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Shane Gillis & Matt McCusker — Vietnam’s Wild Pendulum Swing (feat. Colin Quinn)

In this episode, Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker sit down with Colin Quinn for a chaotic, darkly funny history run-through of Vietnam—how it started, why it spiraled, and why it still feels like the moment everything flipped. They bounce from French colonial control to World War II, Ho Chi Minh’s surprising early admiration for America, and the Cold War paranoia that pushed the U.S. deeper into a conflict nobody seemed to fully understand.
Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker unpack the weird logic of the “domino theory” and the ego-driven decision-making that kept the machine running. Colin Quinn points out the nightmare pattern: smart people warning “this isn’t working,” while everyone in power nods along anyway, trapped in a project that can’t admit failure. It’s less a clean military story and more a psychological one—like a party you should’ve left hours ago, except it’s a war.
They get into how strategies like “pacification,” arming hamlets, and search-and-destroy created the opposite of what they promised, and how corruption in South Vietnam made the whole mission feel morally upside-down. Along the way, Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker connect Vietnam to later disasters like Iraq, the illusion of certainty, and how governments sell fear when they need momentum. Colin Quinn adds his signature punch: history is full of systems hitting an extreme and snapping into their opposite—what he calls “enantiodromia,” aka the pendulum swing that turns “saving” into “destroying.”
The conversation also hits the human cost: soldiers drafted into chaos, veterans coming home to a country that didn’t know what to do with them, and the way war rewires people. Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker don’t sanitize it, but they don’t pretend it’s simple either—this is a messy, bitter, funny look at how big ideas turn into ground-level suffering.

If you’re into Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast energy—history, politics, culture, and brutally honest comedy—this one hits hard. Shane Gillis, Matt McCusker, and Colin Quinn take Vietnam and turn it into a story about power, propaganda, and why “winning” isn’t always even definable.
Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker fans will love the mix of real history and ridiculous detours, with Colin Quinn sharpening the theme into a grim punchline: the pendulum always swings back.

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