Ep. 214: all is risk (w/ john benfield)

[00:00:04] Speaker A: As you'll know, I live. I live in a very old house. Right. At least for this country. [00:00:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Whoa, now. So, like, a new build, as far. [00:00:15] Speaker A: As we're concerned, it's older than your house. Okay. I. I live in an old house. It's a century old. And we. When we first moved in here five years ago, we. We moved into the basement because it was a finished basement at the time. Obviously, anyone who's been listening to this for a minute knows then a hurricane came and destroyed our little basement apartment. So we don't live down there anymore. But, Mark, you'll probably remember when you came here, I showed you around, and there was, like, a little weird back room that Keo kept his stuff in. [00:00:52] Speaker B: You know, I don't think I conveyed at the time through not, you know, not wanting. Wanting to appear, like, masculine and tough, but your basement absolutely gave me the gbs like you. It is the most. The vibes are awful in that basement. [00:01:09] Speaker A: I mean, that is happening. That is certainly not the worst. Like, the. The basement that I grew up in when I was a kid is, like. Was the most terrible. I mean, I didn't grow up in the basement in the house I grew up in. I just was like, just my Harry Potter backstory right here. [00:01:27] Speaker C: Visions of everyone in America living in home alone basements. [00:01:30] Speaker A: Exactly. Just like a furnace. Like, we go down there. No, the one that I in, the house I grew up in was deeply terrifying. Just like spider webs and dirt everywhere. Like, at least this, you know, this has, like, walls and, like, normal places. But anyway, not the point. There is a room towards the back of this that my husband uses as like, a little office sort of situation. And he keeps junk back there, and there's a pipe in it. That one day he was like, hey, Corey, come in here for a sec. And I was like, okay. And I come back, and he's like, look at this. There's, like, some sort of material on it that had, like, threads coming out of it and stuff like that. And he was like, do you think that's asbestos? I was like, I have never seen asbestos. I don't think. And so I open up the Google machine, and I look, and sure enough, it's asbestos wrapped around this pipe that is in here. And so, you know, he goes and he gets stuff and he wraps a whole bunch of shit around in a bunch of duct tape and everything so that there's not asbestos floating all over the place. And he goes and he looks around to make sure none of the other pipes have Them none anywhere else. It's just. [00:02:47] Speaker B: You had like a full respiratory breakdown, didn't you, at one point during that year? [00:02:52] Speaker A: Yes, I do have chronic bronchitis, but things like that. Do you know, it's iffy thinking about that. It was also very far from where I ever was. Again, this is a corner thing, completely closed off from the rest of the basement, which is probably why nobody noticed that it was there. Like, if there's asbestos and everything else, it had long since been removed. But this little room that nobody ever goes in had this little like 8 inch bit of asbestos on it. [00:03:21] Speaker C: What was the pipe? [00:03:23] Speaker A: I think it's just like a water pipe. Like, just like there's a bunch of those going through our house has, you know, like it's heated by hot water. [00:03:34] Speaker B: I dare say you're gonna, you're gonna come back to this with a. We'll get there, Mark. [00:03:37] Speaker A: But probably. Yeah, but go on. [00:03:40] Speaker B: Legality of asbestos in the States because you, you simply can't have it in your home here, can you, Bennis? Is that right? [00:03:46] Speaker A: No, we'll get there. We'll get there, Mark. Here we go. Both, both cases here. But this was an interesting moment for me because like I said, I'd never seen asbestos. And I remember passively sort of thinking like, what is that even for? Like, why is that a thing we would have in our house on this pipe? But it's also just one of those things that you like, hear about all the time. And I never gave it much thought. I don't know if you have these, but here there are always these commercials with lawyers telling you that if you have a cancer called mesothelioma, you can get in touch with them so that you can be part of lawsuits against companies that use asbestos. Do you have those? [00:04:31] Speaker C: Not, not. We, we don't get that. So not like in the States. Like, we don't. Lawyer efforts just don't make it onto the. No, they don't exist. [00:04:41] Speaker A: Sure. [00:04:42] Speaker B: For a while. Yeah, exactly. And for. For a few years there in the noughties or thereabouts, like in injury lawyers, for you, that kind of thing was really just everywhere. We had. What's his name? Lovejoy Shane. Oh yeah, we're real lawyers and we're here to get the best deal for you. That he was, he was plugging in three laws for you for a while, which I was very fond of. But no, not for specific cases. When, when my family and I went to Caribbean a couple of years back, like, as you know, the evenings were spent Watching game show tv. And I was very enamored at some particular class action lawsuit which was. Which was on every single advertisement break for like military wives who'd been affected by like a radioactive lake or something. [00:05:40] Speaker A: Oh. Oh, that's interesting. [00:05:42] Speaker C: Sounds like a cold open for the future. [00:05:44] Speaker A: Seriously, how have I not talked about that yet? [00:05:46] Speaker B: Did your husband come into contact with radiation from this lake then? If so, 555. [00:05:51] Speaker A: Interesting. You know, there's every chance that I may have seen this, but as you have seen, it's very art. Commercials are so all over the place, it's very easy to tune them out after a while. [00:06:01] Speaker B: I would find that tough. I would. I'm super. I love, love American ads, as you know. [00:06:05] Speaker C: No, they're incredible. I'm gonna be there. I'm in America Friday and I'm looking forward to seeing. But no, the, the asbestos thing here, though, was a. It was a big deal and it kind of went. It kicked off in the, I guess late 80s. [00:06:18] Speaker A: Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. I'm going to tell you a story. [00:06:20] Speaker C: Oh, words. We're getting to it. We'll get there. We'll get to it. [00:06:27] Speaker A: We'll get there. Yeah, we'll get there. John, welcome to the show. [00:06:31] Speaker C: Just doing my best mark impression. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:34] Speaker A: Yes. Well, fellas, I can step back. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the history of asbestos and why it became such a societal menace. And then I'm going to tell you about a couple of towns haunted by what one documentary I watched referred to as the evil dust. So while asbestos is naturally occurring and had been used in many ancient cultures, it began being manufactured in the late 19th century in Canada of all places. And asbestos is like this super soft and silky material, but when you sort of pack it together and the way that it comes, like, out of minds and whatnot, it's incredibly solid. So it's got that kind of two different texture things going on. That's really appealing. And they called it the magic mineral. At the time, it was sought after because of its resistance to heat and chemicals and water and its high tensile strength. Like I said, when put together, this shit is strong as fuck. You could use it for all kinds of construction. They would make firefighting suits out of it. And manufacture of this became a huge employer which. Which should already make you go like, oh, oh, no. Because we remember, for example, the radium girls that I talked about a year or two ago. It's never great when there's a hugely dangerous substance and they've got people working up close and personal with it. Odds are they probably didn't, probably didn't tell them they were working with a hugely dangerous substance. Different time. I mean, it's fine. It was, it was cool to sacrifice some ladies for a cool looking watch. [00:08:16] Speaker B: Thalidomide. [00:08:18] Speaker A: Thalidomide, right. You know, listen, no morning sickness. Baby without arms. [00:08:24] Speaker B: Yes. [00:08:26] Speaker A: Who can say which is, which is the better choice? So the working conditions in asbestos manufacture were super dusty, like deeply dusty. One historian explained. Historian explained, quote, workers couldn't see more than 6 to 10ft in certain parts of the factories. And dust was common in a lot of mines and factories at the time. So people didn't necessarily think of this as like a super problematic thing. It was just. It is what it is. Of course, most factories and mines were also super dangerous in their own ways at the time. So it's not like great either way. But this wasn't necessarily a red flag in and of itself. But just to imagine yourself in one of these factories, 6 to 10ft, and you're seeing a wall of fog basically from how much dust there is in here. [00:09:18] Speaker B: Asbestos fog at that. [00:09:19] Speaker A: Asbestos fog, Exactly. And in 1898, an inspector coined that term, the evil dust, when she came into one of the factories and was like, Jesus Christ, there's a bunch of people who work in here who are getting lung disease from whatever the hell is going on in here. 1898. Right. As I told you, this began being manufactured at the end of the 19th century. It is the end of the 19th century and already they've got inspectors coming into British factories and going, hey, what the fuck? This is, this seems like it's killing people. In 1906, a French inspector discovered that 50 women had died as a result of working with asbestos. So they stopped using it, obviously. Just kidding. They were like duly noted and carried on employing people in factories that were killing them. Again. 1906. 1906. By 1918 in the U.S. i, I just want to point out this is happening. My house was built in 1922, so they knew this was killing people before they put that pipe into my house. Just for perspective here. So by 1918 in the US and Canada, as more and more reports were coming out about the health costs of asbestos, rather than reduce people's contact with it, the company started circling the wagons to figure out how they could avoid responsibility for whatever happened to people that came in contact with it. Among the steps taken was to make it so that asbestos workers couldn't get insurance, as they were guaranteed to need expensive care that the companies didn't want to have to pay for. It's basically exactly what's happening with the fires in Southern California. Like, hey, we've. We fucked up the planet and now it's on fire all the time. So now we're not. We're just not going to insure your house. That's what was happening here. They were like, we're giving everyone asbestos problems. So in order to avoid having to, like, do anything about that, we're just going to make it so that they're not covered and we don't have to pay for whatever happens to them. [00:11:29] Speaker B: It only felt like maybe the 1980s or late 70s that it was outlawed. Over here, Mark. Okay. [00:11:39] Speaker A: We will get there. Just settle in for the journey, my dear friend. [00:11:47] Speaker C: Breathe in the dust to go with it. [00:11:49] Speaker A: Breathe in the dust, man. You know. A small shift occurred with the highly publicized death of a woman named Nellie Kershaw. Kershaw worked at a place called Turner Brothers in Rochdale. [00:12:05] Speaker B: Yes. [00:12:06] Speaker A: Okay. [00:12:06] Speaker C: Very nice. Very nice. [00:12:08] Speaker B: Very. Yeah, very nicely done. [00:12:09] Speaker C: Very nice. [00:12:11] Speaker A: I was very. Not sure about that one. As you could tell. [00:12:14] Speaker C: Going to get your. Your. Your pronunciation sticker for today. [00:12:19] Speaker B: Excellent. [00:12:19] Speaker A: Crushed it. But she worked there and she died in 1924. Hers was the first asbestos death into which there was an actual inquest and the newspapers covered the whole thing. Her lungs were found to have been coated in tiny glass, like fibers that cut into them, leaving scars that eventually made it impossible for her to breathe, leaving. Leading to her suffocating to death from her own scar tissue. [00:12:47] Speaker C: Yes. [00:12:49] Speaker A: Horrifying. [00:12:50] Speaker B: Here we go. Here we fucking go. [00:12:53] Speaker A: Naturally, the company she worked for was like, fuck off. That's not our fault. And no one in her family was compensated for it. As Jeffrey Tweedale put it, quote, she had a disease that didn't exist. In other words, since the company refused to acknowledge that asbestos was the culprit, whatever killed her was just some kind of medical anomaly. No one to blame. Lungs just decided to suffocate her. It happens. The company wouldn't even cover funeral expenses because that would be admitting some form of responsibility which could set a precedent for future lawsuits or even just for similar requests. Their employees were dropping like flies. They didn't want to have to pay for all those funerals. The findings of Nelly's case were published three years later alongside research into over 300 other workers in the same factory. It was found that 17 out of 20 people who had been working there for more than 20 years suffered from the same scarring as Nelly. And they were finally given a name for the thing they were suffering. Suffering and dying from asbestosis. It approve of the name? [00:14:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Nice. [00:14:02] Speaker C: It became the tin I think, doesn't it? [00:14:04] Speaker B: Right on the button. [00:14:06] Speaker A: It's not the last time that we'll find a very on the nose name. [00:14:10] Speaker C: Like that in this considering it doesn't exist. It's quite interesting. [00:14:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:14:14] Speaker C: Straight to the point. [00:14:17] Speaker A: It became clear that legislation was going to be necessary if anything was to be done about this because the companies were completely uninterested in doing the right thing for these people. Again this had become like a hugely profitable industry at this point. They were making money hand over the over fist and they did not want to do anything to slow that down in any way. Regulation is amongst the things that would slow that down. [00:14:41] Speaker B: I don't know how much how. I don't even know how full an answer I want to this really. Right. But was there like one company at the tip of the asbestos pyramid? Like big asbestos? Was there like one kind of mining firm? [00:15:00] Speaker A: It depended on where you were. There were various different companies that were, you know, owned the mines and stuff like that. Often ones that did other things as we'll see when we get to the story. I will tell you a little bit later on. So often it wasn't necessari company that was like just asbestos. It was like we do this and this like thalidomide, Right. Like the companies that did, that owned the. That made thalidomide like were not pharmacy pharmaceutical companies or anything like that. [00:15:26] Speaker B: Wasn't there a. Like a pesticides that we spoke about at one point? [00:15:31] Speaker A: Right, yeah, exactly. So yeah, there were. There's nothing that's like going to be a name that you recognize now or anything like that I don't think especially because as I will get to, a lot of those companies went bankrupt later on. Sort of deliberately. [00:15:47] Speaker B: Good. [00:15:48] Speaker C: Making energy drinks. [00:15:50] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, they now make crime. But yeah, so they decided that they did need. The government realized they needed to do some sort of regulation. So a new law was adopted in 1931 to compensate people who suffered illness as a result of exposure. Exposure to asbestos in the workplace. However, it was super influenced by the industry itself. They had their hands in all that regulation. Again, this all relates to everything at least going on in the United States with regulation of shit. It's like every time they try to regulate something, the companies that we're trying to regulate are the ones like doing all the stuff to get it done. So the law ended up only applying to people who were most heavily exposed to asbestos in the plants. That meant that people who worked in, like, shipyards, for example, where asbestos was used, but they weren't actively manufacturing asbestos, weren't covered by any of these regulations. So they could just, you know, carry on using asbestos in those places with no sort of recourse for anyone who got sick as a result of that. So even as people knew asbestos was a killer, they increasingly started using it for all kinds of cutesy things like tablecloths and home siding. Putting out little infomercials and ads encouraging people to use this highly customizable and fireproof material for all their household needs, especially in the United States. In 1948, American asbestos companies commissioned a study which ended up finding that asbestos was giving people cancer and tumors. They then told the authors of the study to just go ahead and omit that from the findings. Again, not the first time that we've seen this shit, as cigarette companies and oil companies did the same things with lung cancer and climate change, respectively. If you pay for the studies, you can make the studies say whatever you want them to say, and that's exactly what they did. In the 1960s, a South African doctor found that there was a specific cancer that only came from asbestos. Mesothelioma doesn't only came come from asbestos, but it's the leading cause of it, right? And you could get it from a very minimal amount of exposure. Days, weeks, months, Just really short periods of exposure. So if it was in your house. [00:18:21] Speaker B: Days. [00:18:21] Speaker A: Did you say days? Yes, days of exposure. So if it was in your house, I mean, Fuck, Right. Although, by unfortunate irony, your risk of inhaling asbestos is a lot higher if you try to get rid of it in your house than if you just kind of leave it alone, which is why keo just wrapped ours up instead of, like, trying to remove it from the house. So if you have it, if you find asbestos in your house, don't try to. Don't try to get rid of it. Have a professional do it or wrap that shit up. But we've got a thin layer of tissue that covers our organs called mesothelium, and asbestos causes cancer cells to grow in that layer. This most, most often occurs around the lungs and the heart, which are places you really don't want cancer to grow. Like, you hear about cancer, like, starting somewhere and metastasizing to the lungs or something. But, like, if it starts there, you're kind of fucked, right? So at this point, it was becoming clear to the companies that they could be liable for not warning customers about the danger of the use of asbestos. So they put really wishy washy warnings on asbestos products rather than pulling them all together. So you would just see stuff that's like, you know, warning, asbestos may cause certain health defects if you, you know, use this in the wrong way. So, like, heads up, you know, back. [00:19:47] Speaker C: To the cigarettes thing. Right. May cause lungs. [00:19:50] Speaker A: Exactly. Like, if you use them enough, chances are, yes, it's going to cause those things. Right. But not taking full responsibility, just letting you know, you know, if there may be issues here. But at the same time that they were doing this, the industry was also spending tons of money running ads and commissioning articles that told how wonderful asbestos was and how safe it was to use. And the industry was so incredibly powerful and moneyed, they were able to influence what was written about it and get everyone to downplay the horrific dangers they'd known about, again, pretty much since it began being manufactured in the late 1800s. We're not talking about a product here where they used it for 50 years and then suddenly realized it was bad. Right? They knew from the beginning of its manufacture, and yet it just got more and more popular to use. In fact, even the Romans had written about how enslaved people who worked in asbestos mine kept coming down with weird lung problems. It was a thing we've known since antiquity and yet kept on doing this with. It's just wild to think about what lax relay regulations were like until very recent history. Asbestos wasn't fully banned in the EU, including the UK, till 2003, and only became fully banned in the US last year. 20. [00:21:16] Speaker B: Amazing. That's what I wanted. [00:21:20] Speaker C: Squeeze out every penny first. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Very nice. [00:21:23] Speaker A: Right? You couldn't use it in most situations, but there were still loopholes that you could use them in. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Trump was like, that's dumb. Let the baby's find asbestos on day one. [00:21:34] Speaker B: Day one. [00:21:35] Speaker A: Like, if that wasn't in his executive. [00:21:37] Speaker C: Every home, we could eject it straight into the front. [00:21:42] Speaker B: Every good beautiful asbestos. Right, Mike, one of my early takeaways here, right, is you talked about, like, even back in the early days, the glory days of asbestos, right, back when it was cool and new, there wouldn't have been such huge capitalist interest in asbestos back then. [00:22:01] Speaker A: So who bent, like in Rome or in Canada in the late 19th century. Okay, in Rome. Gotcha, go on. [00:22:09] Speaker B: No one's. No one's, you know, like, coining in loads of denarii or whatever they use from homes using asbestos, then there's no kind of why would they. [00:22:21] Speaker A: So it's a great building material and like I said, resistant to fire. So they used it pretty much the same ways. Right. They used it to build and they used it for, like, pottery and things like that. The super hard material that didn't smash when you, you know, when it dropped or things like that. So maybe a bit more frivolous in its uses. It wasn't for huge military uses or anything like that. They weren't building ships with it necessarily. But yeah, similar kind of uses for it at the time. [00:22:50] Speaker C: Saying the British Museum's got a chance of being full of asbestos. [00:22:53] Speaker A: Pottery have asbestos all through it for all we know. I don't know. I don't know how much they've checked to see what materials the jokes on them, finally. Right, exactly. [00:23:03] Speaker C: And all that stuff. [00:23:06] Speaker B: Would you like some of the fun symptoms of asbestosis? [00:23:11] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. Yeah, hit me with it. I'll let you. I'll let you have that one. [00:23:15] Speaker B: Of course, you, you know, the stuff you'd expect, shortness of breath, cough, chest pain and so on. But also a, A common symptom of asbestosis is clubbing of the fingers. So fingers and toes become wider and rounder than normal. You get kind of. Kind of Prince Charles figures. [00:23:38] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. [00:23:41] Speaker B: Royal fingers, crackling sounds when breathing and, and, and huge, thick clubbed fingers and toes. How good does it say? [00:23:55] Speaker A: Why that? Like, what's the turning mechanism? [00:24:00] Speaker B: Who can say? Who can say? [00:24:01] Speaker A: Okay, fair enough. Putting you on the spot there. But that is interesting. [00:24:06] Speaker C: Blood circulate. It's got to be circulatory. It's got to be heading around their heart. Right. [00:24:10] Speaker B: And it is totally incurable. Absolutely no treatment. Can't be reversed or cured. You've got it. [00:24:17] Speaker A: I mean, even with like the, the mesothelioma commercials and stuff like that, it's very clear you're going to die from it. It's. And they're basically looking to compensate your family. It's like, do you have this? Well, sorry, but once you're dead, let's make sure your family gets money for this. Like, especially. [00:24:34] Speaker B: Questions, dude. [00:24:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:37] Speaker B: What's the situation with inheritance tax in the us? [00:24:41] Speaker A: What? [00:24:42] Speaker B: Well, so if I'm, if I've got the asbestositis and my, you know, my lung and heart tissues are all. And I'm breaking out in clubbed fingers and tumors and I get a little bit of a payoff. [00:24:55] Speaker A: Sure. [00:24:56] Speaker B: Will that get, like, horrifically taxed? I suspect. [00:24:59] Speaker A: Yes, that's a good question. Like, I know that. Like, obviously I, I'VE told you about getting an inheritance from my uncle recently and it was taxed, but he didn't like. I want to say that there's. So there's a difference between like a lawsuit winning a lawsuit and like an inheritance. I'm not positive though. I have never won a lawsuit, so I cannot. I've not lost one either. I have not been in a lawsuit. Well, I guess aside from like technically when like your car, you get into an accident or something like that. [00:25:33] Speaker B: But yeah, just occurred to me as well. [00:25:35] Speaker A: I don't know. [00:25:36] Speaker B: I do not know because, you know, would the government take a chunk if I won that lawsuit and then passed it on to my kids after my death? [00:25:44] Speaker A: You all. Yeah, probably. If you got the money and then pass it to them. [00:25:47] Speaker C: We're here. They slept. Depending on the amount, like 40 or something like that. [00:25:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:53] Speaker C: Inheritance tax is quite chunky. [00:25:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a good amount here. That for sure would. But if it went straight to them, I don't know that that would be the same case. [00:26:01] Speaker C: Okay. I remember. I don't even remember like here or you could tell me if we're going too far ahead, but I do remember there being a bit of a panic of asbestos in the UK. I can remember in the 90s there being. I can't put pinpoint the. The advert or the thing, but I can remember it being like, oh, you know, you've got to be careful that could have asbestos in. Or every time, you know, you went in a new building or. And it was always. [00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it was very similar here. It was, it was talked about a lot. And I will. I think maybe the thing I'm about to tell you about might be part of what led to that being a thing Brits were. [00:26:35] Speaker B: I seem to remember, like it being an issue in older schools. [00:26:41] Speaker A: Oh yeah. [00:26:42] Speaker B: Theaters, leisure centers. Exactly. Ah, fuck, we got to close that off. [00:26:46] Speaker A: Well, yeah. And it's like the tricky thing is like if you're going to deal with it, like I said, taking it out is dangerous. And so you can't like, you can't have whatever place it is running while you deal with the asbestos problem. It means you're going to have to shut that place down in order to take care of that problem. [00:27:05] Speaker C: Yeah. Just. Just to add context to that. For a short time during COVID and I was listening to this podcast whilst doing this thing that I was doing, I ended up becoming a. A chemical spill operative for a very short time. Just desperately. Yeah, it might be a story it might be another story for another time, but we could dig into it if we need to. But it was a Manston airport. I don't know if you know Manson Airport, but it's the. It's the largest Runway in. In one of the largest runways in Europe. It's an old RAF air base and all sorts of stories from there. I've got tons of interesting stuff like that. But the main thing was that there was a fire station that. Is this not used? It was like it was abandoned fire station. Whole thing is asbestos. [00:27:47] Speaker A: Yes, right, exactly. If you're talking, and I'll get into that in a second too, but if you're talking World War II. [00:27:53] Speaker C: Yeah, you are talking whole thing asbestos. [00:27:57] Speaker A: Like all the way down. [00:27:58] Speaker C: It was like a no go zone around the whole thing, 100%. They can't do anything with it, they can't move it, they can't touch it. It's just sitting there amongst this airport, which has been active for passenger flights until recently and possibly will do again in the future. [00:28:11] Speaker A: So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the huge boom came around World War II. [00:28:17] Speaker B: A lot of people during COVID bought a hot tub. Some people, Rubik's Cues. [00:28:25] Speaker A: That's not what Benners was up to. So it wasn't until greater regulations were. Were introduced in America, Britain and Canada in the late 60s and 70s that its use began to decline in those areas. An interesting example of that is that the first 40 floors of the Twin Towers were coated in sprayed asbestos for insulation in the early 1970s. But by the time it was finished in 1973, regulations had been passed during its construction. And so everything above the 40th floor is not sprayed with asbestos. So the regulation that much good did it in the. [00:29:07] Speaker C: I knew it was coming. I saw. [00:29:13] Speaker B: Wasn't that fucking good. [00:29:14] Speaker A: I mean to be very dark about it. But unfortunately it's one of the issues right, with the Twin Towers. And one of the things that they've been fighting about for the past 24 years is the fact that that asbestos affected the first responders. So you remember all of that dust that was, you know, brought up by the tower is collapsing. The first 40 floors were coated in asbestos. And so all the people who were working in that area and being exposed to it are now 15, 20, 25 years later dealing with cancer as a result of that. So your quip is correct in a sense. Like it didn't do them much good because those 40 floors of asbestos ended up poisoning a whole bunch of people. [00:30:02] Speaker B: Anyway, which is what I Meant wasn't an inform and educated comment. [00:30:09] Speaker A: Right. So in 1982, a British documentary called A Fight for life followed a 47 year old woman who'd worked in an asbestos factory for seven months at the age of 17. At 47 years old, she'd been diagnosed with mesothelioma. And by the time she found out about it, she only had months left to live, according to her doctor. Yeah, it's horrific. And the thing about it is this is about right, like the minimum amount of time it takes for mesothelia to show up is about 15 years. So you'll be sort of riding along, maybe you'll have scratchy throat or things like that occasionally, but the cancer will hit 15 years or more later. So people don't realize that they had this until long after they have left that environment. Which means that for a long time people probably died of asbestos related stuff who had no idea that was what killed them. [00:31:01] Speaker B: Isn't it fucking mad, right? Isn't it mad that stuff that you can mine from our own earth, right? [00:31:11] Speaker A: Like alien planet shit? Like, absolutely. We're all so concerned about what would happen if you stepped out on some other planet somewhere. But our planet is doing that. That is like full of shit that does that. [00:31:22] Speaker B: Absolutely mad. [00:31:24] Speaker C: Is it that, is that the case that it is kind of already as its natural? [00:31:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it's already like that natural. [00:31:30] Speaker C: It's already just. It's not like we've added or mixed or like created this demon dust. [00:31:35] Speaker A: No, pure asbestos, which is actually I was watching Hank Green did a video about asbestos and it's like, it's a broad name for I think, four different minerals or something like that. Maybe seven different minerals. But yeah, it's like a group of minerals that all have these properties to them. So yeah, naturally occurring. The way that they come out of the earth without us mixing it with anything, this is what it does. It's just like this. If you break it open, you're gonna have a bad time. And in this documentary she described her experiences in the factory, which is again gonna like hark right back to the radium girls. No one told her and her colleagues that they were working with a killer material. So they would straight up just play with the dust and toss it around and stuff like that. Having no idea that they were killing themselves with it. [00:32:28] Speaker C: Sounds like your radiation dudes. You remember the guys? [00:32:30] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, right. That's in there painting their lips with it and stuff like that, right? Like no idea. Nobody was like, hey, that'll kill you. And this documentary also followed people like Tony Mendel, a general manager of Cape Asbestos, who said he'd gone to about 110 funerals in his decade or so for working for the company and kept a black tie in his desk drawer because he just had to go to funerals so often. [00:32:56] Speaker C: Jesus Christ. [00:32:57] Speaker A: And shortly after the doc was made, he found out that he too had contracted the cancer. [00:33:02] Speaker B: What was the company? Cape Asbestos. [00:33:04] Speaker A: Cape Asbestos sounds really, like, delightful until you what it is, right? Oh, I'm going Cape Asbestos inclusive, right? Sure is. But rather than dealing with what they'd done, when the penny finally dropped and people started suing the corporations responsible for their illnesses, those companies often just declared bankruptcy to avoid having to pay for anything. And of course, once they couldn't sell the asbestos in the Western world, they just took that shit to developing countries like India, bringing mass death to new areas that are still dealing with it now. China, India, places like that. At the time, the Canadians in particular loved to ship their loads of asbestos to those countries and then wash their hands of further responsibility. What's done with it wherever it lands, is the responsibility of whoever received it. To this day, asbestos kills more than 100,000 people a year and is banned in 59 countries, according to Vice. And you probably won't be surprised to find out what country is the leading manufacturer of asbestos now. You guys want to guess? [00:34:15] Speaker B: Switzerland. [00:34:16] Speaker A: No. Benners. Any guesses? [00:34:20] Speaker C: It's going to be usa. [00:34:21] Speaker A: Surely it's not us. It's not. [00:34:24] Speaker B: Oh, oh, China. [00:34:26] Speaker C: Oh, yes. [00:34:27] Speaker A: It's not China. [00:34:29] Speaker C: Is it us? [00:34:30] Speaker A: It's Russia. [00:34:31] Speaker B: I was going to say it is. [00:34:33] Speaker C: Russia, as long as it's not us. [00:34:34] Speaker B: I was starting to get worried. Oops. [00:34:36] Speaker C: Oh, no. What have we done? [00:34:40] Speaker A: It's Russia and they're super proud of it. There's a Vice documentary that I have included in. In the references, which are always in every episode in the show notes. So, you know, give that a look if you're interested. But there's a Vice documentary I added. This is crazy to watch. It is insanity in this. They go to a town that has renamed itself because of its asbestos production. It is called asbest. And they have a giant pit from which they mine asbestos and use dynamite to do so, blasting asbestos dust all over the place. [00:35:22] Speaker B: And this is horrible. [00:35:24] Speaker A: It's horrible. And the locals at least appear not to give a shit. It feels very much like that, like Russian bravado or whatever, you know, and so they don't wear masks, they don't wear gloves, they don't protect themselves, but it's like. I mean, that's what's crazy about watching is that, like, part of you is like, you have to laugh because this is crazy. These guys are like, nah, we're not afraid. Fear is the thing you die from. But if you don't fear it, then your body repairs itself and you're like, stop, come on, stop this. [00:36:03] Speaker C: Wow. [00:36:04] Speaker B: Are we sure? [00:36:05] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't think that's science. [00:36:07] Speaker B: I wonder, and maybe you'll know, maybe you've come across this. Has the use of asbestos been explored as a weapon in a weaponized form? Aerosol delivery of asbestos dust? [00:36:24] Speaker A: Don't know. Seems like a thing that would be. I mean, yeah, yeah. If you want generational warfare, you know. [00:36:35] Speaker B: Country for, you know, years ahead. [00:36:37] Speaker C: It's not quite setack, is it? But it's. [00:36:41] Speaker A: Yeah, you'd really have to be playing the long game for. For that one to. To work, because, yeah, minimum 15. [00:36:48] Speaker C: Sounds like that's kind of what Canada were doing to places. [00:36:52] Speaker A: Well. Right, exactly. Just outsource it elsewhere and don't have to think about it. I don't know, my. My inclination would be that it's not a fast enough working weapon for that to be worthwhile, But I can't say for sure. But in Russia, in the town of Asbest, like I said, they don't wear protective gear or anything like that. They straight up deny that there's anything wrong with it. Everyone they interview in this documentary is like, no, I can pick it up with my hands. It's fine, like, as long as I wash them afterwards. And they basically are like, everyone's exaggerating. There is no danger to asbestos. That's not real. One guy that they interview does acknowledge that, yeah, there's a lot of sick and dying people here. But, you know, he points out that you'll never find out the numbers because the factories hide it. And anyway, you know, you. You have to deal with it because that's how you make a living. So what do you mean? [00:37:44] Speaker C: That's what it comes down to right there. We'll get money. [00:37:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So banning its production would be economically devastating to the area that mines and manufactures it. In Russia, it is literally the only gig. There's no other thing you can do aside from mine this asbestos in this particular area of Russia. So, yeah, be economically devastating. I think death is more devastating, but I'm not Russian. In the vice doc and the evil dust doc, they show people who never even worked with asbestos, people who had like, oh, my dad Worked in a mine. And then they came home and just the dust that was on their clothes was enough to give those children cancer decades later on. It's that dangerous. And there's no way. These Russians are just built different. They simply aren't acknowledging what's happening. They visited an oncologist near Asbest and he did say there's lots of lung cancer, but he refused to say that there was anything wrong with asbestos. He was like, no, actually, I love the air in asbestos in Asbest. I think it's actually really nice. And he claimed that they don't get any more patients there than they do from anywhere else. They tried to visit another hospital. [00:38:57] Speaker C: I was just saying they probably haven't got a hospital, but they have got hospitals. [00:39:00] Speaker A: Yeah, they have hospitals. They've tried visiting another one and no one would let them in. But they talk to a woman outside who's sort of under anonymity was like, no one is going to tell you the truth. You are not going to find a person who's going to do that. Like, this is again, the only gig in town. You think someone's gonna risk their livelihood to tell you, like, yeah, we're all dying here. Like, that's not gonna happen. [00:39:24] Speaker B: God. [00:39:24] Speaker A: So it's really bizarre to watch just like, literally everyone just like smiling and acting like everything is great. Like as if someone is standing behind them with a gun to their head. Like, no, I love it. I. I put it on my ice cream. I love asbestos. It's so great. It's bizarre. Just a bunch of Russians pretending this industry isn't killing people. There is. Oh, go ahead. [00:39:48] Speaker C: I was gonna say, do we think that that's. Do we think. Because, you know, we, I guess we were doing similar in. For 90 odd years or maybe 80s of kind of using it and building it. Do we think that's just. They haven't. They just don't have access to the information. [00:40:00] Speaker B: Right. [00:40:00] Speaker C: Surely maybe they're just not being told people are dying because of that. [00:40:05] Speaker A: I think it's a little bit of multiple things. So they also, in the documentary go and talk to like a guy in Moscow whose job it is to research asbestos in Asbest. And he is under fire from the entire world scientific community because he, his findings are, of course, oh, there's nothing wrong with asbestos. Right. So there's a degree of information suppression that is happening here for sure. That said, if you live in that town and you notice everyone's dying at 45, like, you're gonna make connections. So you're probably gonna go like, that's, this must be from what we're doing. But like, you can't say anything about it either because there is an attitude of like, this is not a thing we say. We don't risk, you know, the entire town going under because someone got sick. Right. So I think it's a mix of both those things. You're able to be in denial a little more if also your government is saying this doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah, you're imagining the problem. It's very, it's very odd. But there is one town in Australia that bears witness to the fact that people don't just escape the asbestos industry unscathed. Or at least it used to bear witness. Now the town has been scrubbed from maps, it's been condemned, and at least 1200 of the people who live there have died from asbestos related disease. The town is called Vitnum. So as the beginning of World War II loomed, mining entrepreneurs Lang Hancock and Peter Wright began mining and exporting crocodilite, or blue asbestos from Vitam, sending it off to Europe for use in the war effort. So they were sending all that shit to you guys at the time, to Europe and Britain in order to be used for those fire stations and whatnot. Asbestos, being notoriously fire and water resistant, made a very attractive material for, you know, war things. In 1943, a company called Colonial Sugar Refinery Company or CSR, bought out their mining leases and continued exporting the raw asbestos for the usual reasons, shipbuilding, construction and continued, sorry, construction and manufacturing. And because asbestos was pretty much the only industry in the area, much like that place in Russia, Vietnam became a company town, peaking at a population of 881 and making it the largest town in the area. Because Australia, the people who worked in Vietnam were exposed to levels of blue asbestos a thousand times higher than what was considered safe in a workplace. And while the government's health bodies were like, hey, this is super dangerous, the company went on doing this with impeachment, impunity until the mid-1960s. While the mine was in order, the town of Vittenoom, in large part made up of German immigrants by the middle of the 20th century, revolved around it. And asbestos literally coated every aspect of their lives. The people would spread what are called asbestos tailings over the pavement, schoolyards, playgrounds, homes and businesses because it helped to curb some of the extreme Australian heat and suppress dust that came as a natural byproduct of living in the Australian outback. And tailings are basically just the waste Product of blue asbestos. It's just asbestos dust, more or less. It gives the vibe of that scene in the first episode of Chernobyl where everyone is just going about their hollow eyes as happy as, like. Just like a bird falls out of the air and dies. Like, yikes. Probably a bad idea, guys. And a weird revelation to me as a kid who grew up listening to my mother's favorite band, Midnight Oil, is that they actually have a song about vitnum which also applies quite well to asbest describing how people just have to accept the horrors of the minds to make a living. Have you guys heard the song Blue Sky Mine by. By Midnight Oil? [00:43:59] Speaker B: No, let's ring a bell. [00:44:01] Speaker A: I always loved it, but I thought it was just like, about mines in general. Let me just read some of the lyrics for you here. So I'm caught at the junction still waiting for medicine the sweat of my brow keeps on feeding the engine Hope the crumbs in my pocket can keep me for another night and if the Blue Sky Mining Company won't come to my rescue if the sugar refining company won't save me who's going to save me? If I work on all day on the Blue Sky Mine There'll be food on the table tonight if I walk up and down on the Blue Sky Mine There'll be pay in your pocket tonight and some have sailed from a distant shore and the company takes what the company wants and nothing's as precious as a hole in the ground. Telling that whole story down to, like, the sugar. The sugar refining company that bought the place and continued to. To mine the asbestos there just sort of the way that people had to continue working because that was the only thing that was going to put pay in their pocket at the end of it. And that, you know, some have sailed from a distant shore there's all these, you know, German immigrants coming and living in this town who are, you know, this is. [00:45:03] Speaker C: The. [00:45:03] Speaker A: The better life that they can have here is working for this stupid hole in the ground that is killing everybody there. So as is often the case in Australia and here in the United States, and in anything Midnight Oil writes a song about, indigenous people are amongst those that a, could have seen this coming and B, have been impacted greatly because this was their fucking land. The Banjima people populated the area in and around Vietnam for millennia. And of course, no one asked them their take on letting these companies buy it up and poison the area, which is always wild to me. Indigenous people will live where something insanely dangerous exists for thousands of years. And manage to learn not to fuck with it. And then white people will come in, see the thing, be like, no need to think about it, just use it and make the place uninhabitable in a matter of decades. Vietnam is pretty much just a microcosm of the whole ass earth at this point. Like indigenous people living here forever. And then white people were like, what if we destroyed it though? Let's try that. So now the government of Western Australia has shut the area down for good, but with zero immediate plans to clean the place up so that the indigenous people can have the land back further. Even though indigenous folks weren't the ones working the mines, just living near it caused them to have the same health problems that afflicted the ones directly working and covering their playgrounds with asbestos trailings. Indigenous people further warn that the whites are just going to start mining again and stir up the same problems. And they appear to be right. The richest woman in Australia, Gina Rinehart, is the daughter of a man who mined Vietnam's asbestos. And reportedly she wants to mine ore, iron ore, just outside the contamination zone with an eye to expanding within that area. It's also worth noting that while only two residents of the town stayed behind until finally leaving in 2022, dumbass tourists have been visiting Vietnam for years, camping out to check it off some kind of really stupid bucket list. As Bodhi Norman, president of the Red Dog four wheel Drive club, put it, quote, one bit of fiber. The Red Dog four wheel Drive club. It's a guy who, yeah, he's just like into like off roading and shit like that, you know, he said, quote, One bit of fiber can cause in 20 years time a lot of harm and hurt. Touristing there is really so stupid, it's hard to fully express. But the government also says that shutting off all the roads and whatnot would likely have the opposite effect. They want, as Norman put it, saying danger, do not enter is like having a bag of lollies in the cupboard and saying, kids, don't eat these lollies. People are still going to do it. A lot of them too. According to one of the later residents, Mario Hartman, during the COVID lockdowns they would get he would see between 50 to 60 cars a day going out to the gorge itself, the place where it was mined from ground zero of the asbestos and like going and hanging out. Fucking idiots. Wow. So today asbestos is actually incredibly avoidable. You do not have to deal with it in your day to day life. If you see it, don't touch it. Get a professional to deal with it and whatnot. But this is the thing that has been the boogeyman for the past however many years in our culture and still, still kills tons of Americans and Brits and so forth every year. Just from the effects that take a while to set in. Bananas. [00:48:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Wasn't at all ready for that. That was quite funny up to a point. [00:48:36] Speaker A: Right? [00:48:37] Speaker C: Yeah, it's quite funny up to the point that people are just holidaying to. [00:48:40] Speaker A: Right. [00:48:41] Speaker C: Maybe they thought it was Aspen, but they went to Aspen. [00:48:43] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. It's just this is all a big misunderstanding. It was like a dumb and dumber situation. [00:48:49] Speaker B: I wanted to think this. I, I, I think there's, there's, there's a, a more of a focused piece, I think, for us on that town, that town in Russia, asbestos land or whatever the it's called. Maybe they are built different. Who knows? I mean, danger tourism, I think, would be quite good there. [00:49:09] Speaker A: Yeah, danger tourism is an interesting idea. I think talking about as best is difficult because clearly they have a very controlled narrative. So, yeah, nothing I can look up on the Internet is going to get any deeper than that Vice documentary that actually went there and tried to talk to people who all gaslighted this woman to her face. [00:49:30] Speaker C: I do wonder how much of it is still around, because there was. My, My house is Victorian house, you know, old. Very old. And I'm almost certain there's going to be something around somewhere in this place. [00:49:43] Speaker A: I mean, being Victorian, you have the, the thing where it's like. It wouldn't have been built with it in it. [00:49:49] Speaker C: No. But it would have been added. [00:49:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Someone might have tried to update later on. [00:49:54] Speaker C: It was like us with you. You guys talked about lead a while ago and. [00:49:57] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:58] Speaker C: We actually had. We've got like a coal hole, a cave at the front of our house that goes under the road and. Yeah, so I have a cave. I often tell the kids I'll lock them in there if they're being naughty and have you ever done it up close? Close, I think. I think they just call my bluff. I think just go, right, we'll go in there for a bit. [00:50:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, sure. [00:50:16] Speaker C: But we actually found. So the, our water pipe bit. Like what you had. Is that our water pipe coming in? We, When I looked at it, I was like, it's got kind of a leady look. Our mains water pipe was led. Yeah. [00:50:30] Speaker A: Wow. [00:50:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [00:50:31] Speaker C: So it was kind of a similar thing, of which I guess that that would have been wrapped at some point, probably in asbestos Covering and stuff like that. Just like. Yeah, just. [00:50:40] Speaker A: It's wild that things can. Can. [00:50:41] Speaker C: So these things are still around, like. [00:50:43] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Like you would think whoever lived in that house before you would have been like, hey, we should get rid of this lead pipe. But for some reason that stuff persists. It's. It's really. Well, so I don't know. Check your shit. [00:50:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's still a legacy of mesothelioma in the uk. [00:51:01] Speaker C: Just there is. [00:51:02] Speaker B: Corey's been talking. I've just been kind of having a little look. Better as. What if I were to ask you to guess for me, where in the UK would you say is top in the kind of league of UK hotspots of Mesothelia? [00:51:20] Speaker C: I'm gonna go north way. Kind of mining villages, learning towns. [00:51:26] Speaker B: Your. Your logic is sound, but it's the other end of the country. Plymouth is number one. [00:51:31] Speaker C: Wow. Oh, okay. [00:51:33] Speaker A: Oh, ship building, shipbuilding. [00:51:35] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly, exactly. So Plymouth, Southampton, but then you go further up north, Gosport. That kind of way. But yeah, still some 650 odd deaths in the Plymouth area in a. In a report from a workplace injury firm from 2024. So there's still fucking. The legacy. [00:51:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Wild. Okay, I changed my mind. Everybody check your house. Make sure you don't have asbestos. [00:52:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:02] Speaker A: And then get a. [00:52:02] Speaker C: And then get a hammer to it. [00:52:04] Speaker A: Don't take a hammer to it. No, listen to what I say. Do not. [00:52:07] Speaker B: Do not. As delicious as it might look. Don't even think about it. [00:52:12] Speaker A: It's a little cotton candy ish. I'm not gonna lie. [00:52:15] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:52:18] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:52:19] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:52:23] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:52:27] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal recently. [00:52:30] Speaker A: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:52:33] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm fucking. I'm gonna leg it. [00:52:40] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:52:42] Speaker C: I think you feel great about it. [00:52:45] Speaker B: Welcome, friends. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. Good choice. Great move. Welcome back to Jack of All Graves. What we have here is the podcast that a lot of people are calling. A lot of people are calling. It's the Joe Rogan experience, but for the left. A lot of people are saying that they are. [00:53:06] Speaker A: It's. Yeah, all of our reviews, that's what they say. [00:53:09] Speaker B: A lot of people are saying that this week in particular, it's. It's the Joe Rogan experience for the left. It's the Joe Rogan experience for the left that the left has been yearning for and crying out for. Is Joe Ag. The Joe Rogan experience for the left. That came from Variety this week? [00:53:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:27] Speaker B: Is Corrigan the Joe Rogan of the left? Oh, that was from Podcast Weekly. [00:53:35] Speaker A: Sensing a dig here? No, no. [00:53:38] Speaker B: And I, you know, I think, yeah, I think, yeah, we actually are. So there's that. We hope you're all well and ask Best of Free, take a look if there's any doubt, if you have. [00:53:50] Speaker A: Yeah, they're looking a little bulbous. [00:53:53] Speaker B: ET thing. [00:53:53] Speaker A: If you're starting to feel like a. [00:53:55] Speaker B: Windsor, if you're crackling a little bit, then, you know, maybe check your pipes out. Not like that. Friends, we are delighted and blessed, thrice blessed, in fact, to have a guest with us this week. We have the eminent, longtime friend of the cast and friend of Corrigan and mine, Mr. John Benfield, who joins us. Ben, I say hello, mate. It's a. It's. It's a. It's an absolute treat to have you on. It really is. After all this. [00:54:26] Speaker C: It's great to be part of it finally. And obviously sing. I have been listening since 20, I think. 2020. I think it was COVID 19. [00:54:32] Speaker A: Wow. [00:54:33] Speaker C: And. And actually it was. It was our friends over or, you know, pod friends, dead and lovely that. That turned me on to you guys and, you know, RIP because they're. Although Hell Rankers is doing out. Hell. Hell Rankers is doing great things. But yeah, love those guys. And then came on, you know, got pulled onto this and I got just to blow a bit of smoke up on you guys. Or vape. Feel free, Vape, mist, whatever you want to do. Yeah, yeah. [00:55:00] Speaker B: Have a huff. [00:55:01] Speaker C: I. Yeah, it was, you know, during COVID kind of a weird time and jobs being lost and lies being messed up. And I was obviously a big listener of. Of Dead and Lovely and then got kind of pulled onto you guys and that was. And it was a real good time just to a good little distraction despite some of the, well, things that you guys talked about. But it was really helpful. It was good for me at the time. So just, you know, a big thank you to you guys for keeping it going and being part of it, because it was a big part of my life through 2020 and, you know, there was some dark times and it's good to have stuff like this. [00:55:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:55:37] Speaker B: To keep going very Heartening to hear. Thanks, dude. And I gotta tell you, earlier on today, when the in laws were around, I kind of thought to myself, I missed it. [00:55:46] Speaker C: I missed Covid. [00:55:48] Speaker B: I do miss it in certain ways. It was a strange time and nobody was the same coming out of it. But it wasn't all bad, was it? [00:55:56] Speaker C: Hey, well, there was a little. You know, my wife and I often say so at the time it was just my wife and my daughter and I, and we gotta say we. When will I ever get, you know, four or five months with my kids. [00:56:07] Speaker B: Right. [00:56:07] Speaker C: You know, uninterrupted, despite all the crap that was going on around. Actually, if you just kind of went into your bubble and actually as a. As a male and work, he's never gonna get that time. [00:56:18] Speaker A: Right. [00:56:19] Speaker C: I got a week half pay leave in my job that I was in at the time, you know. [00:56:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:56:25] Speaker C: So I often think, you know, I can never. That's. That's the silver lining in that one. [00:56:30] Speaker A: Right, Right, exactly. That's the kind of things we needed to get us through. You know, all of that kind of stuff was like, okay, well, at least I get to like spend time with my family. [00:56:40] Speaker C: Although then I did end up cleaning chemicals at an old disbanded airport. So I guess something went wrong along the way, right? [00:56:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Can't be all just baby cuddles, can it? [00:56:50] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. The that we are cursed to live through in. In this era, man. Horrific, isn't it? Horrific, but. But in. In the best kind of way. [00:57:01] Speaker C: That's. [00:57:02] Speaker B: That's the vibe, isn't it? Horrific, but you know, in the best kind of way. So. Yes, we hope this episode finds you well. In spite of all of this, you know, in spite of everything that's going on, they once again, just as far as weeks go on the burning rock that is planet Earth. It's been another insane one. Nothing that we want to go into, but you know what we're talking about and, and you know, we'll. We'll. I dare say we'll reach back and talk about this in coming weeks, but another. Another poison chalice, another fucking dubious privilege as if it wasn't fucking fun and awful enough to watch the. The climate changing and. And looming over us all like the sword of Damocles. It's also become ever more fascinating and grim and repugnant to watch the. The not even masked rise of fascism in global superpowers now. [00:58:00] Speaker A: No. Yeah, it's all. It's all out there. [00:58:02] Speaker B: You could have seen that coming as well. [00:58:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Who could have go into Some of. [00:58:09] Speaker C: That because actually the kind of writing has been on the wall for a while. But yeah, it's, it's right, it's, it's probably the speed at which it's. The uptick of it has suddenly gone up several notches. [00:58:22] Speaker D: Right. [00:58:23] Speaker C: It's just, yeah, it' it's all of a sudden just embedded itself. So yeah, yeah, it would have been a left field run if I'd have come on here and actually been a massive right winger that just be. Just hiding myself the whole way through like that. [00:58:33] Speaker A: Oh, no. [00:58:34] Speaker B: Aboard quite quickly. [00:58:37] Speaker A: Yeah, we will get to, you know, John here. We'll talk about what John does and why we've got him here and so forth, but we will, we'll sort of get into, as promised, the. What's the, what's the report called? Now my brain is. [00:58:52] Speaker B: It is the World Economic Forum Global Risk Report. [00:58:56] Speaker A: Global Risk Report. Which we will get into that stuff beforehand. [00:59:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, look, the point, the point being, you hear me and Corrie, you know, catastrophizing the world around us and listing many of the ways in which we suspect that we're fucked. But this week, friends, what we're planning on doing is looking for a little bit of economic and data driven rigor around our, you know. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So let's, let's see if we can't actually tie it down and prove the fact that we're. All of which in a bit. But as we do, we're gonna meander a little bit first. We're going to talk about what we've watched and just the. What are we doing to distract ourselves? You know, what are we doing? [00:59:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I have, I have an update. Mark Lewis, I'm surprised you didn't immediately want to, to bring this up. [01:00:00] Speaker B: How does it feel? Blue sky is the one, right? Blue sky is the closest that we have to a safe haven, I think socially from a social media point of view. And just before, before we talk about this and maybe this is one for next week, but earlier on this week, I posted a little story about Elon Musk's heartfelt kind of hand gesture that he did at the inauguration. A lot of people are saying it was a Nazis. [01:00:26] Speaker A: I don't know, I don't see it. I don't see it. [01:00:29] Speaker B: A lot of people, very vague, but. And again, it's, it's not one for this week, but I had a very interesting exchange with somebody who I barely know. Just a nodding acquaintance who goes to my gym and talk about a real life Eye opener. A real life example of musk pilling in action. [01:00:55] Speaker A: Right. [01:00:56] Speaker B: Just a. A British guy, right? As far as I'm aware, just a Brit. Like your eye banners and the hoops. The hoops this fella went through in. In this quite, you know, day long exchange of instant messages with me on Instagram, just tying himself up in all manner of knots to excuse or to hand wave away what. What was going on right before his eyes. It was. [01:01:27] Speaker A: I love that. Like, what's really great about someone spending an entire day trying to like justify you to you? How like, oh, Elon's not a knock scene. He didn't mean that thing or whatever it was like, only then followed up like two days later by Elon going to like a far right German conference and being like, hey, guys, like, it's okay that you are Nazis. Don't worry about it. [01:01:46] Speaker C: Yeah, it's good on both sides. [01:01:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. [01:01:49] Speaker B: Good people. Good people. [01:01:51] Speaker A: Do you want to. Do you want to jump back in the inbox or. [01:01:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Mad shit, mad shit, mad shit. But to business. When do we talk about this? Cast your minds back if you can, Two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, where we discussed or Corry came on and talked about the fascinating and culturally, you know, culturally significant case of one DB Cooper, the geezer who took a plane hostage and just noped the fuck out the door, never to be heard from again. [01:02:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:02:23] Speaker B: Now, Corey, you wrap that one up with the tantalizing notion that the case might have been solved. That the breadcrumbs. [01:02:32] Speaker A: If you listen to that episode, I mentioned that it had just been in the. In the past, you know, few weeks, since before that I had. I had, you know, written that story or whatever. There had been all the. The news had been talking about the fact that it might have finally been solved, that they found this parachute that had belonged. It seemed to D.B. cooper that it matched the descriptions to a degree, that there was just no possible way that this could have belonged to someone else. And this seemed pretty much like a smoking gun that seemed like that, you know, was open and shut. That's it. We've got the evidence. How would this guy have had this parachute if he were not DB Cooper, however, a total DB Cooper nerd, who I'm sort of in love with, jumped. Jumped into our replies on Blue Sky. [01:03:31] Speaker B: Is she someone that you knew beforehand? [01:03:33] Speaker A: No. No, not at all. [01:03:34] Speaker C: She has Daily, daily searching D.B. [01:03:37] Speaker A: Cooper, D.B. [01:03:38] Speaker B: Cooper. [01:03:39] Speaker A: No. No posts on her main feed. None at all. None of her own posts. Only posts are replies to other people about DB Cooper. I love this dedication, absolutely love this, that she is just in there. Like, I am here to tell people the facts of this case. [01:03:59] Speaker B: The last line of defense between. I love it. [01:04:03] Speaker A: Yeah, just exactly. Just like, I'm not going to. [01:04:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Or some kind. Hey. [01:04:09] Speaker A: Oh, Erica. Exclamation point. [01:04:12] Speaker C: Rudy Cooper. So she's gonna be hitting on my timeline. [01:04:17] Speaker A: She jumps in to the DMs, and, you know, like, of course, when it comes to researching things, you can see my research in the, you know, like I said, in the descriptions of every single episode, you know. Yeah. And I cross reference a whole bunch of things. Like there's stuff I look at that I don't even include in my references, because I'm just cross referencing. I'm not necessarily using anything from them. I'm just making sure all of the sources say the same thing, which is what was the case with this. And I love that she addressed this. So she said, hate to rain on the parade, but sadly, this isn't right. Dan Grider, the source for all this, is a notorious grifter and. Love this. Covid conspiracy theorist. Just sprinkle that in. Yeah, just. [01:04:59] Speaker B: Why not? Of course, she was even super cool about it. [01:05:03] Speaker A: Oh, totally. There's no sense of, like, you know. Well, actually, it's like, not super informative, just, like, letting us know. I love. I'm going to keep reading because everything she said is fantastic. [01:05:15] Speaker B: I love this. [01:05:17] Speaker A: So notorious Grifter and Covid conspiracy theorists. As grifters do. He lies and bets on no one. Fact checking, which the media, predictably, didn't like. The description, a sport parachute with D rings. He made that up. Cossey. So Cassie was the guy who. Who sold the. The parachutes. Right. And so he was supposed to have, according to Greider, made this parachute that was, like, adapted in all of these sorts of ways to go from being a military parachute to a civilian parachute. So what she's saying is that Cossey, that guy never said that the sport parachute had the D rings on it. The FBI files are declassified and available to the public. So we know exactly what he said. He said the parachute was a Navy surplus with no D rings and no cape. Well, quick release. So those are the things Greider basically said this had was. He had turned it into one that had a quick release. And the D rings. Greider, as he usually does, lied because the parachute he found doesn't match Cooper's. What Greider doesn't mention is that the reason McCoy's hijacking was similar was because he wrote a term paper on DB cooperation and he constantly bragged about how he could do the Cooper hijacking better, that he is ruled out as being DB Cooper by all eyewitnesses and that he was in Utah on November 24, he said. Special Agent Larry Carr, who is the D.B. cooper case agent from 2007 to 2010, went on a podcast to talk about this earlier this month and said, it makes you wonder what the folks at CNN are even being paid to do. Like, seriously, come on. This is coming out on podcasts and shit instead of in the news. And then. I love this detail, too. To me, the funniest thing by far is that Lad Bible, of all places, were the first to publish a debunking Lad Bible. Imagine being a journalist at CNN or the Guardian and seeing Lad Bible conduct more thorough fact checking than you. Jesus Christ. So I asked her, do you have a favorite theory or do you think that there's just not enough evidence for us to know? To which she replied, they recovered some hair from the hijacker's headrest. It was passed around like a. She's seriously so cool. I love her. It was passed around like a proverbial joint at a party before disappearing from documentation. Unlike the cigarette butts, which we know were destroyed, that hair slide should still be out there somewhere. If we find it, we'll have DNA. That's the only real hope. For a time, we were hoping that maybe some family was just waiting for grandpa to kick the bucket before going public, but it's a bit late for that. Cooper has definitely been dead for a while now. Few chain smokers live to the age of 100, after all. But there are some compelling suspects. My favorite is Ted Braden. He was a decorated black ops commando in Vietnam, mercenary in the Congo, CIA asset, and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in heists across the US in the 70s and 80s. Special forces guys from Vietnam are all certain it was him. And she included, like, the sketch that we've all seen of DB Cooper with some pictures of him where he kind of. He does have those like, wide set, droopy eyes and the pursed mouth and all that kind of stuff. So it's. I can see, like, how it looks more like this, this drawing than what the other guy did as well. So, hey, listen, debunked me. Got me scotched it. [01:08:50] Speaker B: Yeah. But this is just such a beautiful example of scotching done right and even. [01:08:56] Speaker C: This is what I was gonna say. [01:08:57] Speaker B: Like, wow, isn't it lovely? So civil and so you know? [01:09:02] Speaker A: Yeah, tell me more. You know, like, it's almost like when. [01:09:06] Speaker C: Facts are involved, people are pretty cool. [01:09:08] Speaker A: Well. Well, some are not. [01:09:12] Speaker C: And usually it's just because people are spouting what stuff they don't actually know about. Isn't it? [01:09:16] Speaker A: Right. [01:09:17] Speaker C: This girl, actually, she has no reason to angry. She could just say this. [01:09:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:09:21] Speaker C: I mean, I do love her. [01:09:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Here's my special interest. [01:09:24] Speaker C: Instant follow. [01:09:25] Speaker A: Yeah, Right. Yeah, absolutely. So, Erica, thank you so much for that information and happily take that debunking. And I'm going to look up Ted Braden now and who knows, maybe I'll talk about him at a later date. Or other people can look him up for yourself. But I will put a link about that as well. In our description, there are books written about him. [01:09:50] Speaker B: He's got books written about him this time, I'm sure. [01:09:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So cool. Love it. [01:09:56] Speaker B: How does it feel to be scotched rather than to be the scotcher? [01:10:00] Speaker A: Hey, you know what? I know I'm an imperfect being and I will, you know, I will accept that, especially when I get to learn new things. [01:10:09] Speaker B: Mmm. Yes. The Joab journey. We're all there, aren't we? We're all. [01:10:13] Speaker A: Listen, it's a thing I've especially taken from you over the years, Mark. Early on in this podcast, one of the early things you would say is, you know, that you love being wrong. Oh, you know, I think that's a good lesson. [01:10:26] Speaker B: To learn something that happens as often as it does, you gotta. You gotta just get on board with. [01:10:30] Speaker C: It, you know, just own it. [01:10:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm not gonna. [01:10:33] Speaker B: What I'm gonna do. Stop being wrong. No. [01:10:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:10:37] Speaker C: It's like the guys in asbest. What are we gonna do? [01:10:41] Speaker A: Right? [01:10:41] Speaker C: Just keep going. Right? [01:10:42] Speaker A: Just keep going. [01:10:43] Speaker B: Love is best use great chemical. My lung surface. Even right before the advent of gps. And this is again, I'm. I maintain this to my dying day. I. Before setting out somewhere, I would know full well that I was gonna fuck it up and get lost. So rather than go and get stressed about it, I'll just build in an extra 20 minutes and just. Just lean in and just enjoy it and look around and go, oh, this is fun. And then eventually get where I'm going. It's fine. [01:11:16] Speaker A: This is thankfully a thing we also have in. I mean, I don't get lost like you do. I've seen your weird sense of direction, but. Oh, yeah, the fact that we both are very low stress about. The fact about when it happens. Yeah, right. Exactly. Unless you let the GPS take You into like a lake or something like. You'll figure it out eventually. [01:11:35] Speaker C: Especially if it was that lake you mentioned earlier. [01:11:37] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Oh, some of the exploding lakes and things like that we've discussed on here. Good luck, Mark. You also, apparently your son had some input for this week's episode that you were going to show. [01:11:52] Speaker B: Oh, just a question. Right. Just a movie related question. [01:11:55] Speaker A: Okay. [01:11:55] Speaker B: And I can't even remember what movie this gave rise to this query, but Owen asks, and I came up short. I couldn't answer this. Hence his appeal to me to bring this to you, to Corrie, to Benners, and to our listeners. Owen wants to know, can you think of an example of a movie, right, where two things are true? Firstly, the bad guys win at the end. [01:12:24] Speaker A: Okay. [01:12:25] Speaker B: And secondly, there's no sequel or any continuation that sets that right. [01:12:31] Speaker A: Ooh, that is a really good question because I know I've read books like that and I actually. I really like a shitty ending like that. [01:12:40] Speaker B: Oh. Same, same, same. [01:12:42] Speaker A: Nothing to. Nothing to take from that. But wow, what a bummer. And I feel like I watched something recently that had sort of an end like that and it's not coming to my mind you banners. [01:12:56] Speaker C: I don't know, my brain went to kind of like. Like no country for Old Men in a way like. [01:13:01] Speaker A: Oh, sure. [01:13:02] Speaker C: Or is it the Anton kind of. [01:13:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Anton Sugar survives. [01:13:06] Speaker C: Escapes justice. Escapes justice. And then just kind of concludes the film just kind of ends like that. Right? [01:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah, it does. It does. [01:13:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Absolutely. [01:13:18] Speaker B: That's a candidate. It's the closest I can get. But yeah. Listeners, if. [01:13:22] Speaker C: If what about seven, I mean. [01:13:24] Speaker A: Oh sure. Yeah. Seven's it, right. Big one headed about it. [01:13:31] Speaker B: It all unfolds exactly how he planned. [01:13:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:13:33] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:13:34] Speaker B: Nice. [01:13:34] Speaker C: Yeah. That was. That's where I would go to definitely. Yeah. [01:13:38] Speaker A: I mean to also keep Kevin Spaceying. It doesn't. Usual suspects end that way as well. Kaiser Soze just gets away. He just hobbles off. Yeah. And we don't. We certainly don't have a sequel to that. So there are some. [01:13:53] Speaker C: I guess, I guess the mist. We wouldn't kind of say that there's a. The mist is a guy, but we know that that kind of ends a. [01:13:59] Speaker B: Bit if the villain is murdering your kids. [01:14:04] Speaker C: If the villain is suicide. Yeah. Assisted suicide. [01:14:08] Speaker A: The villain is the inevitability of death. I don't know. [01:14:11] Speaker C: Hastiness. [01:14:13] Speaker A: The villain is Hastiness. Yes. It's got kind of a Hamilton thing going on with it. [01:14:19] Speaker B: Very eager to cap all those people in the. [01:14:21] Speaker A: I don't know. [01:14:22] Speaker B: Hung on a little bit. [01:14:25] Speaker A: So there's a few. But. Yeah, tell us more. People listening. Let us know of other movies that end where the. The villain wins and they. They don't retcon that in another. [01:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah, and. And they keep it that way. They just leave it that way. I'd love your thoughts, listeners. I really would, because I feel like there's. [01:14:42] Speaker A: There's an argument to be made that that's how the Fast and the Furious franchise works. Because technically, like, they are kind of villains. Coming from the first one, they're like a bunch of thieves and. But talking to the wrong guy. [01:14:56] Speaker C: I'm with you on that. Okay. [01:15:00] Speaker A: Yeah. They are technically sort of the bad guys. They're a bunch of thieves. [01:15:04] Speaker B: But they're family, though, aren't they? [01:15:06] Speaker C: We all know they're about the family. [01:15:07] Speaker A: And so family is important. [01:15:09] Speaker C: Right. [01:15:09] Speaker A: You're rooting for them in spite of the fact that technically they're bad guys. [01:15:13] Speaker C: I always think about. I remember one of my earliest. I remember a memory from watching. I think it was like Outer Limits. Do you remember the show out? [01:15:21] Speaker B: Oh, nice. [01:15:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:15:22] Speaker C: Classic from Boba. And there's one episode that was like episodic. And one episode of that was when there was. And it was. I always. And I laughed at the end. I thought it was brilliant. And it was that they'd made contact with. With aliens. And then they translated this, like, language from the aliens and translated it to like something really on the nose of, we're going to murder you all. And then so they decided to fire a nuke at them. And then what they realized is then the aliens were speaking within water, which, like muffled or changed or reversed the sound. So then they kind of. They ran it back through again. It actually said, like, we come in peace. [01:15:58] Speaker A: It's like a reverse to serve man. [01:16:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:16:01] Speaker C: Because the aliens just went, okay, we'll just wipe you out. So they just the ends with the whole planet getting destroyed. I'm sure it was out to limits. It was a brilliant episode and it was very plausible. [01:16:11] Speaker B: Very. [01:16:11] Speaker C: And I remember just laughing at it and thinking, that's brilliant. That's wonderful. Yeah, that. [01:16:17] Speaker A: That is great. If we're. Listen, if we're ready for what we watch. That actually transitions well into a movie that I just watched. That actually kind of answers Owen's thing as well. I watched a movie earlier this week called Fail Safe. Have either of you seen Fail Safe? Apparently they remade it in like the 80s or something. This is 1964. That failsafe came out I'm just gonna read you the letterbox description of this. Because of a technical defect, an American bomber team mistakenly orders the destruction of Moscow. The President of the United States has but little time to prevent an atomic catastrophe from occurring. This apparently. So I guess this came out like right after Dr. Strangelove, but it was like this whole thing where there was like a studio dust up and it was like this was supposed to come out first, but like they. What if for whatever reason, a whole bunch of things got moved around and Dr. Strangelove got to come out first? So it's a very similar kind of story. And a good chunk of this movie takes place between the President, played by Henry Fonda, just like on the phone with the Russians, while his translator, played by Larry Hagman, helps to try to like, explain to the Russians and, and reply back to them, like, what the fuck is going on? This is an accident. We're not actually trying to blow you up. And the Russians don't believe the Americans and think this is some sort of trick. And meanwhile, the President is trying to talk to the plane that is carrying the bombs and say, hey, don't bomb Moscow. I'm the President. I'm telling you, don't bomb this. But the plane, the cap. The pilots have instructions to not take any verbal instructions. So they are going to go bomb Moscow anyway. It is so stressful and so tense and ends badly for everyone involved in a sort of mutually assured destruction sort of situation. Here. It's Sydney Lumet. So you're going to love it. [01:18:26] Speaker B: Like, realistically, that's an easy win for me. Did it go into the socioeconomic impact of asbestos prices globally? Get rid of Moscow, the price, weirdly. [01:18:37] Speaker A: They don't touch on that. And I don't know why. [01:18:41] Speaker C: I guess it, it would cure. [01:18:43] Speaker A: Yeah, well. [01:18:46] Speaker B: In a roundabout way. [01:18:48] Speaker A: Listen, there's one problem, but you get rid of another. [01:18:50] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So this was the 60s version. This was. [01:18:54] Speaker A: Yeah, 1964. Cindy Labet, they'll say, I haven't watched the other one. So I don't know whether it's good or not, but I think, I think Mark is going to be on board for this. I don't know. [01:19:03] Speaker C: It's on my list, but yeah, it is. [01:19:06] Speaker A: It's a not a good time. But I wonder when was. [01:19:10] Speaker B: When we talked about that story about the guy, the geezer in the military base on the night shift and the new alert malfunction. [01:19:17] Speaker A: That was a long time ago. Yeah, I think it was a couple years ago. [01:19:19] Speaker B: I wonder if that one because the. No, as in when Chronologically. [01:19:23] Speaker A: Oh, when Chronologically? [01:19:24] Speaker B: When did that happen? [01:19:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:19:29] Speaker B: Was that a submarine? [01:19:30] Speaker C: I don't think the guy was like, no, this isn't. This isn't real. [01:19:33] Speaker A: Yeah. He was like, this is not. [01:19:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:19:35] Speaker A: We're not actually supposed to fire the nuke, but I want to say that was the 80s, so I think it was later than this. Interestingly, much like Dr. Strangelove, this also has, like, the, like, disclaimer that, like, the U.S. government says for us to tell you that this is not based on any real thing that has happened and, like, you're perfectly safe and yada yada. Which is an interesting little Cold War leftover that they had to. Had to put in there. But I recommend Fail Safe. It was, it was interesting. If you're, if you're okay with being stressed out and, like, you are largely Sydney Lumet. It's a talkie, you know, you're watching people talk. Mostly. It was a good time. Do you want me to keep going or do you want to. [01:20:21] Speaker B: No, no, please. I get. I don't know whether it's the place I'm at in my, like, life or what, but I'm having real trouble getting the movies in these days. [01:20:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [01:20:30] Speaker B: I've got a few Locked and Loaded, but those heady days of, ooh, like, four weeks ago, where we could just nail, like, four or five now, I. [01:20:40] Speaker C: Always admire you guys. I don't know how, you know, I get two or three in a week maybe, but it's hard. [01:20:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's not. It's because I don't have another social life. It's so at the end of the night, I'm not going anywhere. Once it hits, it's 8pm it's just. It's just the pictures in it. [01:20:59] Speaker B: Well, I'll tell you what. I'll talk about a real pain then, super briefly. [01:21:03] Speaker A: Oh, I watched that one a couple weeks ago. [01:21:07] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, there's a star separating us in this corrigan. I mean, I don't think you makes a change, like. Yeah, I know. I, I, yeah, I went for it. I really went for it. I mean, this, I. This is the kind of movie that I wish existed more. I wish there was more of just filming, just relationships, people interacting and kind of playing out the decades of idiosyncrasy and, you know, family weirdness passed down through generations, and watching that play out on screen through some really, really great writing, some really, really great performances, and just no frills at all to this Movie it is, you know what I mean? Everything is in camera. The soundtrack is, is sparse and everything, everything in this movie is, is, is the writing and the two performances. Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg. Fantastic. They play two cousins. Two cousins who love one another dearly. But you know, the, the generational, the generational trauma from, from the, the Holocaust clearly weighs heavy on them and, and their relatives. And we see them kind of meeting up for the first time in like a decade and just things bubble to the surface. It's just lovely stuff, lovely stuff that I could quite happily of. It's very Rare again, a 90 minute film. In and out. Get it. Or let's say what you need to say, get it done. I, I, it's very rare I say that I could have done another half an hour of watching work together. [01:22:53] Speaker A: Yeah, honestly, I think it probably could have done with, with more because I think my thing with it is it just felt undercooked to me as I like the idea. I just felt like, like the Holocaust thing, like you could have replaced that with any tragedy. It wouldn't have changed anything about the movie at all. It had nothing really to do with that. And so the parts that were about the Holocaust felt kind of shoehorned in, in a way where I was like, meh, I would have loved to have developed this a little bit further. I think, you know, there's like, their relationship is really cool and I like the way that they, it feels very real and all that kind of stuff. But none of the side characters. I felt like you could get rid of all of them. They felt like a distraction from, from the movie because they were kind of comic relief y and not necessarily adding a whole lot or they pulled away from again, they pulled away from the like, story here by like, I think they were trying to add a diversity element to it. So they have a guy who's not a Jew leading the tour, an Asian fella. They have a, an African genocide survivor. But that doesn't really come into the movie at all. Like he kind of describes it at the beginning, but it's more as like comic relief to bounce off of Kieran Culkin than to really relate. And I just felt like everything needed another 20 minutes to a half hour to like simmer instead of really bulldozing over everything that I think would have helped to make it more meaningful. So it just felt like to me that I was like, it's almost a good movie. It just doesn't follow through on everything. [01:24:24] Speaker B: I hear you. And yet I wonder if a lot of that is. Is kind of what the movie is saying it. Your family is gonna. You up some way or another, no matter what they frame it around. And as far as the guy who was there dealing with the Rwandan genocide, I don't know that. That to me suggested that everybody. Everybody is coming at something with their own baggage. Everyone is dealing with some trauma from. [01:24:55] Speaker A: Which is true. Yeah. I just think to come at it so surface, made it so that it felt like kind of flippant. Like, this isn't really a story about Holocaust trauma or anything like that. It's kind of like, well, we all have our bullshit, don't we? You know, like, I wanted more to. To add to sort of the gravity of like what we are all dealing with here. But I do think, you know, Kieran Culkin's character really comes across very real. And Jesse Eisenberg's frustration with him comes across very well. I also. [01:25:26] Speaker C: I can imagine those two replay off well against each other. [01:25:29] Speaker B: And they do. Yeah. [01:25:30] Speaker A: I deeply hated the music though, that I found that super distracting. I hate twee movies. It felt very like Woody Allen. Very like, just like, you know, like little mellow sentence. Yeah. It's like, ugh, stop. Just. [01:25:43] Speaker C: It did give me just. I got Woody Allen vibes from the big time. The trailers I saw of it. [01:25:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, I can't do. Yeah. [01:25:51] Speaker B: That. [01:25:51] Speaker A: That I thought was distracting from it as well. I don't know what I would have replaced it with, but the like, cutesy little Woody Allen music was not a plus for me. [01:26:03] Speaker B: I hope Jesse Eisenberg isn't listening to this, because I know he does. I hope he gives this episode a pass. But I don't think it is or should be read as a Holocaust movie. And I say that I'm sat down. I'm sat down right now. And Schindler's list is on BBC2. Right. Like. [01:26:20] Speaker A: Well. [01:26:22] Speaker B: There'S a. I don't think. I don't think a Real Pain is and should be considered a Holocaust movie. It's. It's a movie about how you deal with it, not what it is. [01:26:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:26:33] Speaker C: It was marketed, I think, very much as like, this is a tale of these two. [01:26:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:39] Speaker C: Family members, cousins, kind of re. Reconnecting. [01:26:42] Speaker B: Right. [01:26:42] Speaker C: And I remember even in the trailers, eyes. So I remember there was like a sprinkle of, oh, we're going to. Here to. [01:26:48] Speaker B: Yes. [01:26:48] Speaker C: Visit. Revisit our family history kind of thing. But yeah, I think the marketing of it was very much about this tale of these two people that were very. [01:26:56] Speaker A: Different, which I think really works. I think they work really well. I think the framing is iffy. If you're gonna use something as heavy as the Holocaust at a time at which, like, a good chunk of people don't think the Holocaust happened, it gets. [01:27:11] Speaker C: You an Oscar nomination. [01:27:12] Speaker A: Yeah, right, exactly. Holocaust in there, but, you know, feels like it should. Should maybe have a little bit more to it than that. But, yeah, I just wanted. I wanted a little bit more from it. It's not that I thought it was a bad movie. It was just that I was like, I just need. I just need a little bit more. Just give me a little bit. [01:27:30] Speaker C: Mentioning Oscar nominations, you know, if I could just go on, just maybe get. Just drop a bit of go. Obviously, if I mentioned if I was going to ask as a quiz question of the films Nosferatu, the Substance and Alien, Romulus, of what connects those three. [01:27:46] Speaker A: Films, is it Oscar nominations? [01:27:50] Speaker C: I've kind of dropped the ball in the beginning. [01:27:52] Speaker B: Right, okay. [01:27:53] Speaker C: Extended bit is that it's the first time that three horror films have been nominated in the Oscars since 1987. [01:28:01] Speaker A: That's crazy. [01:28:02] Speaker C: 1987. So it is our time, people. [01:28:05] Speaker B: I'm gonna try. [01:28:06] Speaker C: We are back. [01:28:08] Speaker B: So in 1987, you're telling me that three horror movies. [01:28:11] Speaker C: I should have done this. Follow up, up. Corrigan would have done this, wouldn't you? It did. Two seconds. Go on. You start. And we're gonna get them up. [01:28:20] Speaker A: 1987. [01:28:21] Speaker B: So 1987. So they were 1986 movies. [01:28:26] Speaker A: Oh, I guess that depends because they call the Oscars by the year of the. So these will be the 2024. [01:28:33] Speaker C: Okay. [01:28:35] Speaker B: Obscure. [01:28:36] Speaker C: No, no, no. Well, hang on. I think we would have got. I think you would have got a couple of them, but. [01:28:43] Speaker A: Okay, so these are movies that came out in 87. [01:28:48] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:28:50] Speaker A: Okay. I don't know. That's a. That's a tough one. 87. [01:28:55] Speaker B: 1987. Horrors. Is aliens in there? For practical effects? [01:28:59] Speaker C: Aliens is in there. [01:29:01] Speaker A: Nice. All right, what else came out in 87? [01:29:06] Speaker C: Find just the list. But I'm having to go through, like, the whole. The whole thing. [01:29:12] Speaker B: Okay, one of them is Aliens. [01:29:16] Speaker A: What else came out? [01:29:18] Speaker B: Well, 87 is the. The greatest year for cinema in the history of cinema. Right? Everything. Great. [01:29:25] Speaker A: I think you have made this argument. [01:29:27] Speaker B: And it's true, and I. [01:29:28] Speaker C: 84 is pretty strong, but. Yeah. Yes, 84 is strong. [01:29:34] Speaker B: Horror in 87. Oh, man. [01:29:37] Speaker A: We might have to revisit this one because. Yeah, I don't Know that like they. [01:29:42] Speaker B: Because I can think of plenty of really good horror that came out in 87. [01:29:47] Speaker A: I think I have found it. 19. Oh, maybe not. Hold on. [01:29:53] Speaker C: This is where people are screaming at the thing. It's this one? [01:29:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it's this. You idiots. At 1987 Oscars. The fly was nominated. Fly. [01:30:03] Speaker B: Son of a. Yes. [01:30:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So. So make up for that. Aliens. But it doesn't say what the third one is. So we got two out of three. And if someone else fills it in or I find it later, we will figure out what the. [01:30:19] Speaker C: The third arm answers on a postcard. Right. [01:30:24] Speaker A: Interesting. [01:30:25] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:30:26] Speaker B: David lynch was nominated for best Director that year for Blue Velvet. [01:30:31] Speaker A: Is. Does that count as a horror movie? [01:30:33] Speaker B: No, but it's nice. [01:30:35] Speaker C: Nice to go back. [01:30:37] Speaker A: It's a horror movie to me, but I don't think it's a horror movie. But go on. On that note, John. [01:30:45] Speaker C: Yeah. So obviously having some incredible time for horror and Oscar nominated horror and films like, you know, incredible films like the Substance. I. I thought I'd watch. Watch two rather random horror films this week. Which I thought I'd bring to the show. The first one I was. I watched the Class of Newcome High. Which is. [01:31:06] Speaker A: I've never heard of it, I don't think. But Mark apparently loves it. [01:31:10] Speaker C: It has been a cult. [01:31:11] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:31:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:31:13] Speaker C: You know, trauma tromering beyond all possible trauma. [01:31:18] Speaker A: Probably. I'm not a big Troma. [01:31:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's probably nowhere near any of your sort of thing to watch. [01:31:25] Speaker A: What was it called? [01:31:26] Speaker B: Class of Newcome High. [01:31:29] Speaker A: Like Nukem. Like Duke Nukem? [01:31:31] Speaker C: Yes. [01:31:31] Speaker B: Okay. [01:31:32] Speaker C: It follows exactly what you think it is. [01:31:34] Speaker B: A high school in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. And the teachers are mutants. The pupils are mutants. Everyone's a mutant. And you know, fun ensues you. We would never have got the third horror which was nominated for an Oscar. [01:31:49] Speaker C: Oh, good, you got it. [01:31:50] Speaker A: What was it? [01:31:51] Speaker B: Best Visual Effects act was nominated? Poltergeist 2. The other side. [01:31:55] Speaker A: Oh yeah. No, never in a million years. [01:31:56] Speaker C: No. No way. But yeah, the classic. What I do find fascinating about it is just. It's a real time of a type of film. [01:32:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:32:07] Speaker C: Because it is just. The editing is bonkers. It is a collection of scenes of things that people thought would be funny or interesting. [01:32:18] Speaker B: Yet isn't it like just get chopped. [01:32:19] Speaker C: Yeah, they just chucked it. Yeah. It's like skits. [01:32:21] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:32:21] Speaker C: It could be an SNL sketch kind of thing. And it does for a period of the film become like a connected Movie. It feels like more of a movie but either side of it it's just. But it's almost like someone said some great visual effects in it. Like worth for some of the. The visual effects and the. [01:32:37] Speaker A: The. [01:32:38] Speaker C: There's a. There's a great gribly in it as we would. Which is in my vernacular now. And yeah, so it's just this crazy, crazy. Yeah. High school kind of awfully really low budget film. But it is a. Is a classic and it's along with the Toxic Avenger. It's in the same sort of realm as that sort of thing. And it was one that had never kind of. I'd never got to. [01:33:07] Speaker B: I just thought what led you to pick Class of Newcome Highness? [01:33:10] Speaker C: I just was. I was trying to think what could I watch this like a bit crazy and a bit different and just something that I hadn't ticked off that kind of 80s kind of list which was. Was you know, always shortening and. And that was there. So I was just like. But actually I think what led me to it was. I don't know how I got there but the. I guess I went down like a little rap. The other film that I watched this week was a film called Castle Freak. [01:33:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:33:40] Speaker C: Barbara Cranston, horror royalty, wonderful. Set in Italy. So felt. Felt at home with oh hey, nice this family and my wife being Italian and yeah, just even that just. I think something came where I was like looking down horrors. They said oh, people that watch this, like this two very different. [01:33:58] Speaker A: Nice. [01:33:59] Speaker C: Two very different. But I really. I don't know if you knew about the. The concept of like Castle Freak where that came from because basically the director of the film was. Was inspired to create the film because he saw a poster in Charles Band the producer's office which was of just this. This freak kind of being whipped in like. And it was just had castle freak on it. And he was like sounds like something. [01:34:22] Speaker A: That'D be in Charles Band's office. [01:34:23] Speaker B: It does. [01:34:24] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he, he basically said like, oh, what is this? He said, oh, you can. You can have it. I've got no script, but you can have it. I just have one proviso. You have a castle, you have a freak. And the film very much just hangs on that. You have a castle and have a freak. And then you just put Jeffrey Coombs of Barbara Cranston in it. And it. It would be a great one for a watch along. [01:34:47] Speaker A: Oh yeah, it's. [01:34:48] Speaker C: It's a bit slow in the beginning. I'd say to get. But it's still Jeffrey Coombs on screen being Jeffrey Coombs and Barbara Cranston. So you can kind of put up with it but when it gets going, it gets going. And I think it would be a fun one just to. To rib out and to. To. To talk about. [01:35:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you lead me to mention in fact, watch along next weekend, folks. Watch next weekend. Thank you for reminding me, Ben. As watch along next weekend. I'll put some on the Facey about. [01:35:14] Speaker A: That a bit later on February 1st. [01:35:16] Speaker C: Yes, weirdly, I will be on your time for that. Hey, see how that works. [01:35:20] Speaker A: Nice Midday watch along action. Yeah, it's always nice. [01:35:23] Speaker C: But yeah. And then just the other mention I would have which wasn't actually a film but because I've got quite a lot into a lot of the K horror that's around at the moment. There's a lot of kind of shows and. And one of the really good one, you know, we had things like the Sadness film and we had like, I don't know, Alice in Borderland. There was all these shows, these kind of K Horace shows, A Sweet Home and all these things. But one that really stuck out to was Happiness. I don't know if you guys have seen Happiness. Have you heard of this? [01:35:46] Speaker A: God, what's that? [01:35:49] Speaker B: The. [01:35:50] Speaker C: No, not sadness. [01:35:52] Speaker B: No. Happiness. Is it the one about the pedo? [01:35:56] Speaker C: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. [01:36:01] Speaker A: I think my sister and mom might. [01:36:02] Speaker C: Have of watching Happiness was a good watch. I. I'd give. This is a good fun watch. It's a somewhat zombie flick which I know doesn't go up your alley necessarily, but it's. It's not actually kind of your architect for zombies. It's because people kind of become them and turn back to normal, which has a really good concept within the show. And it's all kind of locked within these apartment buildings in Korea. In Seoul. Korea. Where. Yeah, it's just got a good premise that got great. Two lead actors worth binging through and I had a great time with it and it's if you like kind of those quirky Korean kind of slightly different things worth. Worth bashing through. Yeah, it was a good time. [01:36:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:36:43] Speaker A: I think my mom and my sister watched this last time she visited here last year. [01:36:47] Speaker C: It's good fun. [01:36:47] Speaker B: Sorry to keep going back to the 1987 Oscars. Right. [01:36:51] Speaker C: But Marx lost in 87. [01:36:53] Speaker A: Yep. [01:36:53] Speaker B: Genre winners, genre nominees were all over the place. Another nominee for best makeup was Legend. [01:37:00] Speaker A: Oh, Legend. [01:37:03] Speaker B: Yep. A nominee for best cinematography Star Trek 4 and you. Yes indeed. Yes indeed. Best cinematography. [01:37:13] Speaker A: Sure. [01:37:14] Speaker C: I mean I guess the miniatures of the Vulcan ship. Yeah, maybe like you are not going. [01:37:21] Speaker B: To believe Corrigan who was co winner for the Oscar for best original song at the Oscars 1987. You ain't gonna fucking believe this. [01:37:30] Speaker A: Is it, is it Never ending Story. [01:37:33] Speaker B: It's Giorgio Moroder. [01:37:34] Speaker A: It's Giorgio Moroder. Wtf Guys, we just had a revelation if you recall for our Kofi 2 months ago Director of Metropolis watched Giorgio Moroder. Moroder or whatever his name is, his version of the silent film Metropolis. And neither of us had ever heard of this guy until Mark earlier today was watching Neverending Story and he co wrote the theme and I've only ever heard it referred to as by the person who sings it. And so I had no idea of this. I've sang this song at karaoke a million times. No idea. It was our boy crazy distance Just. [01:38:18] Speaker C: A robber a sing all over the place like just. [01:38:23] Speaker A: Cool as so to. Let's power through these so that we can have. [01:38:29] Speaker B: Of course, of course. I don't know why but Owen. Owen got it into his full head that he wanted to watch Batman Begins. Nice. Obviously I'm not going to turn that down. [01:38:39] Speaker A: Right, yeah. [01:38:40] Speaker B: Watch the entire thing with a big grin in my face. And I was delighted that he stuck the whole thing out. Laura and Peter just wandered off after the first 40 minutes. It's like what the is this? But Owen and me snuggled throughout the entire film and he loved it. [01:38:51] Speaker C: I do love hearing your the kind of film experiences with the kids because your kids a bit older than mine. I've got a seven and a three year old and my seven year old's kind of just starting to get into like she's. She's been pretty good with films I love but I'm just thinking now when can. When can I get something in? Yeah, when can I get something good in? You know like. [01:39:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:39:11] Speaker C: So yeah, I mean nightmare was the. I watched that when I was like eight. [01:39:15] Speaker A: So yeah, times are different. So yeah, we treat our kids than our parents. Yeah, everyone turned out great. [01:39:24] Speaker B: No problem. But Batman Begins holds up. Right. Vivid memories of being in uni. Right. And sitting in. Well I think I just finished uni Perhaps it was 2005 and I sat there in front of Dial up right in Aberystwy on my, you know, my Pentium PC and I waited for what must have been four hours for the trailer for that. [01:39:47] Speaker A: I thought you were gonna say that's how you Watched it. [01:39:49] Speaker B: I was like, no, no, just the first trailer. I sat there and I didn't move from that until that trailer downloaded. And just great to revisit. It gets Batman so right. Delicious. What a great movie. And then last night, Grafted so. Which had just popped up on shudder. [01:40:10] Speaker A: Yeah. You watched it literally the day after it came out. [01:40:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I saw. I looked at that yesterday. I was like, oh, interesting. [01:40:15] Speaker B: It's all right. I mean, I'll be a hack about this. What if. What if Audition and Dark man were a movie together? It's a brilliant but traumatized Chinese. What would you call her? Biology student, makes incredible advances in the field of, like, skin grafting. She's got a birthmark, and her dad had a birthmark. And she carries on his work and ends up killing people and stealing their face. And it's fun. And that's all two and a half stars. Nothing to write home about but a good laugh if that's the kind of thing you're in the mood for. [01:40:53] Speaker A: I had a fun, fun little week. Well, in some ways. I watched a couple Oscar nominated movies that I did not like. I watch Nickel Boys, based on a Colton. Colton Whitehead novel, filmed entirely in first person. And it. It's like if Skinamarink were a drama, I guess. Lots of corners. Yeah. Lots of people's feet. Lots of not being able to see what's going on. And the entire time, it is very clear that everyone is acting to a camera and not a human being. Hated it. It absolutely hated it. I was like trying to sit through it because the door to the theater was in front of the screen. So I was like, if I walk out, I have to walk past everybody. But, like, enough people walked out before me that I was like, you know what? I'm going. So like 90 minutes in, I gave up. I was gone. Nickel boy. Yeah, I left. I could. I could not take any more of it. I was like, this is. This is not a movie. This is like a thing that, like, if you were in a museum, they have like a 10 minute loop of and you sit down to rest your knees on a bench and watch. Like, that's what this felt like. But it was 2 hours and 25 minutes long. Like, I'm not doing this. [01:42:01] Speaker C: Have you walked out of film arc? Have you ever walked out of a film? [01:42:04] Speaker B: Yes, I walked out of Batman and Robin. Yep. [01:42:11] Speaker A: That is funny to me. [01:42:13] Speaker B: My brother and I and a friend of mine from school went to see. [01:42:15] Speaker C: I can imagine. Your brother, your brother. I could imagine walking out many A film. [01:42:22] Speaker A: This is not surprising. [01:42:23] Speaker B: I'm not even kidding. Me and Alan walk out of shit all the time. Hit the bricks. If you're not enjoying it, just hit the bricks. And we walk out of Batman Robin. I think I might have also walked out of Danny Cannon's Judge Dread. I think I also split. [01:42:40] Speaker A: Those are funny choices. I feel like I can sit through those, even though, like, they're bad. You know, it's like, enough that I'm like, I can. I can wait it out or whatever. [01:42:50] Speaker C: I think Spawn was. I. I was. I, like, Spawn angered me. I just. Just noped out of the cinema in seconds. I was an angry teenager. These terrible effects on. [01:43:05] Speaker A: I think I've said on here before. My. My two were open water and the. The hellboy that Marco likes so much. Dude, that I walked out before this one. [01:43:16] Speaker B: I'm not gonna take the bait. I'm not gonna take the bait. [01:43:19] Speaker A: I'm just. I'm just stating a fact. But I watched. I also watched Emilia Perez. [01:43:24] Speaker C: Oh, geez. I want to know about this. I need to know. [01:43:27] Speaker A: Christ. Like, obviously, I'm not going to get super in depth on it, because again, we do need to talk to you about your work, but it is the most baffling. This is. You know, it's been compared a lot to Crash. And I think that's the only thing that you really do is it's like. It's the same kind of not. Not your crash. Mark crashes. I was gonna ask the Paul Haggis crash that notoriously won the Oscar only to within, like, a couple years, everyone and be like, this is white nonsense. And Emilia Perez is very much that. A movie that tries to deal with, like, transness in Mexico amongst the cartels, but is made by a white French man and acted almost completely by Americans. And it is just truly with the worst music. It's a musical worst music. [01:44:13] Speaker C: So I've only seen. And I was getting worried that I'm, you know, being out of context because. [01:44:18] Speaker A: Yeah, the one scene that everyone with. [01:44:20] Speaker C: Zoe Saldania kind of, you know, the terror. I mean, it's like, is this real. [01:44:24] Speaker A: That bad through the whole movie, really? Yeah, it is. Like, have you seen that clip, Mark, where they're watching. She's learning. You have to watch it. I'm sure a lot of people are laughing right now because they have watched it. And it's this scene where she is finding out about transgender surgery. And she, like, walks into the place. She's like, I'd like to know about transgender surgery. Operation and like, this whole thing is like, you know, penis to vagina or vagina to penis. And it's like, this is legitimately a scene in this movie, and that is what the whole movie is like. [01:44:58] Speaker C: That looked like an SNL skit. That looks just. That looked like something else. [01:45:03] Speaker A: It's the kind of thing that if you put it on snl, people be like, come on, that's too on the nose. [01:45:08] Speaker C: If I said that Vic and Bob would have done this. [01:45:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, fine. [01:45:12] Speaker C: You'd have known exactly where it is. [01:45:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll take a look at that clip. [01:45:17] Speaker A: Perhaps the last things that I watched, I watched they Live. Felt like I was in the zone to watch they Live. You can't go wrong with they Live. And if you haven't watched it all. [01:45:25] Speaker C: The way through it. [01:45:26] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. If you haven't watched they Live in a minute, do yourself a favor. You know what? Like, give yourself a present and watch they Live. [01:45:34] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:45:35] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:45:35] Speaker A: Just a delightful time. I went on to the Kanopy app, which is an app that you can use through your library to rent streaming movies. And they actually have a ton of horror, like, a lot of independent horror on there that you would never hear of anywhere else. So I watched two movies on that. One was a dud. One was a lot of fun, and even the dud was okay. I watched one called Beezle, which was about. It was like a house that was haunted, essentially by this witch. And you're seeing three different generations of people living in this house haunted by this witch. [01:46:12] Speaker C: And the first she, the Beasel is. [01:46:14] Speaker A: That's Beasel. Amazing what a name ultimately she is. You know, she every 300 years, has to impregnate a human and have a witch spawn baby. And so you're kind of watching this. This. This different thing. In the meantime, she has to feed on humans and that you get beasled. That's how you get bezel, bruh. And the first segment is phenomenal. No notes. Loved it. The second one is quite sufficiently spooky. And the third is unwatchable. So, you know, it starts off really strong. You could watch the first two as, like, their own independent things and have a good time with it, but the third ruins it. The other movie I watched was called Hauntology, which was. And it's an anthology, as you might guess from the title of the. Basically this. It's like a queer ghost movie in which this girl is going to run away from home, but her sister finds her and is like, okay, I will let you go. But first Let me tell you these stories about hauntings in our town. And the girl's like, why the. Okay, fine. If they'll leave me alone after that, you can tell me that. And she tells her these various stories about some sort of spirit in town that has sort of come for people who are different in some way and, like, feeds off of, like, the trauma surrounding people being different. So they're basically all, you know, queer people in the town who've been. [01:47:46] Speaker B: Nice idea. [01:47:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Who've been followed by the spirit over the years. And then they all kind of circle back and connect to one another. And it was like cozy horror. It was like just the kind of thing that I like where it's like. It was like a. Are you afraid of the dark? With a little more blood. I don't. I think you would probably be a little bored by it, Mark. But it was just like a really cozy, ghosty movie with, like, very wholesome, queer themes in it of, you know, sort of beating the generational trauma that comes along with it and all of that kind of stuff and looking at, like, queerness existing over long periods of time and going back to, you know, the 18 or 1700s, I think is like the first story of this. And so, yeah, hauntology, if you have canopy and a library card, which you should, if you listen to this podcast, check that out. And it's a lot of fun. And that was my week. [01:48:42] Speaker B: Absolutely fun packed week. I will tell you that when the time comes, as surely it will soon to sit my boys down in front of Hellboy, there's only one version I'm gonna be. [01:48:57] Speaker A: Can't divide it, my darling Marco. I can't divide it. [01:49:00] Speaker B: Walk the. Away from that. [01:49:02] Speaker A: No, I gave up. [01:49:03] Speaker B: So listen, friends, you all. You all feel it. It in your bones. You all see it in the world around you. We're all told it on the news. We all instinctively, intuitively know that things are wrong with the world. The. The. The. It is. It's in the air, it's in the news, it's in the. It's in the. The. The graphs are all heading a certain way. The vibe is telling us that things are wrong and that things are only going in one particular direction. So why don't we refer to our expert here? We've brought in John Benfield here not just because he's a great bunch of lads, although undoubtedly that is demonstrably the case. But what John is bringing us here this week is that statistical rigor, that analytical layer of truth to what you all feel in the bones and tissues of your body and in your being. John, I'd be grateful if you could just start by just laying out what. How do you. You interact with this concept of risk in your working life and your professional life? [01:50:31] Speaker C: Okay, so probably good to. Yeah, it's a. It's an interesting. So as I wasn't always the world I was in, so I came into this world post Covid. [01:50:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:50:41] Speaker C: I used. I used to run language school. I used to teach, you know, we used to teach English to foreign students. So students come over and we teach them. So that was my world for a long time, way back in kind of the banking world. But obviously Covid put a stop to all that and. And oh, it was certainly was closed down. I went and did the thing I mentioned before a couple of times and then I got approached by somebody who had worked for me at one point to say, we need a me. It was so my kind of. I'm a bit of a storyteller. I bring things to life. I'm good at making relationships and building friendships and getting trust and that sort of thing. And there was this consultancy company that deal in Chris, Crisis management, risk management and most specifically business continuity. So what they do is there were a bunch of very technical people who were very good at understanding risk and. And modeling ideas around preparing for crisis or risk or events and then recovering from them. Because you've got, you know, that's. That was the whole like that. [01:51:49] Speaker A: That steps involved. Yeah. Not just like noticing they're there, but like having a solution. [01:51:54] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:51:55] Speaker C: So not just the solution, but then also how do you build back, you know, how do you get back to normal after. So I came into this company with. About four years ago now, with zero knowledge of the industry or the world we were in, and then was tasked with basically kind of keeping us going and getting business and kind of making it happen kind of thing. And over the years have been involved with many, many clients and businesses and charities and government things that all approach risks in different way and have different risks. And about half our business. The reason I'm in the States quite a bit is we is over in the United States. [01:52:31] Speaker A: We're risky. [01:52:32] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. There's some interesting stuff on that because the thing about risk is that, you know, there's different drivers to how people approach it. There's different drivers onto how the reasons people might deal with it. [01:52:49] Speaker A: It. [01:52:50] Speaker C: And sadly, and we talked about the world that we live in and the fact the structures are broken is that the only. The reason people do deal with it is generally because it starts affecting someone's pocket somewhere. [01:53:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:53:02] Speaker C: So a lot of the risk industry, as you can imagine, is driven by insurance, because insurance are ensuring what, you know, they call everything risks. Every business is a risk. Every person is a risk, ultimately. And they will sometimes highlight. Hang on a minute. This business hasn't really identified their risks or hasn't really identified, you know, how they're going to survive. If one of these things was to happen. And then you've got the other side of regulation. It's a bit more of a thing, our side and a bit less of a thing in the us, although it's, you know. Well, it depends where you are, but it does happen. And then you. But then. But then you've even got, you know, know depending on your kind of news sources. And, you know, I've spent many, many a conference in the UK where it would be all talking about climate risk and climate changing and climate events and all these sort of things. And then I've been in American conferences where people are talking up, saying, you know, we've had our. I won't do the accent. We've had our. Yeah, we've had our. Like, we've had four hurricanes and we don't usually have hurricanes this time of year, but. But there's no mention of climate change, right. [01:54:11] Speaker A: Yeah. We have no way of knowing why this happening. [01:54:14] Speaker C: You're laughed out of the room almost, you know, and. And it's. There's some slight. There has been some changes. It has started to. [01:54:21] Speaker A: That's. [01:54:21] Speaker C: The needle is moving. [01:54:23] Speaker A: But that's got to be so crazy for you though, coming in here because obviously over the years, like Mark has expressed like, kind of, you know, this has been part of the process learning like just how like closed off American minds are about things like that. I'm sure seeing that in person and being like, I have to talk around the obvious problem here. Must be bizarre. [01:54:44] Speaker C: Yeah, this is really strange. And you get businesses that are different or that have interests overseas and they have to deal with things a bit differently. And you know, the companies we deal with are Fortune 500 companies and so they have to have a more global outlook. But even then, you know, when you get down to the. The real nitty gritty that they're dealing with it all differently. So it's really interesting. And, and then just the types of risks as well. So, you know, if you think of. In America, some of. We have to think about things like disgruntled employees. [01:55:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:55:17] Speaker C: Is a much bigger thing than it ever would be over here, whereas over here it might be more of. It could be more of a fire or flooding risk. You know, depending on what the situation is, your environment changes. You know, we do work in Mexico. That's a very different environment again. So it's really interesting that, you know, risk is everywhere, risk is all around us. But it's really interesting it depending on where you are, different things are driving what fixes it. Different things are driving what promotes it. Different things are driving whether it actually matters to people or not. Yeah, and so it's really fascinating. So, but the way we as a business will kind of look at these things is it is all based around businesses. It's all based around economy and keeping businesses going basically. So we tend to look at kind of business impact. So if there is a risk that's materialized, cyber attack, a fire, a flood, whatever it might be, you have to look at what is the impact of that going to be and put some sort of monetary value on that and say, well this is what it's going to cost, this is what it's going to do of the business, you know, and you'll have things like rtos, which is where the amount of time at which you can get back to operations and the amount of time how, you know, so if you think of banks have very short, you know, if something goes wrong, they have to go really, they have to fix it really quickly, otherwise it's millions lost. Whereas it could be a pharmaceutical company has six months of safety stock and actually they're timelines are different. But then you have those kind of max maximum tolerable period of disruptions where if it gets to this point we're in trouble. And I think that's some of the things we're seeing with some of the climate stuff now. You know, like we've told you guys have talked about it a lot. You know, if we get to this point it's, you know, what is our. The MTBD as the term is, I. [01:57:16] Speaker B: Don'T think we really know what does that stand for? [01:57:18] Speaker C: Maximum tolerable period of disruption. [01:57:21] Speaker A: Okay, so tolerable period of distress. [01:57:25] Speaker C: So that's the amount of time you can go before it's almost maybe irreversible damage or you know, or, or just really, really catastrophizing. Like the business, the business would really struggle to keep going or. [01:57:39] Speaker B: Oh, I got the. The right end. So the M. MTBD is your window of time. Sorry. Yeah, Maximum tolerable time period. [01:57:47] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:57:48] Speaker B: Disruption, the time between something going wrong. And the time. [01:57:52] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:57:52] Speaker B: How long can that be? [01:57:53] Speaker C: Exactly? Yeah. So you're measuring all those things. So whenever you approach risk you kind of have to think in those sorts of areas. You have to think how long could this happen? You know, if there is a terrorist attack or, or an armed intruder or whatever, then you've got to, you've got to get, that's got to be sorted pretty quickly. Right. So that you know, so then, then what you go on to next, once you kind of start understanding those bits, you go on to well how do you, how do you fix these things? Well then you need, you need people to assume roles and you need a structure. And what tends to work well in crisis situations is a command structure. So we have to move away. You know, Mark will know this. I think judging from your, your kind of workplace. Everything is management structures is everything we have is all management. It's all meetings, it's all discussions of course. No, no, out the window. That all goes out the window and it becomes, it needs to become command structures where you have very, you know, almost military esque or emergency service esque way of dealing with it. And so you have to kind of then look at well how do you plan for that and who is the response? Who fits into those places. And then you go on to, then actually what do we do? And it's all this sort of stuff that has to come into this world. So yeah that I just wanted to give a bit of a kind of. It's a big subject to. Yeah, it's really interesting especially at 20 to midnight. But it is fascinating, but it is a very wide. But the reason obviously we got discussing was because of these reports that came out now we often talk about can you trust the information that's coming out on things. You know, stats can always be skewed, lots of things. But genuinely I think if you've got a report, you know these reports are often by businesses. So the World Economic Forum report, which is the main one that you talked about last year very well and you know we've looked at this year as well, is built from, you know, businesses and CEOs and leaders, leadership positions of like. So I think this year was actually a lot less people, a lot less companies were involved. Actually I think it was about half the amount, amount of companies were involved in the report, which was interesting. [02:00:02] Speaker B: Which is actually the first question I want to ask. I mean is the World Economic Forum report sourced solely on polling corporate sources? [02:00:15] Speaker C: There is some government input as well or like country base input. But then There is another bit I'll go on to, I'll talk to a bit about in a minute of. There are national risk registers that you can go see which are super interesting if you want to kind of dig into what means for your own country. And I'll tell you a bit of story on that in a moment. But, but these reports are, you know, again it goes into our broken system of money. So the businesses are saying actually this stuff's going to affect us because it's going to cost us money and it's going to start making our money, you know, affect ourselves. And in the same way you've got the insurance risk barometers or reports and generally I think if you can, if you look at them and they kind of marry up, you're probably getting somewhere close because the insurance industry saying these are risks and we don't want to pay out for these and the business industry is saying we're going to lose money here. Well then you're probably getting somewhere close to understanding what's actually going to happen. And when you take into account the World Economic Forum of this year, when you look at the, I don't know if you remember Corey, you saw the two year and the ten year. And in the two year they kind of split it up into economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological risks. And it was quite a mix on there, you know, everything was quite, you know, I think the number one is, of the next two years is misinformation and disinformation. [02:01:36] Speaker A: Right. [02:01:36] Speaker C: Which I think we know is huge. And you know, we've got countless stories on issues with that. And, and number two was extreme weather events that was there as an environmental but then you had things like state based armed conflict, you know, societal polarization, cyber espionage, you know, inequality, those sort of things. But when you go to the 10 year one, I think it's five of the 10 spots on there are the green environmental issues. So in two years there's just two greens. It's extreme weather events and pollution. But the 10 year one they're saying extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to earth systems, natural resources shortages and pollution are all in there. [02:02:22] Speaker A: 10 years. [02:02:23] Speaker C: In 10 years. And so that I think will, you know, and if you, when you look at that you go, hang on a minute. So businesses and this is us, uk, Europe, they're saying no, no, this is actually going to cause us a problem in 10 years. So you don't need like. [02:02:39] Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean just looking at perspective. Yeah, it's Been like the, the problem with fighting it has been businesses weighing this out and going that problem is enough down the road that it is more profitable for us to pretend it's not happening than it is for us to address it. And what you're saying with this World Economic Economic Forum thing is that now we're coming to a point where this is actually. We need to acknowledge this because it is actually going to cost us money now. It is not more profitable for us to pretend this is not happening. [02:03:14] Speaker C: Yeah. And that's. We have we reached that mtpd, that maximum period of total disruption, you know, has that almost naturally started going. Hang on a minute, that's actually real, you know, so it's really interesting when you look through these reports and they are worth seeing and if you do really want to know kind of what's down the line or what things around the corner, just to give a bit of an example. So I wasn't in the business this at this point, but in the years leading up to 2020, the UK National Risk Register, which you can go and see now, they've just released the 2025 one and I'll go into a little bit about that. But what would you say was in the top five of that risk register for five years leading up to 2020? [02:04:00] Speaker B: UK? [02:04:02] Speaker C: Yes. [02:04:06] Speaker B: Communicable diseases. [02:04:08] Speaker C: It was a pandemic. [02:04:12] Speaker A: In the five. [02:04:13] Speaker B: Years leading up to 2020. [02:04:15] Speaker C: Yes. On that report that it said that a Covid type or flu type virus, it was stated, will happen in the near future. [02:04:29] Speaker A: That's disturbing. I mean I'd heard that that kind of thing was warned about and as. [02:04:35] Speaker C: A company we were going to businesses and talking about pandemic plans and this sort of thing. Not that what we did were very good because nobody kind of knew what was going to happen. I'm going to say we were right, you know, but that was sitting there on the National Risk Register. [02:04:49] Speaker A: Right. [02:04:50] Speaker C: For years. [02:04:51] Speaker A: You've blown Mark's mind right? Now, for those listening instead of watching this, it's hand to head. [02:04:57] Speaker C: Mark's doing a perfect of his, of his. Of his Brick and Morty tattoo. Yes. It was identical. [02:05:07] Speaker B: Holy Ben, that's wild. [02:05:10] Speaker A: That's absolutely wild. [02:05:11] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:05:11] Speaker B: So in your estimation then where. And, and this is a huge question, I'm sure, but where was the disconnect between those who had to see it coming, seeing it coming and what actually happened? The, the unpreparedness and the mayhem? [02:05:30] Speaker C: I think, I mean, yeah, it's tough. I, I think there's just this Element of it hasn't happened so it won't happen in a way. [02:05:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:05:38] Speaker C: It's almost like I'll see it when I believe it. I think. [02:05:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:05:41] Speaker C: I think the money thing just comes on now. We're all right. We. And well. And what. Okay. Actually probably the more sensible answer is I remember in 2000, 2001 we had the SARS kicked off quite big in China. [02:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:05:55] Speaker C: And there was a little scare that it. Because I was actually part of the language school back then as well and it actually really affected our Chinese trade at the time because we used to get Chinese students coming over and they just like canceled. It was like 30 of the businesses turnover. So actually as that school was starting to look at viruses and possible viruses in other countries as like a proper risk because it's like oh, this could affect our. Our business. I don't think think that had impacted enough. So you had thing you obviously we had. SARS kind of was contained in. In China to a point. And then you had swine flu or the. The pig flu that came about and all these other ones. [02:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:06:31] Speaker C: And then there was the. There was a. Some sort of bird flu wonder or one. [02:06:37] Speaker A: Yeah. My. My roommate and I when I was a freshman in college used to always scare each other up bird flu every day. [02:06:43] Speaker C: So this was the thing so I think kind of come and gone and not really. Not really taking hold. So I think a lot of people I could even remember sitting around a room. [02:06:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:06:51] Speaker C: Pre covered when the discussion came up about when. When it was the first things happened in Wuhan and it was like we were sitting around going kind of like we've been through this. We think it's gonna be okay. I think it's just that I think it was just the pact of people just getting a bit too. A bit too comfortable. And I think it's probably exactly linked to how we've been with the climate it affects and those changes because people are just probably say well we keep saying it's going to come and it's not really happened. But it's not a sudden thing. It's like a gradual thing isn't. It's like a frog boiling water. You know, that's it. [02:07:23] Speaker B: And is there truth in the point that Corey made just there a few moments back that it's. It's less of a economic impact to pretend it isn't going to happen than to actually prepare for it happening? Yeah. [02:07:36] Speaker C: I think 100 that. Yeah. You know like it's. Yeah. Right now. So I think to. To lead on to that, the, the, the, the national, the UK National Risk Register now, which you can go on to and have a look at and see their biggest thing that they think is like the highest risk, basically, and the most likely thing. Well, first of all, one of their highest things on there is a pandemic still. [02:08:00] Speaker A: Okay, great. Yeah, yeah, well, obviously, yeah, we're obviously, obviously with like the current bird flu, there's chances of that sort of breaking containment and whatnot. And you know, there's always various things coming up that they're like, yeah, if this hits the wrong way, another pandemic. [02:08:16] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also because now, and because now we've seen the economic fallout from that, it's now like, oh, okay, we won't. [02:08:24] Speaker A: Do any, anything, we won't lock down or anything like that. If there's another pandemic, we'll just let it kill people for. [02:08:30] Speaker C: Yeah. And, and then, and then in the, but the uk, one of the biggest things and the biggest things they're worrying about both in insurance and like from government is flooding. You know, like, and if with the climate change for uk flooding is like off the charts of what it's going to do. It's. I'll just see if I can find what I had in some, some stats that I had about flooding. I think it was something in the region and I'll, I'll put, I'll give you links, Corey, of things that I've talked about. [02:08:59] Speaker A: Oh, thank you. [02:08:59] Speaker C: And everything. I'll send them all over. I think it was something like 8 million properties in the UK will suffer new flooding in the next, in the next like five years or something like that. These are new property. These are people that haven't been flooded before, haven't had gold in flooding. And this is going to come from surface water that's rising. You know, all these lakes and streams and Martians and things that we're sitting on. The water is going to rise from, you know, constant bad weather or flash floods and things like that. And that is a real worry because of the, you know, the way with insurance industry. We work quite heavily in the insurance industry and it, you know, they're panicking about that and they're starting to now talk to all of their businesses and say you need some plans for this or you need to think about what the impact of that's going to be, you know, and you need to do it. And so it's the second it starts hitting, like I said, second it starts hitting someone's pocket, things start moving and you start, you start getting somewhere. [02:09:56] Speaker A: I mean, we're dealing with that now. Obviously I talked before about my basement being destroyed by the hurricane and all of that stuff, but even before that had happened, we were dealing with anytime sort of a big storm came through, we were experiencing flooding. And my grandmother lived in this house for, you know, 70 years and had had it flood like twice. Wondering a hurricane that took out Hurricane Sandy, which took out a lot of New Jersey and like once years before that. But it's become like a regular occurrence now. And this has become an issue with people and their insurance around here. Well, you live in a flood zone now, essentially. So will the insurance even cover you for something like that? Because now you have basically assumed the risk of moving into a place that floods, even though this isn't a place that should flood. That is fully just a result of the changing climate over the years and the severity of the storm and the soil not being able to keep up with it and the foundations of our homes not being able to keep up with the amount of groundwater that is accumulating as a result of this, because it literally comes straight through the walls and up through the floor. This is not supposed to happen. And so like, the idea of that is very familiar to me and to a lot of the people who live around me. And I guess now Brits are facing the same sort of things that, you know, we're dealing with. You don't have to live next to a body of water. [02:11:23] Speaker C: Nope, no, no, no. [02:11:24] Speaker A: For this to happen. [02:11:26] Speaker C: No, no, no. There's all sorts of, you know, streams and lakes or just areas of the country where they call like dark. I think the insurance industry names them as like black zones or dark zones, I can't remember. And they, they, they're just like, that's got a flood there and if we get this weather continues, it's going to flood. And so it's. Yeah, it's really. I think in America, I think there was, I think in the World Economic Forum, they talk about a hundred billion annually just to kind of extreme weather events or something like that ranked that. So it's huge. And obviously we've got these risks of fires and floods which we've had for years. So we kind of are better prepared for them. And obviously more of a newer one is things like cyber. Cybercrime is obviously huge. That's the number one risk kind of globally around any country is just, just is, is cyber again because it's people targeting businesses. So that becomes the, you know, the, the, the top risk in everything. And with any of these things, it's always about trying to find out, you know, how you deal with it or how you, how you look at it. But what I found interesting in these reports was that obviously you have, you know, you have, okay, you have cyber and you have extreme weather events and you have maybe a terrorism and then you have pandemic and you have these kind of things that we now know, but then you have these like, emerging risks that I thought were quite interesting as well, some of these new risks that I thought might be a bit better for this to kind of think on. And obviously you guys have talked about AI a lot, you know, and, and the problems and the problematic things around it. And it is a real, it is a real risk. You know, I, I recently completed a master's alongside my work and my project was around, around the risk in AI and it was about, you know, how you, if. Because basically we don't have a choice. Everywhere is going to be using it. It's already on our phones, it's already on our computers. Every day we're getting a new app that says they're using AI. It's just we, you know, we're just not going to. [02:13:31] Speaker A: No way to shut it off anymore. [02:13:32] Speaker C: It just is, it's just there. It just is there. So it was like, okay, well, if we're going to have to embrace this in some ways, then we need some models to actually understand how to, to do that, you know, so there are some quite very good models out there, like ethical AI models that help you kind of understand how best you can use it or, you know, and that covers all things from the risk of climate issues, you know, just the sheer amount of, you know, energy and water and all these things that it uses to, to use AI, but then also the risks around, I don't know. Did you ever come across in your kind of AI research the issue in Denmark around the housing associations and the using AI? [02:14:19] Speaker A: I don't think so. Did you have you. [02:14:20] Speaker B: It's a new one on me. [02:14:21] Speaker A: No. [02:14:21] Speaker C: Okay. So basically, to kind of cut it short in Denmark, so the Danish Welfare authority basically used AI tools to help fight fraud within their systems. And what. That, that, what they. But what it ended up doing was obviously it became just almost, you know, fueled mass surveillance basically. And there's a huge piece on this Amnesty International that you can look at. But what it started doing was it because of the inherent bias in the setup of it, it basically was just flagging anybody that was not of kind of white Danish origin, right? As, as fraud and then was like destroying families and ruining lives and having people almost deported. And it was, you know, and was just, it completely went off. It actually almost wiped out the entire, you know, a lot of the government department that was doing this part because they created this effective mass surveillance social benefit system that just targeted minorities basically. [02:15:20] Speaker A: Right. I mean, it's the thing that everyone, you know, that people of color and marginalized people keep on like shouting about, right? Like, you know, we've talked about it since the beginning of this in sort of a benign way, but how like my camera would always try to focus on like a white man on a pillow behind me instead of me, right? It's like, oh, we'll look for any white man instead of a black person to focus on. And recognizing that algorithms and things like that are biased, you know, they are not neutral in any way. And so the, if the stuff that they're trained on comes from a place of bias and things like that, that's not just gonna be like, oh, the machine's smart enough to filter that out, it's going to continue doing that. And here we've seen that in like workplaces that use AI to sift through like resumes and like that, just straight throwing out anything that has a name that sounds black on it or something like that. You know, if your name is Shaniqua and you try to apply for a job, good luck because the algorithm is just going to filter you out from the beginning of it. So we see that in other places too. [02:16:21] Speaker C: I mean. [02:16:22] Speaker B: Oh, sorry mate. Go on. [02:16:23] Speaker C: No, go. No, you go, go. [02:16:24] Speaker B: I'm fascinated with, from your perspective, right, from, from where you sit and as intimately kind of involved as you are with, with just risk on the whole and with different kind of vectors of risk, where do you think the breakpoints are socially, economically, in terms of community, in terms of, of just the kind of the, the structures that we all live and work around in our day to day lives. What do you think will be if, if, if we take that 10 year thing as an example of, of climate catastrophe worsening and becoming more pronounced as an example, and not just climate, but all of these other various risks in the World Economic Forum report, what do you think are going to be the structures that will kind of show the, the most pronounced damage first? [02:17:22] Speaker C: I think, I mean it will be, I mean again, this will go be different depending on the country, I guess. I think in the UK it will be, I think it will be massively led by the insurance market. I Think the insurance market will. As more and more businesses are failing to recover from flooding or cyber attacks or, you know, especially climate related things or AI issues. You know, with the AI acts come in, the EU AI coming in which is going to start regulating and start charging people for data loss or misuse or wrong use of AI again, the second they all start getting hit and people's shares and stocks start going down, they'll make a change. But it's just whether or not it's. It's in a climate. Is it? [02:18:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:18:11] Speaker C: Is it in the right time? So, yeah, sadly, I mean, you know, it's horrible to say but it always kind of comes back to, to that thing of it's when it affects. Oh gee. [02:18:25] Speaker A: Oh no. [02:18:27] Speaker B: Oh no. [02:18:28] Speaker A: Oh no. [02:18:30] Speaker C: Back in the room. [02:18:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [02:18:34] Speaker D: Being midnight, our IT department does I laptops at midnight. And it just went. We were updating and shut me down. I didn't realize in the background they were doing that. [02:18:45] Speaker A: Oh wow. [02:18:47] Speaker D: Yeah, it was just literally like, I'm out, I'm done. So it just went. I switched onto my phone now. [02:18:53] Speaker A: Oh, that's bananas. [02:18:54] Speaker D: I was like, battery's good, everything's good. And then I was realized, oh no, you've done a external app. Sorry for that. [02:19:02] Speaker C: But yeah. [02:19:02] Speaker A: Can you connect headphones to your thing or is it the. Oh, you've got it. Okay, cool. [02:19:08] Speaker D: Yeah, but he's okay. Can you hear me? [02:19:09] Speaker A: Yeah, no, you sound fine. I just wanted to make sure. [02:19:12] Speaker D: As long as it hasn't changed the sound too much. [02:19:14] Speaker A: No, I think you're fine. [02:19:15] Speaker C: So yeah, I think. [02:19:16] Speaker D: And I think that's the case with the climate thing. Like I said before with in the United States now we're starting to see a bit of a change in the reaction to it. [02:19:29] Speaker C: So I've seen it just in the. [02:19:30] Speaker D: Last few years of where it was completely ignoring it, but now it's actually happening so regularly that there's a hurricane coming at a time when there shouldn't. [02:19:38] Speaker C: Be hurricanes or a fire coming in. [02:19:39] Speaker D: A time when there should be fires. And it's now, you know, it's causing this issue. So yeah, that's going to be the big, the big kicker for it. I mean in the. [02:19:50] Speaker A: Oh God. Well, I was just going to ask sort of as a accompanying Marco's question here of like kind of where does the shit hit the fan next? Because what you're doing is like risk assessment and then trying to figure out how to mitigate these risks. Is there also amongst these like many areas you name pandemics AI, insurance, all these kinds of things. Something that you feel like it's hit that point of all those letters, the maximum time or whatever, you know, it's hit that point that you think that they are actually like, all right, we're fixing this now and we have. Have some chance of getting ahead of one of these dangers that is hitting us right now. Is there anything that we haven't let hit the fan? [02:20:38] Speaker D: Yeah, I think technical, the technological ones. I think actually when it comes to things like cyber and things like AI, I think we, we react to them quite well, actually. I think, you know, as a, as a. We're very aware and it could say terrorism, you know. Okay. It's not to say it doesn't happen, but I think. [02:20:54] Speaker A: Right. [02:20:55] Speaker D: The preparedness, which is a big word of, you know, in the industry, the preparedness against those sorts of things because they've been sitting on the risk registers for a long time, is actually pretty good. You know, it's actually pretty good because we're, We've kind of experienced it, we've looked at it and we're kind of, We've kind of either models or understanding of how to deal with it. And so those sorts of things, I think, you know, I think in America with those, the, the, the work done around that kind of armed intruder stuff, you know, those sorts of ones have. But I definitely lean to technological ones tend to be, Tend to be better. It's when it's. [02:21:35] Speaker C: I guess because. [02:21:37] Speaker D: I guess that could be because there was money to be made out of it. [02:21:39] Speaker C: I don't know. [02:21:40] Speaker D: I sound really cynical. Don't know. But I just, I think that is. [02:21:42] Speaker B: No, no, no. [02:21:43] Speaker D: Yeah. Because all of a sudden you can go, well, actually, okay, we can have a company that's got a cyber. This is cyber experts in this particular area. Consultants, you know, breeds business. So I think all the time it's breeding some sort of extra business. It's worthwhile. And it actually leads me a little bit onto one of the ones I thought was a little bit more kind of out there, a bit different and. Which was about. [02:22:07] Speaker C: In the, in the World Economic Forum. [02:22:09] Speaker D: And I think it's in the National Risk Register as well. Yeah. Is severe space weather. [02:22:14] Speaker A: Oh. So like mass coronal ejections and. [02:22:18] Speaker D: Yeah. Like just the idea of. So I met a friend of mine is a doctor in Rome. He worked on a lot of the vaccines and things for Covid. And he's, he's super intelligent guy and he. One of his friends. I don't know what These guys was in the water. They're from Rome actually. But his friend, his company is set up literally to deal with like possible space debris. And they're, they're like looking at how do we sort the issue of junk in space? Effectively. [02:22:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:22:47] Speaker D: Because if you think of it this way, so if you think about how bad a job we've done in the uk or sorry, UK in the world of dealing with rubbish, just think about how bad it is in space. [02:22:59] Speaker A: Right. [02:22:59] Speaker D: Because especially in year old the space is huge. [02:23:03] Speaker A: Mark's like, I think that space could do more rubbish. Ish. [02:23:06] Speaker D: No, not in near orbit space though. And that's the issue because it's not actually in space, it's actually. [02:23:12] Speaker A: Right kind of. [02:23:15] Speaker D: Yeah, it's just, it's not really space. And so I noticed that there was this, you know, space debris thing and I thought okay, that's a bit interesting, think a bit more into that. And I could see that. I don't know if you saw that, you know, because of commercial space industry booming now. And I think there was something like at one point there was 15 or 20,000 satellites were sent up between a certain amount of time. There's only like a quarter of them are actually still being used, you know the ones that sent up in recent years and they're all actually just floating around. So what happens is things collide, things, right, you know, end up. There was, there's cases of Chinese stuff falling down in Southern California. A piece of space junk fell for a two story home in Florida that was confirmed to have come from the International Space Station. [02:24:18] Speaker A: Several fragments from the ISS. [02:24:20] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Several fragments of SpaceX capture was found in Canadian an onocated farm. The family are now suing NASA for damages which is. Yeah, that might change the view on it all. [02:24:33] Speaker B: Wow. [02:24:34] Speaker D: So because over 60 years there's more than 6,000 space launches then that's put 56,450 trapped objects in orbit. [02:24:45] Speaker A: Jesus Christ. [02:24:46] Speaker D: And only 8% of those 56,000 are actually active space satellites. The rest is just jet junk. [02:24:52] Speaker A: Just. It's just junk in near Earth orbit. [02:24:56] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:24:56] Speaker D: Which has created this thing called the Tesla syndrome, which is this. It's a scenario when which a volume of debris and I'm reading this because. [02:25:04] Speaker C: I wanted to get it right, a. [02:25:05] Speaker D: Volume of debris in the Earth's orbit reaches a critical threshold which then triggers a cascading effect which then collisions with other debris creating more junk and then just effectively hitting the planet. And in June last year actually a defunct Russian satellite broke up into almost 200 pieces of debris and forcing the astronauts on the ISS to take cover and prepare and to evacuate and all. [02:25:31] Speaker C: That sort of thing. [02:25:34] Speaker A: So there's as if they're not dealing with enough on there already. [02:25:37] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. And when you actually start looking at, because the value of like the reused value of space 56 actually supposed to be something in the trillions, like you could actually, like, you could actually collect. [02:25:49] Speaker A: This a reason like, and use it. [02:25:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [02:25:51] Speaker D: Which is what this colleague, my friends, is kind of, I think looking at effectively. But a lot of people were just looking at it. It was just too expensive to do effectively. But there was this, a rocket separation room fell at this Kenyan village in December. But just December last year, 30 December 2024, this huge metal separation ring just, just dropped. [02:26:16] Speaker A: I think I did see that one. Yeah, yeah. [02:26:19] Speaker D: So that's a risk that is, is, is really growing and I think, where did I read the stat of what they're predicting? It was quite staggering, the numbers that they're predicting. Obviously now with everyone's favorite Nazis, Elon Musk, what he's projected to do and, and you know, SpaceX and all these other ones, you know, the, the amount, if you think of what we did between the 60s and now, right, of sending stuff to space and what we're going to do from now for the next 20, 30 years. Yeah, those numbers are going to be completely different. Completely different. [02:26:58] Speaker A: It's, it's crazy to me. Like again, just thinking from the perspective of like what you do and sort of looking at reaction, risk and stuff like that, like the, that at some point it was decided that we would just send shit up there and deal with whatever the consequence of that was later, like from every perspective, whether that's cost or environmental or whatever the case may be. I mean, we see this too, right? [02:27:28] Speaker B: Like how many people can. Yeah, I think it's more a case of we'll send shit up there and someone else will. Right. [02:27:35] Speaker A: It's not going to be our problem. Right, but you see this with talks of what's happened with Boeing, right. How many people can they let die, basically? How many accidents can they deal with and pay out with that balancing out from versus fixing the planes instead. Right. But the idea of our whole planet just being surrounded by thousands and thousands of bits of space junk and just kind of being like, it's occasionally gonna like hit a village in Kenya and who knows, because we've never done this before, what it does to our planet itself, but it's cheaper and easier for us to just leave it like that. Like what the. [02:28:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:28:17] Speaker D: And I just found out there's projected launches, so by 2030, so it's five years time. They. There's over 100,000 new satellites are expected to be launched. So that's because of things like Space Link, SpaceX and Starlink and Amazon's Cooper. [02:28:33] Speaker C: Or whatever they're called. [02:28:34] Speaker B: Right. [02:28:35] Speaker D: And you know, so all these things. And that's without all the other stuff. [02:28:40] Speaker A: How do they even like get to space after this? Right. Like, is there a point where you fill the sky up with so much junk that there's no like pathway for you to even get out of here? How are they going to get to Mars? [02:28:50] Speaker C: I think there are two issues. Obviously. [02:28:51] Speaker D: There's the thought of which I think. [02:28:53] Speaker C: I had, I had the same sort. [02:28:54] Speaker D: Of reaction as Mark where I was like, space is pretty big, you know, when you know the volumes of spaces. But the issue is it's actually not space. [02:29:00] Speaker A: It's. Right, it's here, it's. Yeah. [02:29:04] Speaker D: And, and the thing is, so when you look at risk and if you look in that the national risk ready the uk you'll see like, like a, a crossed square there and they will place risk in different things to which will be like low likelihood, high likelihood, low impact, high impact versus. [02:29:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, in quadrants. [02:29:24] Speaker D: Yeah, in quadrants, everything. So. And what you do then is though, you've got. There's always going to be risk prioritization. So there are things that are like. Things that are like catastrophic and like highly risky. You're going to focus on quickly. [02:29:39] Speaker B: Right. [02:29:40] Speaker D: You're going to try because if it's an immediate impact, impact and it's very high, you're going to try and get just the nature of humanities that we're going to try and fix that one first. But there's some things like. Now the thing is, I think a study happened a couple of years ago, I found it on the BBC and again I'll send the link I found. [02:29:56] Speaker C: Just so we got. [02:29:57] Speaker D: But it was. I think the chances of getting hit by some sort of spray slippery was like one in a trillion or something like that. [02:30:03] Speaker A: Sure. Hey, right. [02:30:04] Speaker D: You could still be the one. [02:30:05] Speaker A: Right, Right. That's not much comfort for, for the one person who does get hit by the space debris. [02:30:10] Speaker D: That number is, is. Has already drastically dropped and we've already found just in the last year kind of five or six cases that I quickly found. I didn't even have a chance to go into it more of some Serious. So, you know, these sorts of emerging risks of things like that, AI, you know, space debris, how we deal with them is going to be really interesting, you know, and if you, if you assign to those risks the same models and importance that you do a fire, a flood, then you're probably going to be right. We'll probably be fine. The issue is because there is always that mentality of, hey, you know, it's kind of okay, or unless someone can make some money out of it. [02:30:56] Speaker A: Like, we as people have a different sense of the priorities here than the corporations who are in charge of actually stopping this stuff from happening thing to us. [02:31:04] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [02:31:06] Speaker D: So it, it, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's a big subject to look into. And, and I think America's actually very good in some, like, personal resilience. And, and you know, you have a lot of. Whenever I'm down talking to other guys that give a lot of things for houses to have, like you put your documents in a pack and you have a ready bag ready and all. That's pretty good at that house there. [02:31:29] Speaker C: Right? [02:31:29] Speaker D: And I remember, Yeah, I think we. [02:31:30] Speaker A: Talked about that a couple weeks ago, in fact. Yeah, yeah. [02:31:34] Speaker D: And I was in New Orleans last year and they were talking about a lot of the. Obviously, I mean, geez, there was a whole different mindset seeing the risk, the kind of hurricane effect still kind of ongoing. [02:31:47] Speaker A: Yes. [02:31:48] Speaker D: But I remember them talking about the, the simple thing of telling people to have like an axe in your, in your loft, in your, in your. Because you could, you know, the people that survived were the ones that if you look back onto the roof, they could cut through their roof. You know, and there's some really simple things when you're dealing with risk that you can do, which just make it a lot easier to deal with after. So that's like, I'm thinking of what we do specifically, and it's something we can try and do with you guys at some point and maybe some other. Maybe pull a few people from the pod in and we can do a bit of bidding. But we, we try and scenario it. You know, we say, okay, we go into a business and we will play out some of their top risks. So after we've analyzed the business, understood what their top risks are, we'll build them a plan. But then we'll actually like War Game. We'll, we'll go, we're gonna pretend this is happening and we'll have videos and cuts, cut scenes and make it really as realistic as possible. [02:32:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:32:44] Speaker D: And that's when you really realize how people are going to react in a, in a scenario. Because you don't know until something happens. Right. So that's why when you've had a pandemic and then all of a sudden people are, okay, well, we could feel like we can kind of deal with this now or to a point because we've gone through it before, we can get up and running quicker. So, you know, you need to kind of think through, okay, well what was, what would I do if this happened? Okay, well I would do this and do that and do that. And would that work? Okay, yes, it would. And that's what we kind of play, play out on it. So yeah, you can be prepared. And I think when you actually, it's better to analyze it, understand the risks that are apparent to you and then you can prepare for it and deal with it. I think that's why these reports are pretty good because you can see what's affecting your regions. They're broken down to countries. You can see what's coming down the line. You know, it could be in workplaces that people could look at their own risks of. What's my job. Is my job something that could be. [02:33:43] Speaker C: Affected by totally coming out is, you. [02:33:46] Speaker D: Know, manufacturing firms might be saying, okay, all these flood risks. All of our sites are in cheap property areas. They were cheap because they were in these dark zones. And now is that an issue? Hard dealerships, you know, they've got EV batteries sitting on all their sites now. Huge fire risks, you know. [02:34:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, all sorts of, of all sorts of things. [02:34:07] Speaker D: You know, businesses with the AI looking at the AI thing, you know. Have you heard about the, the deep fake Hong Kong story? [02:34:17] Speaker C: Do you know about this story? [02:34:19] Speaker A: No, I don't think so. [02:34:20] Speaker D: I think, I think you would have got it from that. But basically there was this guy that was taken onto a call for his business and it was with his leadership team and they were having, oh, they. [02:34:29] Speaker B: Spoofed his managing director's voice and gun. [02:34:32] Speaker D: Got accident faces, everything got him to transfer millions of dollars and it was defect. [02:34:40] Speaker C: They had deep. [02:34:41] Speaker D: They'd social interview with the leadership team. So that's where they've gone and learned every little thing about their lives and mannerisms and everything. Then managed to get an appointment with one of their, one of the key personnel deep fake. So the people on the boardroom were all. Looks like it was there them, but it wasn't there. [02:35:00] Speaker A: Wow. [02:35:00] Speaker D: And he, they actually deforded them out of tens of Tens of millions of dollars. And so that's a new, new risk. That was never a thing before. A simp. You know, a simple thing you could prepare for. Something like that is. Okay, we need to have some sort of secret. [02:35:16] Speaker A: Right. Dual factor. Don't be a deep fake. [02:35:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:35:22] Speaker D: Sort of authentication there for me so. [02:35:25] Speaker C: I could see if it, you know, what was right. [02:35:28] Speaker D: And. But you know, have those things pre prepared and then. [02:35:31] Speaker C: And, and like another. [02:35:32] Speaker D: We had a really fascinating chat from someone who's like our top drone expert in the uk but he was saying like some of the like drone issues are becoming quite a big issue in the UK and that could be because of spying. It can be because of just people being idiots. [02:35:48] Speaker A: Like the people who flew their drones into planes trying to fight the fires in Southern California. [02:35:53] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly, yeah. Or people. There was the Gatwick thing here. Market, if you remember, with Jones. [02:35:58] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. [02:35:58] Speaker C: Space and all that sort of thing. [02:35:59] Speaker D: But he was saying like there's some really simple things you can do. Get some binoculars and get a really bright light. One of these like super lights of Amazon, you know, and you just. That is a binocular. [02:36:11] Speaker C: That is a drone. Okay. [02:36:12] Speaker D: We'll shine this bright light at it. It's not gonna be able to record anything. [02:36:15] Speaker C: So there's always super simple fixes to. [02:36:17] Speaker D: A lot of even the biggest risks. [02:36:20] Speaker B: It's just being aware and being ready as much as. [02:36:24] Speaker A: So what we. Yeah. As people who don't have the power that these corporations do to actually like solve the problems. What we can take from the this list is kind of what forms of preparedness do we need to be taking for the various things that it is saying are on the horizon for us, you know, beyond our. Yeah. Americans in our go bags and stuff like that. We're used to a degree of that kind of risk. But looking at these things on here, how do we protect our data? How do we protect ourselves from deepfakes? How do we protect ourselves from space debris? I don't, I don't know about that. But like basically that's what we can take then as individuals. Right. Is like now we know what the corporations are worried about. What steps can we at least. Least personally do to protect ourselves from becoming victim to that. To the degree that that's possible. [02:37:15] Speaker D: Yeah, it's, it's. It how you know, it's how fast you go because you know, you can have the mindset of which. And I do, I'm quite a, I'm an easy guy. I kind of just go with the Flow of things. I'm just. I take things as they come, you know, I'm not gonna. I don't worry. I don't worry much about things really. I'm not that kind of mentality. [02:37:35] Speaker A: That's. Yeah, yeah. [02:37:39] Speaker C: But it was. [02:37:40] Speaker D: You know. But when you start actually thinking about these things, what I started because a lot of people say oh, but do. [02:37:45] Speaker C: You really want to listen. [02:37:46] Speaker D: Talk about those things with them like. Well, yeah, actually I. Because I like to know. I'd rather know. [02:37:50] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [02:37:52] Speaker D: Yeah. But I mean of course if we're going to focus on 2025, obviously the, the geopolitical stuff is huge, you know, with that still. Although apparently, I don't know. Did you see the BBC news alert come up before Mark about. [02:38:06] Speaker B: Apparently we're all friends now. Yeah. [02:38:09] Speaker D: Farmers saluted Trump and his. [02:38:13] Speaker C: His role in bringing about. [02:38:14] Speaker A: Yeah, of course everyone is just going to let. Just Trump throw us. [02:38:19] Speaker B: What's the word? Capitulation. It's just capitulation from everyone involved. [02:38:23] Speaker A: Yeah, everyone's just going to be victim, very civil about it and watch it happen. Yeah, just destroy the environment and. [02:38:29] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. So that number obviously, that's a huge one. And then obviously for the misinformation and disinformation is. [02:38:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that is. [02:38:37] Speaker D: That is one of the top risks for Tony. So that is going to be the constant all the way through 2025. And that might be one you asked before about. Are there any that we've dealt with? Well, that might be one that we're gone way over the line on. [02:38:50] Speaker B: It's just. [02:38:50] Speaker D: That's my. [02:38:51] Speaker C: Yeah, it's. [02:38:52] Speaker A: It's gone too far. How do we put that back in the bottle? [02:38:54] Speaker D: How do you. Yeah. How do you change that now with. [02:38:57] Speaker C: Every way everything is and who's in. [02:38:59] Speaker D: Control of what and you know, it's. We've gone. We've gone well beyond the Murdoch newspapers of uk which was one. Now, you know, we've gone well beyond that where people are literally getting fed algorithmic based information. You know, how. How do you. Barring kind of an EMP shutdown. [02:39:20] Speaker A: Yeah, right, exactly. [02:39:23] Speaker D: But that is, that's what you know. So we talk a lot about. You say about stats and statistics. Well, it's all there, these dogs. This is all based off of science, off of, you know, people that know this is going to affect them. The National Risk Registers are usually based a bit more scientifically. The economic forum ones or the is. They're usually a bit more kind of business led but they tend to say the Same things when you merge them together. Together they say the same thing. So yeah, it's, but there you can plan, you can prepare and you, you, you can fix these things. [02:39:57] Speaker C: So we just got to start. [02:40:02] Speaker B: Well, look, I've, I've, as you've been talking, John, I've had the, the UK risk register open in front of me and that, that matrix that you talk about, about severity, this is likelihood is, is fascinating. And yeah, one that, that sticks out a mile as being pretty likely and massively catastrophic and that's pandemic. But I mean then you think about, you know, the politics of, of a second pandemic and, and you know how that misinformation that you speak about will play into national and global reactions to another pandemic. It's almost. Almost. It's, it's in and of themselves. Each of these factors that you've talked about are huge, but the intersectionality of risk is, is another matter entirely. How does misinformation play into threat response? You know, all. And, and at half midnight we'll, we'll bring it to a close. [02:40:57] Speaker C: But. [02:40:58] Speaker A: Yes, but we will have you back to talk about more things. You know, one of the things what. [02:41:03] Speaker D: I'd love to do do is do. I did have an idea of a scenario that we could do for you guys, but it's a bit difficult just with two people and I thought maybe. [02:41:13] Speaker C: You could bring in some other aspects. [02:41:17] Speaker D: Maybe we could work something else. [02:41:19] Speaker A: I would be down another thing I think would be really fun to just run by you one of these days. Mark and I often argue over our zombie survival strategies and I would love to know, know how you would assess those. So maybe we can also have that as have you back and, and run some things by you on that as well. [02:41:39] Speaker D: Well, I have an American friend who's in the industry. She's based in, I think like Twin Falls somewhere. Is that Montana? So he's just Montana. [02:41:48] Speaker A: Anyway, it sounds like a Montana. [02:41:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's Idaho. Twin Falls is Idaho, I believe. [02:41:54] Speaker D: Maybe. But see she literally as you do one and as an expert, as the full on kind of, I do this day in, day out, I'm delivering this stuff all the time, so maybe I can rustle up what she did. Yeah, quite an interesting, interesting plan but obviously it's a lot easier for you guys over there. We're just throwing records at sad, you know. [02:42:12] Speaker A: Yeah, right, exactly. Thank you so much for coming and walking us through us. This has been phenomenal. Mark, I think you would agree. [02:42:24] Speaker B: Listen, 100% concur. John. [02:42:26] Speaker D: Sorry if I was going quick, but I was trying to crush a lot in and it's a lot of detail. [02:42:31] Speaker B: Now, your. Your time and expertise are exactly what we need to give just a. Like I said, a little bit of a layer of credibility to our anxiety. But it's good to know the person justifiably anxious. [02:42:44] Speaker C: Is that right? [02:42:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:42:45] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. Well, that's. That's something, I guess. And press friends, listen, this is by no means the last we'll see in here of banners, but the. My takeaway is get an axe, get a fucking torch, get educated. They're Risk fucking. You know, they're. They're very, very credible right there, you know, outlines and warnings and indicators that you can read and that you can study and that you can learn from. So don't say we didn't warn you. [02:43:19] Speaker A: Hear, hear. And of course, the biggest thing that you can take away that will guide you through all of your. Your struggles and anxieties in this world is that you need to stay spook.