Be and many of those, that's California for welcome to the November 11th Veteran Days edition of National Reviews, Radio Free California podcast.

I'm Will Swain, president of the California Policy Center. You can find my colleagues and me at California PolicyCenter.org. You can find my friend and co-host David Bonson right here across the table. He's an economist, the host of the Capitol Record podcast. He's author of full-time, work in the meaning of life. And of course, say it with me, he's founder of the eponymous investment firm, the Bonson Group. Hello, David. Hello, Will. So good to be with you

here in the studio. You can do that without reading the script. Hey, David, it's Veterans Day,

and I wanted to ask you if you'd ever heard of Eddie Rickenbocker. Ring any bells. Yes. Let's see. I was just talking

about him with you about 40 seconds ago. He was a World War I fighter pilot ace,

the most decorated, I believe the most decorated combat fighter pilot in World War I. Is't that amazing that we had fire pilots at World War I? Yes, it is. At all. That they existed like a, I mean we're talking about like a decade after manned flight, you know, at Kitty Hawk or something. Like we had airplanes before we had televisions? This is hard to believe, but we have our priority straight, I suppose.

Yeah, it's just amazing to think about.

So Rickenbacher comes out of Ohio. He's, of course, German-American family. He tries to enlist at the beginning of the First World War in 1914 when the U.S. is looking for enlistees, but not really ready to go to war, of course, at this point.

They tell him, go away, you're too small.

War continues.

The demand for humans to carry weapons on the Western Front increases dramatically under Woodrow

Wilson.

But he's like 5'4 and under 120 pounds, and they just can't imagine him carrying a weapon.

So he finally finagles a job as a driver

because he's also a mechanic and a tool and die guy and he can race cars and so they put him in

driving and within months he's in the first army air force i think it's actually what is it called here

it was called the army air service and by 1918 the year the war ends, he's actually flying missions against Germans up in the sky.

And it's pretty harrowing.

Right toward the end of the war, he has three confirmed kills in one engagement, where he just shoots down three straight German pilots over Germany.

He wins.

He gets 26 confirmed kills, Medal of Honor, and the

title America's Ace of Aces. So a few months after the war is in, November 11th, the 11th, what is it,

...