So is this the first time we've recorded in South Dakota? Yeah, I think so. Does it sound alright? Yeah, I think so.
I mean, can you turn my mic up just a little bit? Yeah, I'll just just wear it in my headphones there. Oh, yeah. It's always different when someone else is set up, you know what I mean?
Yeah, it smells different. You don't have all your cleaning products there. That's right. I mean, they make your smell profile if you're home to make you feel comfortable.
I thought it was really interesting. I mean, you've got a really professional microphone boom set up here and then I moved it and then it sounds from a horror movie. That's right before everything twists upside down and the thing comes out of the dark. Yeah, yeah.
No, it's very interesting to be in a different location recording stuff. Got a bunch of cool books in the room art. There's a lot of history stuff in this room. There's a there's a helmet over there like a is that a Roman helmet?
What is that? Yeah, it's a Roman helmet. I used it in a Babylonian skit, but it's a Roman helmet. I see a sword.
That's like a big sword, man. It's got it's got like a side sword, like a Darth Maul, like pointing things on the sides. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
What is that? Okay. Hang on a second. I grab it.
You don't have to grab it. No, it's not going to be right. If I don't get the sword for it, like you ask me about a sword and I'm not going to put it in your cast. Nobody can see the sword that you're.
You're whoa. Yeah. Golly. I can't imagine being in battle with that.
Yeah. Somebody might call that sword compensatory. Oh, it's I see. Yeah.
Okay. But it's not it looks like in the hills here, it's got like brass knuckles on the side. Yeah. So this is just for.
Okay. This is just for swinging really, really hard. Well, you think so, right? So what you're holding there is not steady.
That's a claymore. This is a claymore. Yeah. So it's got a huge cross shaped hilt there at the bottom.
Yeah. So that that Kylo Ren, I mean, what do you call it? I mean, that was kind of a hilt on the Kylo Ren lightsaber, but this isn't. It's a second hand position.
So grab that whichever hand is comfortable. Whoa, it is a second. It's like a. Yeah.
So those stabby things coming off the side. Okay. That is like a second hilt for when you're swinging it like an axe. No, no.
I mean, if you're swinging it, you're just swinging it with two hands. It's a two handed claymore. So you would just grip that all below the hilt. Okay.
But what this is for is a secondary function. That's to create a phalanx, a spear hedge, a short spear hedge. So what you can do, hand me that thing back real quick. So you can't swing a knife.
You hand them the doline, but I have to rotate this around the entire room to get it back to you. So check this out. Right now I'm taking this four and a half foot claymore and I'm putting the hilt, the ball, the very bottom of the sword. I'm putting it in the pocket of my right foot, the arch of my right foot.
You see that? On the ground. Yeah. That just sits in there.
Yeah. Now what I'm going to move away from the mic a little bit. Oh, you're sitting down on the ground and you're pointing it up so you can kill a horse. That's right.
So the guy behind me can use his to protect me from archer fire and he kind of projectiles and I can go underneath. I'm just at the knees. I'm below the dude. I'm like, the guy behind me is swinging and what I'm creating is a hedge.
This enables us to move forward in increments. Take a little ground, take a little ground all using our foot to brace this and create a short version of a phalanx. You remember what a phalanx formation is, right? Yeah, where you've got a person in the front line holding the spear and a person behind them holding the spear as well.
Like in there, they're kind of like doubled up. Yeah. Only stabby things. It's a hedgehog.
Okay. And you normally go with much longer spears and this is what the Greeks did. We talked about that a while back and this is what the Scots famously did at the Battle of Sterling, the Battle of Banachburn. They made a real long pokey six to shut down the English heavy calorie.
They had armored knights, armored horses. The idea was, well, let's just not let them get near our highlanders and we'll keep them away. So the claymore is reflective. It's a dual purpose sort.
It has a defensive function here when I brace it against my foot to create a hedge and it has a vicious hacking function. When I go with this wide grip and swing it overhead or three quarter arm, that's what you're looking at. I don't know that I like it. That's hurtful.
Well, I mean, if you think about it, well, I'm at this sort of sort of sort of, oh, would you also have a short sword? Yeah, you'd have what's called a dirk. So those highlanders. So for example, I got married and killed and this sort was at my wedding, as a matter of fact.
I got a little ceremonial dirk in my sock. So I got those tall socks, like a baseball stirrup almost. Yeah. And there's blade in there as well.
And that is for getting up and underneath a shield or up and underneath a jaw. It's a shank, man. It's called a shank. Yeah.
Yeah. So a dagger or dirt or both would be part of the repertoire of medieval Scottish warrior. So that's what I've got here. Kind of cool.
My parents gave it to me. Congratulations. Interesting. Yeah, I still have it.
Yeah, I don't think I'd want to fight with it. Meaning I would not want that to be the weapon I was wielding because it's so big and cumbersome and frankly, the rotational inertia is just so big. Can you talk to me more about that rotational inertia of the swing you mean? If you're coming at me and I got one of those things, I get one swing.
If I miss on one swing, I might as well just tornado at that point because I can't stop it. That's going to be so bad for your neighbors. Like the exact opposite of the Spartans. We stand by each other.
We protect our fellow man, except for that guy. He just has a huge sword. He just spins and sort of spins and spins and is far from him as possible. Everyone test many and devel formation.
Oh boy. I don't know, man. I just I just don't think that's what I would want to fight with. What would you want to fight with?
I mean, war sucks. I wouldn't want to bear it. 50 caliber. No, no, no, no, no, no, you knew I wasn't going to accept that answer.
No, no gunpowder. It's disallowed. You are at the Battle of Agincourt in the middle of the hundred years. Okay, and you are trying to settle the fate of really nothing just what king or do gets to say they own what will chunk around, your life as a peasant part time warrior will really be unaffected.
It's not going to matter to you at all. Ultimately, but you might have to die for this. Just trust me. It's for god or king or sultan.
So anyway, you're totally committed to this fight and you have to be in it but there's no gunpowder. It's 14th century. What do you want? We know the answer to this question.
It's as in court. Which Longbow. Oh yeah, Bridget's Longbow, and that's what won Adjunct Court, right? Yeah, or Welsh Longbow.
Seriously, you remember that? What do you mean to them? Why am I even here? I knew that before I knew you.
Yeah, I mean, you just, I kind of remember basic algebra, sort of from ninth grade, and that's literally all I bring to your topics. And then we get into my stuff, and you just pretend that you've never heard of Adjunct Court? That's not true. I mean, you know a ton about all this stuff.
That's a great point. Nice job knowing. Very good. So Adjunct Court, I would use a Longbow because of, you know, we can knock down the French before they can get to us, and let's be clear, the crossbows they have are neat.
They're very neat. But they can't get in close enough to us because we're already knocking them down. However, let's say I was a peasant. Okay, every still Adjunct Court?
No, let's go to like the next day. Crazy. Yeah, so here's the problem with Adjunct Court. It was a big swampy mess.
It was like a woodstock. And so all the people who had big weapons like this, they couldn't get around, they couldn't handle. It was tornado. Yeah, they just got rocked.
It nullified all movement abilities, all movement modifiers on the board, which is zeroed. Yeah. And so obviously Artillery or light infantry, there it was, it's gonna win the day. So forget that.
I'm gonna go to the meeting on clean, open ground, we're just gonna have a good old fashioned, medieval beat down. Now what weapon do you want? A pike, tell me more. So I went to, first of all, what is a pike?
Yeah, so I went to this village in Germany one time with my wife and I forget, I wanna say it starts with an R, but there's this village, it's like an old village. And they keep it, you know, and they've got the town crier kind of guy that you pay him and he gives you a tour in English, right? Because does he have a bell? No, no, but I don't know, but he went into this whole long talk about a pike and how a pike is a big stick.
And it looks like an ax on the top, but it has a spear point at the top. Imagine an ax with like hooks on the bottom and then a spear head out the top. And the idea was dudes are coming at you with horses. You can stick them with a spear side, or if they're running past you, you flip around, you can reach up and you can hook them with the bottom part of the hike and you can pull them off their horse.
And they're done. Once you get them on the ground, you win. Because you go to the stabby side of the thing. So a pike was like, as I understand it, it was a huge equalizer between the foot soldier and cavalry.
I've told you literally everything I know about this. That's broken. I think of a pike as being a very long, very flexible spear, a little wobble to it, right? I pictured having maybe some little spikes coming off of the edges.
And my understanding is that the point there is that you don't want to run someone all the way through. This is lovely, by the way. You don't want to run somebody all the way through with that pike because it's so flexible and so long and you can generate so much power. Now your weapon is three feet out the back of some other dude.
And so the idea was having that little crossbar and some little spikes on the top would stop it. It didn't far enough to get things done, but then you're able to retrieve your weapon quickly for additional work. I could be wrong, but I think of a pike as being a lighter, nimbler weapon, whereas a pole armor, a pole axe, maybe that's what I'm thinking about. Or a whole hook has that little hook on the end.
And all it's meant to do is hook into armor or chainmail. It's kind of like what a grappling hook is to a brick wall and a batman show. A pole hook is to armor. It's just designed to perfectly grab something, anything.
And then you can yank that guy off that horse and then, well, I assume savagery ensues after that. Can we agree? Yeah. There's a child watching cartoons.
I think we've already discussed how incredibly overpowered throwing stars were cartoons. They don't miss. Ever. And I remember there's an episode, G.I.
Joe. I think I've already told you this. Maybe even on the podcast. I'm still riveted.
It doesn't matter. There's an episode of G.I. Joe. And they were against these ninja type dudes.
And they're running. And they run inside the door. And they're like, oh, we're safe inside this room. He shuts the door.
And he's holding the door shut. And then they're like, what's the matter? Where aren't you talking? And then he slides down the door because the throwing stars went through the door and killed him.
In G.I. Joe? I can't kill people in G.I. Joe?
I don't remember what it was then. I just remember I need throwing stars now. What? All right.
Yeah. I do remember talking about this now because we bought the throwing stars together in Florida. And we lost them. Immediately lost my.
I'm going back to our practice. I'm throwing stars. Do you see where those went? Crap.
They dug down the yard somewhere. Kids be careful out here from now on. I don't know what happened to those. I think we literally said that.
I still have my nunchucks. They might even still be here. There's a lot of stuff in here. Wouldn't see what there's a lot of stuff.
OK. I'm seeing a bunch of fish things. I'm seeing. Let me see home.
I'm just seeing a lot of cool stuff. Thanks, man. Yeah. All right.
So what are we going to talk about? She's your own adventure here, buddy. Because I have one thing that was on my mind. But then you started looking at medieval weaponry.
Yeah. I'm like, well, you know what's really fun and interesting? What? I'm not able to weapon.
Because we need to talk about that basket hill one hand claymore. That's a claymore as well. That is a claymore. So this claymore here is from the William Wallace era.
That's like 1,200, 1,300. Right? This one over here, that's from the Rob Roy era. And more like early modern Scottish heroism.
Just before gunpowder. Because not a little bit of gunpowder. Really? Yeah.
Man. Yeah. There was gunpowder in play. Even the 100 years were kind of era.
It was just so useless and untargeted to the Spanish. We're using it already at that point. But it was just a disaster. It was hip cannons they would try to carry into medieval battle.
Yeah, it didn't work. Didn't light and blow up their own hips. Well, Leonardo da Vinci actually drew one of the first multi-use guns, if I recall. Really?
Yeah. I'm going purely on childhood memory here. But I remember, imagine a bunch of pipes. Like, let's say we get 12 pipes.
And we lay them out. And those are gun barrels. We land side by side by side. And then we rotate the thing like 120 degrees.
OK. And you build an equilateral triangle out of these rows of pipes. So you could fire a volley. And then you could roll it.
And you could fire another volley. And you could roll it again and fire it one more time. Really? Yeah.
Because they were muzzle load loaders. I'm not sure his design was a muzzle loader. But it was a really hard thing to load webinars. Well, it had to be a muzzle loader.
Right? And we're talking. Yeah. We eventually was in his prime from 1490 to 1510.
OK? So you're not doing anything but muzzle loading at that point in history. Oh my gosh, dude. There's so much to talk about there.
What do you mean? With breach design, for example. A lot of muzzle loading stuff went down in the Civil War. Whole lot.
What do you mean by went down? You mean that's still how people loaded their weapons? Yeah. But they were starting to develop breach loading weapons, which was amazing.
Isn't the Enfield Rifle of breach loader? I don't know. There were some really interesting designs in the Civil War. There was cartridges that they were starting to develop brass cartridges.
There were some really forward thinking for people in the third chair who aren't familiar with firearm and military technology. What's the difference between a cartridge and a bullet? So the bullet is the slug or the thing that flies out and hits a person. The cartridge is the part behind the bullet.
So if you're thinking about a carting bullet, the bullet is usually copper looking or lead, like gray looking. And the cartridge is brass, typically. There are some really interesting new designs coming out. I remember I had to do a speech competition at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2000.
What was that? 2002, 2003. Whoa. And you're just a little pup.
Yeah. Didn't know anything. Did you have armpit hair yet? No, I still did.
Did they ask in advance? I literally do not have armpit hair yet. What's going on? I don't.
You have armpit. How do you not have armpit? You got like eight. I shaved it.
Why did you shave your armpit hair? I don't know. Occasionally I do that. I got real sweaty.
How would that? How do we go from that sword to my armpit hair? This is your fault. Yeah.
You could have just rolled with a joke. I said you pulled up your shirt like a cussy. I just don't understand. I'm just really comfortable in your house here.
I just appreciate it. I just appreciate it. So this guy that I was, it was a speech competition. It was not a debate.
It was a speech competition. He was working on a way to make a new military rifle using liquid propellant. And the idea was that, hey, we will use bullets and we'll just put the bullet in the chamber and then we'll do two squirts of a liquid propellant and ignite it somehow. I don't remember what the ignition method was.
It was a really interesting idea. He ended up winning, if I recall. 20 years ago, and I haven't heard more about that. Yeah, there were a ton of reasons why it was a bad idea.
Like a ton of reasons it was bad. Because it shoots bullets so that it could hit people. No, not that. It was.
This is a bottomless pit of a conversation between you and I. OK, well, hold on. Because I mean, you're talking about logistics. Like there's military logistics are fascinating.
For example, in the American military, the Americans are great. And by Americans, I mean, us, really, really good at logistics. Everything is standardized, palatized. For example, a light machine gunner.
Right now it's the M240. They're changing over to a new weapon soon. But right now it's the M240. What was it before that?
I won't say M60, long time ago. It's a cruise serve weapon. You got two people typically. But the 240 is a really interesting firearm.
Wait, you're saying this is a light, an LMG. This is a light machine gun? I don't want to say the wrong thing. But Lee was probably a 240 gunner.
I think he actually was for a while. So I don't know the exact term. I just know how they worked. But the uninitiated, we're not talking about a rifle, about a rifle that a soldier would carry around.
We're not talking about a saw, which is like a what is it? SAW, I don't know what this stands for. It's just a saw. Super awesome.
Super awesome. Something to use in Contra. But the M240 is a heavier machine gun, higher rate of fire, not as big as the M240, the Mondo's 50-cow machine gun. But anyway, to my point, logistics wise, the Americans just have ammo with what's called disintegrating links.
I don't know what that means. You open a can of ammunition. Oh, yeah. And then you have a belt like a literal physical can.
Yeah. A belt of ammunition that you pull out and you fire it from the machine gun and the links, the part that links one bullet to the next bullet to make the chain of bullets that can then be mechanically fed into the machine gun, the links for American weapons, both the 50-cow and the smaller stuff, they're called disintegrating links, which means when the machine gun feeds in a bullet, it will fire the bullet and then it disintegrates. It basically pulls the brass cartridge out of the link and that breaks the chain and the chain link falls off. So the action of clearing the cartridge.
Yes. That, for example, in a handgun, resets the firing mechanism. Yes. Here, that energy is being repurposed to dispense with the clutter of the links as it's being fed.
Which is interesting, because the Russians, and in World War II, the Germans, they have non-disintegrating links, which you can reload. So logistically, these are two different philosophies. One of them would say, hey, what we're going to do is, we're just going to send a bunch of cans of ammo. And then you just take this and you wear these things like belts and you have these mental images of these guys in Vietnam wearing these belts of ammo, crossways, almost like suspenders.
Yeah, like rock and roll from J. Yeah. I think that was a guy, right? He was one of the original four or five GI Joe guys.
I think he wore those belts. OK. Like that? Yeah.
Like a bandolier? I think a bandolier is different. Bandolier, if I understand correctly, I've never used a bandolier. But you hold stripper clips and bandoliers.
Golly, man, I'm over my head. I need to quit talking. I know how it all works. Yeah.
I don't know any of the vocabulary. I never talk about the stuff you get at. Never been to basic training. Yeah.
And I've never been in medieval warfare. But I spent a whole lot of time studying it in college and grad school and since. But here's what's interesting about the Russian and the German thought is on the battlefield, you can just go pick up the belts because the belts are contiguous. They're all together.
And you can put bullets back on these belts. For example, there's a couple of really good machine guns that the Russians have made. One of them's called the PKM, I believe. And you may have heard of the German MG42.
The really, what there's a nickname for it is a really, really fast one. Ah. Is it Hitler's Buzzsaw? I don't know.
It's something crazy. But it has an incredible rate of fire. And then the Russians have another one called the disco, which is basically their version of a 50 cow. It's a little bit bigger bullet than a 50 cow.
Bigger? Yeah. Bigger. Yeah.
Right. But what's so interesting about all those is the Americans are like, hey, put these ammo cans on a pallet, ship them to wherever they need to go. So when it gets to the foxhole or whatever, the guy can open the ammo can and just pull the belt out and put it in his machine gun. Whereas the Russian thought is send these wooden boxes to the front line.
And when they get there, they bring out these metal cans that look like sardine cans, but really big. OK. And then use a can opener or sometimes they have a little ways built to rip the metal open, open the bullets, open these paper packs. And then they have this really cool machine that you just dump all these bullets in and you turn a crank and you put one of these non disintegrating belts in one side and it'll just load the belt really.
They're fascinating. Two very different philosophies. I don't really understand why sometimes they make one decision, sometimes they make the other. So it's just really interesting how one decision, for example, that claymore that's still there on the floor by your feet.
Yeah. That's a decision. I mean, a whole army and a whole team of nations blacksmiths made decisions. And like, this is what we're going to do.
And then they show up on the battlefield. And they're like, oh, crap, we have crossbows. They have longbows. We made the wrong call.
It's like there's a shadow war. And the shadow war is a group of engineers, scientists, technicians, fabricators. And that's what ends up determining what kid speaks, what language 200 years from the day of the battle. Yeah.
Yeah. OK. But there's a little bit of a chicken or the egg question here when it comes to weapon design choices, iconic weapons, military strategy, whether you're talking about the stuff that I'm a little more comfortable with, that being ancient classical medieval warfare, or the stuff that you're infinitely more informed about being modern warfare. I mean, obviously I had a bunch of classes about all of that in school as well.
I wrote my papers and I did my work. I just never understood it as well. Once you get past the Civil War, I started to feel overwhelmed by the logistics and the technology. It just became a lot to keep track of.
It wasn't as easy for me to say, all right, I understand the human element here and what we do. But acknowledging that we both spent a little bit of time thinking about this stuff between the two of us. We cover a decent amount of time that we spend some time reading about and all this in terms of the grand scheme of history. There's a chicken or the egg question here.
And that is, did the Scots make weapons like this? Big, huge, unwieldy, dual purpose claimers because they wanted their military to fight a certain way or because the psychology and culture of their people was a certain way. And that's the weapon that fit what they would naturally do on a battlefield and how they would actually behave under duress, that they would dig in and play defense, that they would endure the awful, rainy weather of the highlands and that they would use these in, it's kind of goofy to think about in picture, but it's true that you use these as a tent pole to go along with a kilt to provide yourself a shelter in the field. I mean, a kilt can be yards and yards and yards of wrapped fabric.
Really? Mine has so much fabric, so much more than any human would ever need to just wear. It's not like somebody just took off a towel of each towel and just wrapped it around your waist once. My kilt is massively thick and heavy and it's for formal stuff, so it's all stitched together, but you could easily snip that out and you'd have enough to make a tent, I mean, it's massive.
I kind of feel like this particular weapon design is reflective of who those weapon designers already had to work with and their environment and how they thought and how they would behave under duress on the battlefield. And I suspect that if we went to other people groups, maybe I'm not quite as intimately familiar with that a lot of the same evolved. These people use these weapons because it fits their inculturation, it fits with their mindset and their approach like, what are you talking about with Sparta? The whole hoplite, phalanx thing, it's not just a military unit, it's a culture.
I don't know which came first, the hoplite or the Spartan mentality, but they certainly married together really well. And I bet if we picked away at things in terms of the Russian mentality, the German mentality, the American mentality, the British mentality on making heavy machine guns, machine guns that are on a base and are operated from a solid footing, I'm guessing that they would all be reflective of certain cultural values and instinctive battlefield behaviors went under pressure. I think the bigger driver, counterpoint, I'm not really counterpoint, another point. Okay, I think the bigger driver is what is the enemy using and how do you counter it?
What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, how does a machine gun, I just don't understand what's on my head, how the technology of the belt and whether it is disintegrating or not disintegrating on a machine gun has anything to do with what the other person is doing. On an offensive weapon, you're right.
Yeah, good point, on many weapons, I agree with you 100%. Because a lot of what I worked on was defensive. I think maybe I've just programmed to think differently because I'm like, what are they doing to hurt us? How do we defend against that?
Yeah, and so I see completely what you're saying. Yeah, I think I'm wrong on that. Okay, but I mean, if we go back to the middle, just to talk about the Halbrid or Pole Hook. Halbrid, is that what that's called?
No, that's the one that has the big accent on a very long stick and it also has the pointy spear point at the end. Okay, that's what I'm thinking about. That's Halbrid. I don't want to pike anymore, I want that.
You want that, please? It's H-A-L-B-E-R-D or B-R-E-D, Halbrid or Halbrid. I'm not gonna. I've heard that word before.
Maybe that's what the German guy said. The name of the town sounds like Rothsburg or something like that, Ratzburg or, I forget the name of it, but it was a really interesting town. H-A-L-B-E-R-D, I remember seeing one of these at the Chicago Museum of Art of all the weird things, they have a hall of weapons there. Really?
Yeah, it was my favorite part, which I'm sure is not what my art teacher wanted my opinion to be. Yeah, let me show you a picture right here. That's a Halbrid. That's what I want.
Yes, I want that. It looks like an axe that shredder would carry. From the Ninja Turtles. Yes, absolutely.
It just does. Tall, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you can do a lot with that. So you can adopt that Phalanx formation.
It's a multi-purpose weapon. You can defend against heavy cavalry. The name of the town I'm thinking about is Rothenberg. Ooh, Rothenberg, I think.
Yeah, super cool town. We stayed in a little bed and breakfast. It was early in our marriage and we stayed in what we could afford. Yeah.
That's still largely what we do when we travel. You know what I'm trying to say. Like when you're, I do. I'm giving you crap, but when you're kids, it's a...
It's like you, everything is special. Anything you can get. Anything you can do beyond hamburger helper at your own house. Yeah, yeah.
Do those memories mean more to you? Is there something just a unique flavor to that stuff that all happened when you were young, just out of college in bed and just dirt poor? Yeah. Absolutely.
There's a place called Warehouse Discount Grocery. Sounds amazing. Yeah, it was not. It was so appetizing.
And we would buy the Benton Den fans. Two of the three words in the name of that place. Really warehouse discount. Yeah.
Yeah, right at the beginning, I assume we're going somewhere to like meet the buyer for a discreet handoff or something, but then you said grocery at the end. Yeah. Those were good times. Those were good times.
It was just a really special visit. Because I remember, you know, when you get to go to a new interesting place for the first time, I was there on work and I was able to take her, which was a huge deal. If we could spring for the, for her plane ticket, we could get over there and then we'd tack on a couple of extra days and we were able to do a bed and breakfast. But I remember the town because the guy took us around and he explained all these ancient weapons and how the city would defend itself and things like that.
And I can remember his punchline for the whole tour. Apparently there was a bar. The name of the bar was synonymous with hell. Oh.
He ended his tour right before the part where, you know, you asked for tips as the tour guide. He said something about now everyone go to hell. It was what he said. That was cute.
That was clever. That's cute. That was clever. But it was a really interesting thing.
OK, side note, you know, Camilla works with immigrants and teaches English. Yeah. And it's such a diverse group right now, man. I mean, with the war in Ukraine, we have a bunch of Eastern Europeans and people from all over Latin America.
And we have influx right now. People were getting to know from the Indian subcontinent. It's just a very diverse time right now. I'd like to compliment you.
So one of the things I really wanted to do is go to one of your son's baseball games because I know you spent a lot of time with that. Yeah. I expected to, you know, walk up and you're like, oh, you know, he's playing and we're in the stands just watching. It was really encouraging to show up and see Shane there.
Good friend. Yeah. And then the few guys that showed up from Bangladesh. Yeah.
The vibe was really cool. So it's some engineering students here in town. Yes. Apparently you guys just hang out.
You guys are all hang out. And that's all Shane and his wife, Emily. They just decided there is this group of people in the community who don't know anybody because of the rules of studying in the United States from where they're from. They're on a very super hyper limited budget.
And Shane and Emily were just like, we should just make their time here fun. Just getting the whole experience. Like this is what it's like hanging out with a group of friends and circle of friends in the United States who play sports. We do things we tend to cook out all summer long, come to all of our barbecues.
It's just been awesome. Get to know these guys who've jumped in. They're super fun, super smart, all here studying stuff from your field engineering. So yeah, that's what you're seeing.
The only credit I can take is that I like them and it's been nice getting to know them. Shane and Emily really built this circle up. It's cool. And how cool was it that one of the guys showed up with a little top wear tub of cornbread?
Yes. He's like, yeah, I'm just trying to cook. And I made this. I don't know what it is.
And I was like, you want to try this? Yeah. I tried it. I was like, that's cornbread.
That's real cornbread. It's from the south. Yeah. I don't understand what that means.
He's from the south. Well, the cornbread is it's a lot. You did a great job of cornbread. It's good.
Yeah. It was so fun. Yeah. That's great.
And I've really enjoyed just watching the natural flow of your life. And I've really enjoyed our boys getting to hang out. That's been a blast. So yeah, thanks for having me.
Yeah, for sure. It's been fun doing nothing because really we haven't done anything. We're both in the flow of our lives right now. You're finishing off a project and we're just going to hear hanging out.
That's fun. And it's been really fun to watch the boys just know what to do. Get on a scooter. Go scoot somewhere.
There's a park. Explore it. Yes. There's a neighborhood.
Go feed a dog. Yes. Later, we will see you possibly before dark. Yeah.
Possibly not. I'm sure it'll go great. And so far it's gone great. It's been really good.
It's been really fun. Yeah. But you were saying Camilla works with immigrants. Yeah.
We were saying the thing about the guy telling everybody to go to hell. We've got immigrants from all over the world who are working with through the literacy council here. And she does tutoring for some. She helps to bring on new tutors because the demand is great.
She's got a bunch of people and train them up. She's doing that in the morning. She was doing a conversation class here a couple weeks ago. These conversation classes are where she gets together a reasonable amount of people where everybody would have the social ability to get in to the conversation.
She can't do this with 50 people. And the ground rules are it's just English. And so Camilla speaks Spanish. And she can easily just speak Spanish and exclude the Ukrainians or the Bengalis.
You say Bengali for somebody from Bangladesh? Don't know. She can exclude everybody else really easily and get practice and feel good. But she restricts herself.
The rule is it's all English. It's immersion. You just communicate what you're able to communicate. Grunts, hand gestures, drawing, anything.
We're just practicing communicating in this country. And so the students text her. She's sort of the hub. And so she gets interesting messages from people as they attempt English or use Google Translate from their native town.
Well, there's a restaurant here called Inferno. It's a wood fire pizza place. Yeah. Is it this Kobe Bryant?
No. No. LeBron James. He has Blaze pizza, which is kind of like subway, but for pizza.
And Inferno is the same thing. Just competing brand. I don't know if anybody famous owns that one. And they're both good.
Inferno is good. So Camilla's there for some kind of class. I don't know. I see where this is going.
And you do see where it's going. She gets a text. And the text. The text from the student reads, teacher, I am in hell in the door is locked.
Obviously it was a Google translator. I am at Inferno, but the door is locked is what the guy was clearly trying to communicate. But it just turned Inferno into hell. I don't know what language it was.
I don't know who said it. Yeah, it tickled me. Dang. What do you respond to that?
I know. You just be a good sport. That's amazing. Yeah.
That's incredible. Yeah. I really think it's cool what you guys are doing here. You're spending a lot of time with people in your community.
And more interestingly with people in your community from other communities and you're giving them community. I don't know. It's kind of weird. That's what you're doing is really, really cool.
I don't know why I didn't expect that because I know you well enough and I know how you think and I know how your family thinks Camilla is next level with this sort of thing. Serving others. I don't know why I didn't see that coming. But of course you do that.
Of course that's what you do. I'm riding everybody else's coattails. I really am. I'm in and I'm excited about the things like that that are going on.
But I can't take credit for that. It's easy to be a part of cool things when everybody you're hanging out with is initiating cool things all the time. So it's yeah. That felt like you sticking a Scottish claymore in the ground and deflecting my blow as I charged with compliments.
I think it's a nice thing you said. I appreciate that. This episode of questions is sponsored by stamps.com. Matt, I just read the offer right at the top here so people know what ultimately we're hoping they do.
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