeah, sometimes you gotta get a little more than that. That's sad, but that's true. And, you know, the older you get, you do look at that stuff

I mean, I would never encourage any of my kids to join the military now just because we don't do shit like we did in World War II. You know, we fought that fucker to win. Yeah. Just plain and simple. Where now, we go to Afghanistan, get a whole shitload of people killed, just leave all the fucking shit here. Just here, you can have it. We're just going to come back to haunt us. We didn't keep any territory. We didn't free anybody. We just...

You or I are no more free today by going to Afghanistan than we were. I mean, and I'll still argue that. I mean, we're not. That was my dad's thing. And like in Vietnam, it's like, oh, Hill 2150. We're going to take it tomorrow. Okay, what's at the top of it? Nothing. It's Viet Cong. Yeah. So what are we going to do when we get taken? Oh, we're going to leave. They'll take it again tomorrow. And then two days from now, we'll have to take it again. All right. Well, this makes perfect sense. You know, at least in World War II, we were. There was a goal. It was uniformed soldiers. Advancing, yeah.

So you knew who the enemy was for the most part, and there was territory to take. You weren't willingly giving the ship back. You didn't just go into Holland and take it and back back out. Holland's ours now, fuckers.

The part that always amazes me of that is, what the hell is everybody doing in Africa? I know. It's like, hey, send one of our best guys. This is Germany. Let's send him to Africa and let him roll around over there because the other guy has it so screwed up. And it's like you talk, though, where stuff goes your way, whether it's the hand of God or whatever. Just like a deal like that, you take one of the best German commanders and you send him to Africa of all places. I mean, the guy clearly could have had...

I weren't, weren't they doing that to bail the Italians out? I think it was. Yeah. And then, I mean, don't take this the wrong way. I like Rommel and the fact that Rommel was a good military guy and he knew that Hitler needed to be taken down. So he wasn't a hundred percent all bad, maybe 99, but he wasn't a hundred percent all bad.

But, like, yes, he dominated there for a while. But then once they figured out that he had an inside guy on U.S. Communications and they got rid of that guy and they started feeding him false information, he ended up losing more territory than he had gained. They ended up further behind than when they started in the end. Once they, you know, it's pretty easy to win if you've got the other team's playbook. I mean, ask Harbaugh at Michigan. Apparently you're not supposed to do that, which just makes common sense to me that you would watch the other team's signs, but whatever. Yeah.

But yeah, once we took that away from him, he didn't fare near as well. Yeah. To me, that's the part of war that intrigues me the most. Yeah. Is the behind the scenes. The side stories. Yeah, exactly. I love that stuff. Yeah. I don't even know what the Italians were going after in Africa. There had to be something. I assume natural resources of some fashion. Yeah.

Which still baffles me to this day, not to change the subject, but Africa could be an absolute powerhouse in this world. I mean, they've got more natural resources from top to bottom of that continent than you could ever imagine, but they can't quit killing each other to capitalize on any of it. They can't manage it. It is sad. They cannot manage it. It is sad. It is sad. But, you know, like on a side note...

What's your thought? Everybody goes on and on about German engineering. What do you think is a mechanic? Is it good or is it bad? I don't know. It just screams complicated to me. Yeah. I've seen that on German diesel tractors. People just rave over. But from what I've seen, it's like it's a little bit complicated. I'm not saying it's not good or bad. You know, their machine work was all probably great back in the day. But it's always complicated. They always take the long way around. But I think over there, like...

You're not going to travel 30 miles to this machine shop. Everybody's got a lathe in the middle of their garage back then or whatever. Well, we'll just make this and so on and so forth. Like, that's neat, but it just looks complicated to me. Yeah, makes sense. For the most part. Like, the quality is there for the most part, but like in the world of tractor pulling, okay? You name me one vehicle that's powered by anything German. Yeah, that's true. There isn't any. There's a shitload of Allisons, at least at one time. You know, now they're hard to come by, but every modified pulling tractor at one time had an Allison on it.

See anybody pulling German stuff? Like, there's Allison teams in Germany right now to this day. They're not using any German engines. To my knowledge, Germany never had an engine that was worth a shit for anything like that. Like, I don't know what they used in their tanks and their big boats, but apparently it wasn't that good. Makes sense. You know? Or maybe they all got annihilated and there was just none left. Maybe that's what it was. Well, I always wondered. Like, I never had a German diesel tractor of any kind. You know, the guys that got them just rave about it. I'm not saying they're not good. I don't know, but it's...

Is it sort of like a John Deere Soundguard? Oh, this is the greatest fucking thing in the world. Well, I always ask my dad, I'm like, how'd you work on those back then? He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, we didn't have any metric tools. Well, come with a toolkit. I'm like, yeah. A set of end wrenches doesn't tear the engine down and put it back together. You're not twerking a head down with an end wrench. Yeah. You know, like, oh, we had this, that. You guys couldn't have had shit for metric tools back then. I wouldn't have thought. I mean, shit, even when we were kids, there wasn't much metric shit back then. No, no. Even in our life. Absolutely not.

The German diesels don't wind me up any. I always avoid those. I'll take the American diesel every time. Is that right? Yeah. I guess, do they run forever? I mean, are they fairly quality, just a bitch to work on, or are they just not as good, do you feel like? I don't know. They're okay. I mean, the American version of the same size is better. What was different on the German, like a 656 with a German diesel? What was so different about the German diesel? I mean...

I know you showed me something on the fuel pump. It was totally different. The fuel pumps were always a little goofy. They weren't super popular. Like, the American stuff had, well, the later ones would have had a Model 100 on it, which was fairly simple. That was American Bosch stuff. The German diesel pump's a little goofy. You know, it's manual kill, which doesn't really hurt anything, but a little odd for everybody else to just shut up. Well, I eat stuff, I'll shut off with a throttle. Nobody else can figure that out, but...

But, you know, I'm trying to think here. Like, you can't get the – I'm trying to think. Boy, it's been a long time since I had one of those apart. But, like, you can't get the rod through the counterweights, if I remember right, or something. Like, the counterweights overhang that or something goofy there. Like, you've got to slide in and roll the crank around. And there's some dumb shit there. Why did IH ever go with that German diesel? What was the draw? My personal opinion is they had a factory in Germany that could produce stuff.

And I don't think the U.S. factories could keep up. Gotcha. I think was part of it. Like, maybe I'm wrong there, but that's always kind of the way it seemed to me. Like, they were still using German diesels clear into the 32 and 3088s. No shit. I didn't know that. Yeah. I thought that was like a 656. 886s were all German diesels. Like... No shit. I didn't know that. Personally, my personal opinion is...

The American plants were union, and they couldn't produce enough. So, well, we still got this shit over here in Germany. We'll just keep putting those in. I'll be damned. They don't wind me up any. I'm not seeking out anything German, a German diesel for anything. Did they use that motor in trucks or anything, or just strictly tractors? No, just tractors. Just tractors.

Just tractors. Their truck business was so big at that point in time, I think they were maxed out on capacity. Probably. Like I say, a 686, you could get either way. Well, why do I want the other version? Well, I think that's all they could get of the American version, so they had to put Germans in some of them. Yeah, I didn't realize an 886 was just rare around here. I'm not saying it was a rare tractor, but around here it was. I didn't realize it was all German diesel. Yeah, I think. I'm pretty sure. Everyone I ever saw was. Hmm.

Yeah, I didn't know. Everybody just raves about them, but I didn't know if it was. They don't wind me up any. They're not bad, but you put much power to them, and then they had gas going to leak or this, that, and the other. Dad and I actually fabbed up. We had a guy just last summer. How old was this summer? I took a couple pictures of it, I think. I should have did TikTok on it, and I didn't. With a 756 German diesel.

Got a bigger auger, needed more power. Wanted a turbo kit on it. So, of course, you can't buy M&W turbo kits anymore for it. So we fabbed up the whole deal and made it come out of the stock hole in the hood. It actually came out really nice. Yeah. And it had pretty good power when we were done, you know, enough, you know. And it was kind of neat. Are them things hard to get parts for, the German diesel itself now? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. I mean, your common stuff, pistons and that stuff, probably not too bad. But your other little knickknacks, yeah, it's just getting hard to come by now.

But that was the only thing different was the German diesel motor. Nothing else on the tractor was any different, right? No, the rest of it was the same. Yeah, so I assume the tractor was built here, but the motor come from Germany. Yeah, I assume. Yeah. I assume so. Yeah. And it's funny that now, like deer, you know, most of that shit, that size of a tractor has all went back to being made in Germany now. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. My mom actually just toured that plant here this summer. Yeah. You, uh...

Well, there's not a tractor under a hundred and some horse made in the United States, is there? Correct. By anybody. Right. To my knowledge. Yeah, that's correct. Which is, is crazy to think of, but that's the way it is. Yeah. I can't help but think that this ain't going to come back to haunt us one of these fucking days, moving all this shit. You would think. Out of here, but what do I know? I guess that's why I'm not running the show, but. I don't know. It's a, it's a little scary when you think about, you know, wartime production and how dependent we are on other countries.

Like, there again, that's how we won World War II. We weren't. Exactly. You know, we had the iron ore here. We had the factories here. We had the manpower. When Rockola Jukebox is going to start making M1 Garands, you know, we don't even have that now. Yeah. Yeah. International Harvest was making them. Yeah, I mean, at one point in time, there was a bunch of companies making M1 Garands. I mean, that was shit you've never even thought of, you know. Yeah. Ford was making airplanes. Like, they told Henry Ford that they needed more airplanes and...

I don't remember what the deal on it was now. They built that plant, and they were hoping for X number, and he's like, we can blow that out of the water. And, like, they surpassed what they thought they could produce by a huge margin, you know. But Henry Ford was kind of pretty good at the assembly line thing. So that was kind of his deal. And it makes you wonder how many of them guys, Henry Ford, Rockefellers, all them guys that made just fortunes off of going to war. Yeah. You know, I'm sure they all had their hands in it. I mean, yeah.

Henry Ford was a pacifist though, wasn't he? Yeah, he was. He was against the war, but they talked him into producing stuff for it because he had the capability to do it. Yeah, that was always kind of the big hoopty-do that he was not necessarily against it, but he was just a pacifist. Wasn't that airplane factory, the one that he ended up building, it was supposed to be like a mile long, but that was going to run it into a Democrat district? So he turned it 90 and run it.

Really? And put an L in it, I think. No shit. So that it wouldn't bump into the other district, I think. I'll be damned. I think I read that somewhere. Yeah. And then later on, he sold it to GM to build transmissions or something, which, excuse me, always baffled me a little bit. Like, you're building airplanes, and then you end up building transmissions. They're like, transmission's pretty small, airplane's pretty big. Yeah. But, yeah, I think they humped out a bunch of those.

You know, I've never went back and actually looked at the stats. You're like, how many planes did we lose in World War II? You know, how many aircraft carriers? How many, you know, it'd be mind-boggling. It would be mind-boggling. Like, at one time, Ford had some badass engine that was like all next-level shit that they wanted to use in planes and tanks, I think.

But since he wasn't politically connected, they're like, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, we're not going to use it, though. Thanks, though. No kidding. So then they end up cutting a few cylinders off. It was a V12, I think, originally. And then they cut it down to a V8 for something else. But it was, you know, he put...

thousands of man hours into it. And it was, it was like the ultimate engine, but they're like, yeah, yeah. We don't really like you though. So you're not getting the contract. Yeah. So see that shit was even prevalent back then. Thanks, but no thanks. You're good. Which I assume was a lot of them tanks back then gas powered, not diesel. I don't know. I mean, I assume diesel wasn't real popular then. I mean, you know, I don't know. I,

I don't know. I think it was some of both. Yeah. But, you know, like the airplane thing, like the Allison was cool, but it wasn't quite enough. Like that one plane wouldn't really fly. And then they put the Merlin in it, which was the British version of the Allison, more or less, with a little more technology. And they're like, oh, shit, this thing's pretty badass. Yeah. It just needed more power. Most things in life can be solved with more power, Tony. That's right. Now, my grandpa had a brother that he was in the glider division, which...

I don't think you're going to fucking get me in this paper airplane and put a rope on it and then get me up in the air and then cut the fucking rope and then we're going to glide into fucking Germany or wherever. That seems like a one-and-done mission. Yeah. What'd they call them? Not sky coffins, but it was something like, you know, basically, you're dead once you get in this fucking thing. I mean, he did. But he made it through, but yeah, it was not a good deal. I got to think the alumni parties for those were pretty thin, though. It couldn't have been a lot of guys made it out of that. No, I don't think so either. You're basically getting in a wooden structure with...

paper canvas on it and you're going to glide this bitch right on down into the fucking front lines. You know, you think about World War II and it's like, you know, when the Germans took Poland, a lot of their shit was still on horseback. Yeah.

And then by the end, they had jet airplanes. Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. In less than 10 years. Yeah, and Hitler's like, nah, we don't really need those. If they would have launched that program when it was available, holy cow. By the end, when they were trying to do it, they literally didn't have anywhere to launch them from. Have you ever seen that where they move them up the mountain sideways and try to launch them off the top of that mountain? But we just kept bombing the shit out of it. But that escalator-ish type deal is still kind of sort of there. Yeah. You know.

That's the crazy thing. You look at the landscape over there in some of those places that got bombed heavily. It's like, where did this huge-ass hole come from? From a bomb. Yeah. Misguided one. Maybe it didn't hit where it was supposed to, but there's a big-ass hole there, and we never took the time to fill it in. Yeah. And when you start talking over there, there is no way you could have fought soldiers in that. I mean, it's straight up and down mountains. I mean, there's no way you could have done it. Yeah. Yeah, it is crazy. It is crazy.

And that's where I need to go back and read up more on like World War I. I don't know much about World War I. No, I don't either. And a lot of people don't realize either, though, that that's where a lot of your chemical warfare, you know, they used mustard gas and all that shit. Yeah, it was nasty. Heavily on World War I. About killed Hitler. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then somebody let him live. Yep. You know, they had him dead to rights and let him go. I'd like to be that guy. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Ain't that funny, though? Could have saved six million people. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the most primitive numbers. That's just the Jews. We're not counting everybody else. He easily saved 6 million people, but I let him go. Yeah. That's just the world playing out in bigger hands than you have. Yeah, for sure. That's why he had his mustache like he did. Yeah. Because his mask was the mask. Once I get popular, it will be the style. Yeah, that didn't really play out. No, it didn't. Do you think he really committed suicide or do you think he slipped out the back? I don't know enough about it to comment either way. I truly don't. I mean...

I don't trust the Russians. Right. And then whatever data they had later on kind of proved not to be him. You know, there's some pictures from South America that look an awful lot like him. Right. But can a guy with that kind of ego just hang out in South America for another 40 years? Like... Yeah, I... Without trying to flex a little bit? Like, I don't know. I mean, obviously, tons of Germans ended up in South America. I mean, you...

You see the documentaries on that. It's like, oh, yeah, that's not native structures. That's German shit there. So obviously they made it there, some of them. I don't know that he could have held it off unless they, once they got him off all the drugs and they're finally like, hey, dude, I can see that going either way. I can see him being so proud that he refused to leave, and I also can see him being on the next thing smoking and been out of there 20 hours before they ever thought about it. Because when you bring that to modern times...

Saddam Hussein was a lot like a Hitler. And, you know, he ended up fleeing on the run, found him in a frigging foxhole. Yeah, found him in a hole. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. I could go with, I mean, my gut says no. I think he actually died, whether it was suicide or actually got clipped. At least we pulled Saddam to justice and had him on trial and this, that, and the other as opposed to bin Laden that we supposedly got who probably died of diabetes four years before that. Right. But, yeah. Yeah.

After we funded him for 25 years. Yeah, exactly. I couldn't figure out how he rose to power even though we've been funneling him shit. Yeah, Bill Clinton had him dead to rights numerous times. Nah, we're not going to get tangled up in that. Yeah, he ain't that bad a guy. It'll be fine. Yeah. Still going to have a hard time convincing me that those dipshits could fly a plane, but hey, whatever.

Yeah, that's, like you said earlier, you know, in the heat of the moment when that all happens, you know, this is what you saw, this is what you think happened, you're all gung-ho. But then once things have cooled off and 10 years later, you're like, I don't know. I don't know. It's a little sketchy. I'm not ready to just jump out and say. Because there's always some side story, right? Like, okay, these planes hit the Twin Towers, right? And, you know, September 12th, we're arm-to-arm, we're united, right?

We're going to find these assholes and we are hunting them down, which I'm all for. And that was September 12th was a great day in America for the unity and the fact that we banded together for the first time since probably World War II, honestly. But then you get the backstory later. It's like, why'd they immediately haul that scrap steel off?

Like, clear out of the country. What we did keep is locked away in some warehouse that you can't get to. Like, there's just so many things that seem a little bit fishy on all that. This shit at the Pentagon, we literally have a flash is all we have. Yeah. I mean, and I'm not saying. It can't be the only camera they had on that deal. Yeah. This is the fucking Pentagon. And that thing sets where it sets, so it can't be hit. And magically, this guy, let's take like 20 minutes worth of flying lessons and, you know, played it on Nintendo, can fly it in there. I don't know.

Where'd the wings go? Eh, we're not sure. They must never hit there. It just has a round hole. Happened to hit the computer where the $2.3 trillion information was kept. That's the part that we forgot to mention was the $2.3 trillion. We just had it on that one computer, and I guess the investigation's over. Yep. Damn the luck, you know. We happened to mention it yesterday, and today it's gone. And you hate to be that way, but I guess this day and age...

I leave anything on the table. I'm not saying... I think you have to be that way at some point, though. I do, too. Because there's so many things that we're told. Fluoride. We'll just use fluoride. When I was a kid, oh, you go to the dentist, they're packing this stuff with fluoride and bite down on this and this, that, and the other. It turns out fluoride ain't so good for you. Yep. Yeah. Okay, well, thanks for giving it to me a whole bunch. Exactly. You know, there's a bunch of that stuff. It's like...

And then when you even take it to the next level, and I'm not saying this is true. Don't misunderstand me here on the podcast. But, you know, then you'll see the other level of that, that fluoride actually makes people docile. But, like, basically, you know, you're just kind of a pacifist. And when you stop and think about it, it's like, well...

Shit. Maybe there's something to it. It's like nobody cares nowadays. It's like, fuck it. Just let it roll on. Maybe they're on to something there. I mean, there's all kinds of that stuff. You can get tied up in some of those rabbit holes. I read a thing one time, and I'm not saying this is true either. Don't misunderstand us here. But they figured out that people who smoke cigarettes are more likely to be rebellious.

Yeah. And so that's why governments want to outlaw smoking. Cause they clearly don't give a shit about your health. We got legalized abortion over here. Yeah. But yeah. Oh, we're all concerned about your health and you can't do this. You know? So when you see it from that aspect, it's like, well, that does make some sense, but they figured out that. And back in wartime, that's why they gave cigarettes to people because even though I know this is wrong, fuck it, I'm going to do it anyway. Yeah. And so, uh,

They figured out the people who smoke cigarettes, and it has something to do with the nicotine, that they tend to be more rebellious. Yeah, I can see that. I don't know. I'm just saying it's what I read. I'm not saying it's true. Well, it makes some sense. I mean, meanwhile, the same government that's trying to get you to quit is the same government that's subsidizing tobacco. Exactly, exactly. You know, so they're making it on both sides. And then you hear about all this 5G shit. You know, how it fucked with your brainwaves and this and that. And I don't know. I don't know. I'm not... I don't know. Yeah, I...

I think cell phones have a lot of negative effects just in general. Like I need to be better about putting mine in a different room. Yeah. And a quasi doctor here explained some stuff onto me that a while back and I tried it a couple of days and it did help. I'm still too dumb. I usually plug it in next to the bed, but I, I shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't, but I do just in case of a, I wasn't doing it. And then dad got sick and,

Like, well, I got to have my phone close, but I should at least put it further away. The other side of the room, next room over, whatever, where I can still hear it, but it's not right there gamma raying me or whatever the hell it is it's doing.

Well, the tentacles of the government are so big now that you're never going to stop it. And everybody, oh, they're going to push us too far. We're going to have the second revolution. We're fucking way past that. There's no such thing as rolling a government program back. Yeah. That never happens. And why is that? We can always come out with a new one, but for whatever reason, you can't roll the old one back. We've got people dependent on it. We can't ever roll it back. I call bullshit on that, and I will to the day I die. Did you ever watch the TV show Alias?

Never did. Okay. Well, quick side note on it. Jennifer Garner ends up being a double agent, but originally is in this organization that's anti-American, but she doesn't know that. And so when she figures it out and gets pulled in by the government and they're going to go after this and she wants to take this office down and they finally pull her out of basically a map, a flow chart of this isn't about, you know, cutting the head off the monster. It's about killing the monster. And they show her the real flow chart of how deep this organization is and

And it's tied into so many things like just taking out this one office ain't going to do it. You know, initially she thinks that's all there is, but there's way more to it than that. And that's where we're at on so many fronts. Oh, I agree. You know, you always hear stuff about the new world order, the one world government, and this, that, and the other. And like the powers that be on that deal are putting so many pieces in play all the time.

You and I moving one piece around the board is... Ain't going to make a hill of beans. When they hold all the cards and they're nine steps ahead of you. Yeah, they're way more than that. They got all the money and all the cards. Exactly. You know.

It's like trying to beat five casinos at once. Yeah. Just think about it. Let's just pretend that you are truly at the top of, whether it's the New World Order, whatever you want to call all this. You're the top ten players in the world. You control everything. So I can listen on your cell phone. I can watch the videos you make on social media. I can listen to your podcast. I'm getting a pretty good idea of what the feel is for the enemy here because they're just openly giving it to me. Yeah. And...

Yeah, I mean, they hold all the cards. I mean, they're nine steps ahead of anybody else. Yeah. And I've always said a hundred times, you can't get America unified enough now to do anything. It wouldn't matter. If I come out tomorrow and said lettuce is the most healthiest thing you can either be, a million people would give me reasons why it's not. And you just... Look at eggs. Yeah. In my lifetime, eggs are going to kill me or save me at least nine times. Yep. You know? Fortunately, I like eggs, so I never gave them up even when they said they were bad. Exactly. But...

You know, there's a ton of little stuff on that. It's like, and they could, within the age of social media, they can manipulate you so easy. Like, all they have to do is make some video viral with one little smidge of the information or one dance or this or one little item that you need to buy. And next thing you know,

20 million people are doing exactly what they wanted them to do. Agreed. And we're all guilty of it. Yeah. Like, we're all guilty of it. You know, they've kind of quasi-approved it during elections. You know, Facebook is showing you certain stuff and this guy certain stuff. You know, so even though we think we're all saying the same thing, we're clearly not. We're not. So. And it's all in how they spend words. Oh, for sure. Just pull up Yahoo News sometime and look at the headlines. Like, the people that they're clearly backing.

It's always spun to the positive. Sure. It wouldn't matter if be like, Oh, John Doe ran over a dog, but it was a rabbit dog and it didn't hurt him. It was nobody owned it. This, that, neither. Meanwhile, Donald Trump could have jumped out, give vaccines to 25 dogs, saved him, took him in, put him in the back of his truck,

Took him to a shelter, got him fed, watered, and be like... Yeah, but he was saving rabid dogs that are killing people. Yeah, and his truck was polluting on his way to the shelter to do it. Agreed. And all this stuff, like...

People argue against that, but just look at the headlines. Did Melania Trump ever do anything to hurt anybody? And there is never a positive headline about her. Never. You know, Michael Obama was supposedly super hot. I don't know to who, but supposedly she was the picture of fitness, this, that, and the other. I'm like, meanwhile, Melania's pretty good looking, pretty nice gal. Never said a mean word about anybody that I can ever find. But there is never a positive headline about her. Never. Never.

Once they took control of the media, they controlled it all. When they control what's in front of you. Did you ever see the James Bond movie? It was with Pierce Brosnan. His ex-girlfriend ends up with the guy that's in control of the media. It was Tomorrow's News Today or whatever. I don't remember what the name of the Bond movie was.

But that was this news media mogul's slogan, tomorrow's news today. And he got to the point he would create the news. That way he could be the first one to scoop it, you know, because he had all the power. Exactly. And he could tell you exactly what he wanted you to know. And we're basically there, unfortunately. Break that all the way down to your kids. If you just told your kids – if you homeschooled your kids –

And you could just tell them every day, you could have your kids believe in anything you wanted them to believe. Yeah. By the time they were 10 years old, if they didn't go to public school or watch a TV or whatever. Yeah.

Plain and simple. Because the only information they get is from you, and you can make whatever information you want. I need to grab one of my kids' history books sometime, because they'll talk about stuff once in a while. I'm like, that's not really accurate, like what you're saying there. Like FDR was the greatest president of all time. He was the fucking worst. Yeah. I mean, they sold that to us. Like, oh, FDR brought power to the country. Yeah, I...

Not really, but okay. What about all the bad shit he was doing? Well, we're not going to mention that. We didn't talk about that. I mean, sure, he partnered with Stalin, who was our sworn enemy, but I mean, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to go after Hitler, but we're going to partner with Stalin to do it? Now, does that seem like a great plan? Yep. Yeah, to this day, 99% of the stuff you read, FDR was the greatest president of all fucking time, and that fucking guy was the worst. He's responsible for most of the socialism we have today. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, him and Woodrow Wilson. Oh yeah, Woodrow Wilson was even fucking worse because he was blatant about his. Yeah, absolutely. Had a stroke and then his wife had to take over. League of Nations, all that stupid shit. All the bad shit. You can trace back to those two dipshits for the most part. Yeah, it's appalling. I'm convinced once George Washington left office,

It was a pretty rapid downhill slide from there. Yeah, it was. Once we ran out of the founding fathers presidents, which really didn't last very long because they didn't live to be that old and they didn't run for office when they were 75, if they lived to be 75. We ran out of those guys pretty quick. Yeah, we did. It was a pretty slippery slope. So take this day. You know, our whole life when we were little kids at the time, you know, we're, I remember a history teacher in,

In seventh grade, I think, talking to you, I think we were $7 or $8 trillion in debt then, which was mind-boggling. Yeah. We're $33 trillion now. But our whole lives, we've heard, oh, we're going to default, we're going to default, and we never have. But where is the breaking point? We're getting close. The interest is starting to rack up. Starting to rack up. So, I mean, is that number $35 trillion? Is it $60 trillion? Is it $100 trillion? Where is that number at? I don't know. Honestly, I don't know.

I think since the moments ago when you said trillion, the interest on that money would set you and I up for a lifetime. Oh, absolutely. The interest on that money in that short 30 seconds here would last you and I the rest of our lives. Yeah. You know, that's how fast that shit's racking up. Yeah. But I don't know where the ceiling is, but we've got to be getting close. And actually, how does, and maybe this should be a whole new podcast in and of itself. So we owe $33 trillion.

But do we owe all that to China? Do we owe one trade to China but something over here? Do we owe it to Joe Blow Construction Company here? My thing is we owe it to China and be like, sorry about your luck. We're resetting the clock to zero. Piss off. Yeah, that's what I mean. We don't like you guys that much anyway. Yeah, so how does this work? That's where I get foggy on it. You know, and you always hear that, oh, we donated, you know,

200 billion to Ukraine, but we borrowed it from China. Well, why don't we just call the Chinese and be like, hey, once you guys give 100 billion to Ukraine, cut out the middleman, save everybody some money, you know?

I don't know why we would want to borrow money from other countries if we are, in fact, borrowing it from them. Right. And where are the Chinese coming up with all this money that they can loan us? That's what I mean. Yeah. So that's what the whole thing, it gets a little foggy to me because you know damn good well local bike care. If you and I both went and borrowed $10 million and then they find out that we're just uptown just at the local bar just fucking handing money out like hotcakes, they're

They're going to be like, well, fuck you. That's over. But it's like this train never ends. It just keeps on chugging. So where does it come from? I just don't understand this. Printing presses, I suppose. And we're getting to the point where we can't hardly print it as fast as we're spending it. That's what I mean. In my safe, I've got a $100 trillion bill from Zimbabwe.

That when they, inflation, and this has been 15, 20 years ago, their inflation was so rampant that a $100 trillion bill, which I have one, would not buy you anything. And after they printed them, they printed them in Germany. After they printed them, Zimbabwe didn't have enough money to give Germany for the fucking bills to ship them to their country. So Germany just sells them now as novelties. But it's a $100 trillion bill.

Back to our Africa thing on where they could be but where they're not. Exactly. Yeah. All the natural resources, nobody to manage it. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what I've always wondered as far as who do you flip the bird to? It's like, well, you know what? Fuck you. We're not paying you today. I mean, is it the Federal Reserve? Is it the fact that you've just diluted the money so bad because you printed so much? I just don't understand where the $33 trillion... Which wraps us back into Kennedy. Exactly. You know, like...

There's layers of the onion, Tony, and we're not allowed to peel them off. And if we do, it's bad. People don't realize how much $33 trillion is. It's a lot of money. And they always talk about reducing the deficit. So you mean to tell me that we're going to roll this back to zero magically? Oh, we cut $400 billion off the debt. Okay, so you bought us 10 minutes. Thanks. I mean...

Yeah. They never make any major changes. Those guys shouldn't get paid until the budget's balanced. Agreed. And there's debt service in there, and there's actually paying it down. Agreed. That should be a federal law, but we never do it. No. Never have, never will. Yeah. Ain't about to look into it tomorrow. They're not going to do it. So, yeah, I just don't understand how this works. I just, for the life of me, I've racked my brain, and I just can't figure out who we owe. I mean, who is going to knock on the door tomorrow and say, you owe me $33 trillion? I can tell you who we owe.

And he's going to collect the debt one of these days. Yeah. That he is. Yeah. He's going to be like, you know, I set you guys up with the best there ever was in everything. And in 200 and some years, you guys ran it in the ground. Yeah. Of course, the Bible never says it's getting any better. So...

Yeah, unfortunately, I think we're on the slide. We're on that big yellow slide. We've hit the first hump. Yeah. And we're like, well, this is fun. I wonder what's the next one. But have you ever stopped and thought about wars, how at the end of the day, it's literally two dipshits. They each run a country, and they say, you know what? I want your country, so we're just going to go slaughter all these innocent people. I'm still going to sit in my cushy office and don't really care. If I get it, I get it. If I don't, I don't. Yeah.

At the end of the day, it's all bullshit. It would be no difference to me today if you said, you own 80 acres, fuck it. I want it so me and my kids load up our arms and we all just shoot it out until one of us has the 80 acres. Yeah. And it's just complete and utter bullshit. Yeah, I mean...

Look at the Roman Empire. Yeah. At the end, like, well, shit, the Romans are coming. Ah, shit, they got a lot of cool stuff. Like, they'll make this a better place. All right, we'll let them have it. Well, shit, we can't manage all this. Like, we're too spread thin. Yeah. I guess it's all going to crumble away. Yeah. Could you imagine if we break this down to the micros, that that's how you...

get land in the U.S. If you're going to fight it out, I'm farming 1,000 acres. I want the next 80 over here, so load up the fucking guns. We're going to take it. Hop in the Buick. We're going to get 80 acres. There are still countries that are that way. There's places in South America, if you squat on it long enough, it's yours. You've got to defend it. Maybe we should start that program. Maybe we should. Some of those big landowners are too old to defend it. They are.

And I know some people that are armed to the teeth around here. We'll just leave it at that. Yeah, it's a crazy mixed-up world. And I got to think that our ancestors thought the same thing. Like, holy cow, it's getting way out of hand here, you know. And in their time, it was from what they'd seen to where it got. But, you know, it's an exponential curve. It's ramping vastly. So, whatever. I mean, we can't stop it. Yeah.

No, we can't. I mean, you can vote all you want. You can bitch all you want. You can do whatever. Not pay your taxes, but I promise you it's coming whether you want it or not. Your best bet instead of worrying about any of that is to get right with the Lord and pray a lot and get squared away there because ultimately that's the only way you're getting out of it. It's going to be what it's going to be in the short term. At this point in my life, I'm more worried about the long term. Yep. Eternal life.

Damnation sounds like a long time to me. So I'm just worried about that at this point. I can't stop the other stuff. When you read the book of Revelations, I'm not trying to get religious on people, but that's how the Antichrist comes to power is worldwide economic collapse. Yes. He's the only guy that brings you out of it. So you're like, oh, my God, this guy's the greatest thing in the world. That's how Hitler got to power. Exactly. You know?

And so, you know, we were always kind of the home base superpower. Look to the U.S. I mean, if your last glimmer of hope is lost, go there. Like Reagan said, we're the last best place. If it collapses here, there's no place to go. And he was 100% right. Yeah, and I feel like now we're... You name me another place, but still to this day, there's no other place I want to go. Like, there's no place that's better, you know, but...

Damn, we are messing it up bad. Yeah. Because I'm like you. Everybody always says, well, yeah, we're going to be screwed when trying to call Zinedine because I'm the type, if I take that phone call, I'm like, yeah, fuck you. Sorry. You're speaking Chinese. But once again, I don't know how it all works. Yeah. Probably. Whatever. Probably a little bigger than we can grasp at some of those, you know. It just always cracks me up on politicians. They throw billions around.

Like you and I would do $2 at the bar for a tip. Oh, you brought me a beer? Here's a buck or two. They're throwing $200 billion around on those deals. Like, oh, you get $100 billion. You get $10 billion. It just boggles the mind. Like, we can't even fathom the numbers. No, it is. It's unbelievable. I'd probably be a terrible city manager or a large government guy, but I'm like...

Yeah, there's got to be a way to do that for half. I just assume that anything the government's involved in could be cut in half. Agreed. Easily. They're easily overspending by 50%. Yep. And that would be day one. We're cutting all government budgets by 50%. We'll work forward or backwards from there. Agreed. I would like to know the post office budget versus UPS's budget. Oh, it's got to be mind-boggling. UPS clearly turns a profit.

But where is the, who's spending what on what? Like, where's the, I realize the post office doesn't necessarily have to make money, but it shouldn't lose a shit ton of money. Agreed. Like, I realize they have to service everybody and they're going house to house and delivering mail and that's a service and the government's providing them. That's cool.

Like, are we, if we're blatantly just losing money on this, like maybe we'll put somebody from the private sector in charge of this. Yeah. Because almost isn't a little bit easier if I'm the local post office here and I know that I've got 150 houses in town. I'm going to go to one of them houses every day. Yeah.

I should be able to budget that pretty good. I've got a lot of data now that I go to every single house every day. You've got like 100 years worth of data. Yeah. So I know I can't go under this number because I've been doing it for 100 years and this is what it's going to take. Yeah. So I should at least be able to break even, minimum. The sad part is in today's postal world, the mail's not that much faster than when it was on horseback. No, it's not. Like in the last two or three years, it has went to pot. Yeah. Yeah.

And I don't really understand how that got so screwed up. Like, it doesn't seem like it's that difficult of a deal with computers and automation and AI and everything else. Like, you ought to be able to figure some of that out before it even happens. Newsflash, Christmas is coming. Mail is going to get increased with Christmas cards, et cetera. You know? Yep. I've seen stamps are going to begin January whatever, which that's probably –

Part of the reason, again, I don't know that in 1989 you could have bought a Forever label at UPS. Yeah, that's true. Where the post office, you want some Forever stamps? Oh, yeah, we're just banging it. They'll never go up from here on out. Do they still honor the Forever stamp? I have no idea. I assume. I mean, I would be highly pissed if they didn't. It's a fucking Forever stamp, you motherfucker. Yeah, exactly. I didn't buy enough of them, obviously, but yeah, there's an investment. Apparently, I should have bought...

200 billion of those and sold them off after the fact. Correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't know, does FedEx or UPS do a flat rate? Like the post office, you can get a flat rate box? Nothing I know of. So there's probably a reason why, because I know that I can't ship this motherfucker to 10 miles away or Juneau, Alaska for the same fucking price. Didn't FedEx get started on a guy, wasn't that his college thesis? Shipping checks. Yeah, shipping checks, and the guy told him it'd never work. Yeah.

must have worked out fairly well yeah i think it did yeah yep well jesus christ we went way off the rails on this yeah we have we have come this was the straightforward conspiracy podcast it's not even a full circle this is a spiral of nothing thanks for listening yeah no shit we really took it around the horn there it wasn't straightforward farming but it was straightforward whatever yeah so it was straight something yeah anyway

Thanks for tuning in. We're trying to get back on track. Bear with us. You've got to bear with us. Yeah, we'll keep pushing through. Yeah. All right, we'll see you guys next time.