100 Years of Wisdom: B17 Pilot on the DarkHorse Podcast
Martin Agegian is 100 years old at the time of recording. He served in World War II as a B17 Pilot, and has stories from a life full of wisdom and intrigue. Bret and he discuss his life on the DarkHorse Podcast.Buy Martin’s book: https://www.amazon.com/God-Bless-Amerika-Martin-Agegian/dp/0692435530*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon. Please subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @DarkHorse Podcast...
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this afternoon with Martin Agagian, who is somebody you may not know.
He is an author.
He has written a book called God Bless America, America spelled with a K, a book about your father's experience.
He is also a hundred years old, which I find amazing.
Not only is he a hundred years old, which is a difficult accomplishment in and of itself, but he in fact drove us here today.
I met him traveling all by himself on one of the planes that flies up to the San Juan Islands.
And anyway, I was fascinated by his story.
So, Martin, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
Thank you very much, Brett.
I'm happy to be here, and my pleasure.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, I will say, you and I spent a fair amount of time talking yesterday, right after I met you.
You ended up having a conversation with me, with Gina, and with Ray.
Gina is one of the shuttle drivers at the airline that flies up here, and Ray is one of their pilots.
And anyway, we were engrossed in what you had to tell us about Your life and about your experiences in World War II and your observations about this country of ours and about different generations.
So my hope was to capture some of what you understand about the world so that our viewers could learn from it also.
Well, I'll tell you, Brett, I don't have all the guaranteed answers.
You don't?
No.
There's no guarantee in life.
I had thought that you had all the answers.
No, but I have some insights.
Well, perfect.
That will do in this case.
And they're not just random insights.
They're well-figured-out insights that have become part of my philosophy of life now.
And life changes.
One of the philosophers in Rome, what is it, Epicurean people, Epicurean followers of Epicureus, they said, nothing in life is standard.
Nothing remains.
Nothing is without movement.
Things change and then they change again and again.
And pretty soon you don't recognize the thing that you knew in the beginning.
It's changed so much you have no knowledge of how that happened.
And that's how life is.
We're changing.
Nothing abides.
Nothing.
And you have to make the best your own way and no one has all the answers.
It's a fight to the finish.
And you better do your best.
And that's all I can tell you.
Do your best and don't quit.
Don't stop.
Always think.
If you lose, you make a mistake, consider that a benefit.
When you lose, don't cry.
Don't blame somebody else.
Don't say you had the wrong mom, the wrong dad, or the school was not doing their job.
You are responsible for yourself.
So don't ever blame anyone else.
Just say, I made a mistake.
Hooray!
I made a mistake!
Let me correct that and not do it again!
Well, I agree with you that each of these errors, as much as they have cost you, are also an opportunity to upgrade yourself.
And if you look at these things in that way, it does fill your life with opportunity to get better.
The Japanese call it Yamato Damashi.
That means, basically, it's untranslatable, but it means Japanese spirit.
The philosophy of Japan, whatever it is you want to call it, it's hard to translate.
Like, Volk in German means people, but means more than people.
It's something deeper than just people.
Anybody is a Volk.
It's a certain type of people.
Yes, it's the core of the society.
Core.
The very essence of being German.
Yes.
Not because you eat sausages and drink beer.
That has nothing to do with it.
It's deeper than that.
It's historically deep.
So, Yamato Damashii to the Japanese mean, if you make a mistake, Congratulations, you made a mistake, but don't do it again.
Right, making the same mistake twice, that's on you.
Right.
Now, among the things that I found very interesting when we spoke yesterday was you were keenly aware of the origin stories of the various people that you had interacted with over your life, what population they had come from, where they have immigrated from.
You know, in the case of, you know, The Japanese, you seem to know something about the Japanese mindset and history.
You were a B-17 pilot in World War II.
I know you were fighting in Europe and not in the Pacific, but nonetheless, the Japanese were the enemy.
And yet, you are clearly enlightened in the sense of understanding that though you are temporarily at war with another population, it doesn't mean that population doesn't have something to teach you.
First of all, there's nothing new on this earth.
No human adventure, no human thought, no human concept of anything, governments, types, philosophy.
It's been hashed over, changed, rearranged, and come back to the original again.
But that was so far, a thousand years passed, and the people who are present don't even know that ever happened.
But they did the same thing in Egypt, in Jerusalem, in the Middle East, in Germany, Everything is a repeat, only we don't live long enough to see that.
You have to read it from the historian, the readings or the wall paintings or whatever is left available to draw.
Like if someone found a A Coca-Cola bottle, 2,000 years from now, they'll say—they've never heard of Coca-Cola, of course, 2,000 years—they'll say, oh, there's designs on that bottle.
Must be a sacred bottle, you know, on the altar.
They can only go by what they see, and it's only a Coca-Cola bottle.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know if you remember this, I mentioned to you yesterday that I'm an evolutionary biologist, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about why it is that human beings make art.
It's a strange thing, because art is not productive in the same way that farming or metallurgy is productive, but the hypothesis that I have advanced
is that art is a way of conveying very deep things across space and across time and in fact the example that I use is the painting Guernica, Picasso's painting of the bombing of Guernica which was apparently terrifying and devastating and he conveys the
insane destruction of this event in history so that people generations later are able to intuit what you said to me yesterday about the hellish nature of war.
So in any case, I guess our philosophies meet there.
Well, you see, Brett, when you go today, if there's a stadium, say Oakland Stadium, they play football and baseball.
If you pay, say, $5 or $10 a ticket to go and see gladiators kill each other.
Would you today?
No.
No.
Would they first have that at all?
They wouldn't have it at all.
They wouldn't hold it.
It's coming back, I think.
No, but violence, maybe physical things, but not actually killing you right there with a weapon.
Right.
And nowadays, it's like going to the football game.
You see, they're still going to a game, they're still sitting in the bleachers, they're still cheering for the guy they want to win, and the outcome is either death or at least leniency.
It's the same.
It's the people sitting in the audience aren't going to say, oh, that's not nice, don't do that.
Well, you know, I mean, if you look at, let's say, professional football, for example, These people are now so highly paid, but to put their health in severe jeopardy, the toll it takes to be an elite football player is actually very severe.
And while they don't typically die on the field, it's not so different from having people in a stadium fighting for their lives.
It is, you know... No, gladiators, it's a profession.
They know they're going to get killed or come out alive.
In fact, the emperor might say, okay, you should fight another battle.
It's all the mindset.
And the people who sit in those coliseums with the front row seats or the way back in the back, the peasants, these people come there, they're thinking of death.
Their lives are miserable anyways that come in there.
They're people who are starving and hungry and the elite seats are someplace else.
But these people, life outside, in fact, most of these gladiators are gaining their freedom that way, to be an ordinary citizen.
And so it's just the way things are.
Like my mom, we had a neighbor next door, there are two homes down in Detroit, and Harry Van was his name, and she didn't want me to go into their home.
I said, "Why, Mom?" I was about 10, 11 years old.
She said, "I don't like that family, Martin, but Harry can come here to our home, but you can't go to their home." And that was her privilege, she's my mother.
She didn't want me to associate with people that would, I would see things that were not the same in my home, and I could be misled or be thinking something different, and my moms and dad would be negated, in other words, in a sense, and I would go their way, maybe.
So you see, everything has to keep things in focus, and there's nothing wrong with saying, Our family is different, and I don't want you going there with them, because all our effort is on you.
Yep.
And so that's how everything goes.
The world repeats itself over again.
You can go, if I could take you back to the time of the pharaohs.
What did they do with the pharaoh when he died?
Mummify them, right?
Who else did they put in there?
Servants.
Servants.
Put them to death.
Yeah.
Why did they do that, though?
What did they believe?
Well, they believed there was somewhere to go.
There's a life hereafter.
That's not Christian or Judaic, that's not anything.
That's Egyptian.
They said he has to have his servants, he has to have his best general, he has to have all the things, the cup he drinks wine out of, whatever it is, all in that coffin, in that pyramid or wherever they're buried.
Because they believe earnestly that there is a hereafter.
And we do that today, too.
Yeah.
We don't kill your mother and father if you die first, but then you have to be with your mom and dad.
Yeah.
Or a little baby just born dies.
Oh my God, you've got to have a mother there, too.
Kill the mother.
No, we don't do that.
We don't do that, but there is obviously a continuity.
They believed hereafter, that's my point.
Yeah.
So, let's talk a little bit about, you've had various chapters of your life.
I think, you know, you've talked to me a little bit about your childhood.
You obviously went to war as a very young man.
How old were you?
No different than anybody, 18 years old.
18 years old, and how long did it take?
By the way, Not only me, infantry, whatever, you're a Marine.
If you're 18 years old, you can go to battle and get killed, but you couldn't drink liquor in a bar.
And you couldn't vote.
Right, which is, yeah, I mean... If you stop and think of it, I can't vote, I can't go to a bar, but I can go get killed myself.
I mean, get killed.
You can die for your country.
Yeah.
So you flew B-17 bombers.
Yes.
It's a Flying Fortress.
Flying Fortress is the name.
And I will tell you, one of my favorite books of all time, is catch-22.
Catch-22, yeah.
And I know from that book and from reading a certain amount of history that bombers had an appalling rate of returning from a bombing run.
Yes.
They were frequently shot out of the sky.
Yeah, that because at that time, Germany had controlled all of Europe.
They defeated the British and the French at Dunkirk.
They went back to England.
And by the way, Hitler had his armies stop before they got into Dunkirk.
His orders, and all his generals said to him, all the top generals, the men who got the war to that point, now's the chance.
There's 400,000 or 390,000 troops, hardened, war-hardened troops.
We can capture them or kill them.
No, don't go into Dunkirk.
You know why he did that?
No.
He wanted to do that Because he didn't want England.
He loved England.
Hitler didn't want England.
In Hitler's mind, England could have the rest of the world.
He wanted Europe and the breadbasket Ukraine.
He didn't want it.
Defeat England.
English was a Germanic race.
The language is part Latin, but basically, it's a Germanic race.
Dutch, in fact, in Parisia, that's part of Holland, Parisia, he told the army, "Do not do any destructions." That's Northern Belgium.
Do not destroy anything there because I promised him I wouldn't because they'd be part of my German unity forces.
So this man was a super, super politician.
Forget his evilness.
Put that aside, just temporarily.
Yeah.
This man could bamboozle anybody except Churchill.
Churchill knew this man, because Churchill is the same type of a man.
He is one that can negotiate and figure out angles for good purpose, but also for England's purpose.
And Hitler was more overt.
You knew he wrote it in Mein Kampf what he's going to do to the letter.
No one read the damn book.
I read it four times.
It's all in there.
Yeah.
Exactly what he's going to do.
Exactly.
That's troubling.
I will say, I don't know, you know, I do know from talking to you yesterday that you're not the most up-to-date guy with respect to technology, which of course should be a surprise to nobody.
I tried to describe to you what a podcast was and, you know, obviously it's not the most intuitive concept.
Yeah.
But the Internet, For some time I've been quite concerned about the fact that Hitlerian thinking is returning.
And I've been trying to alert people to the danger of this, and it's very hard, based on the way the internet works, you don't run into it unless you go out of your way to find it.
And so... Seek and you shall find.
It's there, and you know, the attack in Israel on October 7th has brought some of it to the surface, so people who didn't think it was out there are now seeing it for the first time.
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We have this unfortunate view of Hitler that is like a cartoon, that because we don't any longer understand that what we're dealing with was a diabolical genius.
Diabolical, that's a perfect example.
Genius doesn't mean necessarily a good person.
Right, it doesn't.
He's genius, that's all.
Whether it's for good or for bad, but he's a genius.
He's a genius.
And the diabolicalness was carried along on that insight about people and how to galvanize them.
And so because we treat him as a cartoon, we don't anticipate the danger of this happening again in some form.
So I worry about that a lot.
Well, you have to have a population.
That means, for instance, America.
You have to have a population that is well-educated.
And we don't.
We don't have that, number one.
And whose parents were well-educated.
We don't have that either.
Maybe you go back to my generation, we had a little more awareness.
Can you imagine if today I was in kindergarten or in elementary school, in my time when I went to school, 6th, 5th, 6th, up to 8th grade, K-8.
The worst offense, the worst offense I as a student could cause was, you know what?
Chewing gum in school.
Wow.
Chewing gum.
Chewing gum.
I mean, they walk into high school now with their belly button showing and their tits hanging out.
Yeah.
And no one pays it, that doesn't mean anything.
They don't understand the underlying danger that's lurking in the shadows when people lose control of them.
They're all overweight, they're eating all kinds of garbage, and the parents don't know any different, and they're all occupied with making money, buy more food, and want to go to get the next polished fingernail.
You know those fake fingernails they put on?
Cost 60 bucks.
And these girls have to work at a ice cream parlor to make $60 to put the damn thing on and then wipe it off, put another one on.
I don't understand that.
No, it's hard to understand.
And I will say I'm 54.
So when I was a kid, World War II seemed like ancient history to me.
But now, you know, I was only born 25 years after the end of it, and we've now covered more than that distance since then.
So by a lot.
And so anyway, my point would be.
My immediate ancestors, people I knew, right?
My relatives.
Yeah, uncle, aunts.
Yeah, people who had seen World War II.
My grandfather and my grandmother.
My grandmother died when I was 13, but my grandfather lived into my adulthood.
He met my children.
All of the elders were very clear-headed about The danger that something Hitlerian, that a genocide could happen, that it could happen here in the United States.
How?
Anywhere?
Anywhere.
That you needed to be aware.
And they were also very clear with us about the fact that the people in Europe, the Jews who had died, were the ones that told themselves that as bad as things were, it would pass.
That's right.
And so anyway.
They had their hope.
Yeah, that was their hope and they were wrong.
And that means that I've been on alert for my whole life.
I didn't think I would live to see it, but I'm on alert for the signs that things were turning.
And now they are turning at a rate that's hard for me to even imagine.
Well, don't feel bad because you were living in those countries at the time.
You were in America.
You were safe.
My Armenian people are the first historical genocide of the 20th century.
1,500,000 killed, which is half the nation.
Half of the nation was killed by the Turks.
And not like the Germans, methodical.
Next case, I mean, butchered in the streets.
Terrible things.
On the priest's feet, they nailed horseshoes.
Can you imagine putting horseshoes and making him walk on a priest's feet?
No, and anyways, terrible things, raping women, pregnant women, get the baby and the mother at the same time.
If the baby's a nice-looking baby, take him, raise him up as a Turk.
And so we went through all that.
That's why there's some sort of a camaraderie, not to say camaraderie, but some feeling of Mutual feeling of being singled out and done away with.
And the Armenians were that.
And now they're all over the world.
And in fact, one of my Jewish friends said she thinks we are one of the lost tribes of Israel up there.
It's because we're like the Jews.
We're family-oriented, strong for each other, and have a religious I'm not preaching religion.
I'm not even denying religion.
I'm just saying there's a unifying factor in every, some countries don't have it.
Yep.
But other countries, or people, certain peoples do.
And it's too bad that these Muslim people in today's, what do you call them, the Gaza Strip?
Yep.
What's that?
Hamas.
Palestinian.
The Hamas people.
Butchering babies.
Well, I mean, we have to we have to draw a distinction, OK?
And you draw the distinction correctly.
You said Hamas.
I mentioned the Palestinians.
We have the same thing.
They're on the same on the same track.
Well, no, I'm going to correct you.
Hamas is Hamas.
And there are many Palestinians who support them and there are many who don't.
OK, so it is just vitally important that we not mix those two things.
But there are there are clearly people who are Unfazed by violence, not just the violence, but the the barbarism that was shown by Hamas, which actually matches very well what you were describing from the Armenian genocide.
It was not a desire simply to wipe out other people.
It was a desire to show the opposite of mercy, to delight in tormenting living people, mothers, children, And that is about something.
That is about not just replacing another people, but it is about, well, it is about fundamentally dehumanizing them.
Well, you know, Brett, I'm afraid I have a different philosophy.
Sure.
And not different, it's...
How can I describe my philosophy?
I'm not excited about what I'm telling you, killing these, putting horseshoes on their feet, nailing horseshoes.
That's minor.
It's the mentality that when Hitler come into power, the German people, and some of the book I read, Fall and Rise of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, they didn't like Hitler, but he said, the man said, at least we have bread on the table.
You see?
They closed their eyes.
Sure.
Hitler had a hard time to get the votes to become chancellor.
The people were against him.
But business life improved and he got Czechoslovakia.
He got part of the Rhineland without firing a bullet.
Austria.
My God.
Then the personal, and he played upon that.
Harry Gellos played the music, played the announcements, and they were convinced that this man was going to lead him to Nirvana.
Yeah.
That's it.
We're here.
And they backed him up 100 to the very end.
Yes.
Well, you know, the way you describe the story, which I think is totally accurate based on my understanding of it, is that it played on... So, excuse me, the Palestinians might be against him, but if they get their way, the Hamas people, they're going to vote for Hamas.
Sure.
They're playing on what the Palestinians want.
They want the power personally, but they'll get it through that back door.
You know... Yes, although...
The thing that's so hard to understand about what happened in Israel is that the barbarism of the Hamas attack guaranteed a reaction by Israel that would be devastating to Gaza.
There was no way that the Israelis were going to act with
restraint because the degree to which, you know, Israel's not a large country, the degree to which people, almost everyone in Israel knows somebody who was killed or kidnapped, and the way in which families died and Hamas delighted in it and recorded it and called their parents to brag about killing Jews, all of that
was certainly going to enrage Israel so that its tendency to behave in a civilized way would be challenged by just the simple ghastly nature of the atrocities.
Listen, if you and I are going to have a conflict, I mean, an argument.
I hope it doesn't come to that.
No, no.
No, I meant an argument.
Yeah.
And I see you have one agenda and my agenda is contradictory to yours because I'm looking at my end of it and you're looking at your plan.
Hamas doesn't care about beheading babies or All the hideous things that they did, they want Israel to attack.
Yes.
They're asking.
Of course.
They're begging to hit us.
But when you say that if Hamas delivers an improvement in the quality of life for the people of Gaza, that that's how they will get ahead.
What I don't understand, and what I don't think anybody understands, is how, given what Hamas did, Powerful nation like Israel was going to respond in a way that can't help but make life terrifyingly awful in government.
Wait, you missed one more point.
Okay.
1937, the World's Olympic Games were held where, you know?
Munich.
Germany.
Yes.
Germany.
Berlin.
Berlin.
Wait, oh, I'm sorry.
Munich is a whole different thing.
Hitler was in power then.
He was the chancellor of Germany.
They took down all the signs that said Jews not allowed to be here.
They cleaned the city and the German people happy.
They're drinking beer.
They got their lunch pail there.
They got a job.
Unemployment has been wiped out.
Six million people unemployed are now working.
Of course, they're building battleships and submarines and tanks and whatever else.
And Hitler is the top of the world.
And The whole world comes there.
They see happy people.
They see happy German young people, and they can't get over it.
Youth clamps, bicycle clubs, glider clubs training for Air Force.
You see, you learn to fly.
If you want to learn how to fly an airplane, you go a glider.
A glider, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
It teaches you all those lessons.
When you take a glider, you better know what you're doing.
Yeah.
There's no engine that gets you out of trouble.
Yeah.
And then we got to catch the wind.
Anyways, so once Hamas gets the Palestinian people who want a peaceful settlement just to have a country of their own, there's nothing wrong with that.
Yeah.
And Israel wants to Ancient history of Israel.
All their history is written in that one little area of Israel, which is now Israel, Jerusalem, Nazareth, all that area.
And if the Hamas can do it, get away with it a little bit, and then defeat Israel somehow, they'll go with Hamas.
They Yes.
have to improve their lives first.
And Hamas doesn't want that.
He wants Israel to strike.
Yes.
And I'll tell you, I wouldn't want to be a head of the army in Israel to make certain, or the prime minister, Netanyahu, if I could make that kind of a decision, because you have to be very brave.
And not only brave, confident.
Confident is a better word.
That you fight, you're going to win.
And Netanyahu made an interview with the radio commentator, television, Sean Hannity.
He said, We have to go.
We can't afford to lose.
We have to become victorious.
Period.
There's no such thing.
Halfway measure.
If you do a little halfway measure, that's Chamberlain giving them the Rhineland.
That's Chamberlain giving them Czechoslovakia.
And Czechoslovakia was guaranteed by France.
And England that they would come to their aid if they're attacked by anybody, not Germany, anybody.
And they never did.
And they gave Czechoslovakia You know, to Germany, give it to Hitler.
He took Austria, that was easy, as is the most Germans there.
Yeah.
So you see, Hitler had his mind made up.
That's one, two, three, then Danzig, that didn't do it.
That's where the war started.
And too bad Stalin didn't read Mein Kampf.
Had he read Mein Kampf or had any American president, anybody had read Mein Kampf.
No, even the Germans didn't read it.
Yeah.
He told exactly, I mean to the letter, what he's going to do to get power.
In 1937, when all the Americans in the world came to Berlin for the Olympics, they saw a happy, not a phony, real happy people.
Right, he had provided growth.
Yeah, no unemployment, nice clubs joined, freedom to go abroad, do whatever you want.
The people knew this man was their destiny.
And by the way, Hitler could not happen in any other country but Germany.
It would never happen in America.
Yeah, you'd get something else.
Something else would be, but not that way.
Ours might be Sink down, down, down, down in the gutter that we have gutter rats running the country.
Oh, I think we do.
Yeah.
Gutter rats running the country.
Gutter rats is what we got.
Yeah.
So I want to go back to a couple points.
Yes.
Clean them up.
Am I crowding you out too much?
No.
Okay.
I'm doing all right.
You're doing great.
You hear that, folks?
Yeah.
So I wanted to return to a few things here.
One, I must tell you, I am stuck in a bind with respect to what's taking place in Israel because I have nothing but compassion for these Israeli people.
Oh, you can't help it.
Can't help it.
And you don't have to be Jewish.
Right.
Anybody.
Common sense.
Right.
I do not feel like Netanyahu is doing right by the Israeli people.
And in fact, I believe he put them in a position where this happened.
So my feeling is I'm stuck because I'm told that I have to wave the Israeli flag.
And I want to wave some flag that allows me to say that I am on the side of the innocent Israelis.
And that does not put me necessarily on the side of the Israeli government, which I believe is in hands that are at least Through negligence, responsible for what took place.
So, anyway, I just feel like that needs to be said.
Okay.
That's, of course, your view.
Right.
I don't put that view on anybody else, but it is important to me that, unfortunately, we live in an era where people are waving flags and it's like, well, are you on board with Israel or not?
And it's like, the Israeli people, yes.
The Israeli government is a very different question, and I wish there was some way to separate those.
But I also wanted to talk, you talked about the Berlin Olympics.
It's interesting, what made it to my generation was not the story that you tell, where the world could see that Hitler had delivered something to the German people, which explained their allegiance, right?
It was not madness on their part.
In some sense, it was, you know, it's probably even wrong to describe it as greed, but just a desire to have more of what had been delivered to them.
But what made it to my generation was Hitler's refusal to shake hands with Jesse Owens.
You know, a black man who won the race.
Right.
The dash.
It was a long race.
He did a very good job.
Yeah, he did a very good job.
And Hitler, Hitler's pettiness, his unwillingness to shake the hand of a black man who had demonstrated superiority was the thing.
So even in portraying Hitler as a cartoon character rather than as a, you know, a genius of a diabolical nature, which would You know, if history had given us that lesson, then we would be better able to watch for such a thing.
But one thing may add to that.
Sure.
Chamberlain, the prime minister at the time, he went to England, I mean to Germany, to negotiate with Hitler, even gave him what he wanted, even in some cases more than he wanted.
The people, the English people, I mean the German people, didn't say that They thought that was wonderful.
Our Hitler was negotiating these things, but Hitler was true to his colors.
He never shook hands with a black man, because he was against blacks completely, and a race like the blacks, the low quality.
The Untermenschen, they call them, the Poles, the Russians, the Slavs.
Yeah, they looked at everybody as inferior.
Yeah, inferior, subhuman.
And when you think, if I think you're subhuman, I better keep you subhuman, or I don't want you to get any smarter.
They killed in Poland, they took about 3,000, no, 20,000 intellectuals, Polish intellectuals, not Jewish, Polish.
Killed them.
They didn't want these to be the leaders on the ground to challenge the German rule.
They did the same with the Armenian people in Constantinople.
They took 28 of the top professional people, doctors, lawyers, bankers, hung them in the street, let them know that their future is going to be that.
But Hitler was true to his color.
He said, I don't shake a hand of a black man.
He would be a hypocrite.
Yeah, well, you know, the funny thing is I'm trying to show you is how internally He is what he is.
He doesn't gloss over it by being nice to you, then behind your back say he's a jerk, I'm not, you know, all that stuff.
He was true to his cause, and the people didn't see that.
How they couldn't see that, and read the Mein Kampf.
Have you read the Mein Kampf?
I haven't.
Read Mein Kampf.
It'll be a replay of World War II.
Everything he said, he did it to the letter.
You know how he attacked Poland?
Tell me.
He took 25 or 20 men in concentration camp who were, you know, there for a bad reason, not necessarily Jewish, but criminals.
You don't mean concentration camp.
Yeah, I mean prison or concentration, yeah.
He took them, put on German uniforms, and had the Gestapo shoot them dead.
In the city of Gleiswitz, there's a radio station which is on the Russian-German side of the border between Poland and... and lay these bodies out and took pictures that Poland attacked German soldiers and workers in... A false flag.
That's the excuse.
That's how he operates.
Now that didn't do right off the bat start the war, but that was all it and then Stalin You want to know something?
That guy is really genius.
He knew everything.
And he just said, oh, yes, like the Japanese.
Ah, so, you know.
But meantime, their aircraft carriers are heading for Pearl Harbor.
You know, this is all fair in love and war.
I don't hold that against anybody.
He's on his side, he's fighting for his side, for his agenda, and he can do anything he wants.
They even mentioned Hitler, and one of them said, if you kill all these Jewish people, then what will the world... He said, they killed all the Armenians, and who remembers that, he says.
No one remembers it.
Right, and in fact, it's very clear from the history that the Nazis intended to cover their crime, and what happened is they were overrun by the Allies, and so they were not fully able to erase the evidence of the Holocaust.
Yes, but that happened only after the Allies landed on Europe and they found all this information.
But before that, when they controlled the whole continent, they were having a field day with people.
Poles, Jews, communists.
Every village they went into in Russia that had a communist commissar, he's dead.
And his generals were against that, believe it or not.
That's not war, that's murder.
Hitler says, you do it or you'll be dead.
I mean, oh, it's, at my age, Brad, Nothing means anything more to me.
I mean, material things.
I found a lot of pictures.
My wife just passed away, like, you know, August 20th, four months ago.
All the things we cherished before, material things, mean absolutely nothing to me.
All right, I just saved a few best ones I like, and I don't know what I'm going to do with those either.
Material things mean nothing.
And you lose, before you're saving, you're like in Ecclesiastes.
Have you ever read Ecclesiastes?
No.
Oh, read Ecclesiastes.
Twelve chapters.
I read it over and over again.
Life is vexation and What's the word when you think of yourself only?
Let's see.
Vanity!
Vanity there.
Vanity.
It says at every paragraph, life is vexation and vanity.
After I die, the man is saying, and he's one of the kings of Israel, he says, I worked all my life to make the castle and have the wealth and the land and the armies.
I die and the next person wastes it all.
What?
What is this?
Yeah.
No one even carries it.
His own son won't even carry it on.
So let me ask you this.
What does still mean something to you?
Pardon?
What does still?
Material possessions mean nothing to you.
That makes sense to me.
What does mean something to you now?
What does mean something?
What means something?
I have to narrow it down.
It's not to religion because I already settled that.
There is a God.
Okay.
There's no doubt about it.
We call it God.
You can call it Asfalt in Armenian and Diu, whatever language.
They're all pervading intellect.
You can see it everywhere.
How does an acorn become a big oak tree?
One little acorn, one little baby grows up to be a genius like Tesla, Nikolai Tesla, and becomes great.
Something, something, you weren't, you didn't evolve into that.
Well, here's the thing.
That's right, I don't have that evolution of Darwinism.
I hear you, and you said this yesterday, and I, let me just make this clear so it doesn't confuse the audience.
So, I'm an evolutionary biologist.
My wife is an evolutionary biologist.
I, of course, not only it's a mistake to even say that I believe that we evolved from apes, for example, That's okay.
I'm not against you.
Of course.
I'm glad you have your opinion.
And in fact, I would say the following thing.
It would be strange for me, at 54 years of age, to even correct a 100-year-old person.
Whatever it is that you have done, however it is that you have lived your life, you're sitting here at 100, able to come up with the names of historical figures.
Yesterday, you were telling me particular pages in important books that I probably ought to read.
Alone.
So whatever it is you're doing works like nothing I've ever seen before.
So who am I to tell you you've got something wrong in the way you see the universe?
No, you don't have to say I'm wrong, but you could challenge me.
Well, sure.
Yeah, I mean- But I wouldn't even do it because the absurdity, let's put it this way, at a factual level, I don't really have any doubt about the general story of Darwinism.
At a practical level, I have every doubt.
You know, does it make sense?
Yes, a person can live a good life thinking in this way, but is it the optimal thing to pass along in order for people to know how to approach the world?
I don't think we know that yet.
There's a big gap between the factual reality of the way the universe works and the information that tells you how to live.
What is the key factor in the universe?
What is the key factor needed for it to function like it does?
The stars moving a certain way, the aurora, how it happens, the rhythm.
What is the key word that would describe how this...
Oh, here, what's the key word that makes this watch work?
Well, the watch works because of design.
No, I mean, there's harmony.
Everything moves accordingly.
You can't have the little hand move faster than the big hand, because that only takes the minutes.
The big hand makes the hour.
So how can you, I mean, the other way around, I'm sorry.
You can't, you can't, you just didn't grow.
Someone made it this way.
Right.
Now, that is a very famous argument about whether or not the appearance of design, if one were to find a squirrel, the squirrel has the same kind of orderliness that a watch does, and so this is a very old argument.
Yeah, nothing new.
The people who believe in Almighty God, call it whatever you want, they know that this didn't happen.
Well, and I would put it to you a different way.
And again, my thought was not to offer a challenge to you on this front at all, because I don't know what the purpose of doing so would be.
But I would just submit to you that as long as we're down this road, That if there is a God, that that God utilized the processes of geology to make the world, that God utilized the processes of evolution to make the creatures.
That's your opinion?
Right, of course it is.
You know why it's your opinion?
You're using a human emotion to create an opinion.
No, no, no, no.
How do you know that God did that?
Because, for example, Darwin was offering a model for how creatures would come into existence before he had any information about how genes were encoded or what they would look like.
In fact, maybe the weakest part of his entire model was, where is the information?
How is it stored and how does it interact when two animals breed?
Now that we know where that information is stored, that we know it's stored in the DNA, we have a mechanism to look at the tree of life.
Okay, and so what that, each of those genetic spellings, if God had made us each separately, there would be no reason for the morphological pattern that suggests that all of the apes are closely related, that they are slightly more distantly related to the monkeys that are not apes.
That they are slightly more distantly related to the other primates, that they are slightly more distantly related to the mammals.
There would be no reason for the pattern of genetic spellings to align so well with the pattern of morphological form that we see in the creatures.
That suggests a process in which those creatures really do have a history.
Okay, let me ask you this then.
Yep.
A lowly worm.
- Yes.
- Has to cohabit with another worm to create more worms, right?
Let's take a crocodile.
- All right, let's do crocodiles.
- Crocodile, they have sperms and they have a womb and they give birth to their babies.
- They give birth to eggs, which they bury.
- And the babies come out and they're self-sufficient.
The moment they come out of the egg.
- Not quite in crocodiles.
- There's no nipple on the mother.
No, but so it happens that I have lived with crocodiles and I've watched them do this and so the interesting thing with crocodiles, crocodiles are a very ancient primitive group, but the mother listens
or the eggs which are ready to hatch and when the eggs are ready to come out the babies inside the eggs make a beeping noise it just sounds like beeping it's crazy and the mother will return to the nest and the babies she will then carry the babies in her mouth to a Place.
A hidden place.
Hidden place.
On the side of the water or something under a tree.
And the babies will all exist there.
Hatched.
They hatch.
They're swimming.
And she's effectively protecting them because they're pretty helpless when they're small.
That's all built into the genes.
Yes.
100%.
100% built in.
If that wasn't the case, you'd have no crocodile.
Right.
You'd have nothing.
Right.
The world would be nothing but trees.
Yeah.
Even the trees do this.
They have that same... In fact, human beings are one of two groups In which there is substantial evolutionary information that is not in the genes.
Birds and mammals.
That's the two places where this happens in significant amounts.
And it happens because parents and offspring spend time together.
Crocodiles are an exception.
They do that, but there's nothing behaviorally transmitted as far as we know.
In birds and mammals, There is the opportunity for mothers, it's usually mothers, sometimes in some species it's both mothers and fathers, but mothers to convey information about how to be a hummingbird, for example.
They can convey this information because mothers and babies encounter each other, right?
In human beings, This is the most elaborate version that has ever existed on the Earth, where in fact a large fraction of what it means to be a human being is actually not in the genes, right?
A human being raised without their parent is not a fully capable person.
A human being raised by wolves, to take the classic... But how do you know they're human?
Well, it depends what you mean by human.
I mean, well, you said human.
Yeah.
No, let's put it this way.
If we say, what is this person?
They're human by virtue of the fact that they... If you strip a brown bear, strip it of fur, everything, right to the skin, and lay it out, not his head, just body, it resembles a human being.
A bear.
Sure.
But just naked bear.
Legs, they stand up, they're almost like human beings.
Human beings will never know the answer, Brett.
Never know the answer.
We'll never know because the almighty, all-pervading intellect, which I call God, that word I was asking you, what word we'll describe is harmony.
Okay.
Harmony.
Here's the problem, okay?
And believe me, I did not intend to get into an argument with you.
This is conversation.
I know.
I love it.
I grew up in a home where this was perfectly normal, and I love that you also love this style of interaction.
But I didn't intend to go here.
But we're here.
If God created these creatures intentionally, if God designed the bear separately from designing the human being, then God very much wanted us to believe that they had evolved.
Don't even think that way.
You know what you're saying already?
He didn't want us to think that way.
He didn't take anybody into consideration.
This is the way it is.
God is not saying, oh, the people will get confused.
They'll never, never know the answer.
But no, follow me a little bit farther here, because if God created us as we are, then God created us so that we would have something called scientists.
Right.
And he knew that what a scientist would do.
But before you say that, let me continue.
What did God create?
How do you think we look, the first human being looked?
Just your opinion.
I don't know myself.
Depends what you mean by the first human being.
It depends what you mean by the first human being.
Like we are today.
You got fingernails.
I got the same fingernails.
But we can go back, you know, we can go back to the first modern human, which would be a couple hundred thousand years ago, or we can go back to our ancestors, which were already on our branch of the tree, but were not fully modern, so we could go back You know, to Homo erectus, for example.
We go back even further to Australopithecines.
We have, we don't have all of the fossils, but we have enough fossils to be able to piece together how we got here.
Creatures that no longer exist, right?
They were out-competed by their descendants.
And in any case, what I would say to you is nobody can rule out the possibility that a god put us here with a purpose.
But I would submit to you one of two things.
For a purpose, no.
Sure.
None of us know.
None of us.
We'll never know.
This is my, what do you call it?
My way of looking at it.
I don't know for sure.
- Sure.
- None of us know.
- None of us.
- We'll never know.
- Right.
- He didn't do that.
All he did was create a place where people or animals or what do you wanna call us, could breathe the air that keep us, sustain us.
Some could breathe under the water, and they were fish, they had to breathe air, the air that's in the water.
Oxygen, I mean.
And so without that oxygen, they'll suffocate.
Sure.
And if they don't, they, okay.
And some became lady eggs and some gave life birth and some had to have a sperm in an egg to fertilize.
You can go on forever.
All we're going to do is take our human experiences and interpret that our way.
That's all we have to go by.
Right.
We don't have, I suppose, a million years from now.
Yeah.
They found a Coca-Cola bottle.
Yeah, you already told you that, didn't I?
Yeah.
And they'd say, "Mom, what is this?
Coca-Cola." They know what that means, like the Rosetta Stone.
Sure.
They interpreted that.
They found out a clue.
Napoleon, one of his scientists, found that.
And anyways, they would concoct a story that this is one of this temple's most valuable piece of ordinance of the, I mean, on the altar, and they sacrificed, and they filled it with blood, and you had to drink it, you know, who knows what they would make out of that.
Yeah, they'd make it nonsense.
All in their own concept.
Sure.
Of their own experiences.
Right, but the thing about science is that science allows us to take our expectations and discover that they're wrong.
That's the one superior thing about it, is that you can have a belief about what something is, and if you do the science correctly, it will actually tell you it's not true.
And so, the story of evolution is either a hoax perpetrated by a god that wanted us to believe in it, or the mechanism that a god would have used to accomplish the creation of creatures like us, or God really is a story that we impose on this more complicated, difficult thing that we've happened onto.
God's an easy answer.
Not an easy answer.
Yes, it is.
He can do anything.
Yeah, but look, I've been fighting a battle for a long time with my colleagues in evolutionary biology.
My colleagues tend to view religion as A phony story.
A phony story?
Yeah.
I mean, the way it's laid out now, you mean?
No, they... I mean, in fact... You mean there is no God?
A living God?
Not only do they believe there is no God, but they believe that people who believe in a God are effectively fools.
Okay.
And I try to explain to them that belief, these belief structures that we call religions, can't possibly be a mistake.
Which doesn't make them literally accurate, but those are the stories that allowed human beings to accomplish the things that they accomplished.
Who was the god of the Greeks?
The ancient Greeks?
Well, Zeus would be the top.
Zeus.
Yeah.
He was the top man.
Yeah.
He was the god.
Yeah.
Do I have it right?
Is it Zeus or Jupiter for the Greeks?
No.
No, it's Zeus.
Yeah.
And Jupiter was second in charge.
And then the third.
And then he had actually saints.
Well, so what you're describing... The Greeks had Jesus, or the Jews had against Jesus, and a lot of Jews were for Jesus.
So Jesus became the Son of God.
Jesus became Jupiter.
And the Greeks and all the other gods were saints with lesser power.
So you see, mankind It's hard.
You're telling the same story that I'm telling in a different way.
I'm giving you conjecture.
I don't know myself, even.
None of us do.
I mean, I'm saying, Martin, is this what you think?
Yes, I'm trying to analyze it.
And I'm open for I believe it, but I don't believe it.
Yeah, but, you know, the marvelous thing is, you know, Martin, you're 100 years old.
Yeah.
Whatever mechanism you have used to navigate your life has worked really well.
Well.
I mean, I'm sure you got lucky.
I mean, obviously, you're a B-17 pilot.
I don't believe in luck.
I never did.
No luck or no random happenings.
I believe that everything has a purpose.
Now, this is one of my examples that I use when I talk to my colleagues about the idea that things can be metaphorically true, even if they are not literally true.
If a person believes that there's no such thing as luck, that everything happens for a reason... You can if you want to.
It fits perfect for luck.
Well, I think a person who believes in luck is actually at a disadvantage, even though there is something that I would say is literally luck.
Did you and I meet in that airplane?
Very lucky.
No, I don't think it was luck.
No, it was meant to be.
Meant to be.
Well, here's the thing.
I don't know if I'm right.
Right.
And it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Here we are.
My point would be that a person who believed that everything happened for a reason would be on the lookout for opportunity all the time.
Oh, that's okay.
No, there's nothing wrong with it.
But the person who isn't conniving to look...
Come to a place, I'll go for that person to help me.
I think I like his way he looks.
That's different.
You're analyzing people.
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.
Probably the drunk next to him would be the best person to go to because he has more knowledge of what you want to know, but you don't know that.
You don't know that.
But whatever happens to me before, I should say lucky.
Yeah.
Random.
Chance.
All that.
And I told you that man, that Indian boy behind me, did I tell you that?
I don't think so.
Okay.
I was, my wife was very ill.
I took her to India to a homeopathic physician, Dr. Vijayakar, very well-known man, not some hocus-pocus guy.
And so I had to go back.
We were in India for one year.
I had to go back and make my income tax.
Back to California.
And so it took me two weeks to go and do all that and come back to India again.
Well, I never knew on my visa, in a little tiny paragraph, in tiny letters, you'd have to have a magnifying glass, honest to God.
I see, honest to God.
I have the magnifying glass to see what that you couldn't come back to India again unless you stayed overseas six weeks.
If you're going out of the country, you can come back six weeks later.
So when I was in to, to go back, I get to the airport.
He says, you can't go back.
I said, why?
No, you have to be there six weeks.
You only been there two weeks.
I know, he says.
I can hardly read that.
I just know it by experience.
He says, all I can say to you is, go to the consulate, the capital of Belgium, Le Havre.
What is it?
Le Havre.
No, I can't pronounce the word.
Le Havre.
Belgium.
That's where the United Nations headquarters is.
Go to the consulate and tell them your wife is ill, that she's under care.
I said, oh yeah, take the commuter train, get there, and they'll help you.
I did all he said, got to the consulate, and the guy was a typical low bureaucrat who thought he was the king.
Sorry.
I said, please, And my nature is, I say please, because I like to say please, but I like to take that son of a bitch and beat his brains out.
He says, I'm sorry, but you can't go.
Like, he has control.
A small bureaucrat who's got America under his- Petty tire.
Petty, yeah.
And there's other Indians in line behind me, and they've been there for two days, three days, trying to get through also.
And I said, let me use your phone, please.
We don't allow anyone to use a consulate phone.
What do I do?
Gotta go back to America.
Stay there six weeks, continue six weeks, and come back.
A tap on my back shoulder.
Turn around, it's a young Indian boy.
He says, Sir, I heard everything.
Please take my cell phone.
Make the call.
Get what you have to do.
And he's on vacation from Cambridge.
He's going to his very wealthy family.
He's in school in England.
And, oh, I says, thank you.
No, pay.
That's free.
Just take it, he says.
So I called the hotel.
I got the downstairs boy.
He knows me.
I said, go upstairs and get my wife.
Tell her to get a doctor to get on his letterhead.
Write that he's the physician and da, da, da, da, da.
And that Martin has to be there.
So forth and so on.
Fine.
And here's the fax number of the consulate.
The fax came in less than 20 minutes.
Perfect.
And he still was going to act like this, you know, sell me a little more, make me sweat.
And he, well, I'll give you June 28th.
And little did he know that we're going to go home on June 27th anyways, because my birthday is on June 27th.
And so I said, Oh, thank you very much.
So you see, that was destiny.
If that boy wasn't behind, you can call it luck.
Yeah.
I don't like to call it luck because it's too easy.
I like to, then wait, I'm not, wait a minute.
One more thing.
I got it.
Okay.
Now, right.
I'm going back down to the train station to go back to the airport.
The train that goes to the airport goes right into the station.
The train pulls right in.
It's a commuter train, but it takes an hour and a half to get there.
And we're sitting in the train, and there's a girl there, and everybody speaks Dutch, of course, and French.
There's an announcement.
The girl said, did you hear that, sir?
I know you're American.
I said, I don't know what he said.
He said, this train is being cancelled.
Is it cancelled?
I have to get to, I have to go back to my wife and so on.
He says, well, Let me see.
I can go with you.
I'll go out of my way to take you.
The bridge has been weakened.
The bridge won't hold the train, whatever it was.
You have to make five circuitous way to get to the airport.
You wouldn't be able to handle that.
You wouldn't know what to get off, what to get on.
I'll take you the first two.
And then from there, I'll go to my sister's house and sleep there and go to work tomorrow.
Oh, I said, please, thank you.
While we talk like this, walking, a voice behind me, Sir, I turned around, short, well-dressed, I mean, elegantly dressed.
He's a clothing, men's clothing salesman in Holland, and only the United Nations people, all they get the best, you know, custom-made clothing, and he looked elegant.
It was the Ghana, from Ghana in China, I mean, Africa.
Excuse me, folks, 100 years old.
You're doing great.
And I'll take you the rest of the way, all the way.
Don't worry.
I'll stay with my sisters and this and that.
Oh, I said, thank you very much.
And he stuck with me, got me right to the airport.
And I would never have been able to do that, not in a million years.
So you see, I have to call that not luck, random chance.
It looks like it could fit that category, wouldn't it?
He's behind me.
That's chance.
Why was he behind me?
Why was he over there in front of me?
Right, right.
No, I get it.
I get it.
I think I have to call it something.
Believing in luck is not very useful.
That's right.
It's not.
I don't believe in luck.
Our is not luck here.
This is That's meant to be.
Let's suppose it's luck.
It does nothing for us.
I accept that because it could be right.
Could be right.
It sounds right.
It sounds right and it's still useless.
But OK, so this does sort of return us to the question of you as a B-17 pilot.
Yeah.
And by the way, everybody but my flight engineer were 18, 19, or 20 years old.
He was 26 and married.
And we all thought, poor Jim, he's an old man.
What's he doing here?
And he's married on top of that.
Oh, God, he should be home with his wife, whatever.
The mentality of the 18 to 20 years made him an old man, and married made it even worse.
You know, there is a line, I won't get it exactly right, it's been a while since I've read Catch-22, but there's a line in Catch-22, there's a favorite section I have in the book where an old man, the proprietor of a brothel in Italy, is talking to one of the young airmen, might be neatly, and The young airman is saying something about how he's young and he has his whole life ahead of him.
And the old man has accused him of being old.
And he says, I'm not old.
I'm only 20.
And the old man says, you don't know if you're going to live through tomorrow.
You don't get older than that.
Well, something on that order, Aesop's Fables, you know the way Aesop's Fables, and Jesus spoke in parables, and Aesop's Fables is sort of a parable.
The one I'm going to give you is that the wolf just killed a rabbit, and in his hunger, he's hungry, chewing fast, some of the bones got caught in his throat, and he looks up, and there's a stork flying above the air, Oh my God, the wolf, calling me.
What is it?
He's up there flying, gliding in a sense.
He explains the situation.
He says, please come down.
You've got a long neck and a long beak.
You can get that bone out.
I'll give you anything you want.
I'll give you money.
I'll give you a reward.
Stork's a reward, huh?
He comes down, lands about 10 feet away.
Make sure, you know, this is legitimate.
Comes closer.
He is choking.
He's dying.
He's open your mouth.
Puts his long beak in there, the neck in there, and takes the bone out.
Thank you.
Well, the stork backs up a few feet.
Where's my reward?
The wolf narrows his eyes and says, you got your reward.
You go back and tell the rest of the Storks, you put your neck down my throat and pick it up in one piece.
That's your reward.
You want a reward?
That's your reward.
Don't overdo something.
Be thankful for what happened.
Yeah.
Well, there is something, and I do think this is one of the things that, um, our culture has lost track of.
There's, uh, Very little gratitude for what we have.
And in fact, it's part of why we are now putting our civilization in jeopardy, because we don't realize how much worse it can be.
People who are obsessed with Small problems, or in some cases problems that are actually fictional, are putting the entire civilization in jeopardy of collapsing by causing us to obsess over these little things.
And it's very, you know, I think if you've traveled, you've seen war, you know how bad things can be.
And so you tend not to wanna take a system that works and wreck it in the hope that something better will emerge in its place.
But I don't know, young people have it too easy to even know how bad it can be. - You know, don't forget changes in the past where you had to travel, Abraham Lincoln, what, nine miles walked it just to go to church or to school.
And now things happen like that.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine Washington coming here and saying, I want to go to Philadelphia.
It takes four days, sir.
You can fly there from Washington.
You can take a car and get there in 15, 20 minutes.
My God.
He'd be shocked, wouldn't he?
Okay.
In our point of view, The world is going—our generation.
I'm leaving this generation, this life.
Next five years, if I go that far, I'll be happy.
The speed by which things take place, catastrophic things, almost like earthquakes, destruction immediately.
It's happening in everyday life.
Things change.
Things move.
New inventions come that negates everything else.
And we go faster and faster.
Our end's going to come very fast.
Yep.
This world of ours is going to, if we're not, and I'm saying, can we do something to stop it?
I don't know.
No one knows.
That's the normal reaction to that.
How do we change today's education?
How do we change the children's way of being educated?
They're being taught in such a way that is contrary to every common sense, normal common sense.
Yes, contrary to normal common sense.
Yeah, common sense.
Babies shouldn't be... They're giving the baby in New York and in New Jersey, I think the two states, the baby can come to full term.
It's out of the womb.
It's crying.
And the mother can still have the baby aborted.
That's a law!
Yeah, I can't speak to what the law is, but I will say that the tolerance for abortion right up until the, you know, beyond viability up to the moment of birth is obviously a A hazard to our most fundamental values.
And yet people treat it as if it's an obvious right.
You know, the best thing I can answer that is that the young generation is worried about pigeons and squirrels and squirrels are being exterminated and they lose their identity and the animals are disappearing.
And last of the polar bears that won't be coming in the next 10 years.
And yet they take a baby and kill it.
Isn't that a contradiction?
That's worse than being an atheist!
That's an atheist that at least says, there might be a God, I don't know.
Well, I will say, I see a lot of these issues changing.
People's perspective is changing, and there is a lot more consciousness now than there was 20 years ago.
I agree with you.
That's good.
That's a healthy sign.
It is a healthy sign, and I hope that people become more aware.
I want to make sure that we talk about a certain number of things.
I want to talk about what it was like to be a pilot in World War II, especially a bomber pilot.
When you're a pilot and you're 18 years old, I mean almost 19, I mean put it that way.
I was 19, I graduated, I was 19 from Marford, Texas.
You know, only a young kid.
Yep.
And all the everybody else is like me, all young kids.
Out of the 500 in the class I was in, class 44B, only 100 made it to the final advanced training.
100 made it to graduation?
Get their wings and their commissions.
And at the advanced training, only one or two would be eliminated.
And not because they were incompetent, they couldn't give them more time.
The government said you must graduate This much people we needed, wars going on.
Good guys got kicked out, but they were good and they needed a little more time.
And our lessons, our ground school had to be 90% or better.
You couldn't get 89%. 90%.
You might fail in that.
Your physical exercise had to be, if you fainted, you better get off the ground, buddy.
And they had three instructors in Arizona, each doing 15 minutes apiece.
They didn't have to worry about fainting in the sun, you know.
Anyways, and you're flying, you had to learn how to be solo in four and a half hours.
What does that mean?
That means first day, one hour and a half.
Second day... Hour and a half of what?
Hour and a half in the air.
Okay, so you're flying a trainer.
They're sitting, it's an open cockpit.
Yeah.
You're in the front and the instructor's in the back.
Okay.
And there's a rear view mirror up here.
So somebody takes you up, an instructor takes you up, and you get four hours to... Not one time, four days.
Oh, over four days.
You have to, in that... Fourth day, you have to solo.
You have to solo.
You have to know everything there is to know.
He won't let you go up.
He'll just say, I'm sorry, I can't pass you.
And we go back.
And your whole world collapses.
OK.
So you graduate.
You've soloed.
I did what I was supposed to do.
Yep.
And 100 of us did that.
OK.
And then they shipped you off.
Pardon?
They shipped you off to Europe.
No, no.
Yeah, you're graduated with the wings and a second lieutenant commission, and they even flew in tailors from Kansas City, five tailors, to take our measurements so our uniforms wouldn't be officers, you know.
All right.
Tight fit, nice, everything normal, and we felt superior, you know.
So far it sounds like a good deal, but then I know they shipped you off to Europe and you had to actually fight.
Then you go to another transition to learn how to fly the plane that you're going to fly.
The bomber.
The B-17, in my case.
And I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but my mom and dad thought, in their own ways, Martin, please go in a ship where there's a lot of people in it to help you, and you help them.
You're safer.
They thought... You tell me.
Bomber duty was more dangerous.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
But my folks figured more people in the plane, all by yourselves.
Right.
It sounds better.
They didn't have the confidence that I had.
Yeah.
They're parents, only child, don't forget.
Got it.
And it's bad enough to have 10 kids and one died.
In an Armenian home, the sun rises and sets on that child.
Everything is Center it on that child.
And I was a good child.
I'm not saying that.
I believe you.
I was a good child.
By saying good, I didn't say, Ma, I want that bicycle.
I never did that.
You can't have it, Martin.
We can't afford it.
OK, Mom.
That's it.
I know they love me.
That's all I cared.
Yeah.
They said, no, that doesn't mean you don't love me.
They don't have the money.
Right.
Okay.
I understand.
All right.
So you train on the B-17.
My night crew.
Yeah.
So you train together with your crew.
Oh, yeah.
Now I got a crew.
We met for the first time.
You're meeting your brother's Together.
Yeah.
First time.
You are family now on that ship.
Did you know at the point you were training on the B-17, did you know how dangerous bomber duty was?
I didn't care.
No one cared.
The more dangerous, the better.
That's my personality.
I just love the challenge.
I'm not the only one.
No one liked that.
What can you tell me about what it was like to train on this plane?
What did you think of the B-17?
Well, the B-70 is a very, very safe and stable airplane.
It's known for its slow speed, but you can shoot two engines out, half the plane could be falling off the wings, it still can go.
And you can still not go, but you can manage it somehow.
Either to get back to base or land safely.
The B-24 didn't have that luxury.
It had a thinner wing, more powerful engines, and could go faster, but was unstable on damage control.
The B-17 was the workhorse of the U.S.
Air Force.
And so you trained on it with how many people in your crew?
Pardon?
How many people were in your crew?
Besides myself?
Nine others.
Nine others.
And that includes a tail gunner?
That's a co-pilot.
Yeah.
The crew chief, that means the man who handles all the engine possibility and all he handles the engine man.
He's a sergeant and the rest are all privates.
And the officers are co-pilot, pilot, navigator, and bombardier.
That's four officers and there's six enlisted men with the crew chief being in charge of them.
Of course, I'm in charge of everything as a captain of the ship.
I call it captain.
I wasn't a captain, but I was the head of the ship.
I was the king in the ship.
My law was my law, and you obey me.
But I never acted that way.
Only one time, they came to my room.
I'll never forget this.
Knock on the door.
It is in Florida.
We're ready to go overseas now.
We're all together.
Co-pilot, crew chief, and a couple other guys.
They used to call me AG, Gage-ian, you know.
I didn't care if they called me Mr. Gage-ian or called me a lieutenant.
We all had a family.
He says, can we talk to you?
I said, what's going on?
Come on in.
What is it?
The problem was I don't go out with the boys and get drunk.
All the other pilots go out and they do that, but you don't even go out with them.
They're crying.
Is that the problem, I said?
I said, you know, you have a right to change if you don't have, you know, if you have in the Air Force, if you don't have confidence in the pilot, you can ask to be sent to another crew.
Yeah.
If you think he's not a good pilot, you know.
No, it's not that.
You've got to get drunk.
That's easy.
Let's go out and get drunk.
I got plastered.
And they brought me back, holding me like this.
I couldn't even salute the guard at the door, at the gate.
From then on, smooth sailing.
Smooth sailing.
All right.
So they shipped you out.
Where did you go?
We went to a place called Mendelssohn.
It's a small village on the East Anglia.
That part of England, if you say it like a thumb, like Michigan.
Yeah, yeah.
Like a glove.
Okay.
We're right about there.
Right about there.
Right about in Ann Arbor.
Yeah.
That's right.
It's called Menzelsham.
It's maybe 75 people live there, families, 75 families.
The nearest big town is Filixto or Ipswich.
That's over here, 22 miles across channel to France.
Yeah.
So we're right there and Then you're part of a group.
I was a squadron 18.
And then you fly missions.
Oh, first they sent me up with an experienced crew to sit as a co-pilot.
Yeah.
So he can evaluate me when I see all the action going on.
Do I panic or something?
Then he would report that, you know.
So I was eagerly looking for trouble.
I just love this excitement.
Yeah.
I'm not being unique.
Everybody did it.
Yeah.
We thought it was great.
Lieutenant.
I remember being 18, you know.
Yeah, I could imagine.
Nothing bothered me.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm looking forward to whatever it is.
Anyways, then you fly with your crew.
The next mission, you pass that little test.
And that day we went to Kiel, Germany.
Kiel, K-I-E-L with the submarine pens.
And that's a big bombing.
They're guarding that part of that That pits the undercover 18 feet thick cement roofs.
Yeah.
You couldn't penetrate that stuff.
Yeah.
And we had to bomb that, drop in bombs sort of at an angle.
Oh, to scoot it under.
Yeah, yeah.
We couldn't do that too well, but we tried.
Yeah, that's not easy to do.
No, it's not.
They're not bombers in a group.
Individual planes can do that.
They never come back alive.
Yeah.
And anyways, and I, you know, it's all the black puffs of smoke, quack, crack, I mean, no, flack.
Sorry, folks.
When you get 100 years old, you know what I'm talking about.
No, they're not going to make it.
I like this man.
He's a wonderful guy and I'm getting all excited.
Anyway, we, uh, that was it.
That was it.
Okay.
So, um, you know, it's funny, uh, my generation, You don't know this because we haven't really talked about what this podcast is and all of that.
But we have an expression we use, which I often have to explain to people because they don't have a relationship with it.
You know, if somebody is getting beaten up in the world socially, we'll say ostracized some way.
Yeah, we'll say, well, that's flack over the target.
That means you're doing the right thing.
Don't get the wrong lesson from the fact that you're taking flack because it means this is a heavily defended position.
Anyway, you've actually faced actual flak, which I will, you tell me if I've got it wrong, but flak is basically shrapnel.
Shrapnel.
Shot into the air.
88 millimeter cannon.
Yeah.
They calculate your altitude, not right to the nth degree, but pretty close, and they just fire, fire, fire, and pieces of metal.
Shrapnel, they call that.
Many of us had holes in the airplane, or fighter pilots, bullet holes.
If you figure out the way it came, it missed your nose maybe by that far away, you would have been dead, no doubt about it.
So it's dangerous.
Did you lose any members of your crew?
Never lost one.
Never lost one.
I only, what do you call it, had a Harry Arnold, he's passed away now, it's okay.
Harry Arnold was my waist gunner.
While we're in the thick of battle, on the final approach to the target, that's about three minutes away, airtime, every plane locks tight so that all the bombs would fall concentrated on our target.
That's 40 ships.
All dropping bombs.
Almost two seconds after the lead ship drops the smoke bomb, we drop ours.
Simultaneously, for all intents and purposes.
I'm hurt!
On the radio, to me, A.G., A.G., oh my god, I just, Jim.
So wait, this is your, you said waist gunner?
Waist gunner, yeah.
And waist gunner is not the little ball.
No, no, that's a turret underneath.
Yeah.
That's a ball turret.
Yeah.
Waist gunner is just a window, and his gun has a very small.
So it's side mounted.
Yeah, he can't go, it's about a 45 degree from center.
Yeah.
You know, 22 and a half degrees this way, two and a half degrees that way.
So wait, he has the ability to go either side.
Oh yeah, he does, with a gun.
So he's in the middle.
Yeah, 50 caliber machine guns, two of them.
And they fire simultaneously.
And a 50-millimeter cannon of a bullet is about six inches long, 50 caliber.
Yeah.
Also there's armor-piercing, a lot of powder behind it.
Boy, if it hits an engine, it'll tear the engine to pieces.
And this is to shoot down fighters that are after you?
Yeah.
Ours are .50 caliber, but the Germans didn't have it.
They had .30 caliber, which was less, but they could fire whatever.
That was their way of doing it.
Yeah.
I got all excited.
So wait, Harry calls on the radio.
Yeah, Intercom.
Yeah, yeah.
And that Intercom doesn't go to the rest of the squadron, the group.
I can only hear the rest of the crew.
Oh God, they all got excited.
And I said to Jim, the flight crew chief, the sergeant, I said, Jim, go back there and see what you can help.
A.G., yeah, he's only joking.
I was joking.
I wanted to tell the copilot, take the wheel.
I'm going to go and pound that son of a bitch.
I said, Harry, what?
I couldn't speak.
Right.
In fact, the plane got me so excited, I got out of formation sort of like.
All this took about five minutes to crawl back to that part of the ship.
Anyways, I didn't know how I was going to rep a man.
I didn't know how to do it.
But they do, the crew.
They said, he comes to my officer's quarters, comes to my Quonset hut, you know, these round metal huts?
Yeah, yeah.
They're called Quonset.
Corrugated?
Yeah, corrugated, right.
That was how they put them.
We lived in those mass bunks.
Enlisted men that live the same way as we did, no segregation anywhere there.
And Harry, he's got his duffel bag, all the clothing in it, and everything.
They won't let me in there!
They kicked me out!
I said, you deserve it!
It's gonna rain tomorrow, I guarantee you!
I don't care if it snows!
Anyways, Harry, I said, come on in here, get out and sleep on the floor.
Tomorrow I'll get you back in the building.
Don't you know it?
I know it!
Okay.
That's the only body that got wounded in my plane.
Oh man, that's incredible.
So, okay, how many missions did you fly?
Fifteen.
Fifteen missions?
You don't fly them one after another.
You never, oh never.
It's too much sometimes.
Some are milk runs.
Yeah.
Very few of them, but they're milk runs, if you compare.
Milk runs, so milk runs, a long time for that.
That means it's an easy run.
Yeah, it's an easy run.
And by the way, 430 in the morning, you've already had your breakfast, and you're sitting in the room where the commanding officer is going to tell you about the trip you're going to take that day, the mission.
Yeah.
And he's on a stage, maybe a foot and a half higher than the floor.
And we're sitting down here, all pilots, navigators, and bombardiers.
And the curtain covers the map.
And on that map, a bunch of pins, and there's a yarn going the direction to where you're going to go.
Yep.
And on purpose, they move the curtain slowly.
Where are we going?
You know, they say, we're going to go to Berlin, bye-bye, you know.
Oh, watch it.
And the curtain, the curtain stops.
I got to scratch my nose a little bit, boys.
He pulled the curtain.
Oh, my tie isn't on right.
And finally, we see the yarn ends, Regensburg, ball bearing factories.
Oh, there's a groan in the audience.
Anyway, that's just fun.
Yeah.
Then we get down to get the mission.
Then we get in our planes and we take off by squadron.
We get into the town of Felixstow.
The first plane probably pulls in there around five o'clock, the first group.
Yeah.
Then three minutes later, the second group.
This is all precision work within 15 minutes.
So we have a bomber stream of a thousand ships.
A thousand ships.
Wow.
And one aft behind each other.
Yeah.
Approximately, I'll call it 40.
There's 38, but 40 ships in a group.
And we're heading for Regensburg.
But we're not going, we try to be evasive.
We go this way.
Ah, they're going to go to Hamburg.
No, we're going to, the Germans are going to guess where we're going.
Yeah.
So we, at the last minute, they know now, Regensburg.
And you know, every German squadron on the ground, fighter planes are notified and they're up in the air.
They're going to make hell, we're going to pay for hell.
Anyways, that's how it is to handle.
Sometimes we go to, we go, then we split.
One goes to, Sure.
Now, what percentage of bomber crews get shot down?
time air for Austria.
Try to confuse the enemy as much as we can.
- Sure.
Now, what percentage of bomber crews-- - Get shot down.
- Yeah.
- I don't know, but it's not a few 'cause a lot of bombers.
- Yeah.
- And I'll tell you, if you lose out of your group, Six planes.
That's six out of 39.
Yeah.
That's heavy.
Yeah.
That's a whole crew.
Yeah, yeah.
Airplane.
Yeah.
And all those crews have been trained.
Now you've got to get a new batch to train them.
If we sank seven German submarines, that's a lot of submarines because you've got to get a crew, you've got to make it a submarine.
Yeah.
Instead, you don't just get a guy from the street and put him in a submarine.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it helps.
Seven.
If you lost 15 out of that, oh, that's horrible.
Yeah.
That doesn't happen very often.
Yeah, but... Wounded people, yes, but not... Wounded people who got hit by flak or bullets.
Or killed in the airplane.
Yeah, yeah.
It has to be terrifying either to watch planes, presumably you knew all of these crews, you were living together on the same bases.
Well, you know, there's no explanation.
For an 18, 19 year old kid, this is fun.
Honest to God.
And I say fun.
I don't mean we're enjoying killing people.
Right.
Because we don't see that.
Right.
But you do have a thrilling, meaningful job.
I'm doing my job.
And if they're trying to stop me, I'll show them they won't get me.
Whether I'm American or Canadian or Russian, I don't care who I am.
I am Just doing my job.
I appreciate that they train me.
My loyalty is that flag, American flag.
And my mom and dad wants to see me again.
I'm going to come home.
I don't think of dying.
The other guy's going to die, but not me.
That's the mentality.
And we didn't want the other guy to die either.
You know?
Right.
Now, things have gotten all tangled in the last many decades.
Obviously, the Russians were not only allies, but they were really You mean the Russians of World War II?
Yeah.
They were a major part of why the Allies won.
Not really major, the... They were the reason.
The important element that Hitler had to overcome or we could never have done it.
Right.
So this is the thing that Americans often don't get.
Yeah, the Americans don't know that.
And even though they were communists, Stalin, who was just as bad as Hitler, in fact maybe more, I mean more sinister.
And anyways, but the Russian army, navy, whatever military force you want to give, Without their vast resources, the depth of the country, they moved whole factories out from Moscow and Leningrad.
Moved it like moving New York to Nebraska.
Intact machinery.
Imagine the turmoil, transportation, feeding these people.
They made Hitler pay for it.
Early in the war.
19- he hit Russia 1941, June.
By 1942, Hitler was finished.
He didn't know it, and the Russians didn't know it.
History tells us that's the important things to happen, that that was the Russians, not the Allies.
Yeah, well, it's a really important piece of history, and the fact that the, you know, A, the The difficulty, you know, Stalin was a tremendous villain.
Oh.
But he was Uncle Joe Stalin during World War Two, that the Allied powers, the need to defeat Hitler, you know.
At least Stalin, it was so much work.
Hitler didn't kill Germans.
Stalin didn't.
He killed Russians.
Yeah.
His own people.
He's not Russian.
He was a Georgian, but he was part of the Soviet Union.
Anyways, he killed his own citizens.
Wipe him out.
Yeah, he was definitely diabolical.
But you see, even at diabolical, he became strong enough, now this is what I, it's not luck.
I say it's not luck.
That's Martin talking.
Yeah.
You might say that's how it happens.
No, no.
I don't think that.
I don't think most of what matters is luck.
In fact, luck, you know, it plays as a role that's positive as frequently as negative.
That's the nature of luck.
Well, Stalin knows that the Western countries hate communism.
Yeah.
Russia, I mean, America, London, England, France, Czechoslovakia, all of them hated communism.
Yeah.
But he acted like he didn't know.
If you read the minutes of meetings they had, and how the diaries of the German generals, and he acted like he had everything he wants.
They praised him.
Oh, I'm glad you won that battle.
You got to kick the French out.
You got to control the German army.
We drink our vodka to them every day.
And so, and he bamboozled these dumb Germans, who were supposed to be very smart.
They thought, because they were so eager to get Russia, the Ukraine, the wheat, the grains.
Oh, yeah.
In fact, I've forgotten.
I'm going to get the German word wrong.
Lebensraum, the elbow room.
No, no, Lebensraum.
The future of Germany lies in Russia.
In the East, he said.
And what's the East?
Poland, Russia, Ukraine.
The vast resources.
And that was in his Mein Kampf.
He wrote that specifically.
You've got to be a moron not to know that East means Poland, and after Poland, Russia.
How could you go wrong?
Right.
No, it was an ingenious and diabolical plan.
Yeah.
You can call him whatever you want, but he's a very evil man, but very evil genius.
Yeah.
Well, people, you know, the problem, and I think this is putting us in great danger, when somebody is terrible, We want to attribute everything that could be wrong with them to them, which is a it's a terrible mistake.
So to view, you know, either Hitler or Stalin as, you know, mentally defective, by virtue of the fact that they were ruthless, is a mistake.
And it means that we don't properly anticipate what the next one will look like because the next one is, you know, not going to match the cartoon that we've painted of our enemies.
So anyway, I do think, you know, we are headed to some new tragedy of history, and it's not going to look exactly like the tragedies of the past, but we are going to fail to anticipate it when in fact we should have been, we should take ourselves, we should have been warned.
You know, the cartoon, you make a point that he's evil, but they make a cartoon out of it.
Yeah.
As if, you know, funny mustache or whatever it is, or big belly or whatever.
But don't forget, That cartoon is not the evil man you think he is.
That's no different.
They made cartoons of Lincoln.
They made Lincoln look like a gorilla.
Did you know that?
I think I've seen that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
His body was disproportionate.
Six foot four, 184 pounds.
His torso was normal, legs were long, should be shorter for a man with that kind of a torso, and his arms are longer.
Yeah.
And his face wrinkled, you know how it is.
Yeah.
They made him look like a gorilla, our own president.
Yeah.
So that's standard.
And if you're a southerner, ah, that's the gorilla!
If you're northern, how dare them do that, you know?
Yeah, it's the same team nonsense.
But the cartoonists are doing that Because he has a certain agenda, and his agenda fits a certain group of politicians, and they go, ooh, good, you know.
So cartoons, I can make a cartoon out of you and make a cartoon out of me, and I look like a horrible person, you know what I mean?
Guerrilla or something.
Sure.
Okay, so we've talked a little bit about how long, what period were you fighting in Europe?
What years were you in Europe fighting?
What years were you flying your bomber?
Oh, in combat.
Yeah.
That was 1944 until the end.
You were there at the end?
Yeah, yeah.
June.
So... January through June 44.
January through June of 44.
Yeah, where they were throwing everything at us.
Yeah.
And we had already landed on Europe.
So we were still flying from our British air... Yeah, your base in Britain.
the target was getting closer and closer, and so we could move fighter planes in France who could protect us all the way almost, but they took a beating.
And a lot of those fighter planes, the Germans were sending train loads of ammunition, food, troops.
They did most of the strafing.
That's how Ernst Rommel, the German general, called the Desert Fox.
A very nice man.
I mean, as an enemy, the British respected him.
He was a gentleman fighter.
I mean, he wasn't a Nazi.
He was a good man, doing his calling and his country And he says, I cannot do what I, I have to follow orders like the men who under me follow orders.
A very kind of a man you want as a friend, not military.
Yeah.
And if you needed some help, next door neighbor, he'd come over and give you anything you want, help you.
Yeah.
My viewers are going to struggle hearing that.
He was an extraordinary man.
He was strafed.
Unknown, the P-51 strafed his automobile when they were trying to rush to the front, and he got terribly hurt, injured, and he was almost going to die.
But he was also working behind Hitler's back to overthrow him.
Really?
Yeah, Hitler found that out through Himmler, the chief of the Gestapo.
And they sent two men to his home while he was recuperating.
He had terrible injuries to the plane.
They shot him.
In his home, he has a wife and one son.
And they gave a different excuse why they're coming there.
When they got him in private, they said, here's the pill.
You have to commit suicide.
We know what you've been doing on the side, trying to overthrow Hitler.
And so, take your choice.
Pill, and then we'll give you honorable burial.
You'll be a hero of the Reich, and you will be highly honored.
We'll never mention that you were fighting against Hitler or trying to overthrow Hitler.
Or if you don't, your family will be shot, wife and child.
What can a man do?
He took the pill.
Yeah.
They took him out someplace, and the mother and son think—well, the son was brought there because he was in a uniform, too, on leave.
His father was injured, you know.
And he took his own pistol, blew his brains out.
They took him, gave him a burial, and told the mother and the son, one peep out of you and you're dead.
To this day.
I don't know any of that history.
You see, things happen.
If you follow those things, look at the grand picture, pretty soon it's sort of a drama.
Shakespeare said, what fools we mortals are.
What fools mortals are.
And by the way, Shakespeare Sir Francis, some Roger Bacon, you know him?
Well, I've been struggling with this question myself because I've become aware of evidence that Bacon actually was Shakespeare.
That's right.
Shakespeare, his real name was Shakespeare.
There was a guy named Shakespeare, but it's not clear that he did the writing.
No, no, I mean his name was Shakespeare.
Yeah.
William Shakespeare.
Yeah.
And one way is spelled S-P-E-A-R, another time S-P-E-A-R.
Yeah.
H-E-R, you know, whatever it is, Shakespeare never finished school.
Yeah.
His daughter couldn't even read or write.
Yeah.
And here's a man who's writing things that are impossible for this man, you know, to do that.
Right.
And even more interesting.
I mean, I don't know if it was Bacon.
That's not the only hypothesis of who it might have been.
But how marvelous if it was Bacon.
Because that makes Bacon like a Da Vinci-like intellect.
Yes.
Right?
Just an impossibly deep thinker.
Somebody as expert in science as he was in... A genius!
Beyond genius.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And by the way, did you ever read, you know who Manly Hall is?
No.
Oh my god.
You don't get go get Manly Hall.
Manly Hall.
Manly.
Manly, there's an issue there.
Manly Hall.
H-A-L-L.
Palmer.
Manly Palmer Hall.
He's dead now.
You talk about, get the book.
He has written all kinds of books.
Get the big one that's $125.
I got that one.
And I got it and I gave it away.
After my wife passed away, nothing means anything to me.
I've done my mental arithmetic on all the things I've read.
I know what I know, what I don't know, what I don't care.
My philosophy of life has carried me through right to the end.
So you'll have the same feeling too when you get to the point where Martin, what am I doing?
I don't need all that stuff.
Yeah, the stuff means nothing.
But you have children.
Yes, I do.
Which you can leave it to them.
Yeah.
But I had nobody to leave it to.
We had no children.
And anyway, there's so many things.
But I remember I told you, Admiral Byrd, you get that book?
Did I tell you that?
You did.
Alone.
The word is alone.
Alone.
Get that book.
Audience, get that book.
Beside my book, get that book.
He wrote page 160, 164.
The whole book is only worth those three pages.
The other part is very good, but it's all about... But the price of admission is in those three pages.
That covers everything we're doing right now.
Yeah.
It gives you my opinion exactly to the letter.
All right.
And this man Admiral Byrd is a very known family in Virginia.
Senator Byrd, his great-grandfather—I mean, grandfather and his father were both senators.
In fact, his great-grandfather just died.
He was a senator from Virginia.
Great-grandson.
The author of the book alone, Admiral Burr.
Oh, his grandfather.
Yeah, his great-grandfather.
Great-grandfather.
Yeah.
So anyways, that book alone is an excellent book.
Just those three, four pages.
All right.
So I want to draw a little odd connection here.
I learned about the evidence that Bacon was Shakespeare from... I hope he will not mind me describing him this way.
Actually, I know he sometimes watches the podcast.
A young man named Marvin.
Very unusual young man.
And I did not meet Marvin until we were moving out of our house in Portland and he started to come by to visit.
How old was he?
It must have been 14, 15, something like that.
Young man.
And he actually asked if he could, as we were moving out, literally moving out of our house, we had a piano, which we couldn't bring here.
We just didn't have enough space for it.
And he asked if he could play it.
And he played it marvelously.
He's a very gifted young man.
And anyway, he was also very intelligent, you know, book smart and beyond, and artistic.
He actually drew beautiful renderings of- Multi-challenged.
Those are multi-challenged.
Yeah, exactly.
And he, at one point, started talking to me about the evidence that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare and that, in fact, Bacon had been Shakespeare.
And at first I thought, You know, the strange ravings of a young man.
But he convinced me that actually this hypothesis was actually more likely true than false.
So anyway, I mention it because A. Unusual person, viewer of the podcast, deserves to be mentioned.
The fact that I even know that Bacon may potentially have been Shakespeare, I owe to this young man.
And that's happened to me many times.
I've learned a lot from my own students, and I learned from this young man.
But I know that your career was spent as a teacher.
Now, I know this because you told me yesterday.
And I know that you were a teacher of troubled young men.
Is that fair?
Me?
Yeah.
No.
I was a troubled man?
No, no.
You were a teacher of troubled young men.
Oh, yeah.
Of young boys.
Yeah.
They gave me a special class of 12, I think it was.
Or 11 or 12.
So you got a collection of these bad boys.
Bad boys.
Bad boys.
Tortured boys.
Not bad.
They're not bad.
Oh, I know.
They're tortured.
Go find yourself another school district, buddy.
We don't want you.
So you got a collection of these bad boys.
Bad boys.
Bad boys.
Tortured boys.
Not bad.
They're not bad.
Oh, I know.
They're tortured.
I know because you told me as you were describing this to Gina and Ray and me yesterday, you said that you had actually been happy to get this assignment.
I like, I'm made for it.
Yeah.
I know, I'm made for it.
So that's you know if you got a physical body that's good for athletics You know it and you you follow you play hockey or you play baseball or whatever it is I know I have them in the palm of my hand.
I know I'm God I know my way.
Yeah, you know what you're supposed to do Okay, so what I didn't tell you yesterday, and I'll just briefly say this I was a college professor for 14 years I was a terrible student when I was in school.
Now, I was smart.
You mean, yeah, you were a belligerent?
No.
You were against the school?
I didn't love school at all.
Yeah.
I really didn't like school, but I wasn't belligerent about it.
You did your job.
I didn't perform.
No, I didn't.
I was a terrible student.
Oh my god.
I didn't perform.
And, you know, I got poor grades, but maybe one out of five teachers saw me and they thought, "I don't know why this guy isn't doing the schoolwork, but it doesn't really matter.
He is smart." And so they would break the rules for me in some way.
They would make it possible for me to get school.
So I got through school.
I wasn't really capable of doing the work.
It turns out, I don't know if dyslexia is a real thing, but if dyslexia is a real thing, I have it.
And it was getting in my way, and it was making it impossible for me to perform, which was then resulting in me being punished for not performing.
And so anyway, I didn't like school, it didn't like me, and that was my history.
And when I got, somehow, through graduate school, I got my PhD, and I became a college professor, it happened that I was teaching in a school that The professor was entirely free to teach any way that they wanted to, any subject.
Liberal?
Beyond liberal.
Wow.
Almost insane.
But this was perfect for me because I wasn't going to teach in a way that I would have failed to learn.
I was going to teach in a way that would have worked for me, and so I ended up being a teacher for students who were smart, but did not perform well in school.
So that became my specialty.
It wasn't, you know. - You know that life. - I know that it is possible to teach students who are not made for school.
And it sounds like you and I did two different versions of this.
You taught kids who got themselves in trouble.
I taught kids who weren't performing.
But anyway, I want to hear... They need help.
Yeah, they need help.
They need some teacher who actually cares about them to do something different than the other teachers have done.
Get them off that track.
Yeah.
So, okay, you're teaching 12th graders.
These 12th graders are Troubled young boys.
What did you do?
How did you teach a room full of people who were constantly getting in trouble?
Okay, first of all, I was teaching at a time in junior high, seventh grade.
The head of the math department in John Muir junior high.
They had to get a teacher and I was ready for the junior high.
I had enough of sixth grade.
And Martin, they know I'm good at people who have problems learning and I can help them.
So they gave me a bad, not bad emotionally, but poor performers for whatever reason.
And the kids like me, they saw I'm good for that.
I got that job.
The 12th graders.
In junior high.
Then the next promotion, Mr. Burrell, the superintendent, moved me from there to the continuation school.
I forgot, 11 or 12 boys, 12th graders, total wrecks.
One more infraction, expulsion.
Get out of our hair.
Go to another school district and we'll take you.
And I said, oh good, this is my golden opportunity.
And Mr. Burrell knew that.
He knew me real well.
I'll tell you why, because I gave him, when he went to the hospital to get a hernia operation, no one came there with any, you know, saying, get well, Mr. Burrow, you know.
And I told my wife, Ceci, I said, Ceci, you know, I should take him a box of candy and tell him, I hope he gets well.
And he's a nice man.
Well, go ahead.
That's a good idea.
When I went there, I gave him the box of C's candy, you know, C's candy?
Of course.
I gave him that.
And he was in the hospital, laying in the bed.
He said, Martin, please don't tell me any jokes.
I just had a hernia.
I don't want to laugh.
I don't want to laugh.
And because he knew what kind of a person I am.
And I said, Mr. Burrell, I hope you get well.
Thank you.
You know, Martin, no one has come here to wish me well.
Not that I'm waiting for it, but someone should have said, the superintendent is coming to say, get well, Mr. Superintendent.
And he said, I appreciate that.
That would help me.
And I'll tell you why.
I didn't do it for that purpose.
I just, you know, It was the right thing to do.
Yeah, I wanted to do it.
No one told me to do that.
I just wanted to do it.
And so, we got—he liked me, and he thought I'd be a good teacher for those bad boys.
And so, he put me in a room in the administration building, because they can't put them back in the regular school.
And even if the room was isolated, they're still in the school, right?
So, he put me in this room upstairs in a building built in 1912.
Called Lincoln School.
And the rest of the building was administration, secretaries, Board of Education room.
It was all administrative.
One little room in the corner painted green because green is supposed to make you calm.
Is that right?
I don't know if it does.
I've heard it.
Okay.
And they gave me a little office in the side.
And the boys come in the first day, you know.
Here they come.
I'm nervous.
Because I usually deal with little kids, you know, sixth graders and seventh graders.
And so they come in, you know, like, you know, who in the hell is this guy?
What's his name?
What the hell are you pronouncing?
You know, I don't know what's going through their minds.
They put their feet up on the desk.
They're dominating this room.
We're the boss.
You're just a jerky teacher.
Little did they know, five years in a logging camp in Canada, I had barroom brawls every Saturday.
I could pick these guys up and boss them off the walls.
I was 205 pounds then, I was 6 foot 1.
34 years old.
I was six foot one.
Power.
Boom!
34 years old.
Power.
Never use it, but power.
So the guy in the back had, you see, he lifted up weights.
You can tell by the way he's built.
He had a, what do you call it?
Earrings.
A diamond, no, it wasn't a diamond, probably a glass earring, and he had a tattoo.
In those days, 1971, no student ever had tattoos or earrings or here or there and all that stuff.
So, ah, okay.
I said, boys, I'm your teacher.
And here's my name.
I put A-G-E-G-I-A-N.
First name is Martin.
And I said, I want you to look at that name and you remember how to pronounce it because I'll know every one of your names by the time you get out of this classroom today.
And I'll memorize them clearly.
And I know your face.
In this ear and out the other.
They don't care anything.
Now, what do I do?
I got to do something to get their attention.
The boy in the back, the guy that's like this, I said, come here.
He wouldn't come at first.
You know, sulky.
Come here.
He gets up, saunters up.
I pushed it clear of my desk and I said, I'm going to arm wrestle you.
If I put you down, class will stay here and you'll follow my rules.
If you put me down, class is dismissed.
Go home.
These guys never heard of a teacher talk like that in their lives.
And that's the way I am.
That's my personality.
And it comes out better with the bad boys than the good guys.
And these kids got all like, come on!
His name was Elvis.
Elvis Hernandez from Puerto Rico.
We got on my desk.
I cleaned the desk up.
I said, God, The almighty pervading intellect.
When you're old as 34, your endurance is greater than a young man, but his strength is greater in the beginning.
Even though I'm strong, if he puts me down in the next 2 or 3 seconds, that's it.
But if he goes 5 or 10, I've got the lead on that.
I know that the older you are, the more endurance you have.
But you have to have the power too.
Long story short, I put him down.
Uh-huh.
Okay, now listen to me carefully.
Now they're taking a little notice.
Yeah.
And this teacher, they can't fathom it.
They can't digest it yet.
I'll tell you why you're here.
You're not stupid.
A lot of you have ability.
I can tell by looking at you.
I've been a teacher a long time.
I can size you up.
You've got ability.
You're no genius.
There might be even a genius here for all I know.
And I told him, you know what?
I killed better people than you and me in my lifetime.
I killed hundreds of them like that.
People I never saw.
I murdered them.
I told them bombing raids.
You must have killed somebody better than you.
A future Newton or whatever.
And so I got their attention and I said, here's the reason why you are in here today.
And I'm making this all up now.
There's no scientific or physiological reason for this to happen.
You sit like this, slouch in your seat, and you hunch over like this, and I drew a picture of the spinal cord, and there's holes in the middle of each... Vertebra, yeah.
Vertebra.
Vertebra.
Yeah.
And the nerve goes through that hole into the back of your head, the medulla.
Yeah.
And that brings the, whatever you're hearing, it registers in your brain.
And if you get to see pictures of what you're doing, in mind pictures, and you get smarter and smarter.
And if you sit up straight, that doesn't bend, causes short circuit.
The electrical current in the nerve won't get to the medulla.
Or maybe parts of the area so often go through, you miss the whole show.
I'm not kidding you.
It took about two weeks.
They got you like this.
And some say, Mr. Gidgen.
Yeah, that's right.
That's good.
You know.
Confirmation.
I know I got him now.
I got him in the palm of my hand.
And literally, they were boys who never had a childhood.
That's what they missed.
A little childhood like you with your sons.
You grew up with them.
You help them.
You tell them things to do and they remember you and they thank you.
The mother does something to help you.
It's a family.
Harmony.
There's no friction.
And so I became their father, obviously, and their mother.
More than their mother sometimes than the father.
And so that Elvis, I was in the detention home several times.
I had to go to the juvenile delinquent detention home and talk to the guard.
Please let the kid out this time.
I'm his teacher.
Okay, they want you to keep him there and do something with the kid.
They're not trying to put him in prison.
So, long story short, he graduated from Lincoln High School.
So did every other boy.
Your whole class, correct?
The whole 11 of them.
And they want to put girls in my class, too.
I said, no, I will not take girls.
I can't react to girls like I can react to boys.
Get another woman teacher.
And I got a woman teacher, a Ph.D.
in psychology.
She worked in a prison with young women, perfect for the bad girls.
They didn't hire her.
You know why?
No.
She was fat.
Ph.D.
in psychology.
Worked in the prisons with tough women, tough teenage girls.
Perfect for these girls.
And I thought, Mr., I won't mention his name, assistant superintendent of personnel, Martin, he says, you know, did you see her?
I said, I saw her.
What's the matter?
She wears men's shoes.
She wears men's shoes.
I said, I won't mention, I know his name.
There's a, okay.
And I said, I took the paper at his desk and I rolled it up.
Can I say a bad word?
Oh, here?
Okay.
Oh, absolutely.
I said, shove this up your ass.
I walked out and the two secretaries outside could hear everything.
And they both did this to me.
Oh no.
I got kicked out of that school.
- Oh no. - Yeah, and put into regular classrooms again.
- Ah. - And Mr. Burrell, then from then on other things happened, but Mr. Burrell was my defender.
And anyways, I took care of one of the bad boys in the sixth grade there in the school I was teaching at, Mrs. Reardon, and she said, "Martin, we're gonna see the movie "Pantasia." You ever see that movie?
I have.
Symphony music, beautiful.
Walt Disney's wonderful.
And local theater will take six carloads of buses from the school and make a special 12 o'clock noon showing.
If we can go, you want it?
I said, sure, I'll join in that.
But he says, would you watch this one kid?
I can't handle him.
Danny Rogers.
Sure.
I sat behind him.
He's a bad kid.
Okay.
I grabbed him by the neck, pulled him out of the chair, get in the bus, hold the bus driver.
You watch him.
You have to have an adult watch the student.
We saw the movie.
Next thing I know, I'm up for, the parents are coming home.
The pilot, the truck driver, come home.
They're going to have me fired.
Leaving a mark on his neck.
Oh.
Parente loco parente.
That means you're the parent at the time you were under your, but you're not supposed to.
Yeah.
Unless you're protecting yourself.
Sure.
And they want my throat.
They want me fired.
And you know, Mr. Burrell's there.
And the assistant superintendent of the school, Mr. Alex Smith, he hates my guts because I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm not a bully, but I fight for what I believe.
Mr. Brill hears the whole thing.
He gets his gut up, like he's going to leave already, as if he heard enough.
And the other guy, lackey, following behind him.
And he said, Martin, let me tell you something.
I'll take care of it, don't you worry.
You won't be fired by me, I'll tell you that now.
For God's sake, when you go do something like that, grab the hair, it doesn't leave any mark!
Don't you know that I did that when I was a teacher yourself a long time ago?
Grab it by the hair, it leaves no mark!
And from then on I was king of the roost.
So that's the kind of things that, they're not luck.
Who knows that candy?
Who knows what happened?
And that candy was not done for any purpose.
Right.
I mean, I don't even know.
But but OK.
So do you have any idea?
So you had.
Oh, wait.
Yeah.
Elvis.
Yeah.
I was going to ask you about Elvis.
Elvis.
This is 15 or so years later.
I'm in a restaurant and meeting a hot dog and root beer.
And there's a counter I'm sitting at.
It faces the street.
And so I'm eating, you know.
People going in and out of the place.
And I hear, Mr. Egasion!
I turn around, it's Elvis.
He starts giving a talk to the people there.
This is the greatest teacher in the world!
I said, Elvis, calm down, calm down.
Come on outside.
He grabbed me by the hand.
I dropped the hot dog and the thing outside.
I want you to meet my wife, my little baby.
And we go out in the car park there.
She's a young girl.
She's got a little baby in her arms.
She says, Mr. Gageon in the morning, Mr. Gageon at night.
That's all I hear in our home.
And I'm glad to meet you, sir.
And I said, Elvis, what are you doing?
Look what he's doing.
45, I think it's 45 men, what do you call it?
It's a crew of men, 45, that in case of storms or things happen, all the electricity, you know, things are down.
This is the emergency crew.
He's the superintendent of all of them.
Wow, he's running a crew.
He's running a crew.
Doing all this important work.
Expert men doing expert work that everybody can't do.
You have to be trained for that.
Yeah, dangerous work.
And Albers is cut out for that.
And now he's taking all that energy Yeah.
If we could take Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin—Stalin was going to become a seminarian, you know, you're going to be a priest in the Georgian Orthodox Church—and if Hitler wanted to be an artist, that's all he wanted to do, be an artist.
His father said no.
No artist.
He wanted to be an artist.
Can you imagine?
If we could direct those people, if things happen and things go and you end up that way, maybe you could have been a criminal for all I know.
I could have been something else, who knows what.
But we come out, things happen, not by luck, not by chance, not by randomness, But by purpose?
Well, I don't disagree with you.
I think that the difference between, you know, maybe occasionally there's a situation where somebody is born defective, but mostly defective people are the result of developmental environments that aren't enriching, that don't reward the right things, and it creates... By defective, what do you mean?
Well, if you have, if your parents are broken, let's say, and your parents, let's say your parents are obsessed with themselves.
Or they're drunkards.
Or they're drunkards, yeah, or gamblers.
Oh, I got you.
Okay.
Yeah.
A poor environment.
Right.
A poor environment causes a child to solve their own problems, and they may discover ways of solving those problems that turn them into monsters when they're adults.
Yeah, I don't see it as random at all.
No.
I see it as something that we should be very focused on.
Yes.
And, you know, it's... Elvis is an example of that.
Yeah.
Well, you rescued him, you know, whatever... He was doomed.
Yeah.
A tattoo and an earring at that time, unheard of.
Yeah.
1971, you say? 71.
Maybe 72, I don't remember.
But yeah, that was way out of... that was an indication that he was headed down some bad road.
And what he needed was somebody to care about him enough to hear what he was about and to guide him.
Yeah, and he's the guy I wrestled with, you know?
Oh, he was.
Yeah, he's the one I put him down.
And he didn't like that at first, you know, but anyway... Of course not.
And by the way, they used to watch me when I come... they'd be all the way in the room.
They came to school early.
They liked school so much.
And I come down the hallway, I say hi to the secretaries as they come down, and my door is open, and there's an old school bookcase with glass doors, but nothing in it.
And you could see my reflection.
I mean, they could see me coming down the hallway, coming close to our door to come in, and to be hiding there like little kids.
I walk in the door, they jump me.
And put me down on the floor.
Gentle love taps.
Yeah, yeah.
Boys, boys!
My shirt!
My wife will kill me!
They were children.
Yeah.
They were children.
Well, whatever they were.
I mean, they wanted to be children again.
Right.
They needed to go through that, and they needed somebody to care very deeply about them.
And, you know, the funny thing is, we don't understand this anymore in our educational system, and we don't understand this as parents, that children You know, we look at children and we watch them break the rules, and we think that they want to break the rules.
Really, what they want is to find out what the rules are, and they want to know that somebody is paying attention to the rules.
And that they're going to help them.
Right.
And so if you are consistent with a child, right, and you make good rules that aren't arbitrary, and you enforce those rules, the kid actually appreciates knowing where the line is, and that if they abide by it, things are okay.
Brett, that dog, if you teach it badly, look how loving that dog is.
He knows his house is love.
I don't know what the dogs call love in their way of thinking, but I can see in their eyes, they're watching everybody.
You went there, he wanted to know where you were going, when you come back again.
That dog is love.
Yeah, you can tell.
The dog is not nervous about anything.
Nothing about anything!
What?
I mean, your children, I saw your two boys.
Nice boys.
God almighty, you can't get any better children than that.
You can't get better kids.
And, you know, the funny thing is, Heather and I, you will meet Heather, I will make sure that you do.
Heather and I did not know anything about raising children when we met.
Who does?
Well, some people have children in their family, they've been around kids, they've watched.
Okay.
But we didn't really, either of us have this.
And, you know, we kind of looked at each other like, "Neither of us know what we're doing.
How are we gonna do this?" - Yeah.
- And-- - A little anxiety sets in.
- Sure.
- Yeah, and it's good, that anxiety.
- Yeah, you want-- - That means you're conscious and you wanna do something about it. - Exactly.
And so we just decided to, you know, the funny thing is we decided to talk to our children like they were adults from the beginning.
At first it was almost a joke, right?
You know, you talk to your child like they're an adult.
It's amazing how well that worked.
Boy, the credit goes partly to you, but more credit to the children.
They rise to, so you have to always, this works with students and children, you shoot above their heads and they will rise to meet the challenge.
And if you meet them at their level, they don't.
No.
Because they've got nowhere to go.
They know about that.
Right.
They reasoned that out a long time ago.
Give them something to shoot for.
Yeah.
And they make you smile.
Make mom and dad happy.
Absolutely.
And go out.
We have dinner this time outside instead of eating in the house.
A little thing.
Take a little vacation or whatever.
Yeah.
And the other thing is, and you point this out with the dog and it works exactly the same way with Steven, they have to know that nothing they're going to do is going to result in you not loving them.
You can be angry at them.
Yes.
But they don't have any insecurity about, at the end of the day, whether you're on their team 100%.
They have a term for that, tough love.
Well, not that tough, but tough love.
The psychologists, they use the term attachment.
Attachment, okay.
Secure attachment.
Okay.
And it's amazing.
If you make sure that your kids have a secure attachment, And you do your best.
You'll never do a perfect job, but if you do your best to give them a consistent set of rules so that they can figure out what the rules are, right, then... That means husband and wife working together.
100%.
It can't be, you know... Yeah.
Mama, can I do this?
Did you ask your father?
No.
You ask your father, then I'll say what I'll say.
You stick together.
Then you can talk privately.
Right.
My dad told me once that my mom and dad had an argument.
I never saw that.
I felt bad.
They're fighting to each other.
After the thing was over, my mother said to me, my dad wasn't there anymore.
He was out someplace else visiting somebody.
He says, Martin, don't remember, your mom and I, your dad and I had a terrible argument, but I want you to know one thing.
You don't mention this outside our home.
I still love your dad and he loves me.
And That just, well, sometimes that has to be that way.
She, I said, okay, Ma.
- Yeah.
- We're not mad at each other.
- Yep.
- We're just arguing.
She had his view, I had my view, now we settled it.
- Yeah, and she didn't create an insecurity for you because you knew that at the end of the day- - And I'm the only child, mind you, I felt bad.
I always had a harmonious surroundings, you know.
Anyways, go ahead.
Sure.
Well, I wanted to ask you before we finish up here, your view on family.
You've told us a little bit.
What did your dad do?
My dad was first a Ford Motor Company employee.
He had a job.
He lived in Watertown when he came from the old country.
He was saved by American missionaries.
So wait, wait, wait.
Your father, I know from reading the paragraph about your book, your father was an orphan.
Made an orphan.
Tell that story.
Mother and father, like the Jewish people, they got slaughtered in their own home.
So your father was an orphan from the Armenian Genocide?
Yeah.
Okay.
His parents, mom and dad, and baby sister, only but maybe, I'm guessing, couldn't walk yet, I guess, a little baby, and the brother was about 10 years old.
All murdered.
Yeah, and he was, and his dad, before the And a Russian and a German, a Turkish sergeant was in that same village.
His family and my father's family were friends.
And he was a special, had a high rank, an enlisted man's rank in the Turkish Army, very high.
He had a certain symbol on his hat, Halpach.
In fact, Kaplan, the Jewish word Kaplan, Kaplan, there's a Turkish Jews who are named Kaplan.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
My best friend when I was a little boy was named Kaplan.
Kaplan is the Turkish word for Raplan, which means lion.
Interesting.
Kaplan is a word for Turkish Raplan.
It's Turkish for a Jewish person's last name who lived in Turkey.
The Armenians have the first part of their name are all Turkish words, some of them.
They put an I-A-N on the end, you know, that becomes Injesulyan, that means a person who is ingenious doing things, machinery, or Goshgagaryan, shoemaker, shoemaker.
Tertsakyan, tailor.
Tertsak is a tailor.
Yan, son of a tailor.
My name is Aghegyan in Armenian.
Agheg means good, well, Well, son, good, son, son of good.
And guess what?
The street's name was my wife, when I was courting her, was Goodson.
In Armenian translation, my last name.
Well, I have one for you, as long as we're talking coincidences before we return to your story.
I told you my best friend when I was a little boy named Kaplan, Aaron Kaplan.
Okay.
He was a great kid.
He was a bit wild.
But everybody loved Aaron.
Everybody wanted to be his best friend.
He was a great guy.
He died a few years ago of leukemia, which is very sad for me.
Long since grown apart.
No negativity, but we've just gone to opposite ends of the country and not stayed in touch very much.
But anyway, what was I going to tell you about Aaron?
Oh yeah, here's the coincidence.
Aaron was born the same day, not just the same date, but the same day of the same year as my wife.
Same day.
Same day, same year.
And obviously the same number in the calendar.
Yeah.
Yes.
April 26, 1969.
They were both born in the same city.
I don't know what hospital Aaron was born in.
It's possible they were even born in the same hospital.
But anyway, I find that an interesting coincidence.
You know, it took me a while to figure out that that had happened.
But anyway, yeah, Aaron is gone.
But he went on to be a doctor.
He was quite a good doctor, apparently.
Died of leukemia after a long struggle with it, which even though we had not seen each other in decades, I made a point of going to his memorial service.
You mentioned it's a present coincidence.
Yeah.
Chance.
Luck.
You see, your reasoning is correct.
According to your philosophy of life, which is wonderful, you're sticking to your guns, but if you take the word God, take it out for a minute, all-pervading intellect, that's Admiral Byrd's word, all-pervading intellect, which means God.
Yeah.
Basically, he's a meteorologist, and a very good one, and he's making all the universe, he says, is rhythmic.
Things move in harmony.
Everything is harmony.
It can't be chaos.
If it's chaos, it looks like chaos, but some stars blow up.
That's part of the harmony.
Thumb stars are extinguished, new moons come out, or whatever it is.
This is all part of that.
We can't go beyond that because you say, next thing you say, who created that?
Well, the thing is, I can make those arguments.
I don't need to though.
I'm very comfortable with a world of people who have a religious perspective.
In fact, the funny thing, I grew up in a home that was very secular.
We were Jewish.
You know, we celebrated Hanukkah, Passover, but not much more than that.
Yeah.
But my friend Aaron was in a family that kept kosher.
They had a Seder.
Religious.
Yeah.
And they invited me in.
So, you know, I got to experience their view of the world, too, and it meant a lot to me.
You know, it didn't really change my direction, but it certainly made it very clear that people who I was close with, you know, really was my second family for a little while.
That, you know, they had a very different view of the way the universe worked and it was just fine, right?
We could sit at each other's table and it was lovely.
Yeah, they weren't anti you.
You were just excited to see how these people think.
Yep.
That's wonderful.
It was terrific.
And you didn't say, "I'm not coming here anymore." Oh, no.
No, you were excited.
Eager to know as much as you can.
I was too young to really realize what a privilege it was to be included in their family rituals.
I'm glad you didn't say you were lucky.
I was too young to understand you said.
That's okay.
I mean all of these things you can rephrase it.
Any way you want.
My thinking, I'm glad you said it that way.
All right, let's see, what else before we... we've talked a long time, I have no idea how long actually, but anything else you think especially belongs here?
Well, I had a lot of nice experiences in teaching.
I'm a very unorthodox Clearly.
Teacher.
Yeah.
And I'm an unorthodox person.
Yes, I can see that.
And I look like I'm dominating somebody, and I am not.
I'm just excited.
Yeah.
And I don't know how to curtail my... No, I don't think you need to.
I mean, I want to give the other guy... My teacher in school, Mrs. Short, my math teacher in grade school, we had to go to the My mother and father, because we had three checks in self-control, our report card changed in the elementary school.
It was first 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
It means excellent, good, fair, poor, failure.
And then they changed it to U, I mean, E, excellent, S, satisfactory, U, unsatisfactory.
They didn't say failure, unsatisfactory.
Then they had a whole list of behavioral content.
attentive, uninterrupted, good nature, did he brought his homework?
Check marks.
I got three in self-control.
And my mom and dad wanted to know what's going on here, self-control.
So teacher parent night, I went there with my parents and Mrs. Short, my math teacher, she says, "Mr. and Mr." By the way, three checks were from three different teachers, of course.
One was the art teacher, too.
And by the way, you know ivory soap?
Sure.
Ivory soap is a white soap.
Yeah.
And she wanted us to bring one ivory soap from home so we could carve and make a polar bear in the art class.
Sure.
Perfect for that.
And then we could water it and smooth out the skin and make a little.
She was a good teacher.
And I was so hungry.
Depression, I'm the heart of depression.
And all my mom could make me was the onion sandwich with mustard on it.
Bread, mustard, onion.
And if your mom was the same as mine, you have bread, mustard, onion.
And we had a way in school.
When you and I met, we'd go, Brother!
Anyways, Mrs. Short said, Martin, this is the last row because I was tall.
I put the problem on the board and whoever got the answer quick, they raised their hand.
He'd go, Mrs. Short!
Mrs. Short!
She'd be running up down the aisle.
He almost had his hand in my face.
I got the answer.
The other kids, they're not doing that.
And she says, at least he didn't give me the answer.
He just said, Mrs. Short, you didn't give the answer to the problem.
And my dad said, well, that's something.
He didn't tell it to her, but he told it to my mom when we were walking back home.
Martin at least didn't give the answer.
And then, she's a wonderful teacher and I loved her very much.
Mrs. Short, you said?
Yeah, Mrs. Short.
And she was short, red hair, curly red hair.
Very good teacher.
All the teachers were good.
Not all mine.
Anyways, our literature teacher, we had a class for literature where she read a book that you should read and she explained the book.
It's in our library, boys and girls, and they introduced it and we encouraged to read and This is okay.
And it was the Charges of Life Brigade.
Lord Tennyson's book, poem, what's that one word in there?
Out of the mouth of hell rode the 500.
That was the British Hussars, the men on the horseback.
The Russians mowed them down.
They come out of the mouth of hell, rose the 500, and they wiped out that whole 500.
The word hell was in there, right?
Well, we kids, sixth graders, hell is a bad word, right?
Go to hell, you know?
And so we say, Mrs.
I can't—it sounds like Whitney—anyways, Mrs. Jones, she asked, what do you want me to repeat?
Any poems?
Yes, that one about the Charging Light Brigade.
And so she read it out of the mouth.
When she held, we all go, she's swearing in class.
Naive children, you know.
Yeah, no, I recognize it.
Sure, of course.
Of course.
All right, you don't remember her name, huh?
The only reason I ask is because I know from experience... It's something like Whittier or... I can't think.
I could make up a name, but in my book, I got the name.
It's in your book?
It's in the book.
Well, I was going to ask you about your book.
Wait, let me see.
No, it's not in the book.
It's not in the book.
Mrs... Oh, we had a fresh air camp in a fresh air room in our school.
You know what that was?
No.
A regular classroom.
All the windows are open and there's windows on the roof.
Oh, skylights?
Pardon?
Skylights?
Yeah, but it could open it up.
In the morning, you came at 7.30.
You lay on the military steel, no mattress, just steel beds, the little springy and the pillow.
And boys and girls, usually the girls end up going this way and the boys are going that way.
You lay down and quiet music would play on the record.
And one of the kids would crank the 78 RPM.
I've never heard that.
78 RPM?
Oh no, I've heard that.
But I've never heard of such a fresh air room.
Oh yeah, fresh air class.
And we all breathe in.
To get the fresh air and music's playing.
Meditation.
Really?
That sounds kind of healthy.
Isn't it nice?
Yeah.
That's before you start class.
Yeah.
Okay.
So my grandfather, who you actually do remind me of a fair amount.
Um, my grandfather was a great guy.
Uh, he was a tremendous influence on my brother and me.
He was a chemist.
Um, he never, he was not an accomplished man in terms of, he never, uh, He was a pollution control inspector who got fired in the Proposition 13 cutbacks in California, but he was a wonderful guy.
And in many ways, I think his accomplishment in life was that he affected a great many young people, not just me and my brother.
At that level?
- My friends met him, they adored him.
He was a wonderful guy, very funny.
And he also took children very seriously.
Any question you would ask him, he would do his best to answer it. - At that level.
- Yeah, well, no, he would take your question perfectly seriously and he would sign it.
- No, no, I meant he would get too complicated so the kids would understand what he's talking about.
Right.
He knew how to talk to them.
So he was sort of a born teacher.
That's a natural.
Yeah, he never taught officially, but he was a born teacher.
So anyway, young people loved him because where other adults would ignore them, he would take them seriously and answer their questions.
And all of that.
And why was I talking to you?
Oh yeah, you mentioned 78 records.
One of the things that my grandfather did in his career, he worked for a number of different companies.
He worked for Schick Safety Razor Company.
He worked in the formation of dental polymers for dental work.
But one of the things he did is he worked for RCA.
On vinyl, when records went from lacquer to vinyl, he worked on the polymers that they used in those first vinyl records.
To make the records.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you're talking about the era of records before that, these hand-cranked... 78 RPM, you had to crank the machine and, you know, catch it before it dies out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so anyway, my grandfather just... And those records, if you don't want them, you know, at the time you say, well, I heard that record long enough.
You take in hot water, what it was made of, I don't know to this day, what you said, lacquer?
Lacquer, I think, yeah.
You could shape it into a bowl.
You could?
Yeah.
Oh my goodness.
And plug the hole and move the soft part of it and put flowers in it.
Oh, wild.
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
And I learned all my In that book, I was raised on Beethoven, Mozart, Galli-Curci, the opera singer, Mendelssohn, Igor Shalyapin, the great Russian bass.
The Russians all are good in bass music because their guttural sounds, their language, deep, you know, like the Volga boatman, the song, and all that.
And so I knew about the wars.
My grandpa told me all the wars, this, that, and the generals and the heroes.
My grandma couldn't read or write, even an Armenian, couldn't even, you know, a farm person.
Women never got educated at all.
And she would memorize all the Bible parables of Jesus.
And I sit in front of her in a rocking chair and, Grandma, tell me some more parables.
And she, see, I showed I'm not saying I'm great, but no boy my age would do that.
But my grandma made me want to do it.
I loved her so much and I wanted her to talk to me.
I might learn something.
What was her name?
Pardon?
What was her name?
Oh, Turfanda.
Turfanda.
Turfanda Mardirosyan.
Now, I don't know what Turfanda is.
I don't know if that's an Armenian name.
It might be a Turkish name.
Yeah.
Because in Turkey, like the Jews of Germany have a German name.
Yeah.
And the Jews in Poland has a Polish name.
But in Armenia, the Armenians had a Turkish first part of the name, but the last I-A-N meant Armenian, nothing else.
So some German Jews, you don't know whether they're German or Jews or what, they have a German name.
So in Armenia, it's the I-A-N.
And my grandpa, when he was a boy, he said, if you spoke Armenian in public, they'd cut your tongue out.
They did that.
Wow.
Yeah, and he said, I go outdoor barber, cut my hair, and some give me a shave.
I want to be sported up.
Passers-by know I'm Armenian.
They say, what are you doing there, Emmett?
I'm skinning a dog.
And I said, Grandpa, let him do his work, because he could make a razor slip, and you're dead, and no one cares.
That's right.
Okay.
Um, so before we close this.
Yes.
Uh, your father.
Folks, I hope you're interested in all this.
Yeah, no, I bet they will be.
Um, tell me, this is the chance to tell your mother and your father's story.
I think it's important, um, because so much of what life was like is lost and you're a hundred years old.
And I know, What happened?
There aren't very many people who are 100 years old, and the number of people who are 100 years old who are lucid the way you are is very, very tiny.
By the way, the Veterans Administration?
Yeah.
I got a letter about two years ago.
There's only four B-17 pilots left.
There are only four B-17 pilots left?
B-17 specifically.
Yeah, got it.
Four of them left.
Three or four years ago.
Yeah.
And I'm sure I'm one of the last ones maybe.
Yeah, you might be the last one.
But there's 183,000 World War II veterans left.
Veterans of all kinds.
Marines, sailors, whatever it is.
Yep.
183 out of 16 million.
Wow.
Okay.
Okay.
So your dad, orphaned by the Armenian Genocide.
Yes.
And the man who did the most work for it was a Jewish man.
You know who he was?
No.
Henry Morgenthau.
You ever hear of him?
I don't think so.
Henry Morgenthau was a very brilliant Jewish financier.
And during Woodrow Wilson's administration, I mean, sorry, Roosevelt's administration, he was made Secretary of the Treasury.
And on those bills is written Henry Morgenthau.
When they sign on the bill, the next Treasury guy, he puts his name on it.
Yeah.
But during World War I, he was ambassador to Turkey.
And he has written a book called The Murder of a Nation by Henry Morgenthau, and he was once a greatest supporter for Armenians.
And he got many Armenians out of Turkey in Danish orphanages, German orphanages, the German missionaries in Turkey, They were for the Armenians 100% against the Germans who were arming the Turks.
See, Turkey was part of the German and Austro-Hungary fighting the Russians and the Tsarist Russia, Imperial Russia, and France and England.
That was the Allies before we came into the war, 1917.
1917.
Anyways, my dad, what was I saying?
I was trying to get you to tell me your dad was rescued.
How was your dad rescued?
Yeah, he was, he was, uh, I don't want to bore the people.
The book will explain it very easily, but basically he was saved by two American missionaries, husband and wife.
And I know this, I'm making this part up and not lying, but I know he was saved, how he was saved and who the names were.
My dad never sat down and said his, but I never even had that.
I made it, Okay, so he's saved by two missionaries.
It's a true incident, but maybe it didn't happen like that.
Maybe the fish you caught was 40 inches long.
I said 80 inches long.
Okay, but what happens to him after he's rescued?
Oh, I had to stay in the mission.
I mean, he couldn't get out because the Turks out there would kill him.
Yeah.
Oh, so they brought him into the mission.
He stayed in there a year and a half.
He learned English pretty nice.
My dad has a hard time.
Do not speak English without an accent.
Yeah.
He's a very smart man.
Yeah.
But that's one of his weaknesses.
Language pronunciation.
Some people come here when they're 25 years old, they speak fluent English.
After a while, you can't even tell if he's a foreigner or not.
Yeah.
But my dad, America, you know, blah, blah.
Hence the title of your book.
Yeah.
God bless America.
America.
I said, Dad, America.
No, America.
I said, forget it.
He says, you know.
Okay, so your dad is saved.
He stays in the mission.
Yeah, he learned English good enough.
And he also loves the National Geographic magazine.
And he used to read that.
And my granddad said, it tells you all about America.
Cowboys, Indians, back in 19, you know, Well, it's 14, you know, America was still Indians.
Some states weren't even state territories.
Arizona and New Mexico, 1912, they became states.
Anyhow, he read that.
He loved National Geographic.
Crocodiles and alligators in Florida, Indians, this and that.
He couldn't wait to see that country and imagine the imagination of a young child growing it out of proportion.
And so he decided to leave.
And they begged him not to leave.
Not to leave the safety of the compound, the American mission.
The American flag is up there.
Before America entered the war, the Turks didn't dare go in that compound.
I mean it.
And thanks to Henry Morgenthau, who did very behind the scenes, and he was able to talk to all the Kemal Pasha, Anver Pasha, all the big shots who ran the genocide, because he's an American ambassador to Turkey.
He has high rank.
Anyways, He tells him, I'm going to leave, please.
I love both of you, but I have to go to America.
I want to go.
And they try to convince him, we're going to leave here sooner or later.
Why don't you wait?
Impetuous young man, and he's confident in himself.
So they gave in, they packed him up a little cheese and apple and bread.
They gave him a $10 bill.
My dad, I remember he told me, a $10 American bill and some Turkish liras.
They got liras of Turkish money and little packets of stuff and kissed them all.
They're all crying.
He left.
Somehow he got down to Trebizond, it's on the Black Sea.
and got onto a ship.
Mm-hmm.
I won't go into the details, I'll take all that.
But he swam, a lot of obstacles, he overcame them.
Got on the, and it's an Argentinian ship.
They spoke Spanish.
He thought it'd be an American ship 'cause America hadn't had a war yet.
But a lot of German ships there.
And they, you know, the Jacobs Ladder, Jacob's Ladder is that thing they put down on the boat.
Yeah.
They come to a rowboat, you get off and on the ladder.
That was up and here's the border.
Dark evening, cold water, this young kid with a basket of all his food to eat and his hat.
Yeah.
All in a document saying We are the missionaries.
This is one of our boys.
Take good care.
He's a very good boy.
Official seal.
And he had it covered in oilcloth and wax.
Mel's the camera.
To seal it so it wouldn't get wet.
An official seal of the mission and that was all safe and he got on the ship and they were going to go to Buenos Aires.
First the Azores and then to Buenos Aires.
Yeah.
And so they got to the Azores and he had, my dad got like a flu or some kind and he couldn't, he had to have a doctor's care and rest.
So he got off the boat and He was there for I don't know how long.
I think I made it four weeks in the book or something.
But this part I make up.
And the American ship come in, the Roma.
I got that book, I mean, a buddy of mine looked in the computer and got the ship with the passenger list and my dad's name was on it.
Wow, you found that.
Anyways, that boat went to Newport News, Virginia.
It was an American ship.
And the Roma is the name of the ship, but the president, I mean, the captain, I mean, Gillespie.
Captain Gillespie.
Come on board, son!
And they welcomed, loaded with immigrants, and no charge, just take them, save their lives.
They come to, instead of going to, they were all looking for the Statue of Liberty.
They didn't see it.
Newport News, Virginia, there's no Statue of Liberty.
Right.
And so, anyway, from then on, he went, his, the missionaries said, Watertown, Massachusetts, a lot of Armenians there, they came here in the early 1800s, I mean 1880s, And go there first, and they'll help you.
They hugged each other.
A tearful, bad moment.
My dad gets there, followed him to the right priest in the church, took him to the right lady, brother and sister.
The parents had died.
And they were in their 40s, and brother was 45 or 42, and she was a little younger than him.
They took him in like a son.
And he became mom and dad.
Wow.
And they just loved, and he loved them.
But he always, my dad, I would say sometimes, we slept in the same room together.
My mom couldn't stand his snoring.
I mean, I mean snoring.
Yeah.
And I just, I go to sleep.
I'm a young kid.
And, and in his sleep, he'd say, Maitik, Maitik!
Mother, mother.
Oh, Maitik!
He'd cry in his sleep.
He was a grown man.
He's got a family.
Sure.
It affected him.
So you think he was crying for the mother that he lost, or the people who raised him, or who took him in?
Yeah, he loved them.
He wanted a mother so bad.
And Rose and George, the brother and sister, Rose was a never married and she's about 45 at the time, I guess.
I'm just guessing.
Yeah.
And she's very fat and I'm not, no, overweight, I put them, muscular arms.
And the brother was a shoemaker and they had the store in the front and the home in the back.
And he grew up there.
And then from there, he got a small job, made some money.
A lot of the nice, interesting things you know about at the time.
Christmas, on the trees, there's no electric light bulbs, candles.
And you had to be very careful.
Yeah, I bet you did.
And that candle was set on a little thing that you squeeze on the branch and lay the candle in it and light it.
Yeah.
And my mom told me that she was in Troy at the time.
They didn't know each other at that time at all.
The stallions at the fire department, you know, you pump it by hand.
Yeah.
Many fires going on in town, you know.
Yeah.
These horses were ready and so anyway he comes to America and from then on he Ford Motor has an ad.
Now, I don't know if this is how it's happened, but I have to make it up on facts.
Yes.
But it's a narrative on true facts.
I'm making up the story.
How did he get that job?
He read it in the paper.
I figured that's what he did.
My dad never told me all these things.
Yeah.
But the story is based on true.
It says Ford Motor Company is looking for These following people who speak these languages, about 12 languages, German, Italian, whatever it is, Armenian, and interview for a job in Detroit, Ford Motor Company, Employee relations job, and had to be a foreign employee.
So I'm Armenian, let's say my dad, and you're Armenian, and you got your wife, just can hardly speak English.
And I want to know, come in there and talk to you, and look around, check.
This is Ford.
Yeah.
His way.
Is his home clean?
Oh, I see you have a new couch.
Very nice.
That means he spent the money wisely.
And today you call that what?
Meddling?
Yeah.
So your dad was hired to figure out which Armenian workers... Yeah, and the German guy was for the German, and the Italian for the Italian, the Greek for the Greek.
Huh, never heard of such a thing.
And also, yeah, and Ford gave each employee One acre of his own land to grow a vegetable farm.
Really?
So he could have fresh vegetables.
Now, Ford is a very strict man.
I mean, people hate him because he didn't like Jews very much.
Yeah, he didn't.
And he didn't like, not Jews, Jewish bankers.
He hated the people.
He hated all bankers.
And his greatest employee he had was a Jew.
Albert Kahn, an architect.
And he thought he was the greatest man in the world.
But the bankers, he hated their guts.
Come up with bootstraps, no education.
He cut the idea of mass production.
Yep.
He didn't invent the automobile, just the Germans invented the automobile.
The assembly line.
Daimler.
Yeah.
Daimler-Benz.
And Porsche came later.
Anyways, my dad, I mean, at that job, and he goes to the Armenian homes, or you're Greek, go to the Greek homes.
And that was his job.
And he had a chance, they gave him an automobile.
In fact, a company car.
He passed that test too.
And back in Watertown, they made sure that he could drive the car before he went there.
So anyway, everybody helped him.
Yeah.
Met my mom, got married, and that was it.
And my grandpa, those days, you know, just take a girl out.
Yeah, yeah.
You gotta go to interrogation.
I mean, interrogation.
The Nazi, the Gestapo couldn't do that good.
My grandpa would say, how's your health?
How much money you got?
Are you strong?
What's your religious belief?
And my dad was, he said, I'm Protestant.
In Armenia, it's protestant.
I don't care.
I'm Armenian.
I'm Armenian Orthodox.
And what political party?
I mean, they were what do you call it?
Presbyterians.
I don't care, I'm Armenian, I'm Armenian Orthodox.
And what political party?
You have to be a social democrat.
That's a national, international party.
Germans had social democrats.
Hitler hated them.
And they're more socialist, but more liberal.
Yeah.
And he belonged to the Tashnak, which was like equivalent to super nationalist.
And so my grandpa said, no good.
He says, I'll change you whatever you want.
I don't care about those.
I want your daughter.
Right.
Anyway, that's how they got married and had me and my mom lost everything.
My uncle, her brother died the moment I was born in the same hospital.
He had a 10-year-old brother younger than herself.
And two of the sisters had died in Troy, New York, buried there.
And the last two, my mom and her little brother Martin, he died, they named me Martin because same name as my uncle.
He died in the same hospital?
Same hospital, Herman Kiefer Hospital in Detroit.
It's a very famous hospital in Detroit, Herman Kiefer.
I don't know.
I think it's still there.
Anyways, it's just such a nice... I'm biased, let's face it.
I see it as the epitome of what I believe.
How about what I went through?
Imagine, I would hear records of great opera singers, music, and history, and religion, and love, and care.
I wasn't ever ashamed.
Many Armenians like Tertsakyan is an Armenian name.
Tertsak is a T-E-R-T-Z-O-K.
Tertsak means a tailor.
In Turkish.
So if you're born in Turkey that your last name is Tertakoglu, you say Tertakyan.
That means you're Armenian, but you're from Turkey.
And so my name is pure Armenian.
My grandfather's name is Mardirosyan.
Mardiros is the Armenian name, means martyr, a man who dies for a cause.
And so I come from that kind of a The other Armenians, all Armenians, they have a Turkish name, though, in the first part.
Yan is on the end.
And if you're from Russian Armenia, or Communist Armenia, it's Y-A-N.
And if you're from Turkish Armenia, it's I-A-N.
Now, how much of your family story, is it just your father's story in your book?
Is it what?
Is it only your father's story in your book?
My mom, my me, my father, grandpa, The Times, President Roosevelt, Everything, the World War II, World War I, heroism, Purple Heart, my dad got in the, what do you call it, the Silver Star for bravery.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, it's a good story.
I am hoping that people are going to listen to this and they're going to buy your book.
It has very good reviews.
I looked at it online and I've actually ordered a copy myself.
By the way, it's not a book that—you've never read a novel about that thick, you know, 2,000 pages, and at the 300th page you see Joe Johnson.
You say, who was Joe Johnson?
You have to go back and figure out, was he the son or the brother?
You get confused.
There's so many names, volume, and you get no fun out of that.
Mine is not that way.
Yeah.
You can read it and you're reading.
You're in the book.
Yeah.
Well, the reviews do suggest it is an excellent, very readable book.
The book.
And by the way, I didn't know that reviews are in there.
You showed it to me.
Yeah.
Five star, right?
Absolutely.
I don't have a computer, folks.
You don't have a computer.
You don't have a phone.
I have no television.
You are driving yourself at 100, which I find shocking and impressive.
But anyway, the book is God Bless America.
America spelled with a K. At the end.
Not T-A, but K-A.
So anyway, check out God Bless America, and you will get the story.
Any bookstore.
Yeah, any bookstore.
If they don't have it, they can order it.
Yeah, they can order it.
So, Martin Nagevian, it has been a pleasure talking to you.
I am sure we could go on for many, many hours.
I don't think there's any end to how many stories you've got.
Brett, right now you've made me feel about 21 years old.
I'm so Excited and like I'm not, I'm not a hundred.
You're not a hundred.
I feel like I'm just, in Turkish, which means, means mother, means born.
Again.
I'm a new mother.
I've been reborn to be my youth.
I feel so happy and so youthful.
So naive.
All the things that youth means to people.
I feel confident.
You've made my day today.
Great.
I'm going to be 105 before I die because of him.
Hell yeah.
All right.
Well, I look forward to part two of the conversation.
