Latest / WoT Spoilers / A Plain Wooden Box - Knife of Dreams chapter 27 - EP500

Transcript

A Plain Wooden Box - Knife of Dreams chapter 27 - EP500 · WoT Spoilers

• 0:12
  This is the Wheel of Time Spoilers podcast. We are recording on day one
• 0:20
  of what Idol. I know you were talking about that before recording. I
• 0:25
  don't know if you want to go over any of that again. This will
• 0:28
  come out after what Idol is all said and done, but you can still
• 0:31
  go to the Dusty Wheels YouTube channel and check out the replays of the live
• 0:36
  streams, and at some point there will be a playlist of all the videos
• 0:42
  that were done, all concentrated together, so you don't have to watch the
• 0:46
  live stream and get the fragmentary version. I'm not sure when that playlist will
• 0:50
  get assembled, but it will be there on the Dusty Wheel channel eventually,
• 0:53
  or also on the IDOL channel. I think they have a YouTube channel now.
• 0:56
  Anyway, there will be links in the description. Go watch the replays
• 0:59
  and watch all the talent. I'm sure it was amazing. I'm recording this
• 1:02
  before I get bowled over by the eighty one other entries. Yeah, because
• 1:07
  I'm just gonna throw this in here. Two. I can't believe you won.
• 1:10
  I can't believe you got second place. I can't believe you got third
• 1:14
  place. Oh my god, you got top ten. That's amazing. Wow,
• 1:19
  I can't believe you were top twenty. That's incredible. Hmmm that think.
• 1:23
  I love your optimism. You really tried. Thanks. There we go.
• 1:30
  That's about the tier I'm expecting to get, But I'm very much looking
• 1:34
  forward to the eighty one other entries that are all going to be better than
• 1:36
  mine. Well they're eighty two. Yeah, there's eighty two entries. They
• 1:41
  got seventy eight last year and eighty two this year, So it's gonna be
• 1:46
  a long couple of three days. It's good to see it's not still like
• 1:49
  exploding in size that it seems to have stabilized below one hundred, sort of
• 1:55
  in the high eighties. You know. Yes, if this is the plateau,
• 1:57
  then I think will be all right because it's going to be two long
• 2:00
  days of preliminary voting and then a very long Saturday. So by the time
• 2:07
  this episode comes out, I'm going to be so whatte idled out, I'm
• 2:10
  going to be so low on serotonin because I'll have spent all of it on
• 2:14
  being excited for all the entries. And again, it falls on my work
• 2:17
  week, so I probably won't get to listen to almost any of it until
• 2:22
  afterwards. Yeah, that's a bummer. That's a bummer. But yeah,
• 2:25
  that's really all that's relevant for this recording. But what we wanted to do
• 2:30
  on episode five hundred is, you know, I kind of went back and
• 2:35
  looked at our patrons and I really wanted to do a special shout out to
• 2:39
  just our top ten and then our top twenty patrons. And so I looked
• 2:46
  and we actually have ten patrons who have given over one thousand dollars in the
• 2:51
  lifetime of the podcast. Wow, which is incredible. Wow. And then
• 2:58
  we have ten more patrons who have given over five hundred dollars over the lifetime
• 3:01
  of the podcast. Wow, and so just which is incredible. That's a
• 3:06
  lot of money. And like so I for five hundred episodes. Like you
• 3:10
  know, every of course, every dollar counts, every dollar makes a difference,
• 3:14
  every donation makes a difference. But like those those twenty of you out
• 3:17
  there have really formed the cornerstone of the income that this podcast has brought in.
• 3:23
  Some of you have just been giving for a very long time and it's
• 3:27
  added up. Some of you have given large amounts a few times. Some
• 3:31
  of you gave very early and stopped, some of you started later and have
• 3:36
  continued to go. So, you know, I just just a huge thank
• 3:38
  you to everybody out there who's contributed any amount over the lifetime of the podcast.
• 3:44
  It it it keeps us focused, it keeps us going, and we
• 3:49
  just we can't wait to see how far we can take this. Wow.
• 3:53
  Yeah, a lot of these thousand over one thousand names were patrons back what
• 3:58
  I was a patron, That's what I'm saying, patrons together, Like damn,
• 4:01
  these are names from way back, and these are people who just keep
• 4:04
  going right, Like that's that's what's going on. That's how they get these
• 4:08
  big numbers got you know, I was listening back to I Have the World
• 4:13
  and now Great Hunt because I just it's time for me to do a re
• 4:15
  listen, Like in my life, I'm at that point. I was just
• 4:19
  thinking how excited I was to talk to a radio you about those early books,
• 4:27
  especially now with how much more I know about the series, Like I
• 4:30
  feel like when I started it, I was still doing a lot of like
• 4:33
  I don't know a lot about the series despite having read it a bunch of
• 4:36
  times. There's a lot of things I don't know and aren't in my head,
• 4:41
  and like assumptions we've made and discoveries we made and going back and doing
• 4:45
  those first books. I'm kind of really excited to get to that point again.
• 4:47
  And like, so I'm not sure. I wasn't always sure I wanted
• 4:50
  to write, Like I wasn't sure. I was like I was gonna see
• 4:53
  of those books, but like, at least the books that me and Patrick
• 4:57
  did, I want to do with the radio again. Oh that makes me
• 5:00
  happy because I really want to do them. Like, experiencing them as a
• 5:03
  as a fan of the podcast when you guys still hadn't found your stride is
• 5:08
  going to be all different than swinging back around on yet another reread with like
• 5:13
  this full podcasting career behind me. Like I really really wanted to be able
• 5:17
  to experience the first books the way I'm experiencing these later rice, Like I
• 5:23
  want that. I need that, And I mean, of course, I'm
• 5:25
  always going to carousel around forever and ever so the real the time never stop
• 5:28
  starting. So yeah, I definitely need to do that for the podcast.
• 5:31
  Well, I'm glad that you're you're having that that change of card and like,
• 5:35
  oh god, there's a scene again and I of the world where and
• 5:38
  I need is like shows up late and she's like, oh, I couldn't
• 5:41
  leave until my patient was feeling better. But then I was like, wait,
• 5:45
  she actually showed up kind of early. Did she heal that patient so
• 5:47
  she could leave and go oggle? Did she get angry? And did you?
• 5:54
  And I was like, yes, I'm still catching really, I mean
• 5:58
  clearly, Oh my god, yeah, totally totally, And just just how
• 6:00
  much smoother I am between Sidein and Siddar and just all the mistakes I made
• 6:05
  early on and all the questions I had early on I feel like kept me
• 6:09
  from getting a super full understanding of those early books the way I do of
• 6:12
  these later ones. That's yeah, No, I mean when I've gone back
• 6:15
  to do like the rewind episodes, you know, like I hear little bits
• 6:19
  and pieces of what you and Patrick are saying when I do that, and
• 6:23
  yeah, getting Sidein inside Dar mixed up, like being confused about facts that
• 6:28
  we've now drilled into our heads, like by endless repetition, Like even the
• 6:31
  quality of the recordings. Yeah, and like early versions of theories, like
• 6:36
  before they they got to their finished form. It's just oh my god.
• 6:41
  Yeah, the quality, the audio quality, like you can hear the room
• 6:44
  changing you can hear the position of the MIC's changing, and when the egg
• 6:47
  cartons go up and come down, and like, I mean, maybe that's
• 6:50
  just my ears because I have like producer ears at this point, but like
• 6:55
  it's really it's changed a lot. There's been a lot of change. So
• 6:59
  yeah, I'm looking at that going like, Okay, we've got like three
• 7:03
  more years before we finished the series, including New Spring, and then if
• 7:08
  we go out for five more books after that, that's like, Okay,
• 7:12
  it's ship. We got another decade in us. God, damn it,
• 7:19
  I'm never gonna be it. I'm never this is it's it's the podcast that
• 7:24
  never ends. I will the wheel of time will keep turning. Yeah,
• 7:30
  no, yeah, and how yeah origins that has come out. Yeah,
• 7:33
  it's just it's uh and and then we're gonna get to the point where like
• 7:38
  it's it'll be so long, right. Those first well, those first episodes
• 7:42
  are really all about like having a beer and drinking. How I don't even
• 7:46
  drink. Yeah, the books stayed the same, but you don't. And
• 7:51
  that's part of the beauty of why we can keep reading even though, like
• 7:56
  you know, we were talking a couple an episode or two back about how
• 7:59
  you know, you're like, you haven't got a tattoo yet because you don't
• 8:01
  want to have something that that asshole from fifteen years ago decided was good for
• 8:03
  you. And yet we have time somehow managed to you to be relevant.
• 8:09
  Despite the fact that we keep changing and improving and becoming, that Wheel of
• 8:13
  Time continues to have something to offer wild absolutely bonkers. Maybe one day we'll
• 8:20
  actually get a good TV show of it. Wow, I'm just gonna pretend
• 8:28
  that didn't happen. I'm not saying the Wheel of Time TV show is bad,
• 8:33
  but I am saying it's not a very good adaptation. Yeah, it's
• 8:37
  not a faithful adaptation. And it's not even trying to be No, it's
• 8:41
  not trying to show you what's occurring in the books on screen by any any
• 8:46
  measure of the word that is an objectively correct And if you you know,
• 8:50
  and that's where that's where I kind of come down on, is if that's
• 8:52
  what you want, you're going to be disappointed. It's a very easy pitch
• 8:56
  if you can just frame it like that, like if you want to see
• 8:58
  page to screen perfection, you would be very upset. Like that's just like
• 9:05
  you're not going to get that, like, there's no sugarcoating it. That's
• 9:07
  not what's happening. And I think that's what I figured out when I've talked
• 9:11
  to like my coworkers who love the books and other people who were like,
• 9:15
  I got halfway through the first episode and I'm done, and I'm like,
• 9:18
  you didn't even give it a chance. No, they did, and they
• 9:22
  and the first episode very clearly show that this was not going to be a
• 9:24
  faithful adaptation of the books, and and that's what they wanted, and anything
• 9:28
  that wasn't going to be that was never going to make them happy, right,
• 9:33
  right, Yeah, So it's like there's just a very early sorting of
• 9:35
  do binaries. I'm not much for binaries, but there is a binary here
• 9:39
  of like, can you accept this being a radically different take or does it
• 9:46
  need to be paide accurate because you have to be able to like the flow
• 9:50
  chart is very different depending on how you answer that question. It just is.
• 9:54
  It just is. And I feel like I can hold both, right,
• 9:56
  I can be both disappointed because I did want to see that, right,
• 9:58
  and so the show is not what I wanted, And then I can
• 10:01
  go back and watch the show and be like This is a fine show on
• 10:03
  its own. It's a pretty good, you know, fantasy show. I
• 10:07
  like a lot of the visuals, and I can translate that into this book
• 10:09
  that I've read, but it's never gonna be the show that I wanted.
• 10:13
  Yeah, And it's really hard for me to know if I would like it
• 10:18
  enough without knowing the books. It's like the course of knowledge is way too
• 10:22
  real with that, It's impossible for me to know if this would do it
• 10:26
  for me if I wasn't looking for the pieces of the books that are in
• 10:30
  it, and I didn't know the books so well, I might, I
• 10:33
  might not. I'm just I'm not a massively into TV person, So I
• 10:35
  just like, would this actually have caught my eye and drawn me in without
• 10:39
  my massive lifelong commitment to the books? Eh? I don't know, And
• 10:43
  like, I wish that that was not my feeling, right, I wish
• 10:48
  that I could enthusiastically say, well, of course I would be super super
• 10:52
  into it, But I'm like, I don't know, and I can guarantee
• 10:56
  you I would have watched it if I hadn't read the books. Because all
• 10:58
  the THEE and whatever TV series that came out the all the fantasy stuff that
• 11:03
  came out on TV that I haven't actually read. I still watch that and
• 11:07
  a lot of that I actually enjoyed quite a bit having not read the books.
• 11:13
  Mmmmm. Yeah. I got halfway into an episode of Shadow and Bone
• 11:16
  and just Shadow Bone, that's the one. Yeah, I was so completely
• 11:20
  disinterested. I couldn't even finish the first episode. I don't know why,
• 11:22
  but it didn't grab me with like a repellent level of intensity. Like I
• 11:26
  don't know what bothered me about it, but I was just like, I'm
• 11:28
  not I'm not interested, I don't care. None of this makes sense,
• 11:33
  and like I don't know the books. I didn't know there anything about it,
• 11:37
  and it just like I couldn't even give it a whole episode before I
• 11:39
  was like, Eh, I'm gonna go watch something else or do something else.
• 11:43
  That one in Lock and Key I really enjoyed, but I know the
• 11:46
  comic book readers were really frustrated with that. Yeah, just stuff like that,
• 11:50
  you know, I feel like, uh, the curse of knowledge is
• 11:52
  real. It's almost hard to and harder to enjoy a show based on a
• 11:56
  book youth series you love because you know what it should be on. Yeah,
• 12:01
  and I've definitely, I mean, I've watched the Lord of the Rings
• 12:05
  movies so many more times than I've read the books. You know, I
• 12:07
  read the exceptions once, yep, yep, And I've watched the movies at
• 12:11
  a similar point in my life, right, I was about the right age
• 12:13
  to read the books and watch the movies when they were coming out, and
• 12:16
  so they both pair in my mind at roughly the same point in my life.
• 12:20
  And yeah, I've watched the movies many many more times. They are
• 12:24
  the cannon, even though I know technically the books are different, and I
• 12:28
  did technically read the books, and I can remember a few things that are
• 12:30
  different. So but I mean, also Lord of the Rings is an exception,
• 12:35
  so I also have had trouble reading Lord of the Rings. I know,
• 12:39
  I've read it once. I have zero desire. The Hobbit is fantastic.
• 12:43
  The Hobbit is just so good. But I don't know why. I
• 12:48
  don't know why I cannot immerse myself in the world that is Lord of the
• 12:52
  Rings. And I've tried audiobook as well. I wish I could find Lord
• 12:56
  of the Rings read by someone who doesn't have a British accent. If someone
• 12:58
  has as that version out there, please send it to me. I feel
• 13:03
  like it would be so much easier for me to get through an audiobook of
• 13:05
  Lord of the Rings if it was just read with an American accent. And
• 13:09
  I don't I don't care if that ism or ist like the British. It's
• 13:16
  exactly allowed to be against the British right. It's your patriotic duty to be.
• 13:22
  It is fourth of July coming up, after all, but we should
• 13:26
  read out the patreons. Yes, yes, all of that to say in
• 13:31
  a very meandering way that all of you who have been here for a long
• 13:35
  time or a short time are fantastic. But we're going to read a bunch
• 13:37
  of names that have been here for a very long time and and thank you
• 13:43
  so much to each and every one of you. And I have to start
• 13:46
  with the top with a Neil Williams speaking of the British. Some of you
• 13:54
  know OGR Tendencies. He's been there since the beginning. He met his wife
• 14:00
  through the podcast. He is a good friend and has been there for a
• 14:05
  long long time. So thank you, Neil. Yeah, thanks Neil,
• 14:07
  You're fantastic. Next we have Zach aka smoa Key, because that is how
• 14:16
  it's spelled moa key. It's smokey but with an extra a, so smoak
• 14:22
  also been around for since the beginning. Just really appreciate it. H one
• 14:28
  of those names that I've seen in the chat. Forever forever, forever and
• 14:33
  ever and ever forever. Keith William Randall. I mean, I know there's
• 14:35
  been some Keiths around. I don't know if this is that Keith. You're
• 14:39
  fantastic Keith William Randall. And next we have a Ken Peterka. I'm not
• 14:48
  sure who that is. I'm just this is Obie Thunder Ken Peterka. That's
• 14:54
  how I've always said it, infamous troller of Lumen. Uh huh. I
• 15:00
  think I think that's probably the main central thing that one needs to know about
• 15:05
  Ken. Then Nick could Nick could thank you very much. Don't recognize your
• 15:11
  name, but you're awesome. No, but you know, that's kind of
• 15:15
  amazing that, like some people can give without necessarily or maybe he does have
• 15:20
  a screen name that I just don't recognize and don't look up the name.
• 15:24
  That is one of the biggest problems is I'll meet someone in person, I'll
• 15:28
  see their screen name, and I'll see their donor name and not realize that
• 15:31
  all three are the same person. Mm hmmmmm. Yeah, it's entirely possible
• 15:37
  that some of these people just have never connected their their Patreon name to their
• 15:41
  discordinate or they don't have a discordinateme because they just want to give us money
• 15:45
  and not a thank you for that. If you never interact with us,
• 15:48
  but you give us money, that is still a form of interaction and we
• 15:50
  love you. Next up, we have Fate fire X who Fate Man.
• 15:58
  Yeah, dude, fake been around for mid I mean just roll the original
• 16:03
  thirteen days. Yeah, that's original for its saking days. Yeah. Absolutely,
• 16:07
  such a great friend. It was just talking to him the other day.
• 16:11
  He's always asking me how I'm doing, Like, you know, just's
• 16:15
  always been a good friend, always been there for us. Really appreciate you.
• 16:19
  Yeah, good guy. Then we have Jeff Kidder again, a name
• 16:23
  I recognized in the patreon from been around forever. But uh, Jeff Kidder
• 16:29
  I do recall interacting with on Discord. Not in a couple of years,
• 16:33
  Yeah, but I do remember him being around for a while and we had
• 16:36
  a couple of pretty cool conversations for yeat a couple of years in Discord so
• 16:40
  yeah, Jeff, I miss you. I miss hanging out with you in
• 16:42
  discord. You're definitely cool dude. Thank you. Jonathan Morgantini. Yeah,
• 16:48
  another way back in the original thirteen Days another just roll with it member.
• 16:55
  Yeah again, somebody I miss. I haven't seen you in a bit.
• 16:57
  Yeah, took on the monoker of agon Agon. Yes, we're all taking
• 17:00
  on things. I was Masana and frequently if you go back and listen old
• 17:06
  recordings, he would be referred to as agenor next. We've got a name
• 17:11
  that I don't recognize, but thank you very much anyway, John Hunt,
• 17:15
  appreciate you. Oh I remember John? Yeah, John, Yeah, we
• 17:19
  definitely had a couple of email exchanges with John Hunt, had some conversations with
• 17:22
  John. So yeah again old old school name, been around forever. That's
• 17:26
  that's why these people get up to these big numbers, because they've just been
• 17:30
  supporting us for how many years have we been around now? Is it six
• 17:34
  plus seven? Six? I think six six, because twenty seventeen was when
• 17:41
  I found you and it's now twenty twenty four, so yeah, yeah,
• 17:45
  yeah, six, coming up on seven. And then Eric near Gold near
• 17:52
  Guard Guard. There's no ilk my, you know, what my screen's a
• 17:56
  little fuzzy. Hmmm, that's not my eyes. I'm not getting old.
• 18:00
  Definitely, not you getting old. Definitely my screen. Definitely. Thank you
• 18:04
  very much, Eric Nearguard, Eric Nearguard. Yeah, and that is the
• 18:10
  last of the people who have somehow, for some reason crested one thousand dollars
• 18:15
  to their support of this insanity. It is crazy when I think about it
• 18:19
  like that, it's it's amazing and like, and certainly other people have supported
• 18:23
  in other ways direct donations and like not not every donation is captured in Patreon,
• 18:30
  for sure, oh for sure. For sure, lots of energy and
• 18:33
  money through other avenues and for sure, but this is just that steady trickle,
• 18:38
  like many drops fills a cup sort of way, like wow. And
• 18:42
  then moving on to our slightly lesser but nonetheless spectacular tier of people who have
• 18:48
  crusted five hundred dollars, We've got Jed Dues. JEDD's I feel like I
• 18:53
  recognize that picture. Maybe I don't know. I feel like that name should
• 18:59
  be ringing. Oh again, an early early supporter been around for a long
• 19:03
  time, had some early interactions with him, but again not not for a
• 19:07
  while. But okay, next, we've got Evan mac Maybe I am screwing
• 19:15
  that up so bad. I can tell that is not a name in my
• 19:18
  capacity to say properly. There's some h's in there that I'm not sure how
• 19:23
  to go with. Yeah, it probably are pronounced with a V or something,
• 19:27
  you know, medieb. I am very sorry, Evan, but thank
• 19:33
  you very much for your support and for your patients. With that just absurd
• 19:37
  amount of yankification of your name. The email makes it seem like maclamy hmm,
• 19:45
  but maybe cut that out. Names are hard, yeah, names are
• 19:49
  hard. And then Devin Moore Man good Den Devon. Yeah, you've been
• 19:57
  around forever also and you're still around. You still show up in recordings sometimes
• 20:03
  and it's great to see you. Yeah, no, and great to see
• 20:06
  you in like the chat as well frequently. As a kid now right,
• 20:11
  yeah, yeah, which I believe was I should probably not name a child,
• 20:18
  but I believe was given a very cool name. We'll just leave it
• 20:22
  at that, almost as cool as my name. I want to be very
• 20:26
  very careful. Yeah, I'm just going to not dock someone else's child,
• 20:30
  Okay, Okay, After Devin, we've got Kaminara, who's the name.
• 20:37
  I also recognize from some distinct what spoiler cons interactions, I believe, And
• 20:45
  yeah, very nice person. Amazed to see that you've been supporting us that
• 20:51
  long. Fantastic, Thank you so much, Kenneth Brooks. Kenneth Brooks,
• 20:56
  thank you very much. Thank you Kenneth again. Just another name that I
• 21:00
  know I've I've seen around forever. Really appreciate you. Kenneth. I always
• 21:04
  think of the country music singer. Sorry, I'm sure he's never heard of
• 21:10
  Yeah, I mean it's Gareth, not Kat Kenneth. But still. Yeah.
• 21:15
  Next is another name I don't recognize. Matt and Zeveno that I love
• 21:23
  running through the scauntlet. Just so you know, Matt and Zevino was my
• 21:29
  college roommate who I reached out to and told about the podcast and I,
• 21:33
  you know, thank you, buddy for supporting this for you know, ever
• 21:37
  since. But he was a Wheel of Time fan. We just talked about
• 21:41
  Wheel of Time all the time. If anything, I used to have all
• 21:45
  of the conversations with Matt and Zevino that I used to have that I'm having
• 21:49
  on the podcast I had with him first. Right, So he's a part
• 21:55
  of this podcast than you might realize because he was there for a lot of
• 22:00
  my ideas being formed in the beginning, when I was still like the proto
• 22:04
  code. I mean, I had a couple of friends I used to talk
• 22:07
  real time with. I had one guy named Collins I used to lifeguard with
• 22:11
  who had also read the books, and we used to hang out and chat.
• 22:15
  But Matt was definitely the guy in college. This is when slot he
• 22:19
  got me through the slog because the only book that came out while we were
• 22:22
  in college was, of course, book ten, Crossroads of Twilight. So
• 22:27
  when I went to college, I had just read Winter's Heart, and then
• 22:33
  we when Knife of Dreams hadn't come out yet, and so we're spending all
• 22:37
  four of these years and the only thing we get is Crossroads of Twilight,
• 22:41
  and like, oh, the despair, the despair. But yeah, Matt
• 22:47
  was my slog partner in real life. Gotcha. Well that's a double salute
• 22:53
  to you. Yeah, so, Matt for being a supporter of us and
• 22:56
  a supporter of Seth back in the slog. Tails absolutely, and dude,
• 23:00
  thank you so much. I never expected you to support me like this.
• 23:03
  I really appreciate it. Next, there's the name I do recognize, Analise
• 23:07
  Amoro yeah, I've been around for a long time. Her from spoiler cons
• 23:12
  all the spoiler cons. Yeah, I remember. He used to have a
• 23:15
  great time there. I miss seeing her at those cons. She was a
• 23:19
  nurse, if I remember correctly, right. Yeah, yeah, I worked
• 23:22
  in healthcare. Before I stopped using Instagram, I was getting a lot of
• 23:26
  healthcare pictures like and really fun like travel pictures too, because people who work
• 23:32
  intense jobs seem to understand the concept of going on cool vacations in a way
• 23:37
  that I do not. I have a very chill job, so I take
• 23:40
  very chill vacations. Do not take intense vacations. Yeah. Also I like
• 23:44
  being a homebody. Yeah that too, that too, But yes, thank
• 23:48
  you so much Annalius for being a part of this community and also of healthcare,
• 23:52
  because like, not enough people do that, So thank you. Robert
• 23:56
  mc melkin, don't recognize that name, but thank you very much much for
• 24:00
  being a stalwart supporter. I just really appreciate it. Nathan Friday. Nathaniel
• 24:04
  Friday, Why why does my brain do that? I don't know. That's
• 24:10
  like dyslexia, but with like just trunk kading, Yes, just entirely.
• 24:14
  Nathaniel Friday Nathaniel Friday. That's a very cool last name. I'm sure you've
• 24:18
  never heard that before. I'm not sure you've never heard Thank God it's Friday,
• 24:22
  so I will not make any of too late, too late, too
• 24:26
  late. I think that's why I skipped over the first part of the name.
• 24:29
  I was busy focusing on the Friday part, and my brain's like,
• 24:32
  oh, yeah, whatever, that first name is Friday. Sure, but
• 24:36
  thank you very much all days of the week. Stop it anymore. No,
• 24:45
  I'm trying to learn from Tavan. After dark you have to heckle your
• 24:48
  auto. We don't have that kind of relationship. You can't just pick it
• 24:53
  up. Then people are gonna be like, wait, why are you insulting
• 24:56
  me all of a sudden. Nice to meet this whole time. Every time
• 25:00
  I think about changing how I edit, I worry that I'm going to weird
• 25:03
  people out because I've set certain standards and they'll be bothered if I change.
• 25:07
  And last, but very much not least, one of our very favorite Australians,
• 25:12
  Melissa Taylor, very favorite fans in the Land of mad Men from way
• 25:18
  back. You're the person who taught me that squirrels are apparently the most amazing
• 25:22
  thing to an Australian. I did not realize that squirrels had such magical powers
• 25:27
  over Australian squirrels are well, squirrels are amazing. I love squirrels. I
• 25:32
  just seeing Melissa melt down over the side of how many squirrels there were in
• 25:37
  Portland was just fantastic. Did you go through a phase and it was like
• 25:41
  high school or college where everyone around you wanted to have a squirrel army?
• 25:45
  Or was that just me? I don't recall that phase. No, I
• 25:48
  just remember it was like multiple independent people i'd meet would be like, I
• 25:52
  want to train squirrels to rest upon my shoulders and train up a squirrel army
• 25:56
  to defend myself, like in case of zombie apocalypse or something like that.
• 26:00
  I mean, that's very cool. I will be getting on that bandwagon now,
• 26:04
  you know, years later. But like I just okay, maybe I
• 26:11
  felt like that was something that other people came up with. Maybe it was
• 26:14
  me. Maybe I'm the problem. I No, that's an excellent idea.
• 26:18
  I love it so much. Where I moved to for some reason, is
• 26:22
  very devoid of squirrels, and it is a problem that I'm trying to figure
• 26:25
  out how to fix because there are squirrels all up and down this valley.
• 26:29
  They're all over the place. It's not like I'd be introducing squirrels to the
• 26:32
  area. Just for some reason, my particular stretch of valley, I guess
• 26:36
  has too many cats. Like I don't know what's wrong, but like there's
• 26:40
  no squirrels around here, and it's unacceptable. All right. Thank you so
• 26:45
  much to our long lasting patreons, and also to all of our other patreons
• 26:49
  and everyone who has supported us in any way, shape or form. You
• 26:53
  are all fantastic and help keep us going. You're just you're just great.
• 26:57
  Thank you so much. And we want to get into what is a long
• 27:15
  but super awesome chapter. It's a two POV. We got a Rand and
• 27:18
  then a Matt POV in a plane wooden box. Oh yeah, let's it's
• 27:25
  such an unassuming plane wooden box of a title. But man, oh man,
• 27:32
  do things pop off in this chapter. It's the same thing we know
• 27:34
  about boxes is things they tend to explode, especially when you put dragons in
• 27:37
  them. And there's not even a lid on this box, and yet its
• 27:41
  explosive power is profound. And also this is the chapter. This is the
• 27:48
  moment that gets used for the ebook cover. That's right, it's the ebook
• 27:52
  cover for this is the moment when Rand blocks the fireball, right before he
• 27:56
  loses his hand. So what's the box? Referring to the plane wooden box
• 28:00
  that one of the Saldaeians finds in the house that is filled with male a
• 28:04
  dom Oh okay, that it's a very unassuming, just little little wooden trough,
• 28:11
  you know, like you might put woodworkers tools in or something, and
• 28:15
  yet it holds the power to capture all of the men and women with Adam
• 28:22
  of the kind of appropriate to their gender in his party. Should Summarak's plan
• 28:26
  have worked, uh the way she planned for it too. Part of me
• 28:30
  was trying to make it a casket, like you know, ah box right,
• 28:36
  yeah, I like that. I like that. I hate that,
• 28:40
  but I like that. Chill. Let me read us in. Let's get
• 28:42
  started on this chapter. And it is a dragon in a box before the
• 28:47
  icon. That is literally what the chapter is. Yeah yeah, yeah,
• 28:52
  although in fairness, it is exploding out of the box both sides of it.
• 28:56
  Right, it's not totally contained. Oh yeah, this, this dragon
• 28:59
  will not contained in a box. He does not fit. He does not
• 29:02
  sit. The mid day Altaran sun was warm, though augusting breeze sometimes whipped
• 29:08
  Rand's cloak. They had been on the hilltop for two hours now. A
• 29:12
  great mass of dark clouds creeping down from the north above a blue gray haze
• 29:18
  spoke of rain to come and a cooling and or lay only a few miles
• 29:23
  in that direction, across low forested hills of oak and pine, leather,
• 29:29
  leaf and sour gum. That border had seen countless generations of catlades going in
• 29:33
  both directions. Was a lane watching at rain in Camlin that lay a good
• 29:38
  one hundred and fifty leagues east, too far for her to be more than
• 29:41
  a faint presence in the back of his head. Avienda in Aridomon was fainter.
• 29:47
  Still, he had not considered that the wise ones would take her along.
• 29:51
  Still, she would be safe among tens of thousands of Aeel, as
• 29:56
  safe as a lane behind Camelin's walls. Taida Shah stamped a hoof and tossed
• 30:00
  his head. Eager to be moving, Ran padded the big Black's neck.
• 30:06
  The stallion could reach the border in under an hour, but their way was
• 30:08
  west today, a short way west in just a short while. Now he
• 30:14
  had to impress at today's meeting, and he had chosen his garb with care.
• 30:18
  The crowd of swords sat on his head for more reason than making an
• 30:21
  impression, though half the small swords nestled among the wide band of laurel leaves
• 30:26
  pointed down, making it uncomfortable to wear, giving constant reminders of its weight
• 30:32
  in gold and in responsibility. A small chip in one of those laurel leaves
• 30:37
  dug at his temple to remind him of the battle against the shan Chan,
• 30:41
  where it had been made, a battle lost when he could not afford to
• 30:45
  lose. His dark green silk coat was embroidered in gold on the sleeve,
• 30:49
  shoulders, and high collar. A gold inlaid buckle in the shape of a
• 30:53
  dragon fastened his sword belt, and he had the dragon scepter in hand.
• 30:59
  A two foot length of spearhead with a long green and white tassel blow the
• 31:03
  polished steel point. If the daughter of the Nine Moons recognized it for part
• 31:07
  of a shon Chan spear, she must also see the dragons that maidens had
• 31:12
  carved, winding around the remaining haft, The golden main dragon heads on the
• 31:17
  back of his hands glittered metallically in the sun. Whoever high she stood among
• 31:21
  the shan Chan, she would know whom she faced. A fool, Lewis
• 31:26
  Theren's wild laughter echoed inside his head. A fool to walk into a trap.
• 31:30
  Rand ignored the madman. It might be a trap, but he was
• 31:33
  ready to spring it. If it was. It was worth the risk.
• 31:37
  He needed this truce. He could crush the shan Chan, but at what
• 31:41
  cost in blood and in time he might not have. He glanced north again.
• 31:45
  The sky above Andor was clear except for a few high white clouds drifting
• 31:51
  wisps. The last battle was coming. He had to take the risk.
• 31:56
  I mean, it's just such peak Rand. Yeah, yeah, I would
• 32:00
  say this is peak Rand. Right, this is the point where like he
• 32:04
  has achieved everything he was kind of supposed to achieve except defeating the sean Chan
• 32:10
  and making peace with them. Right, He's the king of all the lands,
• 32:15
  he's the dragon reborn, he has the scepter, he has the crown.
• 32:20
  He's an emperor at this point, he's transcended to emperor. Yeah,
• 32:22
  because he's now treating on behalf of the continent against an empire. He's talking
• 32:29
  to an empress, So he is an emperor. That's a good point,
• 32:32
  right, Yeah, He's just the most resplendent and grand and powerful that he
• 32:37
  will ever be. He goes on a very rapid decline from here and then
• 32:42
  hits his Buddha phase where he doesn't have attachment anymore. This is him having
• 32:47
  the maximum attachment, right, He has the most things and is the most
• 32:52
  trying to micromanage the world, and has the most hands he'll ever have,
• 32:57
  you know, like peak Rand, everything really starts to spiral out of control
• 33:04
  and then pull out at the last minute from a total wipeout from this point
• 33:07
  onward, from this chapter onward. But yeah, I mean the blinding of
• 33:12
  him is a really significant event. Yeah. Yeah, being blinded has a
• 33:17
  lot to do with like prophecy stuff mm hmmmm, and losing the hand as
• 33:22
  well. Right, we can talk about like, how do we know he's
• 33:24
  going to lose his hand, Well, all the fucking prophecies, so much
• 33:30
  prophecy, and yeah, exactly, he loses hand, like no, it's
• 33:34
  not balder, it's like tear. He loses his hand like Tyr loses his
• 33:37
  hand to Fenris in Norse mythology. I mean, and like, how much
• 33:43
  is losing the hand a trope? Right? The everyone from Finn and Adventure
• 33:47
  Time to Luke in Star Wars to half the people in Game with Rones.
• 33:53
  I mean Lanister, Jamie Lanister is one of them. Yeah, it's just
• 33:58
  like getting your hand cut off as the hero, is this sort of noble
• 34:00
  sacrifice that sort of turns you from this person of war and violence, right,
• 34:08
  because the hand is always what you're attacking with. Cutting that hand off
• 34:14
  is a symbolic loss of attack and often results in a reset back to someone
• 34:21
  who's more thoughtful, more diplomatic, less violents, less aggressive, someone who's
• 34:27
  now settling down to rule instead of out to conquer. I'd never seen it
• 34:32
  framed that way. I mean, Rand goes ah. I guess I'll have
• 34:37
  to learn how to kill people differently then. So I don't know that I've
• 34:45
  ever seen hand loss as a pathway to peaceful, thoughtful rule as a trope.
• 34:52
  It's not so much peaceful thoughtful. I don't know, maybe I'm exaggerating
• 34:57
  a little bit, but just this idea that there is this this step back
• 35:01
  and like re examination, right, Like Luke loses his hand and he comes
• 35:06
  back as a Jedi right. Oh yeah, right, and so he's now
• 35:10
  achieved that sort of that balance of thought, like, but there's still use
• 35:15
  violence. They still have a left hand. Often they replace the right hand
• 35:17
  with something right like, well, Rand actually loses his left hand here,
• 35:21
  Oh, as is his right hand, Yeah, because he's holding it like
• 35:24
  it's a whole thing where he's like, yeah, I can still do sort
• 35:27
  of form this kind of but not really like I yeah, yeah, and
• 35:32
  it's it's it's a thought I'm forming, it's not fully formed. I'm just
• 35:36
  sort of thinking about how how often these characters lose their hands and how it
• 35:43
  is a very transformative moment for them. I mean, your hands are really
• 35:45
  how you enact things in the world, so like, both literally and allegorically,
• 35:51
  it has to mark a change in how you interact with the world.
• 35:54
  And if you are the Emperor of the west Lands and in charge of saving
• 35:59
  the world and the dark One, yeah, that's some pretty big symbolic shifting
• 36:05
  of energy to have to reorganize around losing a hand, regardless of which hand
• 36:10
  it is to say nothing if you had just the fact that like disability in
• 36:16
  general really changes people's lives and is a big part of the human experience and
• 36:21
  also is like a big part of being a war veteran, right, Like
• 36:23
  losing a limb or having some other traumatic experience is like a very common thing
• 36:29
  that like you have to live with for the rest of your life. Is
• 36:31
  like not having a hand or a foot because of a grenade or whatever,
• 36:37
  or a land mine. This is again a piece of his war trauma,
• 36:40
  right, Like I mean the way that Rand like doesn't realize that his hand
• 36:44
  has been blown off. We'll get there when we get there. But like
• 36:45
  I was seeing a lot of just like you have to keep going even though
• 36:50
  you've lost a part of yourself. What an intense piece of like the warrior
• 36:53
  mentality that Jordan is getting to explore there too well. And I think that
• 36:59
  that part of what is showing here is that Rand hasn't really dealt with the
• 37:02
  loss of the hand yet. No, he hasn't even gotten to the loss
• 37:07
  of the hand yet. We haven't gotten to that point, right, right,
• 37:09
  Let's let's keep going. Yeah, So it's a trap. Everybody knows
• 37:14
  it's a trap, right, we know it's a trap. It's semrog setting
• 37:16
  a trap. Everyone knows it says it's on the page three times three different
• 37:21
  characters who are not in the same party all say it's a trap. It's
• 37:24
  the trappiest trap that ever trapped. And you know what Rand does, He
• 37:28
  says, I'm from the Two Rivers. Our specialty is walking into traps.
• 37:31
  Yeah, how else do you trigger a trap? You know it's trap and
• 37:34
  you walk into it like bang bang boom. That's that's how I do.
• 37:37
  That's how we do in Two Rivers. Like we've seen the girls do it
• 37:40
  enough time. It's actually kind of justifying to watch Rand do it and be
• 37:45
  like, yep, this is just what they do. It's it's a it's
• 37:47
  a cultural trait into Two Rivers to just walk into traps like it's part of
• 37:52
  their their specific mountain culture heritage. You can't trap me. I'm too big
• 37:59
  to trap. Okay, right, okay, yeah, exactly exactly. And
• 38:05
  you know, I got to say, Lewis Thearren is sounding completely saying here
• 38:09
  the part where he says that a woman's love is violent. Yeah, okay,
• 38:14
  maybe like the real women in the audience can stand up and tell me,
• 38:16
  like, are are is that part of the thing, because I I
• 38:22
  mean, okay, I take it back. I do like to bite as
• 38:25
  a form of love. I am a bier. That's what I'm talking about.
• 38:29
  That's what I'm talking about. I am the kind of I am the
• 38:31
  kind of spouse who will walk up to you while you're in the kitchen making
• 38:35
  dinner and just randomly bite you. This is the kind of partner that I
• 38:38
  am. So I guess Loos thearon is completely on the money here. I
• 38:42
  take it all back. Sometimes they hurt a man worse than they think they
• 38:45
  have. I'm telling you those are the choppers. Are hard. Like I
• 38:50
  have learned that there is such a thing as too hard to bite someone.
• 38:54
  You know. I believe zombie movies. I believe people can break skin if
• 38:58
  they're really chewing on your arm like it was something to eat. I think
• 39:02
  psychologically we have a hard time doing that. But jaws are more than strong
• 39:06
  enough. Oh yeah, I remember reading that in like some random book of
• 39:09
  facts in a bathroom somewhere, Like the human jaw is absolutely capable of biting
• 39:14
  through your finger. Your brain would never let you because that's just not how
• 39:19
  the body works. But like you have the bite strength, for sure,
• 39:22
  you could bite someone else's finger off. Yeah. Yeah, Sometimes they're even
• 39:27
  sorry afterwards. It's just it's a funny statement about women. I wonder,
• 39:30
  like, is is it a Jordan's statement? Is it like him being oh,
• 39:35
  this is lewis there and is totally crazy? Like what is he?
• 39:39
  Is he commenting on men? Is men smacking them around a little bit?
• 39:43
  Like I'm really I don't know. I had a lot of confusion about this
• 39:46
  statement and why it's here and what it's what. I guess what it's trying
• 39:51
  to say. I mean, I always assumed that it meant that Iliena was
• 39:54
  actually not such an angel. Maybe she gets portrayed as like just this delicate,
• 40:00
  blonde woman that just got tragically murdered, and I'm wondering if she was,
• 40:02
  you know, kind of spicy and like maybe through things, and you
• 40:07
  know, there was more similarity between her and land Fear than either would care
• 40:10
  to admit. You know, I was gonna say, maybe it's like look
• 40:14
  referring to land Fear. Oh yeah, well that's that's also a reasonable reasonable
• 40:21
  choice. But yeah, I do think it is this this idea that like
• 40:25
  men and women inherently have miscommunications, right, That's part of what this book
• 40:30
  is based around, and that can be painful. Yeah, in ways yeah,
• 40:37
  in ways that like aren't intended. I mean, paren and Fayo really
• 40:40
  do exemplify that the most of anyone, that miscommunication hurts people in a loving
• 40:46
  relationship. Yeah, there's no reason that that couldn't be actually a very salient
• 40:52
  commentary on just it's difficult to people. Being in relationships with people is hard
• 40:58
  because miscommunication will inevitably get in the way. Even if you work through them,
• 41:04
  they still come up and it sucks. And the best people are sorry
• 41:07
  afterwards because they understand that, like, the miscommunication hurts you, right,
• 41:12
  right, if you're in a really ideal situation, you'll manage to get to
• 41:15
  the apology phase in the life cycle of these inevitable miscommunications. And I mean
• 41:21
  it's not that like miscommunications that theme of these books or anything. Yeah,
• 41:25
  communication beefing up the page count in my whale of time now. So he's
• 41:32
  getting i mean basically a bunch of advice from people as they're walking into this
• 41:37
  meeting with the Sean Chan. Olivia's you know, basically saying you can't trust
• 41:43
  them because she's fromer Sean Chan. She also blew the secret that the daughter
• 41:46
  of the Nine Moons is the heir to the throne. This is information that
• 41:51
  is not being acknowledged in at Budhar. But Sheer is shocked to learn that
• 41:55
  she's the heir to the throne. But the reason it wasn't mentioned is because
• 42:00
  because she's under the veil, Alivia doesn't know she's under the veil. Olivia
• 42:04
  got captured before two Wan showed up and started two wanting all over the place,
• 42:07
  so all she heard is daughter of the nine Moons, and she just
• 42:12
  left right to air to the Empress because under the Veil isn't on her radar.
• 42:15
  I also think she's not really loyal to her anymore, so she's swilling
• 42:20
  to spill the beans, right because I think basically all the Wetlanders don't even
• 42:23
  know who the Daughter of the Nine Moons is, and everybody who's loyal to
• 42:28
  them understands what under the Veil means and isn't going to talk about it.
• 42:30
  Ye see, I figured that Olivia didn't know she was spilling the beans.
• 42:35
  I didn't think she had enough political sophistication to deliberately spill those beans. I
• 42:38
  thought she just was ignorant. But I yeah, I mean that totally could
• 42:44
  be. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have a good take on
• 42:47
  Olivia for sure, I know. But anyway, he walks up to the
• 42:52
  encounter with twenty five plus channelers, all kitted out, paired up relationship dynamicing
• 42:59
  their asses off, like he has like the full Avengers like lineup, just
• 43:04
  like walking across the field in an arrow head like headed towards this encounter.
• 43:08
  And there's like a whole paragraph just listing off these paired isidy Aschman's and I
• 43:17
  don't know, I don't think we necessarily need to go through them all because
• 43:21
  there's a lot of backstory you could read on what exactly these characters do,
• 43:25
  what scenes they're in, and how they appear. But it's just, you
• 43:30
  know, it's a bunch of orders and Ashman Warders, and is said I
• 43:36
  who bonded them. Yep. If the names don't stand out to us now,
• 43:38
  they're not going to do anything super interesting. They haven't been around,
• 43:44
  you know, Like we're getting into that phase where RJ is just like and
• 43:46
  suddenly the cast is expanding exponentially because I want to scale up for the last
• 43:52
  battle. I mean, you've got Logan and his we've talked about them,
• 43:55
  we've taught we talked about all these characters many, many times, right,
• 43:59
  it's not like we're not familiar with them, Belden. There's a couple of
• 44:02
  new ones, right, Like, but I just whatever. You know,
• 44:07
  Narishma, he who follows after, Like we've talked about him quite a bit,
• 44:10
  you know, but again nothing really, just know that he has backup,
• 44:15
  right, Yeah, Like, yeah, Jennara and Kajima, I don't
• 44:20
  know that they do anything interesting, you know, Like they're new names,
• 44:22
  but they're whatever, right Exactly pants three or four weeks ago we determined that
• 44:28
  new names just don't matter at this point. So like, yeah, it's
• 44:31
  the people we've been talking about, with a couple of other ones, fulfiller
• 44:35
  that don't necessarily do anything, but there's a lot of them. That's the
• 44:38
  point is we have a very powerful get the band back together, along with
• 44:43
  all their side projects and side hustles at the same time into a whole ass
• 44:45
  festival of channelers, and we're seeing the red Oddja be more sort of the
• 44:52
  odd JA that deals with men who can channel, which in this case means
• 44:55
  getting along with them, right, which is a revel innovation that's going to
• 45:00
  happen elsewhere on a more deliberate scale. But yeah, this one, Yeah,
• 45:06
  Jennare and Kajima, I mean, okay, we want to talk about
• 45:08
  them. I just mentioned that they don't do anything. Here's the one thing
• 45:10
  they do. They prompt Rand to think, well, maybe mas from Tayim
• 45:15
  somehow accidentally did a good thing by getting Isidai and Ashaman. Pair it up,
• 45:21
  because you've got a Red joking with a ahshaman, and maybe that's somehow
• 45:24
  accidentally a good thing. And it's like, on the one hand, Rand,
• 45:28
  I see where you're going, and yes, that is kind of what
• 45:30
  some other people are ultimately going to make manifest, but also like the degree
• 45:36
  to which this is not Tayem's doing and is just a happy accident. Tayim
• 45:39
  was trying so hard to put a stick in your spokes, like this is
• 45:44
  not Ah, this is not even a happy accident. This is like running
• 45:47
  counter to what Taym was trying to do when he ordered this. But hey,
• 45:52
  we've got to Red who doesn't hate men, So that's cool. He
• 45:54
  really wanted to create a sort of slave master reallyationship, and then a lot
• 46:00
  of these people just taking it more as e equals bonding. Yeah, maybe
• 46:04
  there's a bit of a power differential, but nothing like what Tayum was trying
• 46:07
  to instill. So here's a line. No one know the effect of an
• 46:12
  Auschaman's death on the woman he had bonded. Did we ever get an answer
• 46:15
  to that, like what the bond does? Is it the same thing as
• 46:20
  a worder bond or is this a totally different effect. I can't think of
• 46:23
  any moment where an Aschaman dies and we see the after effects on one of
• 46:29
  the Isaida he'd bonded. She's channeling Sidin. Oh no, because that's the
• 46:35
  water bond. This is the right, right, we're asking about what happens
• 46:38
  when it's the slightly different if we do. It's in the standard Lanch books,
• 46:45
  and I don't recall specifically. I want to say, we have to
• 46:49
  see it at some point. It'd be weird if we never saw it.
• 46:52
  They usually die in pairs, right, like it's usual. Yeah, I
• 46:54
  guess that's the thing. Yeah, And or the big group group eyes when
• 47:00
  there's you know, a mass attack, right, yeah. They they're really
• 47:04
  fighting and moving in pairs throughout the battle, so they don't tend to go
• 47:07
  down separately. Yeah, that might well. Should remember to keep an eye
• 47:10
  out for that as we go through. But yeah, I wouldn't expect to
• 47:14
  see it given that aspect of it. But yeah, if anyone has an
• 47:17
  answer to that, let us know. Any idea what Maurice is instructing Arrishmo
• 47:22
  about. Nope, no idea. I'm assuming some sort of weird power games,
• 47:27
  because that's how all the eyes that die are towards their ashaman cod swain
• 47:31
  in ninive or in their trialg real jewelry that becomes very important later, basically
• 47:37
  the deciding factor on how this encounter goes right, Right, those those things
• 47:42
  make them both pretty much indestructible machines, right, Like, yeah, they're
• 47:46
  level twenty. At this point, there's a mention of an ashaman here who,
• 47:52
  much like our patrons that we've mentioned at the top of the episode,
• 47:53
  has been at the Black Tower since before there was a Black Tower, and
• 47:58
  he's finally having his dragon pin and you know, it's a whole thing of
• 48:04
  like, yeah, he earned it. He's awesome, and most of the
• 48:07
  men he started with are dead, which again I was thinking about, like
• 48:10
  war and how it chews up people and the few people that survive long enough
• 48:15
  to get out have to think about all the people who didn't and that whole
• 48:20
  thing well between the training accidents and people going mad and stuff like that.
• 48:24
  Yeah, a lot of those early ashmonod on. But you know some of
• 48:28
  them are still around, right, Like it's not there's a group of them
• 48:30
  that are still important, right, There's just a few. Then they're kind
• 48:37
  of scattered about. Dohmer Flynn. I feel like the ones with parent,
• 48:40
  Yeah, the two with parent have been around since the beginning, Narishma.
• 48:45
  It's just a handful. There was like twenty or so at the beginning,
• 48:47
  and now there's like four or five. Right, that's a lot of people
• 48:52
  to have lost. He promised men that she could come in bed. He
• 49:08
  keeps mentioning this moment of weakness, and I'm like, she could come in
• 49:13
  bed? What? What? What arazing? So Rand promised men that she
• 49:22
  could accompany him on this meeting, but at what point? But he keeps
• 49:28
  saying he made that promise at a moment of weakness, and we of course,
• 49:31
  and then he later refers to no one should man should never get promises
• 49:37
  in bed. So I think we know what the moment of weakness was,
• 49:39
  post coloidal glow baby, and he promised man that she could come right Sorry
• 49:46
  Jesus, he promised men she could accompany him. Yeah, somehow she finagled
• 49:52
  some kind of promise, some kind of favor, and she used it to
• 49:58
  ensure that she wouldn't be left behind for this particular adventure. And he keeps
• 50:02
  telling her to stay behind him, which is kind of why he loses his
• 50:07
  hand. Yeah, it's specifically why he loses his hand because he can't dodge
• 50:12
  out of the way because she's behind him. He's like, I'll protect you,
• 50:15
  I guess with my literal body, you know, And it's like Rand.
• 50:20
  So there's a moment where Ran tries to channel and it doesn't work.
• 50:23
  I want to talk about that when we get there, because I've got a
• 50:25
  few questions. Yeah. The next thing, We've got some mention of how
• 50:30
  it's weird that the local countryside doesn't seem to have noticed a large Shan shan
• 50:35
  presence having arrived. And Rand's like, that's weird because they don't have traveling
• 50:39
  but we know, yeah, this is semurags that they do have traveling,
• 50:44
  and also she killed everyone in the manor house. The Saldaeians go into the
• 50:50
  house after the encounter, and they come back out, saying, looks like
• 50:52
  everyone who used to live here is dead. Yeah, there's no bodies,
• 50:55
  but there's blood everywhere. You know, you don't get that much blood without
• 51:01
  killing a few people, right right, because they're like going through this nice,
• 51:05
  peaceful area. There's a manor house like that is occupied and everything's chill,
• 51:09
  so it looks, you know, it's too quiet, and that's what
• 51:12
  looks like a trap. And yet you go inside the house and it's like
• 51:14
  just blood everywhere, like, oh, summerrog, why are you so nasty?
• 51:20
  So walking into this trap. Everybody's holding the power except ran Rand has
• 51:24
  not seized it because this is no time to give the madman a chance to
• 51:29
  get a hold of the power. And he instead of referring to the voice
• 51:32
  in his head as lealty t, he keeps referring to the madman in this
• 51:36
  case. I'm like, wait a minute, Rand, are you the mad
• 51:38
  man? He did say he could feel loose there and in his head he
• 51:42
  didn't want to give the mad man a chance, Like sure, there is
• 51:45
  a period there, there are separate sentences. There are separate sentences. Yeah,
• 51:49
  that's all I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, that's
• 51:52
  yeah, it's weird and yeah, I mean the part where he's walking into
• 51:55
  what is surely a trap and feels more afraid of himself in the situation does
• 52:01
  not inspire confidence, and he keeps referring to the things Lewis Darren says is
• 52:06
  he sounds remarkably sane, but yet he refers to the madman as getting power.
• 52:09
  I think at this point Rand realizes he's the madman. Yeah, you're
• 52:15
  making a strong argument chapter after chapter for this, this whole take. It
• 52:19
  really does hold up. Lewis Arron's the same one in this situation. Yeah,
• 52:23
  or at least that's like because rand Is just embraced the madness. Right,
• 52:27
  he used to say, I'm not the mad one. Lewis Tharon is.
• 52:30
  Now it's like, gosh, I have to do these crazy things now.
• 52:32
  Lewis Tharn's the voice of reason in his head. Yeah. Yeah.
• 52:37
  The girls are masked and inverted, right, so that they it's Cat's notable
• 52:42
  girl. Sorry. The females just say the eyes sid die the women,
• 52:53
  Yeah, I said, I yeah, I not just the I sid die,
• 52:58
  but also right, the former souldam right. Everyone who should have given
• 53:04
  him goosebumps has not given him goose bumps, and he is upset about that.
• 53:08
  He's mad that he's lost the goosebumps tell because they've got the masking thing.
• 53:13
  When he's trying to figure out if they can get an equivalent weave to
• 53:17
  detect the women, that the women have to detect the men channeling, right,
• 53:22
  which just feels like a lot of extra rigmarole to worry about, but
• 53:24
  whatever. And Ninive also points out when the procession exits the building and they
• 53:30
  start walking towards Rand, Ninieve says, I don't like someone's channeling because I
• 53:37
  have to turn ground to tell me that, but I don't see anything.
• 53:38
  And she's masked her ability and inverted the weave, and I wonder how the
• 53:42
  sean chan learned that, right, And again it's the forsaken because it's the
• 53:46
  forsaken knowledge. But it's like, on the one hand, I'm like,
• 53:49
  oh, it's a load of rigmoro to figure that out. On the other
• 53:51
  hand, we're seeing here that it's like pretty important intelligence to be able to
• 53:55
  know if someone's channeling or not being able to hide. That is actually a
• 53:58
  very uncommon piece of knowledge, and it does matter who does or doesn't have
• 54:01
  it. And the fact that they have the round rial basically tell them that,
• 54:07
  Like you know, Simmrogs going into this thinking, there's no way they'll
• 54:09
  be able to tell I'm pretending to be somebody else. I've inverted the weave.
• 54:13
  I've already I'm not actively channeling. I've hit my ability channel. If
• 54:19
  anyone didn't have specialized Tehran breal specifically to avoid that, they would not be
• 54:24
  able to tell that Tuon wasn't too on yep, And what are the odds?
• 54:30
  What are the odds? That's what she's thinking. And even if they
• 54:35
  had them, what are the odds that they know how to use them?
• 54:37
  They're primitive savages, right, they don't know what they've got. They don't
• 54:40
  know what they thank goodness to that toothless wilder and the black swamp or forest
• 54:45
  or back hills. That's what it was who taught Codswain. Yeah, and
• 54:52
  I forget when we figured out her birth could be, but it was pretty
• 54:55
  early. I mean she's like four hundred years old. It's a while ago.
• 54:58
  Oh the woman who gave her this stuff? Yeah, yeah, I
• 55:01
  mean she was old. She was clearly a chandler. She could have been
• 55:04
  as much as four hundred or something, you know, four or five hundred
• 55:07
  years old. It was a long time ago, six hundred even. Yeah,
• 55:10
  I think we worked out that like it could she could have been alive
• 55:14
  at the very end of the breakdown of Arterer hawk Wing's empire, right right,
• 55:17
  because if Cotswain's four hundred ish, maybe a little bit less six hundred
• 55:22
  ish, and the other woman with six hundred ish, then it gives you
• 55:27
  almost a thousand years, which is roughly arter hawk Wing time, right right
• 55:31
  right. I love how she like tosses back her cloaks like she's unsheathing a
• 55:35
  sword. She's like, I can fix whatever, whatever tom foolery they've got
• 55:38
  going on up there. Once I'm a little closer, my magic hair ornaments
• 55:42
  will fix it. And she's just she's fully kid it out. It's really
• 55:45
  fun. It is. It's very much like endgame when you've got all the
• 55:49
  special magic items that you can get through the game and you go up to
• 55:52
  the final boss and it's like Semarog the Forsaken that you feed all the time,
• 55:55
  and it's like boop, gotcha, I have all the magic equipment.
• 56:01
  There's nothing you can do about it. It turns out going on side quest
• 56:05
  is a really good idea, really good idea. They got not one but
• 56:08
  two sets of taran greal. Yeah, so outcomes they get to the farm
• 56:15
  lated Lady Deirdre's house outside of King's Crossing, which smells of a trap,
• 56:21
  because of course it is a trap, and outcome three pairs of women on
• 56:25
  either side of the door. So that's six pairs of women total of twelve
• 56:30
  six Suldam, six demane and then two on in quotes, come walking comes
• 56:36
  walking out. Yeah, tiny delicate, flanked by all of this magic power.
• 56:40
  Clearly she's not the threat, right, clearly. And then again,
• 56:45
  stay behind me, he tells men. So man gets right behind him,
• 56:50
  and abruptly, no more than ten paces away, she flickered for an instant.
• 56:54
  She was taller than most men, garbed in all black, surprise on
• 56:58
  her face, so she still wore the veil. Her head was covered with
• 57:01
  his shortcut, wavy black hair. Only an instant before the small woman returned,
• 57:07
  her step faltering as she let her white skirts fall. But another flicker,
• 57:10
  and the tall, dark woman stood there, her face twisted in fury
• 57:15
  behind the veil. He recognized that face, though he had never seen it
• 57:17
  before. Lewis Theron had and that was enough. Semarrog, he said in
• 57:22
  shocked before he could stop the word. And suddenly everything seemed to happen at
• 57:28
  once. So yeah, the disruption, and of course ran and instantly sees
• 57:32
  her face and recognize the Semarrog because of course the information he's getting from Lewis
• 57:37
  Theron is true. Yeah, as we'll see. So he goes to reach
• 57:44
  for the source to attack her, and you know this, Lewis Theron and
• 57:46
  him jostle around for it. Neither one of them gets it, so he
• 57:50
  can't see the source in time, and she throws a fireball at him.
• 57:57
  Now I'm not really sure why nobody else reacts quicker, those people who already
• 58:00
  have seized the source, why they take so long to take her down when
• 58:05
  she says summarrog. It seems like they should be able to react as quickly
• 58:08
  as she does. But because what she does is she shouts shield them.
• 58:14
  We hear this from Nineve afterwards that Samarak shouted for the Suldom to shield the
• 58:19
  rest of them. But the shield, but then the shield's all bounced off
• 58:22
  because everyone was already full of the powers. So all of the accompanying people
• 58:28
  were all busy fighting each other, and that's why the central characters were able
• 58:31
  to have their moment. So he basically a grenade goes off in his hand,
• 58:36
  is how I think about it. Yeah, she throws a grenade up
• 58:39
  and he catches it right as it explodes, Like he reaches up to catch
• 58:44
  it and keep it from hitting men. But like then it blows up in
• 58:46
  his hand. Technically, actually he hits it like a baseball bat with the
• 58:51
  dragonceptor, but again it explodes at the moment of contact, and so he
• 58:55
  loses most of the dragoncepter as well as his hand. Oh and it's a
• 59:00
  good point that she probably did. She was preparing to attack him with the
• 59:04
  fireball anyway, probably so it was probably ready to go, yeah, or
• 59:08
  she was gonna throw a fireball at someone and it just happened to be him.
• 59:13
  So he wakes up with the sword poking him in the side, which
• 59:15
  we've seen before. Actually before he got the wound in the side back in
• 59:20
  Eye of the World, I think he fell down and like woke up with
• 59:22
  the sword hilt poking him in the side. And back then I was like
• 59:25
  foreshadowing, Yeah, it happened again when he knocked himself off the horse with
• 59:30
  the lightning in that one battle with the Shawn Channons. He wears his sword
• 59:34
  everywhere and he keeps falling over, so keep landing on it, right,
• 59:38
  Yeah, but yeah, he doesn't even know he's been hurt yet. He
• 59:42
  tries to push himself up and is suddenly like, well that my hands,
• 59:45
  my hands, right, Like he puts a mangled stump on the ground,
• 59:51
  and suddenly he's aware that he's hurt. He is no longer able to ignore
• 59:53
  that information for some reason. That's a lot of pain, a mangled earned
• 1:00:00
  stump on the ground and trying to force yourself up. He struggled to rise
• 1:00:04
  and fell again. I think there's a lot going on in that he fell
• 1:00:07
  again. M m, the amount of pain he must have been going through.
• 1:00:12
  Yeah, yeah, and his vision is all screwed up, like,
• 1:00:15
  you know, he's clearly got the ringing in his ears. You know,
• 1:00:17
  he is disoriented. He's even like having to remember what's happening. Right,
• 1:00:22
  He's had enough of a concussive head moment that he like forgot what's happening.
• 1:00:27
  And it's like, oh, yeah, I attack semurag men to help.
• 1:00:31
  And this really is the fulfillment of the prophecy of the blind fish. Uh,
• 1:00:37
  you know, handless fisher king, right, the man who wanders the
• 1:00:40
  kingdom. There's there's this, the fisher king. This is a hand maybe
• 1:00:45
  not, but he wanders blind right, the blind king who wanders the beggar
• 1:00:49
  king. I suppose it's a better term. Yeah, And he and he's
• 1:00:52
  prophesied to like stand on the blind one will stand on his own grave and
• 1:00:55
  weep. Right, you can't have veins of gold until his eyes are fucked
• 1:01:00
  up, exactly, exactly, Yeah, this, this prophecy is about the
• 1:01:02
  eyes. This prophecy's about the hand. Like it's very important that he becomes
• 1:01:07
  this transformative person who is humbled by losing his senses and his body, and
• 1:01:13
  his body's cheriorating, right, Like this is one of the reasons he's leaving
• 1:01:15
  it. Like everything's broken down, right, I mean, And when he
• 1:01:19
  does his vagrant wanderer phase, he has a walking stick for a good portion
• 1:01:22
  of that because he kind of needs it to like keep himself upright and going.
• 1:01:28
  He's burning his body out right, like he is absolutely doing his everything
• 1:01:31
  to win this battle, and he's literally burning himself through his body and there's
• 1:01:37
  a moment where he dismisses the injury. Yeah, he just compartmentalizes and decides
• 1:01:43
  it doesn't matter, and then I neive heals the pain, so, you
• 1:01:45
  know, but on one level, So for me, it's like, you
• 1:01:49
  know, part of my emotions when I've been injured, and I've been hurt,
• 1:01:53
  you know, not badly, but badly enough that I was like,
• 1:01:57
  I, you know, felt like I was going to lose something, right,
• 1:02:00
  Like I really don't have any fifth sensation in my pointer finger anymore,
• 1:02:04
  right, Like I cut my finger off right pretty badly, And there's an
• 1:02:08
  emotional toll that goes with that because then I have to live with that injury
• 1:02:12
  for the rest of my life. And for Rand, he's like, yeah,
• 1:02:15
  I have to live with this for the rest of my life, which
• 1:02:16
  is gonna be like two weeks, you know, right, And it's like
• 1:02:20
  not. So it's like, yeah, it's just not that big of a
• 1:02:22
  deal to have an injury. It's like, yeah, I might have to
• 1:02:24
  learn how to refight or however long, but like I'm basically dead anyway,
• 1:02:29
  it doesn't really matter. I'm not gonna have to deal with this for that
• 1:02:32
  long. It's a minor inconvenience. Yeah, there's a certain amount of like,
• 1:02:37
  will it slow me down between now and the last battle? No?
• 1:02:42
  All, right, then it doesn't matter. Like the only thing, I
• 1:02:45
  guess I'll have to learn some new sword forms. That's literally all he says,
• 1:02:49
  right, Like, yeah, but he does have phantom pain. He
• 1:02:52
  does have the weird experience of feeling the hand and having it be you know,
• 1:02:58
  you can't itch it because the itch is completely in your mind and all
• 1:03:01
  of that. He is going to experience that, which again, you know,
• 1:03:05
  I'm sure Robert Jordan knew a lot of people who had that experience.
• 1:03:09
  Yes, yeah, I want to do mirror therapy with rand Ooh yeah,
• 1:03:15
  yeah, totally. Or you put a mirror down in the center and they
• 1:03:17
  have both hands out and then you like have them essentially pretend to be clenching
• 1:03:22
  both hands at the same rate, and then that helps them. I forget
• 1:03:28
  what it is exactly, but it helps the brain sync up that you're moving
• 1:03:30
  both hands, and then it sometimes lets people with injuries actually move the phantom
• 1:03:37
  hand when they normally can't because their eye is seeing in the mirror is seeing
• 1:03:42
  the hand move, and if you're doing it, the same hand at both
• 1:03:45
  times. Right, then Yeah, your brain thinks that hand's moving and you
• 1:03:50
  can actually like, oh, change the position of the phantom hand, which
• 1:03:53
  some people it's stuck and that's what's causing pain, right, and it's stuck
• 1:03:57
  in a way. That's wow. That God, the human brain is insane.
• 1:04:02
  I mean it's sane hopefully, but like the human brain is just the
• 1:04:08
  way that it is plastic is just really impressive. I've seen do that too
• 1:04:13
  with uh, they'll put a rubber hand out and nah, that's what I've
• 1:04:16
  heard of. Yeah, yeah, and sort of the similar thing where they'll
• 1:04:18
  brush both the rubber hand and your hand and then and then they'll just brush
• 1:04:24
  the rubber hand and you can feel it. Yeah, and then they'll do
• 1:04:26
  something like smack the rubber hand with the hammer and you're like, oh my
• 1:04:29
  god, that that hurt, and they're like, it wasn't your hand.
• 1:04:31
  Yeah. Yeah. We can identify with a lot of different things, just
• 1:04:38
  if you can. The way we mentally map where we are in space is
• 1:04:42
  very interesting. Sometimes when I meditate and like really try to do like a
• 1:04:45
  body awareness thing, I will realize that I am very much left dominant,
• 1:04:50
  Like I can feel how much more my brain has high fidelity mapping of the
• 1:04:55
  left side of my body than the right side. I feel much bigger on
• 1:04:59
  the left, like a map of countries that have been distorted by population or
• 1:05:03
  GDP or something like. I can just feel how much I don't have the
• 1:05:09
  same level of intensity of wiring for the right side. I just like,
• 1:05:12
  I haven't put the time in to develop that kind of motor control, and
• 1:05:15
  I can feel it. It's wild. Whereas I feel like my head and
• 1:05:19
  my hands and my feet are giant and the rest of me is very small.
• 1:05:21
  Mmmmm, interesting because that's where my sensations are. That's where my I'm
• 1:05:27
  very focused on the extremities of my hands and everything I feel with my hands,
• 1:05:31
  and everything I feel with my feet, and then I'm very folk in
• 1:05:35
  my head right but everything else is sort of I have a vaguely less You
• 1:05:40
  know, your nerves are less dense. Those are the places where your nerves
• 1:05:42
  are the most dense. Is your hands, your feet, your lips,
• 1:05:45
  your your face. Sure they feel outside to me because I feel them,
• 1:05:48
  and you're spending a lot more brain power on them proportionally compared to the area
• 1:05:53
  of your body. Map that it has to like take up like your hands
• 1:05:56
  are very small compared to your arms. It's just like how how the anatomy
• 1:06:00
  works. But you don't need nearly as much brain power to run the arm
• 1:06:02
  between your hand the arm, the arm extends or not right, like,
• 1:06:08
  that's pretty much it sometimes it rotates, but like the hand, the hand
• 1:06:11
  has a lot of digits. Yeah, so much articulation and sensation, and
• 1:06:15
  especially when you're working with your hands or typing or any of that, Like,
• 1:06:17
  so much of what you're doing is it's your brain and your hands are
• 1:06:20
  the only two things really active. Yeah. So yeah, Rand is not
• 1:06:26
  giving any kind of grace or acknowledgement to that. He's just like, suck
• 1:06:29
  it up, buttercup, I'll live out the rest of my month to live
• 1:06:32
  and it'll be fine as far as I can tell. No casualties on the
• 1:06:35
  good guy's side. Some injuries that I need heals right up. Yeah,
• 1:06:39
  that was what I observed too, is that there's no fatalities on either side
• 1:06:43
  in this encounter. Everyone. Oh no, there's there's some dead demand.
• 1:06:46
  Yeah, I know you're right, you're right. Nay, yeah, I
• 1:06:49
  forgot about that. A short dark soul dam and tall, pale head Demani
• 1:06:53
  laid sprawl on the ground, staring up the sun with already glazed eyes.
• 1:06:57
  Well that shows my reading comprehension. So I think it's just one pair though,
• 1:07:00
  out of the six pairs. And yeah, nobody does on Rand's side,
• 1:07:03
  because they were actually expecting a trap, whereas the Suldom didn't know they
• 1:07:09
  were laying a trap. They thought they were there as an honor guard.
• 1:07:14
  They were not aware that they were playing a role in an ambush as far
• 1:07:17
  as I know, as far as I can recall, Yeah, I mean
• 1:07:20
  they knew that Anoth was maybe not necessarily have the best of intentions though,
• 1:07:27
  but they don't have any They're just falling orders, right, they show up.
• 1:07:30
  That's how the next book opens is with Phalendra as one of the Souldom,
• 1:07:35
  like the main Souldom here, and she very convincingly argues that like,
• 1:07:40
  we had no idea what was happening. We got told to go through this
• 1:07:44
  hole in the air, that we were going to do this honor with the
• 1:07:46
  Doctor of the Nine Moons. We were just here to provide escort and security,
• 1:07:50
  like we were not conscripted to do a conspiratorial thing. And the inverting
• 1:07:57
  hides the weaves as much from her allies as it does from her enemies,
• 1:08:00
  so they probably thought it was actually two on there. It's very important that
• 1:08:04
  Enough's disguise start like three days before the encounter in order to have the plausible
• 1:08:10
  deniability from the Souldom and to have them just go along with it without needing
• 1:08:14
  to be friends of the dark or compelled or anything like that. I find
• 1:08:18
  it really interesting that these dragon grows back with Rand's hand. Yeah, it's
• 1:08:26
  part of his flesh now, it's just part of who he is. If
• 1:08:29
  the flesh is restored, so too is the more than a tattoo. I
• 1:08:32
  thought that was pretty cool because I think I think normal tattoos would not regrow.
• 1:08:36
  I don't think a normal tattoo would regrowth. We ever figured out how
• 1:08:40
  to crisper those lizard regrow genes into our bodies, I don't think a tattoo
• 1:08:45
  would be brought along with even the most spectacular lim regrowth sci fi. No,
• 1:08:49
  the tattoo would have to be redone like tattoo. But it's a magic
• 1:08:54
  tattoo. It's part of his The dragon is one with the land, and
• 1:08:57
  the dragon is also one with the flesh. Of the dragon like metaphysics.
• 1:09:00
  Yeah, I agree, Culudians wouldn't regrow agreed. Agreed, absolutely not.
• 1:09:05
  Yeah, that's how you should test for the dragon. Cut off his hand
• 1:09:10
  and see seems a little drastic. So yeah, and then this is where
• 1:09:30
  we find out that something wrong with his eyes. He gets that wavy vision
• 1:09:32
  that ends up you know, I would call him the blind beggar king.
• 1:09:36
  Yeah, his vision impaired rather than fully blind, but like it's bad,
• 1:09:41
  Like the sun is ten times stronger than it should be and he can barely
• 1:09:44
  read, I think, and everything's watery like that's you can't be driving with
• 1:09:47
  that kind of vision. That's a serious impairment. And the wounds in his
• 1:09:50
  side are open and bleeding and I'm not sure if they ever stop bleeding again.
• 1:09:55
  Yeah, he's really just perpetually falling up at this point, you're leaking,
• 1:10:01
  sir, like, because those wounds have been fighting for a long time
• 1:10:05
  and he is now kind of suffering. Kind of you think he might,
• 1:10:10
  you might, he might have crossed the threshold into what you would consider suffering
• 1:10:13
  at this point out But yeah, no, I think you're right that his
• 1:10:17
  the old wounds in his side were nodded with pain. Yeah. Later,
• 1:10:20
  there's a part where he thinks, my wound, my side wounds break open
• 1:10:25
  if I do anything more strenuous than breathe, which means that he's not even
• 1:10:29
  getting good hanky panky anymore, right without them breaking open, Well, he
• 1:10:33
  might be, but the wound break I feel like that would be a bit
• 1:10:36
  of a downer on the moment. If it's like, don't mind the blood
• 1:10:40
  leaking out, it's fine. I mean, it's never stopped me before.
• 1:10:45
  That's different. You fucking weirdo. This is completely This is like a wound.
• 1:10:53
  Oh okay, good Fouji. You're just as bad. Go away,
• 1:11:00
  trust me. I've hurt myself and had bad cuts. It never stopped anything.
• 1:11:05
  I mean, Henry the Eighth managed to like keep impregnating people while like
• 1:11:10
  actively having gang green. So I guess I shouldn't be criticizing anyone. That's
• 1:11:14
  what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. No, that's valid, that's
• 1:11:15
  valid. Yeah, what you think you think a couple of wounds are going
• 1:11:19
  to stop a horny teenage boy. No, that's true. No, I
• 1:11:24
  continually underrested him at the power of a teenage horn dog. And min min
• 1:11:31
  you think she's gonna accept him being like I'm I'm, I'm I'm hurting tonight.
• 1:11:36
  I was just more thinking that she would not want to like break him
• 1:11:40
  any more than he's already broken. Yeah, sure, sure, fine,
• 1:11:44
  what do I know, haven't you ever heard of sexual healing? Come on
• 1:11:46
  this whole song, I'm just saying he says more strenuous than breathe, and
• 1:11:51
  all I can think about is heavy breathing. I guess maybe he just accepts
• 1:11:57
  it. That's just what it is, is he's he's just like you said
• 1:12:00
  at the beginning of this tangent, like he's They don't heal at this point,
• 1:12:02
  they're just perpetually oozing, and he's in just he's so much other kinds
• 1:12:06
  of pain, the not pain, the fan pain, the phantom pain there,
• 1:12:10
  the I mean, the number of times he has taken hits and fallen.
• 1:12:15
  And I'm sure his joints are all fucked up, right, Yeah,
• 1:12:18
  just from the martial arts regime he's put himself through. Yeah. Yeah,
• 1:12:21
  his knees are twice to the rest age of the rest of him. Although
• 1:12:25
  I do wonder how much the regular healing is keeping him going. Oh yeah,
• 1:12:28
  That's always the thing is you have to be assuming that people are like
• 1:12:31
  aging way better if they have regular access to healing for acute injuries. Their
• 1:12:35
  overall aging process and like the wear and tearror is getting squared away. Well,
• 1:12:42
  especially the I said I heal, is they heal everything? Right?
• 1:12:45
  Yeah, And so you would think maybe the first time that happens to you,
• 1:12:48
  it heals a bunch of like old You're like, wow, my joints
• 1:12:51
  feel really good, and like my back feels good, Like yeah, there's
• 1:12:57
  just a lot of Yeah, Matt's going to change his tune about heal once
• 1:13:00
  the arthritis CI. He's gonna be like, Okay, all right, jolly
• 1:13:03
  and come back over here. But I wonder how much of that is unhealable,
• 1:13:08
  right, because they do talk about some of these injuries. Yeah,
• 1:13:11
  Tom's that's what your body thinks on limp or whatever. Right, if it's
• 1:13:15
  old enough or if it's like chronic enough, I don't think regular healing can
• 1:13:20
  fix it. The field healing that the ice that I use. You need
• 1:13:24
  something special, and I get Nieva and she'll figure it out in like six
• 1:13:27
  months, right, she'll figure it out. Right. Well, it's like
• 1:13:30
  when the doctors are like, well, I got to break your bones to
• 1:13:32
  the heel, right, you know, right, yeah, barbaric, but
• 1:13:34
  yeah, I mean such as medicine in this day and age. So this
• 1:13:39
  is where he you know, Rand just hits total acceptance and men vouches for
• 1:13:42
  him. Right, He's lost a hand, but there's nothing to do about
• 1:13:45
  it, so he's left it behind already, and Ninive, being the normal
• 1:13:48
  human being with big emotions, says, you've been hurt. It's all right
• 1:13:53
  to grieve, It's all right to feel stunned. It's normal because she,
• 1:13:58
  you know, is many things, but she's not out of touch with her
• 1:14:00
  emotions. And as a healer, she knows that like this kind of dissociation
• 1:14:05
  and compartmentalization is not the long term mental health sound way to approach this,
• 1:14:12
  which again Rand is not playing for that sort of timeline. But you know,
• 1:14:16
  n Neive because Ninive had her mountain, you know, Veins of Gold
• 1:14:20
  moment when she was drowning, so she's reached emotional sort of equilibrium, whereas
• 1:14:29
  Rand is still struggling for it. Yeah. Yeah, so the soldam this
• 1:14:33
  sean Chan do not believe that an Oth is samarog At first? Yeah,
• 1:14:38
  even to the point of staring her down and being like, well, you
• 1:14:41
  don't outrank me, even though it's the Lady of Pain giving you a death
• 1:14:44
  glare. You just don't know she's the Lady of Pain and you don't believe
• 1:14:46
  it, so you're not seeing the death in the glare. And then uh,
• 1:14:49
  you know, you get the whole prisoners have killed themselves. This always
• 1:14:53
  stuck with me. Men and women who had managed to open a vein with
• 1:14:56
  heath or fingernails, Like the level of desperation to literally chew your wrist open
• 1:15:01
  to the point where you bleed to death. Like we were just talking about
• 1:15:05
  how yeah, our jaws have that power, but your brain won't let you.
• 1:15:10
  How scared do you have to be to overcome that inherent block in your
• 1:15:15
  brain to rip at your own flesh to the point where you bleed to death.
• 1:15:19
  Yeah, yeah, that's that's quite the reputation preceding you, ma'am.
• 1:15:27
  Right well, and yet it's a true perception, right some of these the
• 1:15:31
  way she's tortured people, it's like, yeah, I mean, a clean
• 1:15:35
  quote unquote death where I bleed out is probably better than whatever she can do
• 1:15:41
  to you with the torture and the healing and the pain. Oh no,
• 1:15:44
  you're dead anyway, right, You're You're dead in both situations, but like
• 1:15:48
  one could be weeks of torment, oh yeah, no, being able to
• 1:15:53
  control your own exit when the greatest healer in the world wants to protract your
• 1:15:59
  death. Oh yeah, but yeah no. It is definitely one of those
• 1:16:01
  lines that really stands out and tells you so much and gives you so much
• 1:16:05
  weight to this character. In very few words, masterful RJ world building.
• 1:16:12
  And then I think we get probably the best summation of Rand's madness in the
• 1:16:21
  series and the thing that really cements my idea of what's going on in Rand's
• 1:16:28
  head. Yeah, you know, I mean later it was more confirmed by
• 1:16:31
  Sanderson and he talked about it. But like in Jordan's own words, I
• 1:16:35
  think is what Samarag says, here is the madness in Rand's head. Yeah,
• 1:16:41
  the LTT Yeah, this whole paragraph is just fantastic. Do you want
• 1:16:45
  me to read it or do you want to read it? Well, actually
• 1:16:46
  you should read it because it's in Semarag's voice. Yeah, Semarag saved him
• 1:16:50
  the effort of thinking up a lie. He's insane, she said, coolly.
• 1:16:57
  Grandall could explain it better than I. Madness was her specialty. I
• 1:17:01
  will try. However, you know of people who hear voices in their heads,
• 1:17:06
  sometimes very rarely. The voices they hear are the voices of past lives.
• 1:17:13
  Landfair claimed he knew things from our own age. Things only lose there,
• 1:17:17
  and Telemon could know clearly he is hearing Louse Thea's voice. It makes
• 1:17:24
  no difference that his voice is real. However, in fact, that makes
• 1:17:29
  his situation worse. Even Grandall usually failed to achieve reintegration with someone who heard
• 1:17:34
  a real voice. I understand the descent into terminal madness can be abrupt.
• 1:17:43
  I just the dot dot abrupt. Yeah, abrupt, like she just cut
• 1:17:49
  out all of the support and trust that everyone around him has. The descent
• 1:17:56
  into terminal madness can be abrupt means that nobody can trust him anymore. That
• 1:18:00
  line will be sticking in their head every time his eyes get dark. But
• 1:18:04
  it is so true, because all you need is a moment where Lewis the
• 1:18:08
  insane person in his head takes over and that then becomes rand. He said
• 1:18:14
  that's a problem, right, Yeah, like he's worried about that, and
• 1:18:16
  that's why the abruptness happens is that it's no longer Ran. It's the insane
• 1:18:20
  voice in his head who's in control. Yep. And that insane voice,
• 1:18:25
  Yes, it is the real LTT. The knowledge is real. But I
• 1:18:31
  think what's so important in this paragraph is the clue to fix it. It's
• 1:18:39
  the clues here. Grendall usually failed to achieve. Reintegration usually failed. However,
• 1:18:46
  reintegration is the successful way to bring the void. It is possible for
• 1:18:54
  Rand and lewis there And this is the first clue we ever get that it
• 1:18:58
  is possible for them to reintegrate in a way that brings them together. Before
• 1:19:02
  it's like, oh, what the fuck is what are we gonna do?
• 1:19:06
  Reintegration. We have a word, we have a process that is essentially what
• 1:19:13
  happens to Rand later. Right, He reintegrates to the point where Rand and
• 1:19:16
  LTT are now the same person. He is both and he has the memories
• 1:19:20
  of LTT even though he is Rand. Yeah, that's part of how he
• 1:19:25
  frames the revelation at the end of Vance of Gold is they were one.
• 1:19:30
  They had always been one, they had never been separate people. He literally
• 1:19:34
  reintegrates his knowledge of himself to say, I've always been both of these and
• 1:19:39
  that's a huge thing to swallow. But yeah, no, you're totally right.
• 1:19:42
  This is she tells us, Yes, he's insane and also in the
• 1:19:45
  same breath, and here is how he can become sane again. Yeah.
• 1:19:49
  Wow, I never caught that nice word. Oh thanks. This is one
• 1:19:55
  of my favorite little paragraphs. Right. I've based so much of my theory
• 1:19:58
  on LTT and like, going back to the beginning when I am I've been
• 1:20:02
  like, no, this is how it works. I've been very adamant about
• 1:20:04
  this, and it's it's this paragraph that is I feel. In Jordan's last
• 1:20:13
  book, Jordan does a lot of saying, I know there's been a lot
• 1:20:15
  of speculation on this stuff, here's what it means. And so at the
• 1:20:20
  end of this book, I really do feel like we got this to this
• 1:20:24
  point where Jordan answered a lot of questions going into the last battle. That's
• 1:20:30
  why I think he was setting up the last battle as he was answering questions
• 1:20:32
  and laying things out in a way that he hadn't in the previous two or
• 1:20:36
  three books. Yeah, yeah, totally. He'd been bringing up more questions
• 1:20:42
  for the last two or three books now he's answering them, Yeah, how
• 1:20:45
  are we going to solve Rand's madness reintegration? First, We're going to lay
• 1:20:50
  the problem out on the table, and then we're going to find a solution.
• 1:20:54
  Bam bam mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, that's great. So he
• 1:20:58
  goes to comfort men and he at that moment where he like tries to pet
• 1:21:00
  her hand with his non existent hand because he forgets he doesn't have a hand
• 1:21:04
  there, and it's all weird and awkward, and she of course does the
• 1:21:08
  right thing and doesn't react right well. And there's also this moment where like
• 1:21:12
  he feels her react to Samarock's information, which is this moment of numbness,
• 1:21:16
  and then she's fine. She's like, Noah, I'm fine. I love
• 1:21:18
  him. And then he goes to touch her hand and thinks that that's just
• 1:21:20
  as horrible, and she's like it doesn't even FaZe her because like she's she
• 1:21:26
  has gone through this, I missed that first numbness. Yeah, she goes
• 1:21:29
  through the gauntlet of learning that he really does hear a voice in his head,
• 1:21:32
  he really is going insane, and she decides I love him anyway.
• 1:21:36
  So the physical disability of an already healed stump, like like that's nothing compared
• 1:21:43
  to what she just decided she was okay with. It's not like you're oozing
• 1:21:45
  on her, like it's a smoothly healed surface. It's fine. And it's
• 1:21:49
  not like she didn't know he was going to go insane anywhere, right,
• 1:21:55
  right, that was baked into the stock price, right if you want to
• 1:21:59
  you know that language, Yeah, pants, they have they killed people together.
• 1:22:08
  Though that's true, I don't Men is managed. I mean, Simmarov
• 1:22:11
  does have Men's knife sticking out of her shoulder. It would have only taken
• 1:22:15
  a slightly better aim to actually kill Samarag in that moment. Honestly, I
• 1:22:18
  really feel like Men needs to work on her aim. Way too many shoulder
• 1:22:24
  shots. Girl. You need to be just pull a little to the left.
• 1:22:27
  Stop with the playing, the flipping it around your fingers tricks, like
• 1:22:30
  start throwing those knives a little more. Yeah, yeah, I need less
• 1:22:32
  like competing with Tom for flashiness and more just bulls eye practice, darts,
• 1:22:39
  more more darts at the at the bar. Uh So, Summarog admits to
• 1:22:42
  being Samarag to cod Swain, which I thought, again that face down between
• 1:22:48
  the two of them is not my favorite. Yeah, I like cad Swain
• 1:22:53
  in this moment where she just looks at Summarrog and says, nice to meet
• 1:22:57
  you. I look forward to having long talks together. I wh that level
• 1:23:00
  of just like dismissive because that is the key to unraveling Summarrog is treating her
• 1:23:04
  like a human being, right right, right, and so I like that.
• 1:23:08
  But yeah, it's beating the beans off the floor thing never felt like
• 1:23:11
  a good conclusion to that, you know, it did not. This was
• 1:23:14
  a promising start, that's the way. Being unimpressed with her in this way
• 1:23:17
  was a very promising start. But the conclusion of beans was we'll get there
• 1:23:24
  when we get there, We'll get there. The followers talk about how they
• 1:23:28
  were taken to a room in the terrace and palace and then there was a
• 1:23:31
  gateway that they went through. They didn't know what it was, you know,
• 1:23:35
  shan Chan just following orders always great, great policy. When they were
• 1:23:41
  dark friends around. I mean, in fairness, they don't usually have forsaken
• 1:23:45
  level dark friends running around, but uh true, I'm just saying they weren't
• 1:23:48
  really following like really dark friendy orders. They were just doing like, oh
• 1:23:51
  yeah, be an honor guard. Like just like do your job, like
• 1:23:55
  just go do your secret service detail. Like it's yes, it's just following
• 1:23:59
  orders, but it's not like following orders to like march people off a cliff.
• 1:24:01
  It's like provide security detail at a remote retreat. But it is very
• 1:24:06
  helpful evidence in helping Rand be like I can trust the Sean Shan to not
• 1:24:13
  have set this up as a collective, right, he says it later like
• 1:24:15
  now I've flushed out the forsaken who was there, I can trust that there's
• 1:24:20
  no other foresaken. So this this helps him I think establish that of Like,
• 1:24:25
  Okay, Summarag really was super undercover, Like she did not co opt
• 1:24:30
  the whole system to be Summarog worshippers, Like nobody knew who she was,
• 1:24:34
  right, nobody knew that an Off was Summarrog. She was just in the
• 1:24:38
  right place at the right time, so she could influence things, similar to
• 1:24:41
  Helema. Yeah, yeah, very much. So just like super like layers
• 1:24:45
  deep undercover. So Rand decides to basically send all the souldmin Demane back because
• 1:24:51
  he wants he still wants the meeting, right, like nothing's really changed.
• 1:24:55
  She's like, Okay, I know you got set up for by forsake,
• 1:24:58
  and that's not your fault. Go set up the actual meeting. Go get
• 1:25:00
  the actual daughter of the Nine Moons or whoever's in charge, and set this
• 1:25:04
  fucking meeting up already, right, Like I don't want to fight you anymore.
• 1:25:10
  Just talk to me like please, is basically his message to the Sean
• 1:25:14
  Cham Yeah, which is really funny because he's like, I still want to
• 1:25:17
  We'll get to it when we get to the beginning of the next book.
• 1:25:19
  He's like, I still want a meeting, and Philander keeps pushing back,
• 1:25:23
  like I don't think anyone in Sean Chan, the actual organization, knew this
• 1:25:30
  meeting was happening. I think this was entirely a summar up play. He's
• 1:25:32
  like, I don't care. I still want the meeting, regardless of whether
• 1:25:36
  or not audit was a plot that no one knew about. I still want
• 1:25:40
  it. It's a very weird message. She has to take back the demane
• 1:25:45
  weeping about being freed. Yeah, and I Neve really wants to only send
• 1:25:49
  back the people who are complicit in war crimes, and she wants to rescue
• 1:25:54
  the actual slaves, and then the slaves all cry that they want their owners
• 1:25:58
  and all. Isn't it how the brainwashing makes them all so compliant? And
• 1:26:02
  I'm like, Alivia's right there plot wise, I mean she's not literally on
• 1:26:05
  the hill top, but like, Olivia's right there, Like any one of
• 1:26:10
  these women could be the next Olivia. But sure, let's just brush them
• 1:26:14
  off his NPC's Rand's that's great. I mean, I guess if he wants
• 1:26:17
  a treaty, he has to not start by taking away their most powerful weapons,
• 1:26:25
  at which point we just really need to get into the weeds of Rand.
• 1:26:28
  Why are you treating with slavers? Come on? Kicked his ass?
• 1:26:34
  He says he can't. Right here, He's like, I can't afford it.
• 1:26:38
  I can't afford to fight him. I have lost battle coming. And
• 1:26:41
  then what does he do? Decides that he can in fact afford it,
• 1:26:44
  and he's just gonna have to deal. I'm currently at that part of gathering
• 1:26:46
  Storm where he's just like, well, I guess sucks to be everyone because
• 1:26:50
  the shan Chin didn't make peace with me. But too bad, so sad,
• 1:26:55
  and it's just like, you don't need this Rand. You're going to
• 1:26:58
  decide you can live without it later because tu one won't play your rules.
• 1:27:01
  And I just don't do treaties with slavers, they say, as an American.
• 1:27:10
  So the house is inspected, and what's left behind is, of course
• 1:27:15
  the title of the chapter, which is a plain wooden box. Yes,
• 1:27:21
  and that is brought to rand and it is full of adam from men and
• 1:27:26
  women and women, which are just the sad bracelets, right. Yes.
• 1:27:30
  Ninive gets very angry when she sees the black metal bracelets and necklaces because last
• 1:27:35
  time she saw that there was only one copy in the whole ass world,
• 1:27:40
  and Eggiyannon and Domon were sailing off into the sunset to drop it into the
• 1:27:44
  deepest part of the ocean. They knew. And now she's looking at three
• 1:27:46
  cop three sets are all set up right there in that box, and she's
• 1:27:51
  like, that is the last thing in the world that I expected to see.
• 1:27:55
  She's very annoyed. And it makes sense because now there's no getting it
• 1:27:58
  the secrets out right, they dropped these three in the ocean. There's probably
• 1:28:01
  more copies somewhere. One assumes that these are not the only three copies in
• 1:28:04
  existence. Now she gave her to somebody to copy. Yeah, she gave
• 1:28:08
  them simrog to copy well, they were taken by Sorov, who were then
• 1:28:13
  who then gave them to samarag Sure, because we do see with with Lylewyn
• 1:28:16
  and Domad later that she says, well, I gave them to I mean
• 1:28:19
  so off, like confiscated all of my stuff, and I figured it wouldn't
• 1:28:24
  be a big deal because you know, I didn't have a choice, and
• 1:28:27
  I figured it to be fine. No, it was not fine. It
• 1:28:30
  might have been sort of against your consent to have it taken away, So
• 1:28:33
  you're only like halfway responsible for the end of the world nearly happening in book
• 1:28:39
  eleven. But you know, ah, they shouldn't kept these stored near Samarrog.
• 1:28:44
  Oh oh yeah, I mean I kind of think shadow her On would
• 1:28:48
  have retrieved them from wherever they were stored. Sure, but yeah, or
• 1:28:53
  he just had more, or he just had more, I mean, like
• 1:28:56
  yeah, taking the ones from Katswin and using those specifically undermined Katswin. But
• 1:29:00
  yeah, as far as getting a sad bracelet or sad necklace onto Rand,
• 1:29:03
  yeah, she tried to. Her On could have provided one from anywhere once
• 1:29:06
  they've been copied, Yeah, exactly, And like I mean, and Lylewin
• 1:29:11
  also thinks later on, if I'm recalling correctly, that it wouldn't have mattered
• 1:29:15
  if they dumped them over the side or not. And she didn't really care
• 1:29:18
  if they did or not, because she knows that Rand has to bow to
• 1:29:21
  the Crystal throne. So if it happens through some means that she was a
• 1:29:25
  part of, like okay, you know, she's willing to not try too
• 1:29:29
  hard because she knows how the prophecy has to go. And we know,
• 1:29:31
  of course those are the altered prophecies. They're not even real prophecies because they're
• 1:29:35
  from Sean Shan and right, all that and his kneeling is very perfunctorary,
• 1:29:41
  just like yep, I get that out of the way, okay, don
• 1:29:44
  and moving on. That doesn't change our relationship at all. I knelt you
• 1:29:45
  to fulfill the letter of the prophecy, right, And it's it's part of
• 1:29:50
  why Lylewyn let the bracelets escape is because she was like, it'll be fine,
• 1:29:57
  and then Rand is like, well, clearly this is all bullshit,
• 1:30:00
  every last pit of it. So I'm just gonna yeah, bow to you
• 1:30:01
  in a way that means nothing because this whole, this whole thing was a
• 1:30:05
  side quest. We didn't need I was praising side quests earlier, but this
• 1:30:09
  was not a good side quest. So this is where we find out that
• 1:30:12
  they tried to shield everybody in Rand's group, but they were all holding the
• 1:30:15
  power, so it didn't work. And Codd, Swain and her had the
• 1:30:18
  town real which made a huge difference, the decisive difference. Yeah, this
• 1:30:25
  very nearly was a Samarog against twenty five and Samarog wins situation. And yeah,
• 1:30:30
  just a couple of Tarangriel made the final difference and it kept everybody alive,
• 1:30:34
  right, nobody died? Yes, yes, exactly exactly. Rand Bey
• 1:30:39
  and capture would have been the headliner of that disaster, but yes, a
• 1:30:42
  lot of deaths would also have occurred. And so then they ask, you
• 1:30:45
  know, of course, they're like, by the way, who are you?
• 1:30:46
  And he goes, I am Randolph or I'm the dragon reball And if
• 1:30:50
  they had wept it hearing Samarog's name, they wailed at hearing his And it's
• 1:30:55
  that like the idea that the dragon reborn is worse than the forsaken, I
• 1:30:59
  mean, especially in Sean chanlore. Yeah, I mean that is a vibe
• 1:31:02
  that goes back to like book one, like have you heard about the rumors
• 1:31:05
  from outside? Like, yeah, the Dragon is very much lumped in with
• 1:31:09
  the forsaken as being the worst of them all. Slash the thing they're afraid
• 1:31:13
  of, so you should be even more afraid of it, like well because
• 1:31:16
  and also if the dragon is reborn, like okay, that means you get
• 1:31:19
  to be involved in the last battle congratulation and the apocalypse is happening in your
• 1:31:24
  lifetime. Yeah, all right, So there's that fear right there of just
• 1:31:28
  like yep, welcome, welcome to the apocalypse. Yeah, yeah, not
• 1:31:32
  a relatable feeling at all. And that's the end of that POV with Rand,
• 1:31:36
  And then we switched to a Matt POV. Yeah, so Matt's POV
• 1:31:54
  on the road again fashion nor I slanted across his saddle. Matt sat pit
• 1:32:00
  in the darkness among the trees and waited, surrounded by two thousand mounted crossbowmen.
• 1:32:05
  The sun was not long down and events should be in motion. The
• 1:32:10
  shn Chan were going to be hit hard tonight in half a dozen places,
• 1:32:14
  some small and some not so small, but hard in every case. Moonlight
• 1:32:17
  filtering through the branches overhead gave just enough illumination for him to make out Tuon's
• 1:32:24
  shadowed face. She had insisted on staying with him, which meant Solucia was
• 1:32:28
  at her side on her don, of course, glaring at him as usual,
• 1:32:31
  there were not enough moonshadows to obscure that. Unfortunately, Tuon might be
• 1:32:36
  unhappy about what was to happen tonight, yet nothing showed on her face.
• 1:32:41
  What was she thinking? Her expression was all the stern magistrate, that's a
• 1:32:45
  set up there in the dark, about to ambush a bunch of sean Chan,
• 1:32:48
  which of course is going to make Tuon unhappy. Sort of, Well,
• 1:32:53
  it proves that her princes the Ravens candidate is up to the task of
• 1:32:57
  ruling a murderous empire, that's true. But and he's mostly killing. Yeah,
• 1:33:02
  he's mostly killing on Tarrance. There's not a lot of sean Chan in
• 1:33:06
  the group, so yeah, it's it's I can see where she's just more
• 1:33:10
  curious and he's doing it for her specifically, Like it's hard to be mad
• 1:33:15
  when he does the thing for you, you know, right, because he's
• 1:33:17
  the whole He talks about pulling the cork out, right, Yeah, and
• 1:33:20
  that's the whole thing where the shawn Chan are blocking a pass that he wants
• 1:33:26
  to get two On through, and if they recognize two On, they'll kill
• 1:33:30
  her because they're the ones who have been commanded to kill the quote unquote imposter,
• 1:33:32
  which is actually two On. Yeah, well, all of them have
• 1:33:35
  heard the rumor that a two one person needs to be murdered. It's not
• 1:33:40
  that any one band of them is set to it is that they all are
• 1:33:43
  set to it. Eventually, a band is being led by that one henchman
• 1:33:45
  of Sirots very specifically to kill her, but the entire army, the entire
• 1:33:53
  army is a threat, which is crazy because I just don't really understand how
• 1:33:56
  she comes back from that. I guess just in her seat of power,
• 1:33:59
  she overcomes it and becomes the official ruler again and takes off the veil.
• 1:34:02
  Yeah, basically, that's what happens, is she's able to get back to
• 1:34:08
  the seat of power without being killed by the common rank and file, and
• 1:34:12
  that allows her to then reassert control and tell the rank and file stand down.
• 1:34:16
  We've resolved the issue because it's not that they believe that real two on
• 1:34:21
  is a problem, is that they believe there is a fake two on out
• 1:34:25
  there. So when real two on shows up it, the whole thing becomes
• 1:34:30
  moot. Got it. We have a great moment with Matt being the least
• 1:34:35
  warlike of everyone in the band, despite being the leader and the six you
• 1:34:40
  know, the genius of the band. You know, Mandavwin is like,
• 1:34:44
  you know, Lord Matt's lucky and he makes beautiful battles, and Matt snaps.
• 1:34:47
  A beautiful battle is when you don't have to fight, which I just
• 1:34:53
  I appreciate that because again you think of Matt as like very happy, go
• 1:34:57
  lucky and good at war and care free, and yet he's the one over
• 1:35:00
  here being like, as the person with the most military power in the world,
• 1:35:04
  I am the most critical of the military industrial complex. Right, That's
• 1:35:09
  the position he's in, which I feel like takes a certain amount of It's
• 1:35:13
  a veteran stance, but Matt is kind of the ultimate veteran because he's experienced
• 1:35:17
  so many different lives and so many different wars through his lives. Yeah,
• 1:35:23
  I'd find it very unbelievable coming from a man who's barely twenty, except for
• 1:35:27
  the part where he has like forty different like old men packed together into his
• 1:35:31
  head, and it's like, well, yeah, I mean the amalgamated wisdom
• 1:35:35
  of the elders is generally that fighting is the wrong approach, that that is
• 1:35:40
  a broad consensus across history. So yeah, but the cost is just too
• 1:35:45
  high. It's just too much death, too much suffering, too much loss
• 1:35:49
  of human potential, too much destruction of the land. Like it's just,
• 1:35:54
  what have wars ever accomplished, really, other than destroying everything and everyone?
• 1:36:00
  Not a lot? Not a lot. That's that's that's what people who are
• 1:36:02
  old warheads tend to write about in their cool books that then become the strategy
• 1:36:09
  books for the next several generations of war guys. You know, that's where
• 1:36:12
  Matt's coming from. Well, and it's hard not to like look at the
• 1:36:15
  Iraq and the Iran War specifically and be like, Okay, so what did
• 1:36:18
  we accomplish there? And it doesn't feel like a whole lot. Yeah,
• 1:36:21
  it feels like we just delayed the inevitable and destroyed so many lives, American
• 1:36:28
  lives and everyone else's lives, like just so much, so much suffering,
• 1:36:31
  Vietnam, Korea, like all those wars. You kind of look at them
• 1:36:34
  and go, did we really make anything better? Right? It's a that
• 1:36:39
  argument does run a little thing. When you get to World War two,
• 1:36:42
  fighting the Nazis did have to be done. That that empirically had to be
• 1:36:45
  done, unfortunately. But uh yeah, with the broad history of war,
• 1:36:51
  ancient war, modern war, there's a whole lot of head desking when you
• 1:36:56
  really like zoom out and say what did this accomplish? Like? And I
• 1:36:59
  would argue that even World War Two didn't have to happen if different terms had
• 1:37:06
  been come to after World War One? For real though, that's so for
• 1:37:13
  real that how much of the economic pain Germany was suffering led to the rise
• 1:37:18
  of the dictatorship that caused World War Two. And you know, there's a
• 1:37:21
  really good argument for World War One only starting because a bunch of arms dealers
• 1:37:26
  really wanted to make sales. I haven't heard that one, but I believe
• 1:37:30
  you. Behind the Bastards man, it's a terrible look at a ministory the
• 1:37:35
  last few centuries. I know way less about World War One. Yeah,
• 1:37:40
  oh yeah. Why is the love of money the root of all evil?
• 1:37:43
  Oh yeah, yeah, No, it's the arms race that led to the
• 1:37:48
  powder keg that was the start of World War One. Was very much like
• 1:37:54
  Behind the Bastards made a several hour argument for how it could be laid at
• 1:37:57
  the feet of a very few people who just wanted to sell guns. Whether
• 1:38:00
  or not that's true, your milage may vary, but a voice in my
• 1:38:03
  headphones told me that it was true for several hours. Okay, so I
• 1:38:08
  believe it. So I believe it. Yeah, that's fair, that's fair.
• 1:38:11
  Yeah, full disclosure. Like it's just one of those voices in my
• 1:38:13
  head. I literally said, I was, I think I was. I
• 1:38:16
  was talking to somebody and I was like, you know, I have to
• 1:38:19
  listen to less podcasts. There were too many voices in my head telling me
• 1:38:23
  too many things, and it was giving me too many Like I had to
• 1:38:27
  listen to my own voice again. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, as
• 1:38:32
  as Ali puts it, are needing to listen to something at all times.
• 1:38:35
  She never shuts up. This person in my head, she never shuts up.
• 1:38:40
  I have to drown her out with something. Oh and I definitely use
• 1:38:44
  audio books, but I feel like at least audio books are more of a
• 1:38:48
  like podcasts or too much opinion that that just depends on your podcast. Yeah,
• 1:38:55
  I did. That's that's like saying books are too much opinion. Like,
• 1:38:58
  no, it's just immediate. Yeah, you're right, that's a terrible
• 1:39:00
  way of putting in. I don't I don't know how I'm trying what I'm
• 1:39:02
  trying to say. But like the podcast you were listening to were clearly too
• 1:39:05
  much about Yeah, but also there's just you, you're so you get into
• 1:39:12
  that friendship situation with the person. Yes, the parasocial relationship, the relationship
• 1:39:18
  no audiobook has ever, well we all a time kind of has with Michael
• 1:39:21
  and Kate just because of the sheered number of hours. But that's different.
• 1:39:27
  That's different, and at this point I have a legit social relationship there that's
• 1:39:33
  just a yeah no for sure, and people have that relationship with us,
• 1:39:40
  which is cool to think about. So but yeah, I find that interesting
• 1:39:45
  sometimes and difficult to difficult to reconcile. Yeah, yeah, there is definitely.
• 1:39:51
  I am so prone to agreeing with people when they're talked to me that,
• 1:39:57
  Yeah, sometimes I have to be careful of who I'm letting talk to
• 1:39:59
  me because I am so prone to just agreeing. I actually had a really
• 1:40:03
  cool moment today where I was listening to a podcast and going, Wow,
• 1:40:05
  I guess I'm a shit person for thinking the things that I thought before,
• 1:40:10
  and I had to catch myself and be like, no, this is this
• 1:40:13
  podcaster's opinion and it's different than your opinion, and you can just let those
• 1:40:18
  two pieces of information exist in the world without like having one negate the other
• 1:40:24
  or put a value judgment on it. And it was like one of the
• 1:40:27
  first times I've ever really in real time been able to catch myself and be
• 1:40:30
  like, this is what you're doing, and you can stop. You can
• 1:40:33
  just not engage in that self depreciation. It's hard not to agree with the
• 1:40:40
  loudest voice in the room or the latest voice in the room. Yeah,
• 1:40:44
  it can be done, but my god is it's such a labor of conscious
• 1:40:47
  effort and you have to know where you stand on things. You have to
• 1:40:49
  make decisions and be like, no, I have these opinions and I'm willing
• 1:40:54
  to change with new evidence, but I'm not willing to change with new opinions
• 1:40:57
  or new decibel levels or new decibel levels. Right, yeah, exactly,
• 1:41:01
  exactly, Just because someone's shouting it, I still don't believe it, right,
• 1:41:06
  right, And it's like, you want to intake information. That's a
• 1:41:09
  big part of why I listen to podcasts is to learn things I want people
• 1:41:12
  to bring me information that will help me inform the opinions I hold. But
• 1:41:15
  yeah, it's a delicate balance to make sure I am forming my own opinion
• 1:41:20
  and not just parroting what what other people tell me, which I feel like
• 1:41:27
  art it starts out the same way. Often artists start out and they're usually
• 1:41:30
  copying one or two artists, or a writer is copying with the style of
• 1:41:33
  one or two artists. And then you read more yeah, and you know,
• 1:41:39
  and then you bring in more different aspects of it, and then you
• 1:41:42
  realize you have your own style and you want to be true to that without
• 1:41:46
  necessarily ignoring new information. You still want to evolve your style, but you
• 1:41:50
  want to do be your style instead of going back to copying somebody else's or
• 1:41:56
  let's say you want to change it. You don't want to just copy a
• 1:41:59
  new style, right, Yeah, yeah, totally. You can't exist in
• 1:42:02
  a vacuum. But you also do want to chart your own course. There
• 1:42:06
  is a dynamic tension there that is really at the core of being human and
• 1:42:12
  why AI will never make a good art and the core of you know.
• 1:42:15
  I think school needs to do a better job of essentially saying this is the
• 1:42:20
  line between plagiarism and inspiration. And what they do is they say plagiarism is
• 1:42:28
  this huge no, no, don't ever do it. It's the end of
• 1:42:30
  your career, the end of everything you've ever done. Do not play driese.
• 1:42:34
  We will fucking arrest you and put you in jail for the rights.
• 1:42:39
  Yeah, break any guys, but also learn, but also learn from the
• 1:42:41
  masters because they're great, you know, and like And there's no real definition,
• 1:42:45
  in a real separation of like where those lines are. And I think
• 1:42:48
  that's where you end up. You really do have these kids who who played
• 1:42:51
  drize all the time and don't really understand the difference of copying somebody's words and
• 1:42:58
  being inspired by somebodys. I'm so glad I went to a private hippie school
• 1:43:02
  where none of these trends really made much of an impact. Like god,
• 1:43:08
  I just I can't even imagine not grocking the concept of drawing inspiration and then
• 1:43:14
  generating your own content like it just m hippie school failed in a lot of
• 1:43:19
  things, but not in that creative writing was a priority for me. A
• 1:43:24
  lot of people I was around it was just laziness, right it Psycho quickly
• 1:43:28
  getting Simon donnal. It's a lot quicker if I steal ideas and words and
• 1:43:32
  concepts from something I've already read. You know. Yeah, the school I
• 1:43:36
  went to just they just the way that everything worked. That was not an
• 1:43:41
  option. That was just a completely untenable strategy that would never have worked.
• 1:43:46
  Well, this is where the problem is. People worked the metrics right,
• 1:43:49
  and the metrics were a grade. How did you do all in the grade?
• 1:43:53
  You produced a paper that had blah blah blah blah blah. You know
• 1:43:57
  what was the quickest way to do that? You know, in a lot
• 1:43:59
  of ways cheating. I mean, this is why I was able to just
• 1:44:01
  like sleep mock my way through two years of high school and then get my
• 1:44:04
  ged without studying. Was because like I could do all of that. I
• 1:44:09
  mean, not the not the plagiarizing, but just the like gaming the system
• 1:44:12
  and just learning how to get the points. Again, hippie school, we
• 1:44:15
  didn't have grades, so there's no system to game. There was no cheat
• 1:44:19
  code because it was just all these like deep interpersonal relationships where you have to
• 1:44:24
  like make art in conversation with your teacher's lessons and like they know if you're
• 1:44:29
  bullshitting because there's no points, and yeah, I got the system, and
• 1:44:33
  it's like and then I was shocked at how many people were failing to gamify
• 1:44:38
  the system, not even cheating, but just like gamifying, Like you guys
• 1:44:41
  don't realize that all the bold and italic words are all you have to pay
• 1:44:44
  attention to in the textbook and literally nothing else matters, Like no one else
• 1:44:48
  is noticing this really, So I have to take these compliance tests at work
• 1:44:54
  every once in a while where it's like you'll watch these little cartoon figurines move
• 1:44:58
  around, you listen to what they're saying, and then you take a little
• 1:45:00
  like multi choice multiple choice tests at the end of the right and I blow
• 1:45:05
  through those things in I mean, I don't let they're up on the second
• 1:45:10
  screen for a second, you know, don't let the animation play You're just
• 1:45:13
  like, yeah, I don't even let the animation play out, because like
• 1:45:15
  I can gamify the questions so easily. I can get nine out of ten
• 1:45:18
  right usually on the first try, and then it tells you which ones you
• 1:45:21
  do right, and then unless you retake the test, so I just like
• 1:45:26
  blast through it, get nine out of ten right, that's usually passing.
• 1:45:29
  If it's not, I retake it and correct the one I got wrong right,
• 1:45:32
  And it's like people are like, wait, how do you keep up
• 1:45:35
  on those? They take me forever and I'm like, well, I don't
• 1:45:38
  actually watch them, Like, well then how do you get it right?
• 1:45:41
  I don't read the material. Well then how do you get it right?
• 1:45:43
  I just it's a game. Also, I've seen a million of these things,
• 1:45:45
  you know, you know what I know not to click on the fucking
• 1:45:47
  virus. Okay, Like it's not even like an extreme example of the levels
• 1:45:54
  of pattern recognition that we have to deploy here. This is child's play pattern
• 1:45:58
  recognition as child's playing right, yeah, and like and oftentimes I don't even
• 1:46:02
  read the questions. I just go to where it says all of the above,
• 1:46:05
  click on it, and move on right. If it has one of
• 1:46:09
  those at the bottom, it's almost always the last option if there's an all
• 1:46:13
  of the above. If not, there's a none of the above, the
• 1:46:15
  other option. If there's not another all the above, none of the above,
• 1:46:18
  it's always the longest text because they want you to actually read the correct
• 1:46:24
  answer for once, because they know you don't read the text, so they're
• 1:46:28
  like, Okay, if you read this, you'll for once read the correct
• 1:46:30
  answer, but you don't have to read it because it's the longest text,
• 1:46:31
  so you click on that. Like, there's so many ways to gamify those
• 1:46:34
  questions without reading anything. Yeah, it's almost embarrassing how quickly I can get
• 1:46:41
  through those. Yeah, totally, this is so far off topic. This
• 1:46:45
  is so fu Hey, you know what, I'm loving this chapter honestly,
• 1:46:48
  Like this is episode five hundred. I am all about tangents. I'm all
• 1:46:54
  about like let's take forever to record. Let's let's enjoy the fact that this
• 1:46:59
  is just like, I am mind blown that we are at this point.
• 1:47:04
  Five hundred episodes is so many episodes is a lot. It's a lot,
• 1:47:10
  and so much has changed in my life, my life, the podcast,
• 1:47:15
  the world since we started this in late twenty sixteen, I think, no,
• 1:47:20
  early twenty sixteen, April, because remember April twenty first was we didn't
• 1:47:26
  get it up on April twenty for some reason, but we got it up
• 1:47:29
  on April twenty first. Can't imagine why that was. Yeah, all right,
• 1:47:38
  so here, the next thing I've got is this cool thought from Matt
• 1:47:41
  about how tu Onan had promised not to betray him, and that had to
• 1:47:45
  cover trying to portray his plans. Yet she must wish she had that promise
• 1:47:49
  back, like he knows that she's gonna He implicitly trusts that she'll keep her
• 1:47:55
  promise, Like if she can find a way out of it, she will,
• 1:47:58
  If she can find a loophole, she will. But she made a
• 1:48:00
  promise, and rather than break it, she's gonna wish that she could have
• 1:48:04
  it back. Like that implicit trust between the two of them is very important
• 1:48:09
  for their relationship. Can I talk about how much Robert Jordan's ability to trust
• 1:48:15
  in people's words broke me as an adult, because you can't. You can't
• 1:48:21
  like this just people will not keep their word. Like that's just something I've
• 1:48:26
  had to realize. I thought all the fantasy I read, I thought what
• 1:48:30
  someone claimed. And also, you know, my fucking whatever's wrong in my
• 1:48:33
  head? Right, I believe people, you're just autistic. There's nothing wrong
• 1:48:38
  in your head. Well you know I'm not diagnosed, but yeah, sure
• 1:48:44
  it's a peer review diagnosis. The fucking doctors don't know shit about shit.
• 1:48:48
  So my autism basically says like trust people, right, Like of course take
• 1:48:54
  them at their work. Yeah, yeah, I know. I definitely was
• 1:48:58
  taught to believe that words mean things just in general, yeah, and then
• 1:49:01
  specifically when people promise things that that would extra mean things that that would actually
• 1:49:08
  and that people would like completely burn all connection with me if I ever broke
• 1:49:13
  a promise, right, Like, I mean the way that I have had
• 1:49:15
  to learn that it's okay to fail to do something that you told some what
• 1:49:19
  you were going to do and it's not the end of the relationship and the
• 1:49:23
  end of the world has been a big deal because I thought that it was
• 1:49:26
  like I was basically, you know, the worst. So I have you
• 1:49:30
  learned that exactly? I just started making promises and not fulfilling them, and
• 1:49:35
  people haven't haven't cut ties with me. I've just I've gotten better about committing
• 1:49:41
  to things to over committing. I spent a lot of my life just not
• 1:49:44
  committing to doing things because I was so afraid of what would happen if I
• 1:49:46
  couldn't fulfill it. And eventually, I think in large part because of podcasting
• 1:49:54
  this weekly thing where like we do drop the ball sometimes and I've just had
• 1:49:58
  to live with it, and like the sky has not fallen, and I've
• 1:50:00
  allowed myself to commit to a little bit more like the sky continues to not
• 1:50:04
  fall when I have to like cut corners and do things late, and like
• 1:50:08
  it's just the sky didn't fall. You Basically, you will, you are.
• 1:50:13
  I don't know how you find a you, but I guess I'm trying
• 1:50:16
  to be that for you. But you know, yeah, I don't know.
• 1:50:20
  It's it's only with small stakes things. It's not like with big stakes
• 1:50:24
  things. It's not like I can scale this two important parts of my life
• 1:50:27
  or anything, right right, No, And there's a certain amount of I
• 1:50:30
  think having gone through burnout for a bunch of years where I just I failed
• 1:50:34
  and failed and failed to succeed in anything I tried and didn't have the energy
• 1:50:41
  to really finish anything, you know. And again the podcast did heal me
• 1:50:45
  of that a little bit. The sky doesn't fall. You keep producing it,
• 1:50:47
  people keep coming back despite the fact that you fucked up, like right
• 1:50:51
  right, and the fact that it got big in the first place. That
• 1:50:55
  like there's those people out there who want to listen to what I have to
• 1:50:58
  say. I think was such a huge moment for me from a point where
• 1:51:02
  I just I you know, I think in my twenties I just had no
• 1:51:05
  confidence because I'd like, you know, going through high school, I was
• 1:51:10
  the shit man. I could do anything. I was a good swimmer,
• 1:51:15
  I was getting top a's. You know. I couldn't get a girlfriend,
• 1:51:18
  but I'll figure that out later, you know. And then you sort of
• 1:51:21
  keep doing that stuff in college and it's just not working out quite as well,
• 1:51:26
  you know, and like you're just seeing everybody start to succeed when you're
• 1:51:29
  not. And then you get to adult life and you can't seem to get
• 1:51:30
  a job. And it was just this whole thing where I was like,
• 1:51:34
  I feel like I'm getting worse as time goes on, and I completely burned
• 1:51:38
  out trying to keep up, you know, and then had to recover or
• 1:51:41
  come back and sort of approach life from not what I think I should be
• 1:51:46
  doing, but what can I do and how do I build on that?
• 1:51:49
  Yeah, And this is why you don't need to spend several thousand dollars and
• 1:51:54
  several months of your life having a doctor tell you that, no, you're
• 1:51:56
  not autistic, because look at your job record, right, You don't need
• 1:51:59
  that. You don't need that, you know, get that you are living
• 1:52:02
  the life you need to live, sands that, but that's a very autistic
• 1:52:06
  story. Peer off you diagnosis. I know, I understand. I understand
• 1:52:15
  the burnout and the comeback. Yeah, I'm going to drag you a support
• 1:52:18
  group someday. Man. I am trying so hard to keep us on the
• 1:52:25
  stand. Book, You're really not. You're really not. But like,
• 1:52:29
  as an editor and someone who desperately wants to be at why Idol, I'm
• 1:52:31
  like, sir, this book though, gotcha? Okay, So we talk
• 1:52:35
  about the fact that Matt has essentially machine guns pointed at an army trapped inside
• 1:52:45
  a V shaped canon canyon, two lions facing each other, but pointed down.
• 1:52:53
  It's an absolute killing field. He loses no men and kills everybody down
• 1:52:59
  there. It's yeah, it really does remind those descriptions very much. Did
• 1:53:03
  remind me of like a machine gun ambush, just like this rapid fire tearing
• 1:53:09
  people's limbs off, like it's it's very nasty, and it pairs well with
• 1:53:14
  him thinking about kissing two on by moonlight. It's just like he's sitting on
• 1:53:19
  this ridge top and just all this stuff is happening while he just sits there
• 1:53:23
  right like all the plot is happening aroundhim, but all he's doing is just
• 1:53:26
  sitting there. Right. I kind of have trouble talking about how do we
• 1:53:30
  structure this because it's really just one event that happens on these five pages.
• 1:53:34
  He's got the women with him, and he interacts with them. Right,
• 1:53:38
  He's got two on a solution who's interacted with We've talked about that a bit.
• 1:53:42
  Though. There's an interesting thing here from Teslain where she warns him against
• 1:53:45
  Jolene. She's like, just so you know, Jolene is still very much
• 1:53:48
  a threat to you, like she still wants you as a warder. She
• 1:53:51
  will do underhanded things to make it happen maybe, and that's it never comes
• 1:53:58
  to anything. But it's interesting. The Teslin really likes Matt story, and
• 1:54:02
  like the getting respect from a red story is very very interesting, and this
• 1:54:06
  is a good part of that. She's like, no, that green though,
• 1:54:09
  that green is like a problem for you, like be careful, and
• 1:54:14
  then two on is shitty about it, but like that's not interesting. What's
• 1:54:15
  interesting. It's just the like Teslain doesn't just like Matt. She's looking out
• 1:54:20
  for him. Now he's got the medallion, which will protect him, right,
• 1:54:25
  from being bonded. He does think about that, right, because remember,
• 1:54:29
  oh God, who bonds Rand Alana? So remember when Alana she was
• 1:54:34
  thinking, like, I want to bond one of the three boys, but
• 1:54:38
  parents got fai Iel protecting him and I don't want to mess with that.
• 1:54:41
  And Rand has that stupid medallion, so I can't really bond him Matt.
• 1:54:46
  But yeah, so I've got to bond Matt. Sorry, Matt has the
• 1:54:49
  stupid medallion, so I have to bond Rand. Does he have them medallion
• 1:54:55
  in her back? Then? Uh? After the was he has it?
• 1:55:00
  But yeah, yeah, I don't know if I don't think she knows about
• 1:55:03
  it, but I think more at least for plot reasons, that's why.
• 1:55:06
  Yeah, well I think it's more that Tesla's like, beware of Joliane's word
• 1:55:10
  games, because like she's gonna keep trying. She's just just like Teslain is
• 1:55:16
  worried about it enough to bring it up. And that's a nice thing about
• 1:55:20
  the Teslain Matt relationship. It never comes to anything with Joline. And then
• 1:55:25
  yeah, and then Teslin is the vehicle for us to get the exposition about
• 1:55:29
  why Matt is doing this, why Matt is mowing down these men with effectively
• 1:55:32
  machine guns in a valley. Why he's doing all that death, we might
• 1:55:38
  not quite have comprehended it. And Teslain provides the vehicle for Matt to be
• 1:55:42
  like, if I piss them off really bad by killing a lot of people,
• 1:55:45
  they will come running to deal with me. And then I can slip
• 1:55:48
  through the pass that they have abandoned in order to come deal with me.
• 1:55:51
  And it's not just this one attack right him, until Manis and probably some
• 1:55:55
  other leaders are doing this multiple times across the night. This is a like
• 1:56:00
  a Torlda's campaign at the beginning of the book. In many ways, this
• 1:56:03
  is a very similar playbook, just at a much smaller geographic scale. And
• 1:56:08
  if anything, I'd say the whole point of setting Entrallda up to do that
• 1:56:12
  at the beginning is be like, look, here's the strategy that worked from
• 1:56:16
  a mastermind, one of the four great generals, and here's Matt doing it
• 1:56:20
  again, instinctively copying that just to get through a pass, because that's what
• 1:56:27
  a great general does. That's right, yep. And then VanIn you know,
• 1:56:32
  sorry, Demandrad takes off at a cancer on his horse where he will
• 1:56:38
  somehow he could not outpace the Racken. Well he can if he can travel,
• 1:56:43
  which clearly he can do because he's Demandrad. Yeah, at this point,
• 1:56:45
  Demandred wants or skim this campaign to work, because he does show up
• 1:56:49
  in time. But yeah, I mean clearly he's just skimming, clearly pretending
• 1:56:55
  to have a horse. I guess. Yeah, well he's not actually doing
• 1:56:57
  the writing right, like he's just it's all. That's how he says that
• 1:57:00
  fat and yeah, the horse can carry him that far because he like canter's
• 1:57:03
  off like ten feet and then like stops, opens the door. Yeah,
• 1:57:10
  exactly exactly was the thanks it through. Yeah, and he says that they've
• 1:57:14
  got a thousand more people on his tail than they were expecting. But you
• 1:57:18
  know, it's no big deal. And Matt's three thousand and four thousand a
• 1:57:23
  bit. You know, it's like, Okay, I can handle that.
• 1:57:25
  And then the whole band goes, okay, we can handle that, and
• 1:57:28
  Matt thinks I forgot that about the band. That's something that makes the band
• 1:57:31
  unique is if I take it in stride, they literally don't worry about it.
• 1:57:38
  And that is such a unique thing in an army because he's you know,
• 1:57:41
  dealt with all these other bodies of different kinds of soldiers sense and he's
• 1:57:44
  like, I'm back with the band. They just trust me to a degree
• 1:57:47
  that is insane. He recalls kissing too on. Huh. They're continuing to
• 1:57:54
  make out, yeah, but only like as much as she wants, right,
• 1:57:58
  Like she kissed him once and then tried tokiss her again. She's like,
• 1:58:00
  don't be greedy. Uh huh, you get one, and like another
• 1:58:02
  night, he goes to kiss her and she punches him instead, right like,
• 1:58:06
  he's like kidney. Yeah, So they're having a like Taming of the
• 1:58:12
  Shrew sort of quote unquote cute makeout sessions at the edges of the screen.
• 1:58:16
  I think that the the don't be greedy line is cute, but the punching
• 1:58:20
  him so hard he's worried that she cracked her rib is not funny. But
• 1:58:25
  I do think the don't be greedy line is very cute, and I can
• 1:58:28
  imagine it like with the imperiousness and like she's learning how to have a makeout
• 1:58:30
  session but also needing to assert control. Like, I do think that that's
• 1:58:35
  very cute, right, exactly right, right, because she's like, this
• 1:58:40
  is her first time kissing anybody, right, so she's probably like absolutely,
• 1:58:45
  you know. I mean, if you remember back the first time he kissed
• 1:58:46
  somebody, it was just incredible. I mean, learning how to make out
• 1:58:50
  is a good time time, and Matt is very experienced at it, so
• 1:58:58
  it's not like two ones having like a first time on first time kind of,
• 1:59:00
  you know, like all that awkwardness like. But then she, because
• 1:59:05
  of who she is, has to reassert control the second that, like the
• 1:59:09
  kiss is over. She's like, oh no, no, I gotta like
• 1:59:11
  bring all that giddiness back inside, like pretend that it's not happening. Very
• 1:59:15
  very funny, very cute. The three thousand Lancers Vanas found mostly on tarms
• 1:59:20
  with the fushon chin, might or might not be those Master Ridell Rodell Roydell
• 1:59:27
  had marked on his map, but they are right. I don't think it
• 1:59:31
  matters. I think that there's a couple of bands and they all get slaughtered
• 1:59:35
  in the same night, so it's sort of moot. But I think the
• 1:59:39
  whole point is the maps. The maps are really good, yes, right,
• 1:59:43
  Roydell's makes really good maps, and they like know he's like, oh,
• 1:59:45
  I know exactly where we are based on the map. Yeah, they're
• 1:59:48
  extremely accurate, extremely to scale, extremely up to date. They're the next
• 1:59:54
  as good as you can get without you know, drones or whatever. Yeah,
• 1:59:58
  his own maps are fine, but those from other men with the work
• 2:00:01
  of masters too, he acquired only the Rodell is not just a map maker
• 2:00:05
  but a curator of maps, and so yeah, Matt now has just the
• 2:00:11
  very best possible geographic intelligence he could have with that until he gets gateways in
• 2:00:15
  the sky, well, until he gets s gateways in the sky. Yes,
• 2:00:18
  at that point he has a live feed from a drone, which is
• 2:00:20
  better. Yeah, not even from a drone, from a stationary drone.
• 2:00:26
  So they basically they get in position, they take all the horses, they
• 2:00:29
  hobble them and put feedbags in so they're eating instead of win wickering or whatever.
• 2:00:33
  Right, they're just keeping them quiet. Yeah, and off the trail.
• 2:00:38
  Here's stuff your face. Yeah. Eating. It's like, we're not
• 2:00:41
  going riding, right if we have to, there's no way we're gonna turn
• 2:00:45
  around and run. We don't have swords there. They just have crossbows,
• 2:00:48
  and crossbows are useless for horseback. So if they get charged, you fire
• 2:00:53
  crossbows till you're dead. Yeah. Yeah, some of the other guys are
• 2:00:56
  like, well, traditionally we would have the ability to run away on horses,
• 2:00:59
  and he's like, well, traditionally, I screw tradition and do something
• 2:01:02
  different. That's what we're gonna do. And everyone's like, all right,
• 2:01:05
  that's what Matt says to do. We're not even gonna bother arguing because he
• 2:01:10
  understands that he has, you know, a machine gun in a world with
• 2:01:14
  no guns, and he's like, I got this, It'll be fine.
• 2:01:16
  And this it's a different kind of warfare. It's ambush warfare. They're not
• 2:01:19
  face to face fighting. Yeah, this is guerrilla warfare. And then Tesla
• 2:01:24
  says like, hey, you have to go render aid because of the rules
• 2:01:28
  of war, and Matt says, nope, new rules. I'm deciding how
• 2:01:31
  much like rand gets to break all bonds, I am the god of war
• 2:01:35
  and battles, so I get to decide that there are new rules of war
• 2:01:40
  and I'm not helping them. Even though that is technically the ethical thing to
• 2:01:45
  do, it doesn't work strategically for this moment. So all right, I
• 2:01:49
  like how they've they dulled all their armor, and the nobles were like protesting
• 2:01:53
  and the regular commoners like, ye, no problem. Totally makes sense,
• 2:01:57
  don't don't I want to hide. Hiding is not a bad Yeah. The
• 2:02:00
  horsemen are like, well, I have to stand out and be noble and
• 2:02:02
  shiny, and all the commenters and all the foot soldiers like I would like
• 2:02:06
  to live. So yeah, all right, And then I have a sentence
• 2:02:15
  that I think might contain one of the most suspicious sentences I've come across in
• 2:02:18
  a long time. See if you can spot it. I'm gonna read the
• 2:02:20
  whole paragraph two on and Solusha kept him company, and so did Teslin augusting
• 2:02:26
  breeze had sprung up from the west that tugged it cloaks. But of course
• 2:02:29
  I said I could ignore such things. Though Teslin held her shut solution let
• 2:02:33
  the gusts take her cloak where it would. Oddly, but tu On took
• 2:02:38
  to holding hers clothes with one hand. Yeah, I pinged on that too,
• 2:02:43
  especially because of the oddly. And like, is Solushah supposed to be
• 2:02:47
  a red herring semarrogs situation? Or something like? Is she a soool dog?
• 2:02:55
  What is going on? What is going on? Why does she ignore
• 2:02:59
  the cold? I'm assuming, I'm assuming, I'm assuming that the ignore heat
• 2:03:03
  and cold trick has somehow been passed on through some other like monk lineage of
• 2:03:09
  like fundamental tricks that like Solution has been trained in because it is ostensibly outside
• 2:03:14
  of channeling. Oh that's a good point, right, that she is she
• 2:03:17
  is sort of like a deadly with hands and feet trained monk and having the
• 2:03:25
  void of some kind that let her ignore the heat and the cold would make
• 2:03:29
  sense, right exactly. It is a true like combat meditative technique that has
• 2:03:32
  broken containment from I mean it even has in Randland, right, like swordsmen
• 2:03:38
  talk about about the flame of the void, So like it makes sense that
• 2:03:41
  a bodyguard like Solution could have learned it martially. But yeah, that's the
• 2:03:45
  only explanation, or that she's an Isidae or a Marathtamoni or you know whatever
• 2:03:49
  whatever they want to call it, or grandall right, exactly exactly Grand,
• 2:03:56
  That's what I'm going with totally, Like yeah, it's I hang on that
• 2:04:00
  line too, of like why that's got to be a red herring that he
• 2:04:02
  was trying to put out there to confuse us, just just like Vanon Dredd,
• 2:04:08
  Solution Doll, Solution, Doll grey and ducha, No, Grand Duche
• 2:04:12
  is not Solution all right, cool Vanon Dread and Solution doll. This is
• 2:04:19
  great his whole like au situation as we go through, because like we've already
• 2:04:28
  had a lot of things drop about how Solution is much more badass than we
• 2:04:31
  would suspect right now. Vannon, it's a little easier because he sort of
• 2:04:35
  pops up newly. I think the problem with Solusha is she's been with Tuon
• 2:04:41
  since she was a small child. Yeah, it's a bit of a longer
• 2:04:45
  game than the plot allows for. Yeah, yeah, Vannon could have come
• 2:04:50
  up with his reputation after the war. Yeah, he could have planted that
• 2:04:55
  to Keep's minds and created his But yeah, no, Solution in two one's
• 2:04:58
  relationship is impossible to feigne. Okay, so we're just gonna have to go
• 2:05:02
  with it. It's her monk training where she's ignoring the cold and accidentally letting
• 2:05:05
  that show. Yeah, exactly. She's so worried for Tuon, she's forgetting
• 2:05:10
  to act like a normal person who doesn't have super skills. There's this annoying
• 2:05:15
  moment where Matt treats Teslin and Tuon as both being just people who were squabbling
• 2:05:20
  to annoy him, rather than like a slaver and a slave attempting to have
• 2:05:27
  an interaction, and it's just very frustrating how much he downplays the very like
• 2:05:31
  real reality of the situation, like girls stop fighting. It's like when he
• 2:05:38
  does the same thing to Agwayne and Tuon later in the meeting that they have,
• 2:05:44
  it's just very like, Matt, you're not respecting the fact that the
• 2:05:46
  one is a slaver. You're not giving proper weight and gravitas to the fact
• 2:05:53
  that she thinks that torture and enslavement and owning people is okay. You're just
• 2:05:57
  completely ignoring that. Well, he's just not listening to the argument on either
• 2:06:00
  side. He doesn't care who's right or who's wrong. He's like, he's
• 2:06:03
  like a political right, right, right, he's pretending that he's a political
• 2:06:09
  but that's not a thing. Being a political is a political stance. It's
• 2:06:13
  women's circle business. That's that's that's I think what he's going with, right,
• 2:06:16
  is like these I don't want to get involved. I know, I
• 2:06:21
  know, I know, but again, the slaver is only enslaving women,
• 2:06:29
  right, it's women and slaving other women. Oh my god, it doesn't
• 2:06:30
  affect me directly, so I don't need to care about other people's human rights.
• 2:06:34
  Ah, get churialism out of my fantasy. I came here for escape,
• 2:06:44
  damn you. I was going to point out the thing where Matt sarcastically
• 2:06:48
  acts about omens, and Tuon assumes that he said that un ironically, because
• 2:06:55
  he's completely being ironic, just for something to break the silence, and she's
• 2:06:59
  like, I'm so glad you're taking an interest. It's like, yeah,
• 2:07:01
  taking an interest to one. He's teasing you well, and again her thing
• 2:07:04
  is like an aw wil hoota twice that means someone will die soon? Yeah,
• 2:07:09
  okay, yeah, fine, not inaccurate, but kind of always true
• 2:07:15
  as well, right, Like, which one of these four thousand men who
• 2:07:18
  died was going to have a significant life otherwise, and it is portentous that
• 2:07:24
  he's going to be killed. There's four thousand deaths that are about to happen,
• 2:07:28
  ma'am. So Van comes running back right, always an improbable sight in
• 2:07:32
  a saddle because he's not always that heavy. And then the armored train stops
• 2:07:39
  in a position that is so perfect. Matt blames Tavern. They stop exactly
• 2:07:43
  where he wants them to be. I agree, I think I yeah,
• 2:07:45
  yeah, I mean I don't think we have then of the reason that Tavern
• 2:07:48
  right, like yeah, And then he says he gives the signal, and
• 2:07:54
  did you notice that the light that Teslain uses is red? And how smart
• 2:07:58
  that is? Yeah? Why is that? Because red doesn't ruin your night
• 2:08:01
  vision. If you're doing astronomy and you want to look down at your star
• 2:08:05
  chart and then back up at the sky with that ruining your night vision,
• 2:08:07
  you use a red light. It literally the way that your pupils do,
• 2:08:11
  and don't dilate in red light. You don't lose night vision. And so
• 2:08:15
  she picked red light so that way all the archers wouldn't suddenly be blinded even
• 2:08:20
  though they were basically shooting fish in a barrel. She picks the color of
• 2:08:24
  light that would make it easiest for them to do their job with no casualties
• 2:08:28
  on their side. Uh. And we find out only the first forty or
• 2:08:31
  so are the actual Sean Chan out of the four thousand, Yeah, one
• 2:08:35
  percent was invaders, so the rest was your own people. Good job.
• 2:08:39
  We love war. War is great. Men screaming as loudly as the horses.
• 2:08:45
  That just feels like some nightmare. World War one battlefield sort of moment,
• 2:08:50
  you know, all right, So I had a small problem, yeah,
• 2:08:52
  with the numbers, because everybody, they've got a thousand people on each
• 2:08:56
  side. Everybody shoots twice. That's four thousand bolts. There are four thousand
• 2:09:03
  horsemen. I don't believe that one bolt per horseman is anywhere close to kill.
• 2:09:09
  Yeah. He does mention on the second round that some bolts punch through
• 2:09:13
  men to kill men behind them, So there's the implication that some of these
• 2:09:18
  bolts are doing double duty. But two rounds just doesn't seem like enough to
• 2:09:24
  take out the entire four thousand, That's all I'm saying. And in fairness,
• 2:09:28
  they are all reloading for a third round. They don't expect two rounds
• 2:09:33
  to do the job. Everyone does reload, and then when they go to
• 2:09:35
  pick their targets they realize that they managed to kill everyone in two rounds.
• 2:09:41
  Which, again, that's got to be the taverin right, that every bolting
• 2:09:46
  case they were prepared for that to not be correct. They were not assuming
• 2:09:50
  that two rounds were going to do it. So yeah, the Tivan was
• 2:09:54
  just real strong with that because Matt's asking for an improbable campaign to work out
• 2:10:00
  nasty seeing you he's shredding men and horses with these things and then just leaving
• 2:10:03
  them to lead out on the road, like it's it's a nasty, nasty
• 2:10:07
  machine gun mess that he leaves behind, just dand you're caught in the crossfire.
• 2:10:11
  So there's nowhere to go, right, because if you get hit in
• 2:10:13
  the arm from one side and then the gut from the other side, you're
• 2:10:16
  not dead right away, but you're dead, yeah, Like yeah, especially
• 2:10:22
  without help exactly, Like who's coming to get you? You are the help,
• 2:10:26
  right and everyone died, there's no one to run and get help,
• 2:10:28
  and where you're going to get it from, Like you're all gonna bleed out
• 2:10:31
  by morning. A couple of them are going to crawl away and find a
• 2:10:35
  farmhouse to get like nursed in by some Florence Nightingale character. But like that's
• 2:10:39
  that's not a military recovery. Yeah, I mean it kind of feels like,
• 2:10:45
  you know, gosh, all the stuff I've been hearing about Ukraine,
• 2:10:48
  and like the Russian soldiers who get wounded in on the Ukraine side, who
• 2:10:50
  just suicide because there's no help coming from their side. Oh, Russia,
• 2:10:56
  You're so kind to your people. So you know, you hear about that
• 2:11:01
  and it's like, yeah, that's that's what people do, because it's like
• 2:11:05
  you're wounded, you're on the battlefield, you can't get out, there's no
• 2:11:07
  help coming. Even told horror stories about what the other side is going to
• 2:11:11
  do to you, which is nonsense in actuality, but also like dying of
• 2:11:16
  your wounds is not a pleasant way to go. I've read enough stories.
• 2:11:22
  Yeah, yeah, no, you have all these weapons lying around. It
• 2:11:24
  makes sense to not let bacteria be your end. It just does. Yeah.
• 2:11:30
  So it's it's a brutal call, a brutal call to make for sure
• 2:11:35
  on the battlefield. Yeah, Matt just fucking bails on all of them.
• 2:11:37
  And it's like, yeah, that's your world now. To quote Tom,
• 2:11:41
  war is just fools killing other fools for foolish reasons. Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:11:46
  And in the words of you know, system of a down, why do
• 2:11:48
  they always send the poor? Why don't princes fight the war? Yeah?
• 2:11:56
  You know why, I know, we all know why. It's really it's
• 2:12:03
  and a couple of people maybe get away, like there's a couple of horses
• 2:12:05
  running. Yeah, but the two one is impressed with how ruthless this is
• 2:12:09
  She's like, whoa a lion can have no mercy. Let's kiss again.
• 2:12:13
  And this is where he's like, this is a new kind of war.
• 2:12:18
  He can still hear them screaming. It was silent on the road, but
• 2:12:20
  he could still hear the screaming. So that's just echoing in his hat.
• 2:12:24
  I assume right, right, he knows what's happening back there, and men
• 2:12:28
  are succumbing to horrific injuries he inflicted with no one to help them in the
• 2:12:31
  dark. It's not great, Matt. You should feel bad. Two on.
• 2:12:35
  Stop feeling turned on in correct response and gathering his men, he led
• 2:12:41
  them down the road down the north side of the hill. There was no
• 2:12:45
  need to let the survivors see how many they were. In a few hours
• 2:12:48
  they would join up with the men from the other hill, and a few
• 2:12:52
  hours more with Carlo Minn. Before sunset they were going to hit the shan
• 2:12:56
  Chin again. He intended to make them run to pull that bloody stopper for
• 2:13:00
  him, just like Roda the Giralda. Yep, do we get an idea
• 2:13:03
  of how many people he kills? Because it's four thousand there, there's at
• 2:13:07
  least two more places where they're doing that, so you know they might not
• 2:13:11
  be as big, but figure, you know, another two thousand at each.
• 2:13:16
  I mean, he's probably not crossing ten thousand deaths in one night,
• 2:13:20
  but he's getting uncomfortably close to not be calling it a war crime or something
• 2:13:26
  like one general for that much death in a single night, Like, that's
• 2:13:31
  that's a lot of death, my dude. I feel like maybe you should
• 2:13:33
  give up a critical body part and recompense for that. Hopefully there's some weird,
• 2:13:39
  creepy interdimensional aliens that can help me out with that desire. Phil Is
• 2:13:43
  is saying that might represent giving up a part of your body for a wound
• 2:13:50
  you give to somebody else, like an eye for an eye. That might
• 2:13:54
  be you know, you should be a writer. That's a really cool,
• 2:13:56
  cool thing you just came up with there. Maybe maybe he should take his
• 2:14:01
  Oh wait, yeah, so yeah, that's that's a fun one. I
• 2:14:05
  love that that scene of him just absolutely massacring, Like you see Matt finally
• 2:14:11
  finally back with the band, finally back on the war path, finally back
• 2:14:15
  in his element of yeah he's gonna be lucky, he's gonna kick some ass,
• 2:14:20
  and like really getting ready for the last battle. It's it's fun to
• 2:14:24
  see Matt back at his elm I mean in a way like we just saw
• 2:14:28
  Rand really hit like peak Rand, and then he hit the thing that begins
• 2:14:33
  his really sharp descent. Matt has now hit peak Matt. This is now
• 2:14:37
  the Matt we think of. He's got his hat, he's got his army,
• 2:14:39
  he's got his confidence in synthesizing all his memories. He's like dealt with
• 2:14:45
  the two one thing almost like this is really peak Matt. He's come back
• 2:14:48
  into his fullness. He's out of that horrid slump that the whole Aboudhara tangent
• 2:14:52
  brought upon him. He has fun right. He hasn't been with the band
• 2:14:56
  since he tried to rescue a Gwayn from the eyes die right, Like,
• 2:15:01
  this has been a long time since we've been back with this Matt, and
• 2:15:05
  it's it's glorious, even though there's a lot of death, that is glorious
• 2:15:09
  to see him reunited with the band and able to do all that magic stuff.
• 2:15:16
  In the same way, it's really nice to see Parent reunite with Fayel
• 2:15:18
  and become back to peak Parent. He has everything he needs, which is
• 2:15:22
  again why I don't like when Sanderson goes back on that and sort of there's
• 2:15:26
  still marital issues, right, I don't like that he rehashes that. I
• 2:15:28
  really wish that they just kind of resolve that and moved on. But you
• 2:15:33
  know, Sanderson rehashes a lot of the three boys relationships in the first book.
• 2:15:37
  So, but in Knife of Dreams, Jordan completes a lot of the
• 2:15:46
  characters. He brings them back to their full power. Yeah, and you
• 2:15:52
  get to see them with all of the all the little details that Ariel puts
• 2:15:56
  in her transition posters. You know, like this is the point at which
• 2:16:00
  they're really hitting. I mean, there's a couple of details that technically haven't
• 2:16:03
  happened yet, but like this is where they're reaching that point of like the
• 2:16:07
  fulfillment. They're companyons their costumes, their weapons, their powers, they're overcoming
• 2:16:11
  their doubts, the big boss battle that they've managed to get through, like
• 2:16:16
  each of them has gone through all of that, and they just are glorious
• 2:16:20
  And we're ready to send our level twenties at the Dark One, right,
• 2:16:22
  Yeah, we're ready for the last battle. It's sort of what this feels
• 2:16:26
  like is like, and that's why I think this book was so well received.
• 2:16:30
  It's like, Okay, obviously this is gearing out for the last battle.
• 2:16:33
  They are we are on the march for the last battle. We are
• 2:16:37
  getting to an end of this series. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely,
• 2:16:41
  that's my feeling every time I read this book, from the first time through
• 2:16:43
  this time, and it's why I consider it part of that final chapter,
• 2:16:48
  right, that final it's not a final three books, it's final four absolutely,
• 2:16:54
  you know, that is the final quarter of the series. The first
• 2:16:58
  three is quarter one, the next three is quarter two, and then seven,
• 2:17:03
  eight, nine, ten, the next four or quarter four or quarter
• 2:17:07
  three, yeah, and then the next four three, three, three,
• 2:17:13
  three, four, four four other four quarters of the series. Absolutely,
• 2:17:16
  and then New Spring is just a nice little thing that loops back around between
• 2:17:20
  the beginning and the end. Ye yep. It's the connective bead on the
• 2:17:24
  bracelet. It's the string that goes through it, which is Moraine, of
• 2:17:30
  course, because the story really is about Morain more than anyone else really,
• 2:17:33
  yeah, absolutely, Like the story is about Rand as a phenomenon, but
• 2:17:37
  the character is Moraine. That's the one who actually unifies everything in the Bring
• 2:17:43
  It down to Earth, you know, Rand is a force of nature.
• 2:17:46
  He's not down to earth. He is the Earth. It's totally different,
• 2:17:48
  right, Wow, Episode five hundred, dude, Episode five hundred in the
• 2:17:54
  bag fucking That was a long episode, but befits us, very much fits
• 2:18:00
  us. It was in fairness. It was also a long chapter with a
• 2:18:03
  lot of density, its knife of dreams in its conclusion phase. It's so
• 2:18:09
  good. It's just so meaty. And it's Matt and Rand, which are
• 2:18:13
  also you know, pretty dense. That's like the center. Glorious. I
• 2:18:18
  love doing this stuff. Oh man, No, I'm so excited. I'm
• 2:18:22
  so excited to be at episode five hundred. And thank you. Thank you
• 2:18:26
  to everybody out there who listens. Thank you to everybody who supports us financially,
• 2:18:30
  everyone supports us in all the other ways that we've been supported, which
• 2:18:33
  are numerous, too numerous to name here. You know, I'll be the
• 2:18:37
  first to say that this accomplishment is at everybody. Oh yeah, right,
• 2:18:43
  who's participated. Yeah, to paraphrase Brandon Sanderson, this is not our podcast,
• 2:18:46
  this is your podcast. It's amazing how much the fan feedback makes the
• 2:18:54
  result. Yeah, yeah, truly, I mean doing this just into the
• 2:18:58
  void with no feed back would be a very different experience. And of course
• 2:19:03
  a huge thank you to you A Radio for stepping up and taking over and
• 2:19:07
  just making it, you know, the ultimate contribution of like becoming the co
• 2:19:13
  host, but also like even before that, Yeah, yeah, I did
• 2:19:16
  lead the pack of Rabbit fanatics that was clogging the discord during your live recordings
• 2:19:20
  for sure. All right, well, I think that's it for episode five
• 2:19:26
  hundred, and I'll want to turn recording off, but I think it is
• 2:19:28
  time. Yeah, thank you again so much to everyone. This has been
• 2:19:33
  great and we will see you next week for episode five hundred. And yeah,
• 2:19:39
  Jesus, I joined just before episode three hundred. That was I joined
• 2:19:43
  right before episode three hundred, so I've now I've now done two hundred episodes.
• 2:19:48
  It's fantastic. Okay, wow wow, And yeah, if we do
• 2:19:52
  circle back around and have to redo as many books as we're as we do
• 2:19:56
  in order for me to be able to have done the whole series, I
• 2:19:58
  think we are going to get to one thousand honestly, to come back all
• 2:20:03
  the way around to book five or whatever. Let's see, eleven books is
• 2:20:07
  five hundred, right, and we have three more plus the five we have
• 2:20:13
  eight more books, so it's gonna be well, plus we have to get
• 2:20:16
  through the rest of this book, so it's really a new Spring ten and
• 2:20:20
  a half to eight and a half. It might be close. I think
• 2:20:24
  we're going to get closer to like eight hundred or nine hundred if we do
• 2:20:26
  it that way, probably yeah, yeah, so I'm guessing in the nine
• 2:20:31
  hundreds. But then there's New Spring too. We'll see if we might get
• 2:20:35
  to we might get to put a comma in our episode numbering, but we
• 2:20:41
  might not. We will see. We have a few years to be that's
• 2:20:43
  that is a long long commitment, because another five hundred episodes will be another
• 2:20:50
  basically ten years at the rate that we're going. Yeah, yeah, for
• 2:20:52
  sure, So we'll see. But for now, it's a new new hundred.
• 2:21:00
  That's very exciting. It's a new hundred. There's a five at the
• 2:21:03
  beginning of all the episodes. Yeah, that's just that's absolutely bonkers. And
• 2:21:07
  half a thousand. Yeah, we will see you all next week, next
• 2:21:13
  week, bye bye. Definitely do the zoom recording because I continue to have
• 2:22:03
  I think my computer's not getting Windows updates anymore, so like there's something going
• 2:22:07
  Caddywampus with its little brain and uh yeah, just let's make sure to have
• 2:22:13
  the zoom on. Okay, zoom recording is on. So have you lost
• 2:22:16
  had any issues with your own recording yet? Not yet. Well I've had
• 2:22:22
  one say that I've run out of disk space right at the end of recording.
• 2:22:26
  That was a hot, nuanced episode. And then yesterday I was recording
• 2:22:31
  with Steve Barnes, who we had on as a guest a Sweet Child of
• 2:22:35
  Time. I was on Sweet Child of Time. We talked about time Bandits,
• 2:22:39
  which was a trip. Definitely go listen to that when it comes out.
• 2:22:43
  I'll put the link in the show notes. But that we were recording
• 2:22:46
  on Zencaster, which is a web based platform. But I also was doing
• 2:22:50
  a local recording because I don't trust web stuff, and sure enough I was
• 2:22:54
  having there was tons of connection issues for me. Okay, those of you
• 2:23:18
  who are watching my girlfriend just try to run behind me with a blanket overhead
• 2:23:22
  to be not suspicious pell and she is about the most unsuccessful attempt to be
• 2:23:37
  I think I've ever seen in my life. Oh my god, that was
• 2:23:46
  good. That was good at that? All right, she failed. That's
• 2:23:52
  trouble with the natural. This blanket just sort of rose up behind you and
• 2:24:03
  moved like really mysteriously, and then it like fell to the ground to revealed
• 2:24:09
  that for like running away. It's like those videos you see the little kids
• 2:24:13
  who threw up the sheet and then try and dive through the doorway to make
• 2:24:16
  it look like they disappear. But it was exactly Sorry sorry about the laughing
• 2:24:26
  of that context, but oh that got my funny bone. It was such
• 2:24:30
  a I should just leave all of that and with absolutely no You'll be like,
• 2:24:39
  what the fuck? No? Put it in at the end? Ah
• 2:24:50
  the fuck? Was I trying to say local recording not trusting it? Something
• 2:24:54
  went wrong at the end of Sweet Yeah, So yeah, I was having
• 2:24:58
  con issues with Sweet Child of Time repeatedly throughout the recording. The recording ultimately
• 2:25:05
  took like three hours because it took so long to work through the multiple iterations
• 2:25:11
  of like I think like every hour it crashed on us. Yes, so
• 2:25:15
  it crashed twice, like where I had to completely leave and come back,
• 2:25:18
  and that was after like a half hour of troubleshooting at the beginning, so
• 2:25:20
  I had to keep leaving and coming back. I have no idea what Zencaster
• 2:25:26
  was actually able to capture from me, there was like a four second lag,
• 2:25:28
  like at the end he wanted to do trivia, but then he was
• 2:25:31
  like, hmm, seems like there's a lag. Let's do a test.
• 2:25:33
  And we tested it and it was like a four second lag and wow,
• 2:25:37
  So I have no idea what Zencaster captured. So I was really glad I
• 2:25:43
  had my local recording right, and I was, you know, bragging to
• 2:25:45
  Steve, like, Harrett, you glad I did a local recording, ha
• 2:25:46
  ha ha, I'm so clever. And I looked at my spot at my
• 2:25:50
  Audacity and it had a little error up that said recording was paused at some
• 2:25:56
  locations or something like the file was the right length. So I'm assuming that
• 2:26:03
  at some point in all of zen Caster's like wild flailing around, it like
• 2:26:07
  interrupted the signal for a few moments. And I don't think it was Audacity's
• 2:26:11
  fault, but just yet, all in all, I'm like, I've seen
• 2:26:13
  that happen with Audacity, and what I think it is is usually it misses
• 2:26:18
  a couple of literally bits like which you know, you say, like a
• 2:26:22
  couple but yeah, you wouldn't notice that because it's a couple of bits and
• 2:26:26
  in a second, you're tambling at thousands of bits, right, So yeah,
• 2:26:30
  and zen Caster said the reason it was having problems with me was because
• 2:26:33
  I didn't have enough like memory available on my computer because this is a really
• 2:26:37
  tiny, little, yeah laptop that is not getting support and like it's just
• 2:26:43
  a whole it's a whole mess. But yeah, again, that's why I
• 2:26:46
  use For those of you out there who care, I use audio Hijack.
• 2:26:50
  I've probably mentioned this before. It's from Rogue Amiba. They make Mac only
• 2:26:54
  software. But that's one of the reasons I'm stuck on Mac is the it's
• 2:26:58
  fucking reliable recording song where that I never have to worry about and it doesn't
• 2:27:03
  render at the end, so I never have to if my computer crashes,
• 2:27:07
  everything is already on disc Yeah, so everything saved up to that point.
• 2:27:11
  I don't lose anything. Yeah. I would like to get a different computer
• 2:27:18
  that to run this station, and then I think I would try using Reaper
• 2:27:20
  because I hope that at this point Reaper and Discord can play nice together,
• 2:27:24
  or a Discord in Zoom actually, because I don't use no Reaper in Zoom.
• 2:27:30
  I think they might play nice together. Honestly, all three of them,
• 2:27:33
  and the modern computer should be able to run all three without too much
• 2:27:35
  problem. No, I mean like the software itself, Like way back when
• 2:27:37
  I first started, like Discord had weird permissions that wouldn't But I don't even
• 2:27:41
  use Discord to stream now I use Zoom. You use the Discord to stream,
• 2:27:43
  So like, I really want to switch to Reaper. But at this
• 2:27:46
  point, this computer is such an ancient, frail little thing that I just
• 2:27:52
  like, don't even want to change anything. But it's starting to really fracture
• 2:27:56
  under the strain of what I've been doing for a long time. But I'm
• 2:27:58
  like not changing anything. Why aren't you Why aren't you happy? Now?
• 2:28:03
  This is annoying, but I guess computers just do that sometimes when they stop
• 2:28:07
  getting support or whatever. It's it's not supposed to matter, but it is
• 2:28:13
  part swear out software develops memory leaks. But yeah, we could talk about
• 2:28:18
  getting we should get you a new computer, like that's been something on the
• 2:28:22
  bylist for a while for you, because that computer's always struggled. And that's
• 2:28:26
  why you do Discord on your phone and you've got you can't see I forget
• 2:28:31
  what it is you can't can't see while you're recording. Isn't it like you
• 2:28:35
  can't see yourself or something like that. I turn myself off on purpose.
• 2:28:37
  Oh okay, because I for my own mental health. That's a perk,
• 2:28:41
  not a flaw. But yeah, it is why I have to use discord
• 2:28:46
  on my phone. And yeah, I mean this is just a little tiny
• 2:28:48
  work hourse. It's just frustrated that it can't do this one task. It's
• 2:28:52
  starting to break down under the same task. I've been asking from it for
• 2:28:54
  years and it's been performing. It's starting to like throw up more errors than
• 2:29:00
  I used to. So all that's to say I really liked there being a
• 2:29:03
  zoom backup. All right, anyway, all right, I got Timber came
• 2:29:09
  on in the Sunshine no less. Oh yeah, he's loving that sacked out
• 2:29:15
  doggy. Oh that's great, Little Jim Yeah right, Fireball and then that
• 2:29:20
  quote fantastic. Still feel this whole hand. I mean they're all good.
• 2:29:26
  I like them all, but you know, some are definitely more better than
• 2:29:28
  others. God. Uh So. Then the Inverse slash Companion podcast to Behind
• 2:29:37
  the Bastards is cool people who did cool stuff, and last week was George
• 2:29:41
  orwell that was the cool person who did cool stuff and pretty neat story.
• 2:29:50
  Yeah on a little George Orwell's story. It's it's wild. He did a
• 2:29:52
  lot of different things in his life, did some kind of shitty stuff.
• 2:29:56
  He starts out literally going to Burma to be a police officer in the British
• 2:30:03
  Protectorate or whatever, and the experience of doing that turns him into an anti
• 2:30:09
  colonialist. He like becomes like a very like staunch anti imperialist who like works
• 2:30:16
  like very much for like the right side, as a result of having had
• 2:30:20
  what many would consider to be a fine time doing like police officer work in
• 2:30:24
  Burma. Like such an unusual outcome, but he wrote his most famous works
• 2:30:31
  near the end of his life. He died when he was only forty six
• 2:30:33
  because he refused to take care of himself despite being sick. Like his whole
• 2:30:37
  life. He was just like, you know what I should do after recovering
• 2:30:39
  from upper respiratory infections that kept me bedridden for months, I should go back
• 2:30:43
  to the Scotland heath and cut timber and live in a cabin. Like,
• 2:30:48
  what the fuck you doing? You so dumb? Killing yourself ridiculous. But
• 2:30:54
  he did, like the works we know him for most like near the end
• 2:30:56
  of his life, like in like the last couple of years of his life,
• 2:30:58
  like right there at the end. Really interesting, interesting, dude,
• 2:31:05
  because like I just know nineteen eighty four Animal Farm, Animal Yeah, nineteen
• 2:31:09
  eighty four on Animal Farm wrote the two two books. He wrote a bunch
• 2:31:13
  of other stuff, but those are the two, and he wrote those fairly
• 2:31:16
  close together near the end of his life. Nineteen eighty four, I believe
• 2:31:20
  was the last one he wrote. And then I believe this week is Dungeons
• 2:31:22
  and Dragons. I haven't actually started listening to it yet, but I looked
• 2:31:26
  at the cover, and this week is Dungeons and Dragons, which behind the
• 2:31:30
  Bastards did a whole satanic panic episode, which of course had a massive you
• 2:31:35
  know, Dungeons and Dragons kept coming up in that because obviously, but you
• 2:31:41
  know, it's it's the cool people who did cool stuff take on the whole
• 2:31:43
  thing, because Dungeons and Dragons is cool. It is very good. It's
• 2:31:48
  a neat way of visualizing gameplay and fantasy worlds and stuff like that. It's
• 2:31:52
  it's it's fun, all right, all right, you want to do this?
• 2:31:56
  Yeah, thank you for listening to the Wheel of times, spoilers,
• 2:32:00
  podcast, rate us in the Apple Podcast app, or support us on Patreon.
• 2:32:05
  Is that good enough?