The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1391 critiques generational blame for economic failures, citing UK pension divergences since 2010 and US home ownership drops from over 50% in the 1950s to 10% today. The hosts detail a harrowing 36-hour rescue of US Colonel Dude44 after his F-15 was shot down by Iranian missiles near Isfahan, involving SEAL Team Six and costly asset losses. Ultimately, the episode argues that systemic policy failures, not moral failings of youth or elders, drive societal strain, while highlighting the enduring "No Man Left Behind" ethos in modern warfare. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Orthodox Easter Traditions00:15:11
Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 7th of April 2026.
I am joined by Beau and Ferrass.
And today, Ferrass is telling us about the importance of some festive persecution.
We're going to just talk about different Easter celebrations some persecution, some not so persecution.
On an unrelated note, I'm going to talk about the boomers versus everyone.
And then Beau is going to be telling us a heroic story of the American pilot who escaped everything, which I actually don't know anything about.
So I'm actually really looking forward to hearing.
Okay, cool.
Cool.
But before I get started as well, Lotus Eaters Live.
Let's be honest, if you're not going at this point, you know, what are you doing with your life?
Rearrange everything.
You've got to be there.
It's so important.
No, obviously, if you came along, it'd be very good.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
I think there's still a few tickets left.
And so come along if you'd like to see us all in person and meet some of the audience.
Also, the Beau Show.
Breakfast with Beau.
Breakfast with Beau, yeah.
Beau's Breakfast Club, the real BBC.
Make sure to check that out.
Every day at 8 a.m.
Every workday at 8 a.m., yeah.
Bright eyed and bushy towed.
Something I never am, but admirable that you do it.
But anyway, with all of that out of the way, I suppose we need to hear who should be persecuted this Easter.
Well, ideally, no one, but we're just going to talk about a bunch of different.
Easter celebrations that happened throughout the world.
There were services in Tehran at St. Sarkis' Cathedral.
These, I believe, were Palm Sunday services rather than Easter services, because this is an Armenian Orthodox church named after General Sergius, who was a Roman general who fled to Persia, was persecuted by Shapur II, among 16,000 other Christians who were killed.
And he became a Christian martyr, and so the church is named after him.
And they were celebrating in Tehran, um, in Gaza.
There were Christian celebrations going on, Catholic and Orthodox.
There were Easter celebrations, Orthodox, obviously, still following the Julian calendar.
In the Holy Family Church in Gaza, they had a nice and pretty festive Easter.
You could see some of the children in Gaza there.
It's quite a dissonant image, isn't it?
Yes.
I was thinking that.
I mean, it is quite a striking image.
Destroyed homes, wrecked everything nearby.
But, you know, children are happily going to celebrate Easter.
Where else were there celebrations?
In Jerusalem, the Orthodox were able to celebrate Palm Sunday.
And this was actually quite nice because the Catholic celebrations didn't go as smoothly as we will discuss in a second.
They were going at it with bagpipes.
I respect that.
So, bagpipes in Jerusalem.
Bagpipes in Jerusalem.
I haven't heard those since we took it from the Ottomans, I don't think.
They still celebrate with them, and it's a regular feature of Christian celebrations in Jerusalem, actually.
So, is that like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or something?
No, that is at.
I'm not sure which church that is, actually.
But, you know.
Waiting for them to transition into Scotland the Brave.
That's the only tune everyone really knows on bagpipes.
For the Easter celebrations themselves in Catholic churches in Jerusalem, these weren't allowed because pews, like no religious assemblies were allowed and things like that.
There was a Jewish Passover celebration, but it happened underground under the Temple Mount.
Whereas Muslim prayers and most Christian prayers. Aren't being allowed in churches, so people are celebrating in the street in some cases.
And obviously, on the 29th of March, the Catholics of Palestine were quite critical of how the Israeli police stopped four people from going to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate.
The Cardinal and three other church officials said this was too big of an assembly and they weren't allowed.
Even though they were going without a crowd, alone, they said for safety reasons this wouldn't be permitted.
So, is this under the justification of we're at war?
Yes.
And therefore, it's not safe to have large groups of people because there's bombs falling from the sky.
Essentially.
Now, there is a 65% increase in attacks on Christians in the Holy Land.
And this is the village of Taibe.
The Israelis recently tried to burn its church and things like that.
But they went ahead and celebrated Palm Sunday with proper bagpipes and spats.
Bagpipes and spats and capes.
Yep.
What more can you ask?
And they've sort of adapted the bagpipe tunes to the local taste, which is just a very strange mix.
I was just thinking that actually, because it's very hard to find people who are, you know, bagpipe enthusiasts outside of the British Isles.
Yes.
And so to hear them play very well actually is quite surprising.
That must date from the early 20th century, yes.
So, what we took it in, what, like 1917?
Something like that.
It's Alan B. and Lawrence of Arabia, isn't it?
T.E. Lawrence.
So, that must have been the point when bagpipes were introduced to the Holy Land.
Surely.
I would guess.
I would guess that.
I haven't properly looked into it.
Interesting, though.
If anybody in the audience wants to research this and update us, please go ahead and do that.
But, you know, for some reason, like Lebanese Christians don't do that.
I don't think Egyptian Christians do that.
It's just the Palestinian Christians who've taken.
To bagpipes for some reason.
I've looked it up and apparently it's the British Mandate era.
So it is.
So yeah, I've learned something today.
That makes sense.
I didn't know that.
If you'd asked me 10 minutes ago, do Christians in Palestine play bagpipes?
I'd say no, don't be crazy.
Of course not.
What a weird thing, but there you go.
And they play well, apparently.
Not that I'm a bagpipe connoisseur or anything like that, but I take your word.
It's in my DNA.
So there was that.
In Lebanon, they have a nice tradition in a village not far from mine, actually.
Where what they do is that they agree each year to celebrate either on the Orthodox Easter date or on the Catholic Easter date.
And they all get together and celebrate at the same time so that there wouldn't be a Catholic Orthodox division.
I think some of the higher ups in both churches don't really like it, but they can't say anything about it.
I mean, it makes sense if you're in Lebanon and a Christian.
You don't want more division, do you?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Do you find it interesting when the Eastern Orthodox, what, patriarch?
Yes.
And the Pope, once in a blue moon, they'll actually meet.
Yes.
Once in a blue moon, they're like together in the same place at the same time, may even hug or shake hands or something.
And there's always a special seat for the Orthodox patriarchs to sort of recognize them as special in the Vatican and in all kinds of Catholic events where they attend.
They are given a sort of more important seat than others to recognize them.
What else?
In Lebanon, they also, the Vatican tried to send supplies to a Christian village, which has been cut off because of the war.
It's sort of surrounded by everyone.
And there's a big fight over is Hezbollah using the village?
Is it not using the village?
But two Christians who were trying to bring supplies were killed.
And then Christian charities tried to resupply that village, but they were turned back by the Israelis, or they didn't even proceed because they didn't get permission.
In Pakistan, a group of Christians were rammed by a truck, unfortunately, which is the kind of thing that happens somewhat regularly.
I mean, being a religious minority in Pakistan has got to be one of the most difficult places to be a religious minority.
I've seen videos of Buddhists, even who you would imagine don't cause any real problems given their actual religion, being persecuted and having their houses burnt down and the like and things like that.
So, yeah, it must be rough for them.
I think Pakistan's record of tolerance leaves something to be desired, shall we say?
I think that's putting it lightly, yes.
It's not terribly inclusive.
No, no, no.
There are no DEI programs in Pakistan.
Where else?
Nigeria.
It was a pretty nasty attack, kidnapping, killing a bunch of random people.
As usual, the police of Nigeria is completely ineffective, completely useless.
This has become a bit of a standard thing.
This is the sort of Islamists that base themselves in the north of the country.
The kind of Boko Haram group, which have now become affiliated with the Islamic State.
And I think they refer to themselves as the Islamic State in West Africa.
That's right, yeah.
And they do their best to regularly attack Christians on important holidays.
You hear about it quite regularly from Nigeria and this sort of thing, don't you?
Yeah.
And they.
Kidnap people, kill them, torture them, etc.
But let's get to some of the more entertaining stuff.
In Poland, there is a tradition where on Easter Monday, everybody splashes everyone else with water.
And they just go around the streets, filling up anything that they can in water, dumping each other in water.
That's quite brave that time of year in Poland, didn't it?
I was going to say that.
Quite courageous.
And they look a bit merciless in what they do to each other.
They go around dressed festively, and you see the firefighters are in on it and are going around.
I feel like.
Not full on hosing people down, because that would be.
This is the worst form of tax rebate they're possibly ever going to get.
So they'll go around spraying people with water randomly.
I'm sure this is what Jesus would have wanted.
Somebody compiled a bunch of celebrations from Spain.
I'm betting they're not mucking about one way or another.
It'll be full bore, right?
Okay.
Okay, there we go.
Epic processions.
And it goes on, and they do all kinds of things celebrating Easter, celebrating Christ's sacrifice for us.
It's genuinely beautiful what they do.
And pretty much every single town has its own little funny traditions and its own rituals for how to celebrate.
They just go around these massive processions, and you can't help.
Being quite impressed because these aren't centrally organized.
These are just local brotherhoods, local communities.
They just, each one of them has its own tradition and they go celebrating.
My Protestant mind is made anxious by the fact they're swaying that cross back and forwards.
It's like, you're going to knock it over in a minute.
Be careful.
To be fair, after several hundred years of experience, they've gotten the hang of it.
It seems like it.
I think, odds are they've gotten the hang of it.
And you see the parts of the Spanish military participating as well, which is nice.
Even though the Spanish government is insanely woke and seems to desperately hate Christianity, Spain remains quite Catholic and proudly so.
That's always an interesting thing to me.
At the moment, it's a bloke called Sanchez, isn't it?
Pedro Sanchez.
And he's extremely left wing.
Yes.
He's even going to give amnesty to something like 840,000 foreign people.
Illegal.
Up to a million, I think it is.
Right.
They massively underestimated the number.
They thought it was half.
It turns out to be three times as big.
And yet, in loads of senses, Spain is very, very Catholic and conservative with a small c, very much so.
It's just odd to me that they then voted in such a traitorous left wing government.
It is incongruous, isn't it?
It is very incongruous.
And there are parties trying to challenge it.
But as usual, the centre right acts as a spoiler for actual conservatives.
Where have I seen that playbook before?
Yeah, exactly.
It seems to be the job of the centre right to just.
Hamper actual conservative causes.
Spain's also quite a divided country, isn't it?
Not only from historic kingdoms, but also just regionally.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So you see these kinds of celebrations.
But at the same time, record numbers of people becoming baptized.
And you see that pretty much across record numbers of people either being baptized or being confirmed or being brought into the church, you know.
And I won't belabor the point because you all know what I think, but I'll leave it there.
Here's a funny one from Florence.
They fire a missile through the church and it sets something else on fire, and that it sort of.
And that's how they light Easter candles, it seems.
Pretty cool.
Might have to turn the audio off just in case of copyright there.
Suffering and Sacrifice00:08:25
Oh, it's already over.
Never mind.
So that's a Florentine tradition.
What's very impressive is quite Italian to have, like, let's venerate Jesus with fireworks, shall we?
Yeah, why not?
Why not?
It's nice to see each individual country's flavor.
The Spanish take it very seriously.
The Italians have a bit of flair.
Yes.
Yes.
In Britain, we indulge in chocolate and have a Sunday roast.
Well, in Britain, things aren't going that well.
You had a school earlier cancelling Easter celebrations to celebrate Refugee Week.
Oh, yeah.
Which is.
The Easter holidays were a staple of the school calendar.
When I was growing up, that's the thing.
And from a Christian perspective, you do owe the genuinely vulnerable something.
We all owe the vulnerable something.
That does not in any way support replacement level migration.
And there is this extremism that transforms Christianity into mere sentimentalism and discards Christian virtues like prudence and justice and, you know, order.
And you see that kind of woke nonsense instead.
Because I remember when I was in primary school, for example, the week leading up to the Easter weekend would usually be spent either learning about the actual biblical story or painting Easter eggs, or there'd be lots of things that get you invested in the holiday that make it feel culturally significant.
And by removing these sorts of things.
Very toned down.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.
It used to be in the pre modern era.
I said this on the breakfast show the other day, but I'll say it again here.
For anyone who didn't see that.
In the pre modern era, in the medieval period or late antiquity, Easter was by far the most important period of the year.
By far.
Way, way more than Christmas.
Way more.
Yeah, yeah.
Because this is when the actual sacrifice and our reconciliation of God was made.
It's the most important miracle, isn't it?
Jesus coming back to life.
The resurrection of Christ is literally the source of Christian hope.
You can't have Christianity without it.
It's much more important than Christmas.
You know those Faber Che eggs that the The Tsar and the Tsarina would give each other.
They were Easter gifts.
Yes.
A fabulously ornate, extremely, extremely expensive thing as an Easter gift.
Yes.
It puts in some perspective how important it was.
Yes.
Far more than Christmas.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Because things have changed.
Again, it is joy through sacrifice that is the fundamental Christian message.
It is the celebration of sacrifice.
It is love because of sacrifice.
Without the sacrifice, it makes no sense.
Otherwise, it's just sort of, you know, a holy man was born.
It's the sacrifice that gives Christianity its unique flavor.
The king decided not to give an Easter message, unfortunately, this year.
And you see, you know, as Nick points out, all kinds of supposed leaders struggling to celebrate Easter and to say Easter is Christian.
Someone to mix it with Judeo Christian, someone to mix it with all kinds of nonsense.
Judeo Christian at that time in particular is.
Particularly tasteless.
It is a bit of an issue.
You did see big celebrations in Trafalgar Square where there's a reenactment of the Passion of the Christ, but it seems that the.
And you saw Sadiq Khan actually issue a statement for Easter, unlike His Majesty, which is a bit of a shame, shall we say.
But it seems that the Passion in Trafalgar won't be happening again next year because of a.
Lack of funding, apparently.
So, if you have the financial resources to ameliorate this sad state of affairs, please make sure that you do something.
And you can see why King Charles opted not to issue an Easter message, because last year he, for some reason, insisted on including Islam in his Easter message, which is something that I can't quite understand.
Given that Muslims don't believe that Christ was actually crucified, so there is a little bit of confusion.
So, yeah, I just wanted to show you some of the Easter celebrations and remind you that a lot of Christians are genuinely suffering and that the way forward is more Christianity, I'd hope.
Meanwhile, Anglicans do very, very little.
Yeah, have an Easter egg and a roast.
That's about it.
It is what it is, but that is my segment for today.
You know, I found out recently that I was baptized a Methodist.
It's still a valid baptism.
Yeah, well, the reason was because it was a nice church, according to my mum, which is the most Church of England thing you could possibly do.
Well, because I'm a convert and I don't know enough, I've baptized my children into three different Catholic denominations.
So one is.
They do not mind?
Is that cool with them?
That's fine.
Okay.
That's fine.
So one's baptized Greek Catholic, one is baptized Maronite Catholic, and one is baptized Latin Catholic.
So.
Your favorite one.
Edging you back.
The best one.
Got the last.
We're all Catholic.
We're all Catholic.
It doesn't really matter.
But one of them was because it was a really nice church.
To be fair, in my mum's family's village, there were two churches, and, you know, my grandmother.
And grandfather went to the one in which most people they got along with went to, which was the Methodist Church.
So that was the reason for it.
So it's village politics in rural Devon.
I'm unbaptized.
Does that mean I can't go to heaven?
Yep.
Sorry.
You're not baptized?
No.
We can fix that.
I want the full body submersion, the adult full body swimming pool one.
I guess my glass of water is not going to cut it then.
Oh well.
Oh well.
Okay, so I'm going to be talking about the boomers versus everyone.
We have a second.
Let's just read a couple.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
I got carried away.
That's a random name.
Says the lack of funding for Easter celebrations in the Trafalgar Square refers to the money they spend.
Spicy.
Sigilstone says bagpipes were invented in 1469 by the Welsh blowing into a sheep's lower intestine.
The Scottish would later refine the design by removing the intestine from the sheep's chest.
I take it you don't read these before reading it out loud.
I should start.
I've got no idea whether part of that is historically accurate and true or the whole thing is just a joke.
It's just a Welsh joke.
I don't know.
I'm assuming it's a Welsh joke.
I can't throw stones given my heritage.
Yeah, I'm assuming it's a Welsh joke.
And apparently Modi released a positive message for Easter.
By me, okay.
I suppose there are Christians in India, aren't there?
You get them in Goa.
There are millions of Christians in India, yeah.
But they are quite heavily persecuted.
I mean, there are thousands of Goan Christians in Swindon, weirdly enough.
Yeah, the Goan Christians, I believe, they received St. Thomas the Apostle.
So, you know, it's a pretty old Christian community.
It was the Portuguese, wasn't it, originally introduced?
No, and then the Portuguese came.
Oh, okay, okay.
They found them already Christian, I believe.
That would be a weird thing, wouldn't it?
Turn up to a place you've never been and say, Yeah, we share the same God.
Boomer Accountability Debate00:03:23
But there we go.
Learning lots of things today.
But anyway, before my false start, let's get going.
So I'm going to be talking about the boomers versus everyone.
And I take a little bit more of a sympathetic view.
It all started with a debate about the.
Triple lock pension, which basically is three different measures in which the pension can track, and you pick the highest one so that the pension isn't necessarily losing its buying power, purchasing power.
Yeah, that's a better way of putting it.
So it's either the wage increase or inflation or 2.5%, whichever one is highest.
Yes.
And so, meaning that pensioners are literally better off every year than the rest of the population.
Yes, they're insulated from the consequences of a declining economy, basically.
And there's been discussion about scrapping the triple lock pension and just pensioners more generally.
And I wanted to look at the competing sides of this because I have a more conciliatory view.
I don't think that people should be infighting between generations of people over what ultimately amounts to a policy failure by blaming the boomers for having it.
Easy relative to young people nowadays, you're directing your anger at the people who benefited from policies created by a government you should be holding accountable, or ideas you should be holding accountable.
It's a policy that has created this.
The fact that they benefited from it in the same way that anyone would have otherwise, I think, is a little bit unfair.
But we're going to look through the arguments.
There's a lot of nuance here, so don't get your torches and pitchforks outside my house yet saying he's a boomer sympathiser.
Because I think that actually.
Once we go through it all, you'll see where I'm coming from.
That there is a little bit of complexity, and you shouldn't hate your own elders because your current government is evil.
That's not directing your anger appropriately, in my opinion.
Although there are things that the boomers could perhaps learn from the contemporary situation that many people face, and certainly they could do of respecting their youngers a little bit more, depending on the individual.
But, you know, I know plenty of boomers that are perfectly.
Selfless and good people.
So, I'm not going to throw the whole group under the bus for the sake of a few selfish people.
So, you're worried about an anti boomer mob.
I thought you'd be more worried about a boomer mob that you're throwing shade at boomers and they'll come round and be more worried the other side.
I'm going to be sympathetic to both sides.
The overall point you're making is perfectly valid.
It's not the individual boomer who gets to draw a pension that's at fault, is it?
He had nothing to do with policy or government at any point.
It's not necessarily their fault.
Well, certainly not their fault.
You can even argue that the British public has always voted against immigration.
So, the pressing issue of our time and part of the reason that everything has declined in things that are in the state they're in isn't their fault because it was imposed upon the British public against our will consistently since its inception.
Student Debt Crisis00:15:43
Right.
So, one thing I do have to quickly mention, though, is that we have a live event going on on the 11th of April, and it is going on from seven o'clock until 10 o'clock.
So, you get three hours of us having a live podcast.
We're doing a lads hour, I think.
And also, there's a debate about the Star Wars prequels, and a long QA.
And a QA.
So, probably go on longer than 10, I would have thought.
I would say so.
But if you want to be a part of that, if that sounds like fun, it'd be good to have you along and meet you all.
And so.
Please do consider getting a ticket.
They're modestly priced, and the only cost is that you have to come to Swindon, which I'm sorry about.
But you can't have it all, can you?
So, another thing that became part of this discourse was people talking about the price of houses in this day and age.
There's someone drawing attention to this house here, which is, I believe, in Tooting in London.
So, it's an 850k house.
Or 1.12 million US dollars for what is essentially a house that if I were to lie down in front of it, I would be as wide as it.
And, you know, it's two of me tall, so it's not a very big house.
And yes, it says.
It's just a terraced three bedroomed house in London.
Tooting isn't great.
No.
And that would be £3,400 a month on a 40 year mortgage, which is considerably more than the average after tax salary.
Total repayment, $1.6 million, and $885,000 of that is pure interest.
If you want to see the destruction of the financialization of our economy, there it is.
Half of the cost of the house is interest.
I don't know how anyone can justify that.
So you need to earn $170,000 to be able to buy what was essentially viewed as granny's house, as they put it, and pay almost double for it, which is already quite an inflated house price because.
As I read the situation, all of the signs are pointing to a housing bubble burst sometime in the next year or so because markets are already collapsing.
Think how much faster the housing bubble would burst if there was re migration.
I know, it'd be wonderful.
Everyone would be able to buy a house.
Everybody would be able to buy a house.
It'd be nice.
And then also, we can invest in things that aren't houses.
So it'd help the economy in other ways because they wouldn't be the safest places.
It's still much more disposable income.
Yeah.
It's a bit more than you have to earn 170 grand.
You have to.
Consistently earn 170 grand at least for 40 years straight.
Yes.
Don't get ill or get fired.
You'll get your house repossessed.
So, yeah, you're going to have to be one of the most productive people in the country to live in a shoebox house.
Which is demand.
And that productivity will be mainly in financial services, which is not real productivity.
Exactly.
Because no actual goods are produced.
I don't know if the housing market will collapse just simply because of supply and demand.
I.e., there's just giant, giant demand.
Insane demand.
So, someone who's desperate, who can just about afford it, will pay that.
That's true.
That dynamic isn't going anywhere.
Well, maybe I should reframe it to mean if the economy were not propped up by the government, you know, as a dead corpse with a stick in it, you know, up its spine, if that wasn't happening, then the bubble would be bursting.
But there are many things they can do to keep it, you know, the lumbering corpse shambling on of the economy.
Bit of a morbid analogy there, I'm sorry.
But this tweet in particular and sentiments like it.
Even though it didn't get much engagement, it started a storm of conversations.
No, I don't think pensioners should have to sell their houses to retire because people were talking about the pensions, the triple lock, as well as house prices and the difficulty of living.
And, you know, I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment here that if you've bought a house, the cost of living shouldn't have to push pensioners to sell their house just to be able to live.
I think that's a fair thing to say.
But then on the other side, you.
See people say, I don't think young people should miss out on owning a home to pay for someone's retirement, which is also fair.
So, both of these things, in my opinion, are reasonable things to say.
This is why I think when both sides are reasonable, you're blaming the wrong people.
That's exactly right.
What this points to is a complete policy failure rather than evil boomers, evil young people.
Yeah, I don't think it's either that young people don't work hard.
I think that.
From my experience of once being a young person, which wasn't that long ago, I came to contact with people who were incredibly hardworking.
Like my parents said to me that I worked so much more than they did when they were my age to better my own future, and they did very well for themselves.
And I think that this is a theme that keeps on going on.
People are aware that you've got to work really hard.
And so it's not necessarily the young people that are at fault, although some might be, but as a group, and it's not necessarily the boomers either because.
They are right that they have worked for a living and they might have lived in more prosperous times, but I think they have a right to keep the home that they bought with their own money and live a comfortable life as well.
And so these two things shouldn't be at odds with one another.
In fact, they're both signs of a healthy society.
And then you see people like this saying, What makes a pensioner more deserving of protection from market forces than, say, a young family?
Which was actually quite a clever way of framing it because this is what is known in the business as boomer bait.
Because then you get boomers saying, Listen, actually, I deserve my house more than a baby.
You can see him here saying, Children's futures are more important than those of pensioners.
This should be very basic to even unintelligent life forms.
I think that's, again, fair that, you know, old people should be building societies for the young, for the next generation, for their children and grandchildren, not the other way around.
That is an inversion of the natural order and therefore a great perversion of human nature, in my view.
And Callum, you know, old Lotus Sutis presenter Callum, was able to pick up on this boomer bait.
And he basically made them claim that they're more deserving than babies for resources from the state, which is an interesting position and not one that I think I agree with.
I must admit, I have noticed that some boomers, I've said a number of times for all the boomers come out and have a go at me, have said a number of times that based boomers are some of the most based.
Yes.
Some boomers are great, of course, but I have noticed that some of them are a little bit fragile.
Any criticism of boomers and they take it very personally, I have noticed that.
That is the case.
You only need to scratch the surface and they start talking about avocado toast and Netflix and how you should just tighten your belt over the very minor expenditures in your life.
Yeah, that classic one.
That's always quite insulting because it ignores the actual state of the economy and how much worse it is.
I remember having a conversation with my father.
Just showing him how the economy has changed since he was younger.
Thankfully, my parents are quite sympathetic to me and we have a good relationship.
But I was explaining to him that, listen, the economy is not how it used to be.
And he's like, oh, wow, okay.
And he actually took it on board and was just like, okay, you know.
When they get you with student debt, this is just life destroying.
This is just a catastrophe.
Well, it's a 9% tax.
Yeah, exactly.
Because in my life, I've only been paying off the.
Additional costs incurred by having the student debt in the first place have not actually paid off the student, yeah, exactly.
Um, so the argument that you've bought any tiny luxury, yes, and therefore that's why you haven't saved 50 grand for a deposit.
It's like, no, that's not really what's going on.
Also, worked all the way through university as well to pay my way through, so I've actually got much lower student debt than most.
And even I, in my situation, am only paying off the interest, yeah, that's so it's a very difficult situation.
Then, of course, you get the house prices being.
The highest proportion of income they've ever been, really.
And then you get things like this you get a boomer coming out saying, Guess, one can work, one can't.
And he's arguing that children can't work.
That's insane.
So, yes, that's arguing against a young family saying that, Well, we're a pensioner, we can't work.
That's mad.
Yes, the.
Go ahead.
This is where people get very critical of boomers because you must live your life for your children.
The whole point is that you give up your life for your future continuity as a people, as a nation.
Your life is not worth much if you're just an individual.
There is actually a generational pact, there is a communal pact.
Without these, nothing can be built.
There can't be any civilization, there can't be any old buildings.
There can't be any traditions, there can't be anything good.
And not seeing that because, ah, I can work, like, okay, even if you're 70, you could work at a Tesco checkout if you want.
I mean, you can work from home these days.
It's never been easier for a pensioner to work.
Not saying that they should necessarily, but if the option is there.
Exactly.
This is an insane take from Mr. Ramsey.
And then here's another one here from Helen.
While you're tossing around this negativity about pensioners, may it.
Maybe it might be worth considering how many pensioners do unpaid childcare for their families, dropping off, picking up from school, caring for sick grandchildren, holiday babysitting, etc.
And then he responds quite rightfully the use of the word unpaid is telling.
I could not care less if you're not paid for helping to raise the next generation of your bloodline.
Thousands of your ancestors overcame horrors beyond their comprehension.
To get you here, the school run is literally the least you could do.
I couldn't have put it better myself.
Yes.
Unpaid, that is just.
Selfish, isn't it?
Talking about raising your grandchildren is unpaid.
I mean, you know, my parents don't get to spend enough time with their grandkids because I'm here.
And that's a source of misery to them, frankly.
And so if you're around your grandchildren or your children, you should be grateful for it.
I also think bringing in money to your family is a weird dynamic.
Exactly.
Like if someone in my family asked me to look after their kids, I wouldn't even think of asking for any money for it.
Hourly rate.
Yeah, it'd be absurd.
It'd be like, no, of course.
Yeah, you don't have to ask.
I never really understand why people take personal umbrage when someone criticizes a whole generation or something like that.
Like when people, if sometimes, get shade thrown at Gen Xers, like I'm a Gen Xer, like their cynicism or something.
I don't take that personally.
I'm like, oh, that's me.
I must go on Twitter endlessly now and defend genetics and therefore general patterns aren't true.
It is a bit silly.
It's like a woman saying, I know a tall Asian person, therefore not all Asians are short.
It's like, well, on the whole, compared to Europeans, yes, they are.
It's just missing a trend.
But no, I get your point, Bo, that when people insult millennials, I don't go, oh, you know, I'm so offended.
I'm just like, well, a lot of the criticisms there I can recognize and actually, you know, I don't embody many of those, so I don't mind.
It's fine, in fact.
Here's another one.
It's obvious a pensioner doesn't have the years left to make up for any losses, therefore, cannot take any chances.
A young person, on the other hand, does.
And he replies, so the children should suffer.
And I think that this is the implicit argument of many that haven't quite come to terms with the economic realities of the country at the minute.
And this one was quite revealing.
Two things.
I'm not going to read that.
Pensioners have literally contributed all their lives, they bought into the social contract.
Questionable.
How exactly is an 80 year old supposed to cope with sudden financial shocks?
No avocado chills for you.
Yeah.
Get a second job.
You're clearly just jumping on the bandwagon here.
And he rightfully points out that what you pay in versus what you get back is not equivalent.
And here, the average person receives 1.9 times what they personally paid in in national insurance.
Is that not anything to do with inflation?
I guess it is.
I guess it is.
But nonetheless.
Yeah.
I don't know if there's inflation adjusted figures.
But yeah, that's a good question.
No, it's a fair point.
Although we will see later that the pension relative to inflation and the cost of living is basically diverged.
So we will be able to answer that in a second.
Just sort of to your point, I forgot what I was going to say.
Never mind.
We can come back to it.
I suspect by the time I reach state pension age, whatever it will be at that point, Like, I'm in my mid 40s, nearly.
Like, I am.
You're in your late 20s, right?
I wish.
I'm 30 now.
Oh, you said 30 the other day.
We're about the same age.
But it'll probably be like 80 plus by the time I reach that age.
I would have thought by that point there will be no more state pension.
No.
In those coming decades, at some point, there will be a government which will have to say the whole state pension thing is broken.
We simply cannot afford it anymore.
There's no upper limit.
We're not going to make it 85.
We're going to make it, it doesn't essentially exist anymore.
Because the pension system.
I'm expecting that to happen.
Because the pension itself breaks the generational contract.
The existence of a pension breaks it.
Well, all welfare breaks up the family, doesn't it?
Exactly, exactly.
Nobody in sort of pre World War II expected a pension.
I mean, yeah, it was introduced in the time of Napoleon for people over 65 when life expectancy was 63.
But it wasn't universal.
It became sort of universal after the Second World War on the assumption that you only got it when you'd exceeded life expectations.
And we're going to die in the next couple of years, as opposed to receive it at 65 and live to 95, which was unheard of that you would, you know, half of your adult life would be spent on the charity of others.
It would always have been, yeah, children take care of their elderly parents and that's it.
And if that wasn't possible, where there were kind of local arrangements for people who were genuinely in need and genuinely capacitated, as opposed to a centralized, enforced charity by the state.
Pension System Flaws00:12:36
No, I very much agree, and I disagree with welfare as a matter of principle, just full stop.
Obviously, the most excusable being disability benefits and things, but there are other ways of dealing with that that I think are actually better for them.
But that is not the focus today.
And here's another one.
Oh, no, I skipped past that one, actually.
55 years of hard work and paying taxes and not whining, which sounds an awful lot like whining to me.
But yeah, this is quite a cut and dry response of just, I worked hard, therefore I deserve a pension.
Which is sort of the cookie cutter one you see all the time, although it doesn't necessarily acknowledge the dynamics of the economy anymore, that the young are paying for this, paying for something that they're not necessarily going to benefit from themselves.
And then here's another one.
As part of the pensions argument, some people keep referring to old people being wealthy due to the value of their home.
It's irrelevant.
I don't care what my house is worth 500,000 or 50 quid.
I live here.
I'm staying here.
I'll probably die here.
So the money means nothing.
I thought that this was relatively fair.
Because it's their house.
They did pay for it with their own taxed income.
They should be able to keep it in an ideal situation.
And also, assets are not the same as disposable income as well.
And people treat assets as the same.
And you do need somewhere to live.
Although, if you had a half a million house, you could probably afford to downsize as a pensioner, to be honest.
And in fact, many do willingly anyway because they don't want a large house to have to manage in their old age.
I'm going to skip over this one because it's quite.
Long, but the gist of it is that not all pensioners are wealthy and going on cruises, which is a fair point.
Some do actually rely on the state pension for their income.
I know my Scottish grandparents did.
They lived in the council house and were reliant on the state to pay their income despite working their entire lives.
And so that is a fair point.
And we shouldn't tar all boomers with the same brush just because many of them are wealthy doesn't necessarily mean all of them are.
Not by a long shot.
I mean, I think that was one of the things that's been missed here quite often.
Doesn't it all depend on whether you're actually wealthy or not?
It does, yes.
Because a state pension is not a great amount of money.
No.
It's barely enough to actually eat and heat the thing.
So, if for whatever reason you've got to the end of your life and haven't got a nest egg, haven't finished paying off a mortgage, then it's the difference between starving or freezing to death or not.
But if you're wealthy, you probably wouldn't even notice it hitting your bank account.
It should be means tested in an ideal situation.
We could save a lot of money.
Like the example was given.
In a recent debate, saying that Lord Alan Sugar still qualifies for a pension, even though he's a billionaire.
And so there should be some accommodation here for people who can't actually afford to live.
Perhaps we could give them a little bit more and then not give any money to people who are very well off.
That'd be a good start.
Well, one anecdote I know of is you know, well, there's some people that really need it just to buy tins of beans and keep the heating on so they don't freeze to death.
Then there was a friend of the family who, when she retired, she called it handbag money.
She'll just save it up for a few months until there was enough to buy a new handbag and buy a new habit because they were very middle class, wealthy, didn't need the money whatsoever.
Didn't need a penny of it, not even close.
But she still got it.
So there's someone that can barely live and someone that doesn't notice it and eventually is like, oh, yeah, there's a bit of money there, I'll buy a new handbag.
So there is clearly an injustice here, isn't there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's partly a question of broken social solidarity.
Do you feel for the others around you?
And therefore, do you feel that I don't need this?
I'd rather it goes to someone who needs it.
And if you don't have that sentiment, you will encourage people younger than you not to have that sentiment towards you because of how human nature actually works.
And so that just seems very unwise and selfish.
I think it's just very, very low resolution to say all pensioners are rich.
No, they're not.
Of course they're not.
No, there's a lot of rights.
They're being really, really selfish.
Well, no, some need it in order to not.
Actually, starve.
So, no, that's bear that in mind.
That is something that does get missed, and I think actually is one of the strongest points in favor of the boomers, although only some of them.
And here's another one that I thought was interesting Dear boomers, can you afford to buy the house you live in currently with the wage you used to earn before you retired?
If you can't, that's the whole housing problem in a nutshell.
It really is that simple to understand.
You could also argue there's, you know, immigration pushing it up as well as.
The difference between wages and house prices.
But you can't expect all of that nuance to be in a tweet, to be honest.
Here's another one as well.
Why should young people have to pay for someone else's retirement?
If you live in a million pound house and you can't afford to retire, sell the house or don't, I don't care.
You just can't expect young people to pay for you.
You could expect your children to pay for you.
Yeah, I'd be happy to support my own parents, but I don't want to support someone's parents who I don't know.
But that's the problem with the current welfare state I'm probably giving money in my taxes to people in a council house in Liverpool who I'll never meet.
And if I did, I'd probably dislike them.
It's charity at the point of a bayonet.
It is, yeah.
Well, it ceases to be charity then as well, doesn't it?
And here's another one.
Can I ask why, if a pensioner has worked all their life, they only have the state pension to rely on, didn't decide to save, put away for a rainy day?
Sounds like poor planning to me.
They're turning around the discourse that's directed at young people on older people.
Although sometimes it can be unfair.
For example, like an elderly lady relied on her husband's large income to live and lived as a housewife and raising kids.
And now he's died and, you know, she's on her own.
That's a very different situation and not necessarily one that you could falter for.
And so, again, there is nuance here, and you shouldn't be blanketly accusing people of that.
What about people that did work hard their whole life, but again, for whatever reason, were unable to save?
They did struggle to make a good wage for their whole working life and haven't got a nest egg, didn't do a mortgage and complete a mortgage.
But they're supposed to just.
Curl up and die.
Yeah, they're just supposed to freeze to death now.
Are they?
Exactly.
My dad worked ridiculously hard, but pretty much spent all of his money on our education.
And so that's the pact that he made.
And therefore, we owe him something.
Doesn't mean that you owe him something.
Sure.
It means I owe him something.
And here, that's the problem.
It's the transfer of responsibility.
So there's one final one I wanted to look at before I run out of time here.
When I was married in 1981, we both worked, and most of our salary went on paying the mortgage as the interest rate was 15% at the time.
Everything we owned was secondhand, and we never went out for meals as we couldn't afford to.
We rented our TV.
We went to the laundrette every weekend as we had no washing machine, only had new clothes at Xmas and birthdays as presents.
We went without until we could save enough to pay for something.
It's always been hard whether you're young or old.
So, those out there that think we had it easy, we didn't.
Our governments are to blame, not the old, which is reasonable.
And many people are doing similar things or comparable things in this day and age, although.
I think actually it's not that expensive to have your own washing machine now, and going to a lingerie is a bit antiquated.
But nevertheless, it's still, I think, comparable.
And even though the situation is different, and also they probably saddled themselves with far too much debt here.
I mean, there were people reacting to the fact that they had a 15% interest rate on their house with this gif of Michael, well, it's not a gif, it's a picture of Michael Burry.
Portrayed by Christian Bale in, what's that film called?
The one about the housing market crash.
It's a good film as well.
It's a very good one.
Well, you're going to have to tell us in the comments now.
It's escaping me.
I haven't seen it before.
It's going to torture me until the end of this segment now.
There's also people pointing out that actually there are people far more deserving of the retired taxpayers.
It is the people claiming welfare from abroad.
The Americans even got in on this as well.
They started getting involved in the discourse because it spread.
And.
The big short, that's right.
Big short.
Thank you, Samson.
That is correct.
Oh, misery is dissipated.
And then there are also people capitalizing on it by just trolling and doing a bit of satire.
The other day, we were on a cruise and our grandson rang asking us for a bit of money.
He just started at the NHS full time and it's $28,000 a year.
That's what we paid for our house.
I said, Love, if you're earning a whole house a year and still struggling, that's not a money problem, that's a discipline problem.
I'd help, but I'm afraid of spoiling the boy.
Our neighbour David was a doctor for 35 years, never complained once, five rental properties now, lovely man.
I just hope the boy sorts his finances out.
If we keep bailing them out, they'll never learn, which is some very good.
Satire here because it hits all the right notes as well as reminding me of my own parents a little bit, although they're actually happy to help me out.
Although they haven't yet, so we'll see.
No.
But that's hitting all the right notes, isn't it?
In that they haven't accounted for inflation.
They've also acknowledged the fact that the sort of persistence of the rental market and how widespread it has become makes buying a property yourself all the more difficult because that's.
It's part of what is pushing up demand as well as immigration and other things.
And just to end with a little bit of data, so it's not all anecdote, this is in the US because they got involved, as I said.
Here's the median sale price of houses sold in the United States.
And as you can see, it is just a great big line up, although it's sort of went a bit funny around COVID times, but I imagine it's probably continued to go up since then.
Here is the estimated percentage of 30 year olds who are both married and homeowners, and it starts in the 1950s at about 51 52%, something like that, and plummets to what looks like about 10% or so.
So, that is a catastrophic thing for society that people can't form their households until their fertility is already in decline.
No wonder many modern Western societies are struggling with birth rates when.
You can't actually get the conditions to have children and raise them in an optimal way unless you're 10% of the population.
Seems kind of a bit unrealistic.
And then you go to Britain here and you see the state pension triple lock versus average real wages, and you can see them from about 2010 massively deviate from one another.
So now, actually, you're probably better off being on a pension over time than you are earning a wage.
And in fact, since about 2018, here you can see it dip and only really recover from about 2022, 2023 in Britain.
And so this hasn't really been acknowledged this massive difference between average salary and the actual value of the pension.
And this is only going to continue to get worse as things carry on.
And yes, so my sort of concluding thoughts are that the situation is a lot more complicated than people on the internet are making it out.
But you shouldn't go around pointing fingers at the young or old for ultimately things that are policy failures of the government.
Special Ops Rescue Mission00:15:27
Direct your anger there.
Okay, sorry that went on a little bit long.
Let's have a quick look.
This segment needn't necessarily be all that long, too.
For the sake of time, these are all $1 cheapskates.
I'm afraid I'm going to employ Carl's rules here and not read the $1 ones.
I'm not a cheap stripper, all right?
At least $2.
Sigilstone 17 Boomers got one shotted by the idea of sending away their children and breaking up their families and were so obsessed with things that they didn't notice the rich telling them to do that didn't do the same.
Yes.
That's very true.
You know, we're a long way from multiple generations existing in the same household and sharing their wealth.
That's for certain.
I don't want to read any of the others.
No, no, it's fine.
We'll perhaps do it at the end if we have the time.
All right.
Okay, I want to talk to you a little bit about a little bit of a Daring Do Deep Behind Enemy Lions story.
I like that sort of thing.
I've actually done a bit of content on my own show, Epoch.
Of loads of eaters behind the paywall.
Consider joining loads of eaters.com for as little as £5 a month, the Bronze Team membership.
Put it down there.
By the World Machine.
Talked about various special forces raids and operations over the time.
Well, one happened over the Easter weekend, which I thought was quite interesting.
And it's the story of a downed F 15 pilot.
Well, he wasn't the pilot, actually.
He's the weapons specialist.
Dude in the F 15.
So I thought we could just talk all about that.
Oh, I have to mention that there's a Lotus Eaters live this Saturday, the 11th in Swindon.
Be there or be square.
I believe all the VIP tickets are sold out, but the normal tickets aren't yet, very nearly though.
So if you do want to do that, consider it.
All right, so how rescue of US airmen in remote part of Iran unfolded.
Okay, so just a little bit of the story, the facts that we know so far, and then just talk about it a little bit.
I thought it was.
I find it interesting what happened.
So.
There were two F 15s flying over the Zagros Mountains, flying over southern Iran.
Some say they were hitting a nuclear site.
It was just south of Isfahan where they went down.
And they apparently all destroyed, according to Trump.
Oh, right.
What, Midnight Happy?
Yeah.
Well, we don't know.
That was pure conjecture that that's what they were doing.
We don't know what their actual original bombing raid was exactly.
That makes sense.
In fact, loads of the details about this are only really coming out now in the last two days, and you get slightly different, contradictory.
Details coming out here or there.
So it's still sort of early days.
It probably won't be, probably the way these things work, probably won't be for years until we find out truly someone's actually really, really involved in the planning of it, or the pilot himself, or some of the special operators themselves are retired and they write a book, or there's three or four different books, and historians kind of figure out exactly what really, really happened.
So a lot of the details we're going to talk about here may turn out to be not actually accurate ultimately, but I'm just telling you what we know so far.
Okay, so two F 15 striking, two F 15E strike eagles were flying over southern Iran and they got hit.
They got hit by some Iranian missiles, surface to air missiles.
It seems like they were relatively sophisticated ones.
That's what they're saying.
Because usually an F 15 flying very low shouldn't necessarily have been hit.
And anyway, one of them was, well, they were both hit.
One of them was able to just about get out of the airspace, just about, and it actually went down, but they were rescued.
The other one that we're going to talk about was.
Taken out entirely, and both the pilot and the weapons systems officer had to eject.
Okay, and they were going fast, they're going like 400 odd knots or something, you know, quite fast.
And it's very, very dangerous to actually eject at that sort of speed.
But anyway, the pilot himself was picked up within minutes.
So, first of all, one of the things to say is that the Americans, I've watched quite a few videos about this, and there was one very, very good one that somebody emailed me.
And it was a guy that used to do this stuff.
And apparently, whenever there's American fast jet sorties going on, wherever it is in the whole world, they will have whole backup teams just ready.
To go, should something like this happen?
Should an airplane go down?
They've got teams, all sorts of teams, ready to rock and roll that instant, should it happen.
So they did, and they managed to get the pilot straight away within just a few minutes.
But the weapons officer was a colonel.
We don't know his actual name yet.
His call sign was Dude44.
That was his call sign.
He was a colonel.
He was a colonel, I mean.
Okay.
And they didn't, they couldn't get him right away.
Um, and so he's now in an EE, an escape and evasion pattern.
Now he's got to, all he can do is try and escape and evade.
He's only armed with a pistol, that's all he's got.
Wouldn't want to be captured by the Iranians after what the Americans have done to them.
No, no, it's the worst case scenario for a pilot or any air crew to be captured behind enemy lines.
Of course, it is.
Yeah, there's one sort of question that pops up, which is the Americans haven't declared war on Iran.
Right.
This is a special military operation, apparently, meaning would he be a prisoner of war under the Geneva Conventions or would it be something entirely different?
But, you know, I think the Iranians would probably go with the latter, to be honest.
And also, you know, I don't think people actually pay attention to international law when the international community are not looking.
Like, are they really going to be able to find out until he's, you know, if he were caught and then released, if he was ever released, what would happen?
I mean, either way, if the Iranians had captured him alive and they put a bounty on his head right away, £50,000, $66,000, if you could capture him, that's what you'd get as a reward.
So they wanted him bad.
Obviously, for political reasons, they would then put him on their state TV.
Yes.
And it's a propaganda coup for them, isn't it?
I mean, I remember a fair few years ago, I think it was the Tony Blair years still, so it would have been the early 2000s.
There was some, it was either SAS or SBS, maybe Royal Marines.
Some dudes were caught right down in the south of.
Iran in the.
These were the 16 Americans on some kind of Coast Guard ship that were captured during the Obama years, I think.
All right, okay.
There's a completely separate thing that was just British guys.
Oh, okay, okay.
And it was in the Tony Blair era.
And yeah, they were in Iranian waters.
They were doing some sort of special op, some sort of covert thing.
And they were captured, and Ahmadinejad paraded them on TV.
And it was a little bit of a diplomatic thing.
And in the end, we.
We got them back, but okay.
They would, the Iranians would, of course, parade this colonel on their TV if they caught him.
So, anyway, just to let you know where it is obviously, that's where it is in Iran, and it happened there.
And okay, so this guy's on the road.
Apparently, he got Dude 44 had wounded his leg in some way.
We don't know the details of how wounded he was, but apparently, he was bleeding.
But he wasn't immobile.
He was able to get out of the immediate area, whether it was a couple of miles or whether it was much more than that.
Either way, he's in his escape and evasion mode and managed to climb up a ridge because that's a very mountainous area, which is good for hiding.
But not so good for getting an escape plan together and getting you out.
Very bad.
It's very, very, very mountainous.
Ridgeline after ridgeline after ridgeline of very hard terrain.
So it's not good if you've got a leg injury as well.
No.
Like uneven terrain is the worst thing you could have if you've got an injured leg.
I've been hiking before with a leg injury and it was awful.
Yeah.
And I imagine his was probably much worse given the nature of it.
He was able to scramble up this hillside, this mountainside, 7,000 feet and hide himself in a nook.
I mean, this is just a few headlines just to show you.
How US commandos carried out a 36 hour mission to rescue airmen from deep inside Iran.
So, when the American they realize that this guy's in trouble, he's trapped behind enemy lines, they send quite a lot of resources to try and get him because they've got the ethos, haven't they?
No man left behind.
And again, listening to people that have that were in the Air Force, the US Air Force, and other arms of the services, they say, sort of, everything.
Everything sort of halts in some senses, and everything goes towards trying to get this guy back at that point.
And he's really suspended their airstrikes.
Yeah, they did that.
Apparently, well, the CIA were involved with trying to do some, um, some espionage, well, not espionage, some, uh, disinformation things, trying to let, trying to think, make the Iranians think he's not where he is.
Apparently, even Space Force, the US Space Force were involved in various ways.
Air assets, of course, the, uh, the Air Force, the, the Navy, SIL Team Six were involved.
Uh, hundreds and hundreds of special operators, loads and loads and loads of, uh, air assets.
I mean, one, uh, little, One lion says that the rescue mission involved 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and more.
It's amazing, really, that many branches of the American state, the most powerful in the world, were focused on finding just one man.
It's a testament to the value of life, isn't it?
As they see it.
And, you know, so do I. Letting any man, not leaving any man behind.
Well, it's a good ethos if you're the most powerful military in the world and you've got the equipment to do it.
Well, and the political nightmare it would be for Trump to see a guy, because the worst case scenario, I'm not sure if the Iranians would have done this, but if you remember in Gulf War I, sorry, Gulf War II in 2003, George W. Bush's adventure, at one point, an Iraqi mob got two CIA guys and they lynched them to bits and hung their bodies up on a bridge.
And it was just like a blackened charred corpse thing.
That's the worst case scenario.
Oh, ISIS got a Jordanian pilot, didn't they?
Put him in a cage and burnt him alive, filmed it, put it on the internet.
It's a great way to have your enemies give you no mercy, is what that is.
So that would be terrible for Trump.
So it's politically very, very sensitive.
And obviously, in the military, apparently, as soon as this goes out, that there's a downed pilot behind enemy lines, we're going to try and rescue him.
Apparently, everyone in the forces at that point is just like, anything I can do to try and help.
Anything I can do.
So, yeah, they scrambled hundreds of aircraft, hundreds and hundreds of aircraft.
Okay.
So he was behind anyone's for something like 36 hours, 48 hours, all of Saturday.
Apparently, he climbed up this ridge, this cliff, 7,000 feet higher, even with a wounded leg, and just sort of gets in some sort of crevice.
They keep saying it sounds crevice.
And he had some sort of electronic beacon, some sort of device to let satellites, the CIA, the military know where he was.
Almost in real time, almost.
So they sort of knew where he was, basically.
And they couldn't get, for whatever reason, they couldn't get him right away on the first night.
But they got him on the second, they got him basically on the second night.
I mean, here's some.
Okay, so what they did, they sent in, they made like a kill box, you might call, around him.
They knew where he was on this top of this ridge.
And it seems like the Iranians knew at least roughly where he was.
Where you could sort of figure it out based on American activity, couldn't you?
Yeah, even though they tried to do deception things, they could still sort of figure it out, at least roughly, because I don't think it was all that far from where the aeroplane itself went down.
And so the Americans create sort of this kind of area of a sort of a kill box around him and using everything they could, like Black Hawks, Little Birds, A 10s.
Higher altitude bombers, all sorts of things, to just kill anyone that went anywhere near that area.
Just blow up roads that were leading to it, anything and everything.
If you tried to get in that area at that time, the full force of the American military was focused on you at that point.
And yet, still, when they did finally send in the special operators, like SEAL Team Six or whoever it was, it was all sorts of different special forces, were sent to the area.
There was still, it seems now, it's emerging now, there was some sort of big firefight that went down, some sort of relatively badass firefight played out.
In fact, can I put, turn this, I'll let you do it, Samson.
Can you turn the sound off on that and play this video?
We'll just let it play in the background.
It's just some sort of, Samson, yeah?
Turn the audio off on it, please.
And so the rescue mission itself becomes, you get bogged down in that.
Because the more men you send in, the more likely they're going to get killed or captured or something.
And it can be like a, it could easily turn into sort of a self perpetuating cycle of fail.
I've heard this from Iraq and Afghanistan where soldiers have said that one person gets wounded and then more and more people, as like a snowball effect, get wounded in return, trying to retrieve them and bring them to safety.
And it is quite a common thing.
That you need to be careful of.
Of course, yeah.
You try and save one person, and many more people get killed in that attempt, yeah.
Classic thing, there's someone drowning in a lake, and people go out to try and save them, and they all drown.
Yes.
You know, classic, terrible thing.
So, okay, they send in these special operators, and there's some sort of big firefight on this ridge where he was.
And the Americans lost some asset, like one helicopter, at least one Black Hawk at that point gets so heavily damaged that it can't take off, and they all have to pile in one other one.
They take it, they fly out to sort of a makeshift airstrip, or some are saying sort of an abandoned Iranian old airfield.
And the Americans land, you know, like those big C 130 gunships.
Iranian Airfield Landing00:03:21
They're like really quite big, aren't they?
Two of those out of more than two that were sent in and landed, at least two of those either got damaged on the way in or got stuck in the soil or the sand of this makeshift airstrip and couldn't take off again, as well as more helicopters.
I mean, there's, they couldn't all take off.
So they sent in more aircraft to pick up everyone and get everyone out alive.
Long story short, everyone, all the Americans did get out alive.
A lot of them, a fair few of them, did get wounded though.
Like some of those special operators on one of the, one of the, uh, Helicopters that first went in that actually rescued Dude 44.
I think a lot of them got shrapnel wounds, for example.
So some lead was flying around one way or another, but they all got out alive, but they lost quite a few assets.
Like they lost at least two of these C 130 ships, and they're like, apparently, they were like $100 million a piece or something.
Two of those, and at least two little birds, helicopters.
And as they were bugging out, the Americans themselves blow those up.
So, they don't fall into Iranian hands.
And in fact, that's what a lot of this footage is the remnants of that.
So, that's what you're seeing here.
That they also picked up the crew in these ships.
They didn't just leave them all behind.
Right.
So, everyone got out.
But they did lose, well, a couple of F 15s in the first place.
And an A 10.
And then an A 10.
And an A 10.
And a number of other things.
I think a fair amount of material hardware was lost in all of this.
But.
But no lives, and Dude 44 himself survived.
I imagine that the sort of information they can get from that equipment coming into contact with this kind of warfare is interesting to them because it's not like the insurgency war in Iraq and Afghanistan really saw that much in the way of, you know, air fighters and the like coming down.
Right, yeah.
What, like Afghanistan in 2001, they probably didn't have all very much or very sophisticated surface to air missile systems.
I mean, they were basically just RPGs, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Or those old Soviet style stingers.
I think they had some American stingers, and I think that they would have had some of the.
Sorry, American stingers.
Sorry, Soviet era mujahideen.
Sorry, yeah, American mate, of course.
Sorry.
So, yeah.
There's just a few pictures there of an F 15.
I mean, it's quite an old jet now.
I think they were originally designed in the 70s.
They've definitely been around for ages.
Been in service since the 80s, but they still can and do a job.
Look, you can see it's a two man, it's a two maner.
There.
But they're quite, they're relatively big as well.
This is, you know, like an F 35 is much smaller, much more sleek, for example.
But yeah, I think they're sort of a, I think they're like sort of a, quite a beautiful fast jet.
They're iconic, aren't they?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And so ultimately, at least as far as the Americans are concerned, as far as like the, the annals of military history, the annals of special operations rescues go, sort of a complete success.
Hesketh said it was some sort of Easter miracle.
Jungle Survival History00:02:39
That they managed to get him out.
So there you go.
I thought, I think that sort of thing's interesting.
It's been all over the news for the last, well, all weekend, all Easter weekend, really.
And we didn't cover it yesterday.
So I thought, well, I'll talk about it a bit.
I'll find it interesting.
Last thing to mention is that if anyone's interested in that sort of thing, there's lots of examples of it in history, lots and lots of examples.
One of the most famous ones was John Peters, Squadron Leader John Peters.
This is a Brit story.
In the first Gulf War in 1991, he was in a tornado, a GR1.
I believe Tim Davies knows him, at least to some extent, has met him and stuff.
And he was downed over Iraq and they paraded him on TV.
And he was eventually released.
But that's sort of quite a famous story.
There's a story, Bat 21.
They made a film with Gene Hackman and Danny Glover about it as a Vietnam era guy, like 1972 or something.
What is it?
I've got a note.
Yeah, 1972.
He was downed over South Vietnam and he spent 11 days in the jungle before they rescued him.
But again, the Americans launched a giant rescue effort and they eventually did.
But that's like not just escape and invasion, but also a true survival situation.
11 days in the jungle is no small thing.
Yeah.
It's a particularly dangerous jungle as well, the Vietnamese one.
The French Foreign Legion sent their guys for a three week hike in Guyana, in French Guyana.
In the jungle.
And if you manage to do that, you are qualified as a sort of special forces super soldier.
I've seen footage from that.
So 11 days.
It's sort of close.
Yeah.
Oh.
Hell.
Well, that's nothing.
In 1943, Fred Hergscheimer was shot down in his P 38 Lightning in Papua New Guinea.
Eight months.
Eight months in Papua New Guinea.
That's insane.
Cannibals there.
There are many, especially at that time.
Yeah.
Just sort of as a side note.
Yeah.
He had to escape, not just.
The jungle, but the cannibals.
Eight months.
There's lots and lots of examples from history of things like that, of extreme stories of survival and escape and evasion.
There's lots of them.
And now this is just the latest chapter in that.
And it turns out, at least from the American point of view, a complete success.
So, all right.
I find that sort of thing interesting.
I thought we had to talk about it as it's been in the news so much over the weekend.
Definitely worth it.
Oh, I very much enjoyed that.
Shall we read some of the rumble rants while Samson's getting up the thingamabobs?
I'll even read the cheapskate ones if I'm being quick.
That's a random name.
Shakespeare Denialism00:03:46
In a normal world, older generations make sacrifices for the prosperity of the younger generations.
In a clown world, however, we need to sacrifice the young so the old don't catch a cold.
Yes, the COVID era was the perfect illustration of this sort of philosophy let's ruin the young's lives so.
People over 80 can live a year longer.
Scan lines.
I saw someone describe Gen Z as the second coming of the boomer.
I can't understand tech, weird sexual tastes and habits, focused on getting that back.
I don't even know what that means.
Maybe Nan shouldn't do the school run after all.
I don't know about that.
I think that there's so much complexity in each generation that any attempt to blanketly say these people have these behaviors is so fraught with exceptions that it's almost.
Worthless saying it in the first place.
I've got no idea what getting that bag means.
Is that about just making money?
I really don't know if it's.
I have no idea.
Maybe.
I hope it's not a part of the male anatomy.
Yeah, it might be something to do like that, right?
The UK Boomers Twitter account is the best account on X at the moment.
Yes, it's not all boomers, but it's enough.
The Habsification.
All these ills happen because of mass migration, lack of energy production, and actively not expanding and.
Deindustrialization.
That is also true.
It is a multifaceted issue.
My issue with the pension system is that I was forced to participate in this system that I never consented to.
I need my money more than strangers who look down on me just because I'm younger.
Fair point, yeah.
Sigil Stone, POV, you're Dude44, seeing Dude69 and Dude420 coming to rescue you.
Very mature.
Sigil Stone is Dude44.
I'm going to read that.
Yeah, they did mention there were some initial reports about him from people that you describe speculatively.
So, yes.
The engaged few, Dude44, sounds like the name of a cheap men's cologne that comes in a green bottle shaped like an antique car.
Amazing.
And finally, yes, Bo, getting that bag means male anatomy.
I see.
Okay.
I was joking when I suggested that, but apparently, that's what it means.
Apparently.
I've learned two things today.
Yeah.
One more wholesome than the other.
That's a tick in my column of the I don't know anything about that whole subculture of it.
I'd never heard that before.
And I'm proud of that.
Yeah.
I'm okay with that.
Now I've reached 30, I'm okay with not understanding youth slang.
In fact, I'm sort of enjoying it.
So you're saying that loads of Gen Xers are gay, basically?
I don't think that's.
Doesn't Carl and other people say that loads of Gen Zers are.
Let's source that video.
Oh, is this the same one we saw yesterday, Samson?
It looks very familiar.
You know, the loose heated.
And that one.
And that one.
Have you opened yesterday's folder?
In the meantime, I'll read a comment.
He did.
That was exactly what he did.
Oh, calling out poor Samson.
Sorry, Samson.
Doesn't deserve this.
Carl's evil twin, Vorsch, says I got baptized this Easter Sunday.
What an amazing experience and the start of a new beginning.
So, I shall try not to be such an.
I can't read that.
That's wonderful news.
It was going so well until you made me Fed Post.
Almost.
Okay, here we go.
Stratford Upon Avon Visit00:04:12
Now we can't hear it.
Uh oh.
Here we go.
I wonder where that is in the world.
Looks like it's up.
GeoGuessr.
It's a geoGuessr.
I don't know.
More northern than the southwest.
That's my frame of reference.
Is that a Brummy accent I heard?
It's certainly more northern than I'm used to.
Yeah, that's got to be.
Nice day out nonetheless.
It does.
I like a good steam engine.
Hey, loads, eaters.
I'm here in Stratford upon Avon.
Currently on Shakespeare Street.
This is the place William Shakespeare was born.
This is where his family home existed for 19 years, 1597 to 1616.
Just some garden there.
Here's his statue.
Nice.
I remember that very well when I went there.
This is where William Shakespeare is buried, his stone being just there.
I remember there being lots and lots of swans in Stratford upon Avon in the canal.
It's very.
everywhere.
It's very pretty.
If anyone's interested, on Epochs of the Lotus Eater, I knew this was coming on lotuseters.com, consider signing up for as little as £5 a month, Bronze Team membership.
I've got a long form bit of content all about the life of Shakespeare.
Okay.
And it's not even that old, it's only about a month or two old.
So, yeah, it's like an hour, hour and a half or something.
All about, you know, all about if he was real, he almost certainly is.
Well, he is.
Or whether his plays were.
Penned by one person or not, and uh, yeah, all sorts of details about his life what we really know and what we don't exactly, what sort of myth and what's sort of historical fact, all that sort of thing.
So, if you're interested in that, consider watching that.
I presume if he's buried in a specific place, he's probably real and one person.
There was, it's you know, there's a whole spectrum of thought on these things.
Some people say he's an entirely fictional character, it's not, it just didn't, it's just not real.
Other people say, You're sure he's not a black woman, then, and other people say, Everything.
That is attributed to Shakespeare is just this one guy, this one historical figure who lived in Stratford upon Avon, and it's well documented enough that you can say that.
Then there's many, many shades of grey in between saying, surely everything that is attributed to him couldn't have been by one person for all sorts of different reasons.
If you drill down into the textual analysis of things, it's unlikely to have been one person.
But so there you go, there's a debate.
I'm talking about textual analysis tests that English lit majors used to have to take before it became completely crap.
They'd be given a text and sort of be told to analyze who the author was.
And they would be forbidden from saying it was Shakespeare because you could actually claim anything was Shakespeare for some reason, which I don't know enough to say.
But clearly the man was a genius, and I don't have any much reason to say he didn't exist.
I'm a believer.
It's definitely documented that there was a man called William Shakespeare who was born in Stratford upon Avon and came to London and wrote plays.
That's just anyone that denies that is sort of way out there for me.
Yeah, Shakespeare's denialism is the worst form of conspiracy because there's enough evidence to say that firmly, really.
Basically, it's whether all of his plays and sonnets are this one person or not.
For example, loads of people argue that some of his historical knowledge is unlikely to have been a single person from the 17th century, late 15th century, early 16th century, early 17th century.
So, make of that what you will.
Like, he seems to have been too well read, too well traveled for one person to have written all of that.
But then others say.
Modern retardation bias.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, maybe.
Quite possibly.
Field Mouse Pet Idea00:07:58
Quite possibly.
Anyway.
Rodents.
Sorry.
Rodents.
After posting animal videos, I would like to put forward our little ash mouse.
He's the patriarch of our little mouse colony and he really loves himself some cookies.
Look at him trying to grab me.
Oh, you want that cookie, don't you?
If only there was something about it.
About not giving mice cookies that would be said in like some sort of nursery rhyme.
Is there a reference to that?
No, it's quite cute though.
I remember when my cat would catch live field mice, she would never kill them and she'd just bring them into the house and I'd find one running around in the kitchen.
Yes, I'm a country bumpkin, what of it?
They would find mice in the kitchen.
But they were absolutely adorable.
They're like, mice are already quite cute, but then you get a field mouse and they're even cuter again.
I'm thinking that once, you know, I decide to get some pets, I might just get some field mice.
Although, you know, once they breed, it is going to go crazy.
Going to have a horde of mice.
That was a Pied Piper.
I find I even had a pet rat when I was a kid.
A rat.
Really?
Yeah.
They're good pets.
They're good pets.
It was really good, yeah.
It was really cute.
I didn't know.
I like mice, rats, gerbils, hamsters.
Even if they nip you a bit, I find them cute.
I like all mammals, to be honest.
I even had a pet giant African land snail at one point.
We called him Michael Schumacher.
This is pre injury, by the way.
This wasn't a joke about his cognitive abilities.
It's about speed.
Anyway.
Thanks for that clarification.
I like to read some important points.
Let's see.
Michael Brooks says My wife is Slovak.
Being in Eastern Europe at Easter is quite magical, as it's so good to experience cultures across churches coming together, so sure of themselves and their community.
They're sure of themselves and their community.
It puts a massive highlighter mark on what we are missing a soul.
Yeah, fair enough.
Korax 80 says, Bo, there are loopholes for entry to heaven.
Although baptism is the best way to salvation, the penitent thief, St. Dismas, was not baptized, but his faith in Jesus reserved his place for the Lord.
I think that was a baptism by intent, which is.
Yes, exists in the church.
So if at the point of death you wanted baptism, that is counted as you having received baptism.
And then there's baptism of blood, which is you see somebody getting martyred and you decide, well, I'm going to get martyred with them because I actually believe now, and that gets you into heaven.
I would recommend baptism by water and the spirit as slightly better.
Well, I'm good.
Just to say pass.
Lars Peter Simonson says, As an unchristened heathen, I still appreciate Fidas showcasing Easter celebrations.
I spent the Easter of 2006 in southern Spain, Cordoba, Seville, and Granada, and it was a fantastic experience.
That too can be fixed.
Geopolitics of a large church.
I've been meaning to do a realpolitik about the geopolitics of the church, but at some point I'll get to it because I want to give it the treatment that it deserves.
The Syrian child, Carl Beatup on ITV, says, Heresy, we must sacrifice.
10,000 Zoomers a day to keep the boomers alive on the golden pension.
Michael says, Bo, the key for Gen X is we don't care what people say.
We grew up being bullied, teased, hazed, and we're cynical for it.
We had to put up with the boomers, the greatest, and our own kids.
Boomers are the most entitled generation, to be fair.
I must say, I think a good thing about my generation is that we grew up before the internet and mobile phones.
And even before, there were loads and loads of channels on the TV.
Yes.
And so I think we're sort of the last generation that just sort of went out and lived a relatively normal childhood in retrospect, a very, very wholesome childhood in retrospect.
I remember us being let loose in summer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You just go out, just go out and play all day long.
Yeah, exactly.
In real life with real kids.
Yes.
No screens, none.
Yes.
You were expected to come back home for lunch and dinner and then said search parties will come again.
And I think it's difficult to have a childhood like that now.
Probably.
It almost certainly is.
It's impossible, even.
Because everything is a play date and you have to organize everything, and it just sort of means that they don't have any spontaneity.
Just kick them out on the street and say, make your own fun.
Sigilstone17, lowering the tone here, says, Firas, ever watch Nacho Libre?
Get bow like how Jack Black in that movie baptizes his wrestling partner.
I haven't actually seen the film, but I'm sure that's a vulgar reference.
Samson's giving it a thumbs up.
I've seen that film, but I don't remember that in it.
Would you like to do that?
Whatever that is, I'm not going to do that to you.
Just sort of, you know, keeping the office piece.
It's going to bring in a water pistol with holy water and just get you not looking.
That's an idea.
Oh, God.
One of those cannons, you know.
Baptism by coercion, baptism by bullying.
I'm going to save your soul whether you like it or not.
Okay, what have we got here?
Michael Brooks says, on my segment, this is very dangerous.
While I agree on the No Man Left Behind, They have just told Iran just how valuable a pilot is, and next time the pilot might not be so lucky.
Yeah, I said in the breakfast show, and I'll say it again I'm surprised something like this hasn't already happened already more than once.
It's surprising to me that no one from American Special Forces or air crew have been caught and paraded on Iranian TV yet.
It may well happen.
It probably may well happen.
But a bunch of time during the first Iraq war, I think.
Yeah.
And if I remember correctly, some of them were placed.
In government buildings to be used as human shields.
So it gets quite nasty.
It gets quite nasty.
Let's see.
Ben Gale says, quote, all got out alive, I guess, quoting me.
Well, that is what the US propaganda claims, but they also claim that their planes at that Saudi air base were only lightly damaged.
When the photos come out, they were completely burnt out.
Yeah, I mean, I can only report, I can only tell you what.
We've reported, I wasn't there in Iran and I haven't got the inside skinny at the Pentagon.
So I can only tell you what we're being told.
If there were bodies that the Iranians had, they would parade the bodies.
You would have thought so.
Presumably, they also tried to take the bodies, like the Americans would like to take the bodies of their own dads.
So there is going to be a fog of war four years after this war and there's nothing we can do about that.
I'm going to read a couple of rumble rants because we got two in.
Wes Angle says, I think the bag reference goes, Back to beat and late 60s hippie jargon, like getting into the height Asprey bag, the Harry Krishna bag.
Yeah, like that's not my bag, baby.
That thing.
I just think of Austin Powers when I hear that.
Sigil Stone, no, Jack Black sneaks up on him with a bowl of water and slams his face into it while yelling, Praise the Lord.
That can be a ring.
I think you've just described Faras' entire political philosophy there, haven't you?
Yes.
And on that note, thank you very much for watching.