yeah all right just making sure okay and then i have the the flip side of yours is just lucky i guess play to allow one of your posse to re-roll a critical failure Oh,

okay.

And I have Iron and Whiskey.

Play on a wounded character out of combat.

All wounds are recovered, but the victim gains a permanent scar that subtracts two from his persuasion for the next game month.

And the little quote is, I'm not going to kid you, this is going to hurt.

And then I have Bullseye.

Favorite part?

friends, and you're only going to be able to have friends with someone who understands exactly what you're going through, otherwise you're not going to be able to relate to

anybody.

Because you can't.

I wondered to myself when I was watching the film last between Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert and then the sword fight between Sean Connery and Kirby and I thought like I wonder if Connery isn't the most like he's not a very powerful and his his sort of grand strategy is to befriend this other guy so that between the two of them maybe they Because, yes, he sort of gives the Kurgan a fight, but by the end, he's so overmatched.

It's clearly not even fair.

And so I wondered if maybe his character is underpowered a little bit, and so he needs this new guy sidekick

go first.

I'm going to get Paul Neskow.

So what were your impressions? Well,

what, um, I thought the, the, they made the bottling part of it pretty idiot proof, which was, which was very helpful for me.

Um, true.

Uh, you know, I listen, I think a little bit of the history that she gave at the, at the very, very beginning of the tasting was nice just to kind of set the context and family owned and the big fire back in the nineties and all of that kind of stuff.

But, uh, But I think for me, you know, that was my first probably real distillery or real tasting, I guess, experience in quite a while.

I thought the lady that ran it did a great job.

I actually ended up getting two bottles.

Andrew, why don't you start us off and tell us a little bit about like what you thought about just the tour, just kind of like Willett in general.

If I could ask you quite a big question to start, how do they go about that?

In the 20-odd years it took to defeat the French Revolution and Napoleon, 20-odd years, which is effectively an adult lifetime for many people, Britain realizes that security is critical, that Europe is not something it wants to be in.

It's something that it needs to manage.

Europe is a problem.

Napoleon is just the last and l- and most effective of the French leaders who have tried to conquer all of Western Europe, dominate Central Europe, control Italy, and turn France from a nation state into a European empire with enormous resources.

We know what those resources are because in 1812, Napoleon is able to move six hundred thousand men into Russia, uh, without stopping any of his other campaigns.

Britain simply cannot fight a country on land which can mobilize millions of men.

How relevant do you think that this kind of historical notion of Britannia rules the waves is today, and particularly against this backdrop of rising global nationalism?

As, uh, as listeners know and as I prepped you, uh, my first question out of the box, what's your book about?

No More Napoleons is a book about all of those things that everybody forgot in the period between the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War.

It's a story of how Britain, a very small offshore island constellation, was able to shape, manage, influence Europe, and prevent the outbreak of another hegemonic burst of full-on total war in Europe from the last of Napoleon through to the launching of the First World War in August 1914.

What it tries to do is to move away from the format that we normally have, which is there's this crisis and that crisis, that the British are at loggerheads with the French about North Africa and some other things, maybe Belgium.

They're at loggerheads with the Russians about Istanbul and control of the Baltic and some things in the Far East.

And we look at these things through the microscope, and what we just see is individual case studies and trying to broaden that out and to understand that for the British, the primary security concern is to stop somebody invading England with a very large army.

Napoleon had threatened to do that in 1803, 1805.

So what does that mean for geo-strategy, geo-strategy today vis-a-vis Europe versus Russia or America versus China or, or, uh, whichever way you wanna take it?