Everything that we had, you know.

Yeah.

Again, there's this sort of ex post facto belief by a lot of people that, oh, if we just eased up a little on the unconditional surrender stuff and told them from the get go that they could keep the emperor, they would have thrown in the towel.

They were ready to surrender.

That's baloney.

There's this fascinating series of diplomatic cables that go back and forth between Moscow and Tokyo at this time.

So before that Soviet invasion, so now we're talking, this is the middle of July that this is all going down.

What the hell is that?

And, you know, I'm interested, too, because with all your books, how do you feel like it allows you to explore the Pacific War differently from just your writing, your academic writing?

that's a great question um so the the podcast was actually started by two other guys seth perrin and bill toady and seth i've known for years he worked down at the world war ii museum in new orleans for a really long time he was the guy who was in charge of their oral history program down there and He interviewed thousands of US vets.

And so he's on top of that sort of corpus of knowledge.

And then Bill Todi, interesting guy, retired US Navy fast boat skipper, who then went into industry and worked for Hewlett Packard and a number of other companies.

Bill sort of brought the professional warfighter angle to the podcast and, you know, professional Navy guy.

He knows a lot of things about, you know, how do you navigate a ship, you know, stuff like that.

And then I ended up being a very frequent third wheel for them and did a number of podcasts, like a lot of the stuff that was happening in Guadalcanal and some of the later war stuff as well.

uh kind of oh here's how the engineers designed that beam in a ship or something it's you know not that that isn't valuable but it only takes us so far right so the thing i've always wondered i don't know if i've ever asked you about this i mean right now i think as we sit here today i don't know anybody who knows more about the imperial japanese navy and and its various ships and the classes and all i do i mean maybe there are people maybe it's maybe it's just my limitations could be but i'm just telling you man i mean it's just absolutely it's like it's like the movie rain man you know where raymond raymond is counting cards or something i'm like charlie babbitt like oh my goodness how is he doing this um so and this has been since childhood for you so so where did that come from i mean how do you get drawn to the imperial japanese navy as a kid from indiana from terre haute right yes i'm a professor and and uh here you are as a you know like the age you could read practically you're looking at the the imperial japanese navy how did that happen