The Brindley Comedy Festival | Triforce #335

Pickox.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the lovely Trifles podcast. I am excited to be joined today by my friend Pyrrion Flax.
Hello, good.

You grumpy.

The Pyrrion Flax? You know, people call me grumpy. They don't know that Lewis is the grumpiest dude.
He is such a grump. He's a pretty, he can be a pretty grumpy.

I think everybody can be a bit grumpy. The thing is, what do you...
I think a lot of people put on this emphasis on people being grumpy, but like, we're only human.

We're only human after all. We're maybe grumpy sometimes.
But he just glides by. No one says, man, Lewis is so grumpy all the time.
If they knew him, they'd know. Lulu's a big grump.

He's the grumpiest grump. Well,

this is the nature of I can present my best self on the internet and then, or at least hope that the editor makes, portrays me that way. This is your best self, buddy.
I've got news for you.

There's not enough editing in the world.

Maybe it's God edited a podcast. Maybe you get AI to have, give AI a go.
You know, just suck out like 50% of the energy resources of a small city and see if they can edit you into being not grumpy.

One thing I find funny, you know that stupid Grok thing on Twitter? You know, Grok. And people use Twitter anymore.
No, I don't use Twitter anymore.

Same. I haven't used it.
But I see posts that are like, someone will say,

in order to settle an argument, they'll be like, oh, yeah, let's ask Grok. And they'll be like, Grok.
And they'll ask a question. And Grok will say, no, that's not true.

And they'll be like, shut up, Grok. Like, it's just like, what's the, why do you ask it? As soon as they get the answer, Grock is like the shitty little brother.

He's like the worst of the AIs. He's like the cheap one, you know? Yeah, but he knows more than a lot of idiots on Twitter.
Like, he does seem to know more than a lot of the idiots on Twitter.

So, when they say something that they think is true and Grock goes, No, that's not true, they're like, Elon, fix your AI, it's gone woke. It's just, it's quite, it's quite funny.

I've gone woke as well. Have you? Oh, yeah, I'm woke.
What time did you go woke this morning? I got this.

I woke this morning. I went woke at 7:50.

That's uh, when I woke, I went woke. I went woke at 7:55 a.m.
Yesterday, 75 a.m. God, I hate that.
I hate that term so much now.

Yeah,

you hear it all the time. It's a big red flag for me now.
Anytime somebody uses it, I'm immediately just like, I don't even want to talk to you.

It's just crazy. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty cringe.
It is pretty cringy, right?

Yeah, there is, it's, it's only a matter of time, though, before we can literally just say, AI, make us a new podcast and make it funny.

And then they'll just do all of their, they'll get together the 200 episodes we've done because it's basically the same anyway, right?

We say the same shit every week, you know, we make the same meanderings and ramblings.

Yeah, and they could just insert whatever new games come out in the last week and say, oh, it's meh, you know, like it's just

we're very rote with our. Oh my god, I've been enjoying a new game this week, though.
I've been enjoying Mega Bonk. Here we go.
Here we go. Mega Bonker.
Not another Mega Bonker. Oh, God.
That's great.

It's so much fun. I love games like that.

It's just a Vampire Survivor.

It looks like Vampire Survivors and sort of Risk of Rain, and it looks like absolute shit.

It looks. I mean, it looks.
When I say looks, I mean the graphics are dog shit. Yeah, but I mean.
But it's popular. It's fun, though.
It is actually fun.

Well, part of the reason for that is because, you know, in these games, you have millions and millions of spell effects and monsters on the screen.

So they have to keep it at a very low fidelity in order to actually render the fucking thing.

Everything could only have about four polygons each yeah, for it to fit on your fucking screen when it gets crazy, yeah, or else it just lags you to death.

No one wants to lose the game of like what's the polar opposite of uh John Cusack high fidelity? That's what we're going for. What would be if there was

yeah, like low fidelity, what would it who would be the actor in low fidelity if John Cusack was the actor movie? Who would be in low poly the movie Low Poly? It would be that chick from

that chick, baby chick 2025,

that chick from baby Reindeer. She'd be in it.

I'm not familiar with the chick from Baby Reindeer. Baby Reindeer.

Jessica Gunning.

Shalom Brune Frank. You ever watched Laura Smith?

No, no, no, no. I've never watched it.

I did watch the Pee-Wee Herman documentary recently. And another thing that I've been watching is The Newsreader.
I've been watching The Newsreader, which is pretty good. It's an Australian

cinema series. I went to the cinema.
No way. I saw one battle after another.

Oh, it's meant to be really good. It's excellent.
Yeah, it's meant to be really good. Excellent.
Really, really, really good. Nice.

I recommend it. Do you know who I don't like?

Josh Gadd. I don't know who that is.
I want you to look up Josh Gadd. You will know who this is.
G-A-G.

G-A-G. He was.
You won't recognize him, but you weren't. He was

like baby reindeer. No, but I just saw his stupid face.
I recognize this guy. He's been in all sorts of stuff.
So, do you know what he was in? He was 44 years old.

He was the voice of the fucking snowman in

Frozen. Oh,

that's what I'm thinking of. No, this is Josh Gadd.
Yeah. He's also been in the Angry Birds movie.
He just looks a cunt, doesn't he?

I think he was one of the things in the live-action Beauty and the Beast as well. Look at his fucking face.
Hi, I'm Josh Gad. He's known for voicing Olap in the Frozen free movie.
My name's Josh Gad.

Yeah, I'm Josh Gad. Oh, he was in the Book of Mormon as well on Broadway.
Yeah, so

Arnold Cunningham. Yeah, who's a massive dweeb, I think.
He's the one who's like the failure. Oh, wow.
He's just, if you just look at the way, like, his fucking face. Oh, my God.

I hate Josh Gadd so much. Right.
I'm sure he's lovely. Well, but he's the perfect cast for the roles that Seth Rogan used to take or whatever.

I like Seth Rogan. I think Seth Rogan's a likable enough dude.
He's married to Ida Darvish, who is. I wonder if she's related to you, Darvish.

She's 15 years old. What's the other child? She is married to Josh Gadd.
That's the rare Hollywood dude marrying an older woman. That's the rarest of Rogans.
Yeah, and Jonah Hill.

Josh Gadd and Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan. They've all got, they're all that same slightly

nerdy guy. How did Josh Gadd meet his wife? In 2004, after the two were cast to play a married couple in the David Ives play All in the Timing, they got married in 2008.
Oh, they have two daughters.

He's godfather to Bryce Dallas Howard. Oh,

no, wait a second. There's no way he's godfather.

You like Bryce Dallas Howard, don't you? She's older than him. How on earth can he be the godfather to her? Wait, she's not older than him.
No, no, they're both 44.

Oh, that makes no sense that he's he might he might be godfather to her children. I'm the godfather.
We're the same age. You come to me on the day of my daughter's wedding.

Asking me to do murder

josh gad as the godfather he didn't even think to offer me coffee hey

i'm the godfather i made him an offer he couldn't refuse made him an offer he couldn't refuse for his signature or his brains be on the contract

it's freaking unbelievable

Oh, this is really interesting. I'm glad that I went down the Josh Gad rabbit hole.
This is what I needed today. Yeah.
The godfather. It's It's me.
Josh Gad.

How can he be her godfather when he's the same age? That's ridiculous.

That's madness. Some Scientology shit.
Oh, no, no. No, no, no.

He's godfather to... No, Sips has read it wrong.
He's godfather to her children. Yeah, her two children.
No, he said he is godfather. Oh, sorry.
Yeah.

She's godfather to Boyce,

Dallas Howard, and Seth Gable's two children. Sorry.
Yeah, you're right.

I didn't, I stopped reading past a certain point, and I made that my basis of knowledge. Sorry, sorry about that.
But yeah,

one battle after another. Very, very, very good film.

I love Paul Thomas Anderson. It's a matter of time.
What is okay? One battle, one battle. Yeah.
I'll tell you what it is. You don't have to Google it.
You can ask me. A human being.

He's not going to ask.

It's got Leonardo DiCaprio in it. wow i'd rather i'd rather not

it's an american dark comedy action thriller film wow okay it's got sean penn in it yeah this is amazing in it leonardo di caprio who's very good in it benicio del toro regina hull yeah tayana taylor chase infinity yeah oh my great

that is like uh chernobyl hope name chase infinity whatever yeah he was a revolutionary he was a revolutionary like 15 years ago right and um it all goes to shit he has a daughter he's now raising a daughter and he's basically still on the run from the law and that's the setup um and it's like a sort of revolutionary thing going on um and they're sort of fighting the power and sean penn is uh a dickhead who's who's embedded deep within the uh the the the uh sort of you know find the revolutionaries is his whole job um his name is like

uh general lockjaw or something like that which is a really funny name but um god and he joins this group, this secret group called the Christmas Adventurers, who are a bunch of far-right Christo-fascists who want to annihilate everything that isn't white.

And that's the setup for the movie. It's really, really cool.
Just what we need, a movie about far-left revolutionaries.

Far-left revolutionaries versus far-right Nazis is what it is. But the weird thing is, obviously, this film was made, you know, this was shot at least two years ago, I'm sure.
Yeah.

Like most of these things take a fucking insane amount of time to film and edit and all the rest of it. Pretty prescient stuff.

When you watch it, you think, oh, damn, that's kind of that shit's actually fucking happening. So yeah, it's pretty nuts.
There's a lot to it. It's quite deep.

So there's, there's a, yeah, there's a Thomas Pynchon novel, which I don't know.

I haven't read many of his novels, but isn't he the guy who writes the way he writes is he writes a book and then puts it aside and rewrites it from memory.

That way he like kind of keeps the good bits. It's an insane process, but I think it ends up with his books being quite,

I don't know, like the memorable. They have memorable, you know, tent poles throughout them.

Anyway, he wrote a book called Vineland, which was a fictional novel about California in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election. Re-election?

Holy shit, that's crazy, eh? Yeah.

And so it was

the free spirit of rebellion of that decade and the traits of the fascistic Nixonian repression and the war on drugs that clashed with it.

And so it was basically, I think, Paul Thomas Anderson wanted to adapt that, but ended up struggling with it because he couldn't work it properly.

And so it became a series of separate stories that, that, you know, you know how it works. It eventually merges and edges and twists its way through to something different.

But yeah, I'm glad you like that. I will say, quite a few people that listen to the podcast don't like it when we talk politics,

which means anytime we mention fascists, they're like, stop talking politics. That's not politics, though.
Well, apparently it is, bud. Oh, okay.

They don't like it. Yeah.
Are you... Do you like fascists? No, I hate them.

I fucking hate them with every fiber of my being, actually. Oh, mate.

You're going to piss people off here. Can you listen? Stop being so woke, you guys.
I just want to listen to the podcast. Don't talk about movies that have fascism in.

I'm just filling in for YouTube comments ridiculous.

You're welcome. Why are we defending fascists?

When did we decide to do this? Do what? Defend the fascists.

I don't know, but I don't know. Oh, it's just, you know, don't be so.

Yeah, it was always taught that they were bad. Dude, stop being woke.
Don't be so quick to judge. Just because Grock told you that.

What's a fascist? Oh, God.

I mean, I did a lot of my own research.

That's how I came to these conclusions as well. I did my own research.
I asked Grok. I asked Grock.
Didn't hear me?

I think that is it. Yeah.
That's the one. Oh, fuck.
Let's move away from that. That is frightening.
Let's talk about

real world things.

How's the garden doing? How's my garden doing? How are the bins?

Let me tell you, we had

an absolute bountiful apple harvest this

year. I've been eating my own apples.
I ate an apple. Yeah.
Well, yeah, I've got a bag of apples here that me and my partner went and collected. Right.
Well, listen, I got buckets of apples.

I got so many apples. Buckets.
Like tons of apples. We've been giving them away.
When I was in the office, I noticed that a lot of the apples were coming from new zealand and i thought why

there are so many new zealand we shouldn't be eating their apples yeah

no but it's like the air miles they float them over it's an apple

they got a tube running through the center of the earth they got like a bob like a really big bobbing barrel that just sort of makes its way across the ocean and the fish that they train fish to like it's like that island of uh rubber ducks but it's just apples from new zealand they just put them all in the ocean and give them a little push and you just fish them out as and when you find them.

That's how they do it. And then you put some money back in the ocean and you hope it floats back to New Zealand.
It's why their economy is in terrible trouble.

It is shocking, by the way, how many apples you get off

me.

Oh my god, it's mad. When we went to the brewery,

me and Harry and Tom and Luke went to the brewery last year, the Thatcher's brewery. They showed us some of the trees.
Obviously, they've bred these ones to give extra apples to make cider.

And I was staggered. It was like the tree is like bending over.
There's so many apples. Man, that's what my tree was like this year.
It's crazy. It's amazing.
It's amazing.

There's so many freaking apples on there.

If only there was more nutrition in an apple. You know what I mean? Like if you could just eat apples, like a couple of apples, and that's you done for lunchtime.

But it's not, it's so much of it is water that it just kind of doesn't work. Yeah, but an apple a day still keeps the doctor away.
It does. You know? That's why they're all unmarried.

It's a nice idea, yeah. Yeah.

But no, there's so many, so many apples, but I don't know what to do with them. Like, I don't really want to to make cider because I don't know how.

And it seems like it's something I need to do some preparation. Just grog.

I can tell you how you make it. Grog.

You get apples. Yeah.
You smush them. Right.
Right. You get all the apple juice out.
And then you just ferment it. And then you've got cider.
Right. So just ferment it.
Just ferment it.

You stick it in a big fucking vat. Right.
And you just leave it there at a right temperature.

Well, that's why I haven't done it. I just, I don't have a big fucking vat.
If I did that, it would go long and moldy or something. I don't know.

Well, anyway, there's a whole bunch that have fallen off the trees that the seagulls really like to eat. Oh, yeah.

So there's like big chunks missing out of the ones on the ground, which I need to clean up. But the ones that I picked off the tree have been great.

We gave a whole bag to one of my daughter's teachers,

and she really liked them apples. What variety are they?

I feel like they're golden delicious, but

they are probably Granny Smith because they're a little bit sweeter.

Well,

some of them are yellow and then some of them are green. Yeah, they definitely have like a

really

quite tart a Granny Smith. Yeah,

I think that's right. I think they are tart, but like, I think they are a bit sweeter.
Like, it's like

a bit more sour or something. I don't know.

So the Granny Smith is like the classic bright green apple. It's bright green.
Yeah.

It's a really tart apple-y appley golden delicious or more of a a yellowy sweet yeah yeah and then uh my favorite is the pink lady i think that's pink lady's nice yeah my kids love well that's the one from new zealand are they from new zealand i think well that's the one i had yesterday was a pink lady from new zealand nice um and then i had an apple

so i i the ones we've got are like these um hit masks from China

and they're um yellow bright yellow they then they grow over Golden Delicious, they grow them in France, they grow them in Spain,

they grow them everywhere.

Everywhere an apple. I think they've declined in popularity, some of these apples, because they store them for so long.
Most supermarket apples you get have been sometimes stored for up to a year.

And a lot of them can just be put in a cold room and you can just leave them there, and

they won't rot instantly once you've picked them, unless they get a hole on them or a market.

Yeah, once something gets in, if a little, if a, if you get a worm in there there or like a seagull pecks it or whatever then it's uh it's the the inside of the apple the minute the moment it's exposed to uh the air it'll just start browning i i i tell you what i did bite into an apple the other day and it had a huge worm in it and i was like i haven't seen this for a while did you slurp it up and that was like shocking no it just it disappeared back into the apple core and crunch it all up

it was gruesome yeah

but no i i feel like it's not worth making the cider out of them apparently here i noticed at the garden center, you can just at a certain time of year,

bring in all of your spare apples, right? If you harvest all, imagine you've got one like apple tree, bring in like a bag of apples.

And for every, I think, bag of apples, they'll give you a bottle of cider. Flip.
And it's like an exchange thing.

They obviously make cider out of the local apples and they'll just trade it for you with last year's cider, which is kind of awesome, right? It's like a barter.

You're not going to do anything with the apples, but I feel like I should figure out what to do with all these apples.

an app i always my i've always used apples weirdly as like a am i hungry enough for an apple um and if i find that i i am uh and i eat an apple and i'm still hungry then i'll go and make a sandwich or something but an apple is like my sometimes i'm just bored and i'm like am i hungry enough for an apple i have an apple every night so i find it uh i find i i avoid heartburn if i have an apple every night before huh it's like the last thing i eat every evening is an apple and then i i I just don't have heartburn anymore.

And I'm sure it's because of

an apple. Cause on days where I don't eat an apple in the evening, sometimes I get heartburn.
So I wonder if I thought the part of heartburn was your stomach. It's your stomach acid, obviously.

But if you don't eat something and you go to bed hungry, does that affect it? No, you just feel fucking hungry because I went to bed hungry last night. As a matter of fact, I didn't eat dinner.

I just forgot to eat. And then I was too lazy to get anything.
And I went to bed and I was really, really hungry. And no, it's not like heartburn at all.

You just feel really ravenously hungry, but I just went to sleep. God, I hate going to sleep hungry.
Yeah, I know. It's not a nice feeling.

Common triggers for heartburn are certain foods, which I assume they mean acidic, but things like fatty foods, chocolate,

alcohol, smoking, and being overweight. So a lot of those things lead to, I'd say alcohol and smoking is what always gives me.

For me, it's sugar. It's the big trigger.
If I have a lot of sugar in the day,

I will definitely be doubled over in the evening with hard force.

Well, Thursdays, what I tend to do is when I finish Triforce, I go downstairs, I get a mug, I fill it to the brim with sugar, and then I just munch through that during the day. Is that bad? Yeah, just

sounding a lot of sugar.

It's fruit that you need to avoid. That's what's got all the sugar in it.
Avoid fruit, just eat raw sugar. Yeah,

sugar is actually quite low sugar.

Are you going to need low sugar sugar? Ask Grok. See what Grok says about all this.
That Grok is sugar. Fucking sugar.
I've been getting heartburn.

Well, sometimes like I'm working late or, you know, my partner comes home late from something and we cook dinner at like, I don't know, because sometimes we're cooking, it's cooking something and we're like, oh, let's cook this, let's cook this.

And then we don't actually eat until like 9.30. And I tend to overeat at dinner.
And then I... I would go to bed at, I don't know, like 11 or whatever.

And I just have like fucking, I lie down and I'm like, oh, this is, I should not have eaten as much as I did literally an hour ago.

God. I've been on a huge cheese and pickle tear recently.

We got some, we got some Branson's pickle, but we got it, we got smooth Branson's pickle in like a, like a ketchup tube thing, you know, like a squeezy thing.

And I've just been buying like, because my kids are all at school now. So in the morning, I can, I can actually just go to the store and not feel like under a lot of stress and pressure.

I can just sort of, you know, meander around a bit. And so I go and buy fresh bread and then

I just slap on some of that Brunson pickle and some cheese into a sandwich. But man, I think I've had one every day for the past like maybe three months now.
They're so good, though. It's so good.

Oh, that's that's just something that

makes you happy like that. The familiarity of it, right? And it's, it's, you got to get good cheese.
You got to get nice, thick bread, though. Like, just like some sourdough bread is pretty nice too.

But like, or, you know, like when you get like that

really thick and fluffy bread, you know, it's not hard bread. It's like really soft, but it's thick.

That shit is great. We do a thing over here.
I don't think it's a UK thing. Over here, they do what's called a cabbage loaf, which is just like a bloomer, I guess.
It's like a round bread.

Oh, this is specific to Jersey. How about that? And

they cook it with a cabbage leaf underneath it. And the cabbage leaf goes, you know,

what's the why? I know, I think it just gives gives it like a hint of flavor, but I probably think it's a throwback from the occupation because there was a lot of. It was wrap it in cabbage leaves.

Yeah,

there's a lot of things that they had to do during the occupation because they were starving, because all the food supply lines were cut off. Right.

And I feel like this is something that just survived that. You know, like the kind of bread they had to make was...
pretty gross during the occupation. So maybe they tried to spice it up with a...

With a cabbage leaf? Well fuck it was it's either that or or nothing. Like they were they were starving like they just didn't have anything.

So I think anything they could do to make something more interesting to eat, they did.

But then I think after the occupation was over and the and all the rationing was done and everything, some people thought, oh yeah, I really liked it when there was a bit of cabbage leaf on my bread.

And they went back to it and now it's kind of like it's a thing. You find it like in all the local stores and stuff.

i've done some research i've done my research apparently uh the use of cabbage leaves in baking goes back to the 18th century oh sorry my my bad i was guessing i was just guessing but there are a couple of things like that from the occupation i just assumed wrongfully obviously i apologize

ask a baker yeah i'll ask a baker it's a nice idea i bet they'll know but it is delicious it's this very thick uh soft bread and it just has like a it's just got like a like a hint of a different taste in the bread because of the uh the cabbage leaf.

Interesting. I do love bread.

Bread is just

outside.

God, I can't get enough of it. What was that joke about that Norm McDonald joke? That Norm McDonald joke, a classic one, is

I want you guys, okay, to forget everything you know about bread. Okay, now I've come up with this amazing idea.
It's called bread.

Oh, man.

Got this incredible idea. It's bread.

His jokes could only, like, it's only he could tell his jokes. Yes.
Like, the way he wrote jokes for himself to tell, not just as a gag, but so much of his jokes was his own.

His jokes, some of his, some of his

very cutting jokes worked well, but his jokes worked really well when he had somebody to tell them to, to, like, to bounce off of. Yeah, I think so.
All the famous clips of him and

such a cheeky little grin on his face when he was telling them you know he really he had that little kind of mischievous naughty you know like like he he'd almost like give you that look you know that oh he has that he'd look he'd look he'd look the people straight in the eye and like make them laugh with it yeah he's brilliant his delivery on uh weekend update was just so good so funny Do you know, he was

quite an interesting character, really, in terms of like his private life and some of the things that he sort of said and did i think he was quite a dark guy like he's a big sports fan he loved he was a big gambler and a big sports fan yeah um if you watched if you were back in the day when when twitter was good uh he you'd he would be watching a tournament he would be commenting on every shot yeah like he was he was there watching he was like real really really into his sport and stuff like that i i don't know i know that he gambled a lot i'm pretty sure from what i read um but i i don't know if he went broke or whatever i don't i never got the impression that norm mcdonald was like rich he's from otta and he went to the same colleges that I went to.

Hell yeah. He's a notable alumni.

Norm McDonald. Yeah, what a guy.

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Before we go on, I've got to ask you lads a question. True or false? Incognito mode makes you invisible on the internet.
True. The answer is false.
What?

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Get ExpressVPN so you can go to town. Amazing.
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On with the show.

God, what did I do yesterday? Gosh, that's what I was wondering. What did Lewis do?

Yes. We did

one of the things we did yesterday was like a little Jingle Jam meeting impact thingy. Yeah.
And risk assessment. Rich asked.
And one of the things we did was, it's one of these new ideas.

Like some of the, we're doing lots of things with Jingle Jam. And it's all Jingle Jam season and we're trying to do lots of things.

And one of the things we did was, um, which was suggested, I can't remember who by, but we basically, because we work so closely with all these charities, one of the best things about coming together and working with them more closely is that they um have have different contacts they have different ideas of doing things they have different things that work or don't work and and they all share it we're stronger together basically um and it's really positive anyway one of the things we did yesterday was an impact seminar or like webinar thing for the big Jingle Jam donors.

So people who've donated a lot over the years. And some people have donated a lot of money to Jingle Jam over the years.

And we wanted to sort of do a little bit of a Q ⁇ A, find out like, you know, what they liked and didn't like, and share some of the because a couple of the charities, Calm and Warshall, came along and did a little five-minute chat about some of the impacts that Jingle Jams had and some shared some of their stories about things they've, you know, it was great.

Anyway, they asked me to talk for a few minutes at the start of it. And so I wrote like a

I wrote a few jokes. Now, I did write them 10 minutes before.
You wrote jokes. Well, I wrote like, not exactly jokes.
So one of the things I said.

I'm getting very, very serious

personal trainer. Yeah, this is coming across.

It was

angry on behalf of everyone who was in attendance. What did you say? So what did I...

Where's your greeting?

It's gone. Good evening, fuckers.

It was similar to that. Yeah, it was.
It was one of the things I said was,

since you're all Billy Big Bucks,

I've invited you here today because there's a groundbreaking opportunity to invest coming at the ground level with our new Jingle Jam product.

It's called Jingle Jam for Jingle Coin. Jingle Coin? It's a

Christmocurrency.

So, so, like, I don't know. And I was jokes, a couple of jokes.

It's a jingle coin. It's christmocurrency p flag

tell me this isn't an actual coin and i'm on board as long as this is just well exactly no of course it's not and then i said the next line i said was don't worry we're not doing anything new we're gonna keep everything exactly the same uh in fact that's actually a good idea if we just run the same streams we did last year then we're not gonna have to do any work this time so it'll be a lot easier for everyone um also i think with some of the streams like civ 5 no one will notice if we just rebroadcast the same one from last year.

So a few jokes like that. And then

what else did I say? I can't remember. I can't remember.
I haven't got it. I haven't got it.
But I wrote it in like 10 minutes. And

how was the reception? Just total silence. Well, here's the reception, right? I was in the Zoom call.
I made a joke about Zoom as well. I was like, oh, I thought Zoom had died during COVID.

Good to see it's still

being used for something. Still absolutely killing

for these types of apparently, you know, this is where all the this is the one that's all the moneyed folks use. Anyway, um,

I it was me and there were like, so it was me, the charity sent a couple of people, the other trustees from Jingle Jam. And so there were like nine of us.

And then there were like, I think we invited anyone, we invited like hundreds of people, but I think only about 18 came on the day, or actually maybe even less. It was like 15.

And so we were kind of, but they didn't have any webcams or anything because it was being recorded. So it could be said to the people who couldn't come live.
So I'm making these jokes.

And of course, everyone is silent, right? No one is,

no one is responding in any way.

Everyone's cat webcam, apart from Rich, God bless him, everyone's webcam was deadpan. Like

they did not get any of these jokes.

But, you know, I felt like, I felt like

it was like,

I don't, I had to do something, right? I had to like take the edge off of this. Um, it's quite serious.
Do you think you succeeded in that endeavor? Or do you think you put the moral on it?

Well, obviously, the charities talking about their impact is such harrowing stuff to hear.

You know, they're obviously, it's so when you, it was nice for me to hear as well, because, you know, I sometimes don't get a chance to hear from the charities about what they've been up to and some of their stories.

And I think it was, I think it was fine. I haven't had any complaints.
No. It was, it was a good time.
I tell you what, I played a weird, I think this genre is something worth checking out in future.

There's a game I've got advert for on Reddit or something, and it's called The Lift. Right.
Supernatural Handyman Simulator. Supernatural Handyman

Simulator. The idea is it's like you are playing like house flipper style.
Right. I.e.

you're like cleaning benches and like, you know, putting new light bulbs in and fixing plug sockets, but doing so kind of unlocks like a supernatural doorway.

Like you go into like a facility and it's fucked and fixing it and turning everything back on makes it like carry on uh and it's it's kind of this looks interesting it's like

yeah like they've advertised it a lot and there's like a play test um that you can just or that i play anyway that i i quite like what do you got to do you got to fix up the whole place yeah you just got to wander around and

solve little mini games fix little puzzles and tidy up mop up charge things do a little bit of crafting, put the thing in hole.

I don't know, it was like weirdly kind of, I don't know, there's a lot of this house-flipping gameplay put into a story-based game. Do you know what I mean? People love cleaning stuff.
Yeah,

I do like games like that.

I really do. And it's a bizarre crossover.
Have you played Total War Warhammer 3 sips?

No, I never have. I think, actually, no, I'm lying.
I played it for like six minutes. Oh, man.
I've been playing that game for the last couple of weeks. That is such a fun game.
You've been a blast.

Who have you been playing as? I played as, let me see, who did I do?

I was the Vampire Lords, Manfred von Karstein, I think he's called, where you just roll around resurrecting armies of zombies and undead lads and just steamrolling people.

I played as the lizards for a little bit. They were fun.

And I'm currently playing as the Chaos Dwarves, and they are a ton of fun.

You get this artillery that's just, you annihilate people from the other side of the map. It's very satisfying watching a bunch of elves just go, ah! I wish.

I wish Blood Bowl was a bit better because I like the idea of it. Oh my God.
Don't get me started on Blood Bowl, baby.

Such a frustrating game.

I talked to Ben about Blood Bowl quite a lot.

And I did a video last year, actually, about why I think Blood Bowl is shit and people shouldn't play it. And all the Blood Bowl fans were very cross about that in the comments.

But I just think, you know, when you see there's a game there that potentially is so much fun, and they just basically don't make it fun. They make it the offer.
What would you change?

Fundamentally, the games, like in terms of the actual board game, I don't play the board board game. I'm talking about the online version, Blood Bowl 2 and Blood Bowl 3.
Yeah.

The things that they need to do. Here is the way you're meant to play Blood Bowl, apparently, according to the designer of the game.

You're meant to get the base races out of the box and play them with their base abilities, right? That's number one.

You're not really meant to do the whole leveling up thing and have all these teams with this high team value and all these skills and everything like that. Not a factor.

He's like, no, no, no, no, it's meant to just be the base team against the base team. All right.

He's not really interested in leveling up your guys, even though that is a thing that loads of people enjoy doing and is a more fun aspect is leveling up your team and then unlocking the new sort of strategies.

And the way I did it, one of my orc teams, for example, we happened to have this one orc receiver that scored all our touchdowns and he ended up with plus strength and plus move.

And he was just like the coolest dude. And we just threw the ball to him and he just run through everybody.
He was like our win condition. Tons of fun.

It was something you wouldn't expect normally on an orc team. He was like an absolute beast when it came to scoring touchdowns.
That, to me, is the fun side of the game.

but that was hours and hours and hours and hours of grinding games to get to that point. And then if he gets injured and it's just minus strength or minus move, that's it.
Retired, game over.

I'll have to retire that guy and we lose tons of TV and we go back to square one and it's another 15 hours of grinding games to get a guy up to a couple of levels.

And you just do a couple of unlucky dice shows, oh, he's dead. And for some people it's like, ha ha ha, that's Blood Bowl.
It's like, yeah, but I don't want to play that way.

So why don't you give me the option within the game to have my own rule set, like triple or quadruple speed experience so that teams playing in my league can get to that high level and have fun.

If you lose a player, it's not that big a deal. Why? Why are you, why is everything on D6, which has a one in six chance of rolling a skull, which is an instant failure? Why? Why, why, why?

Like all of these questions.

If the game was just quicker to play. And didn't have all these tedious fucking animations, which you have to watch of the orc slowly trundling across the pitch.

I don't know what that adds 25 minutes to every game. It's just these shit animations of everybody moving.

The disconnection problems, you disconnect, you just have to sit there and wait for them. And if they don't reconnect, sometimes it just times out.

So you can be 1-0 up and people pull the plug and they're just like, nope, this result didn't happen. Or you, you know, maim one of their big players.
They just pull the plug and

it just doesn't count and all that kind of shit. People find all these cheesy ways to do shit like that.
Yeah, yeah.

They'll just wait for you to disconnect. There's always been bugs in it.
So on the coin flip, heads or tails, if you don't choose, it'll just sit there endlessly. That used to do in Blood Bowl 2.

People would just, you would have to quit. It would give them the victory.
Cheap shit like that.

And it's just tedious. It's just tedious to have to grind the

fucking skills in the game. It's just, it's super, super slow and boring.
And quite frankly, it's just the only reason people play it, I genuinely think, is there are two reasons.

Either you're an actual big fan, or there's just nothing, there's nothing else really like it. Well, I think Bible or whatever was the original

that was like, yeah, so that was what Cyanide made. And they got sued by Games Workshop and told, you have to make a Blood Bowl game.
And Blood Bowl 1 was abysmal.

And then Blood Bowl 2, because Blood Bowl 1 still somehow did okay relative to what they expected. Blood Bowl 2 came out and was actually not bad.
Blood Bowl 3 came out and was somehow worse.

All they had to do was make it look better, run quicker, run smoother, and update the rules. And they couldn't do it.
I don't know why.

I think it's, first of all, it's incredibly greedy.

You know, the way these companies like Nakon put their games out is everything is a DLC and everything is an extra 11 quid, you know, and everything asks you for a bit more.

The second thing is you're playing against other players right and and that is always going to be difficult because when you're when it's a board game i've i've experienced this so often with two with board with miniatures games it's a 1v1 you're going to win 50 of the time which means you're going to lose 50 of the time which is kind of a feels bad you know people expect to win more than they lose um but you don't really feel it even if you're winning more than 55 you know that's a great really good

win rate you know it still sucks to lose as much as you do and and it hurts. And I think, obviously, the AI as well in Blood Bowl is notoriously terrible.

I mean, there is an eternal computer. There's a full solo mode now, but playing against a game.
No, no, no, no, no, no. The single-player game of Blood Bowler, who gives a shit?

Like, if you're playing that, you fucked up. Like, this is, it's, it's not worth playing.
It never has been. You should play against other people.
That's the game.

It's not about playing against a computer. Whatever that is, they've added in and they did Dungeon Bowl and all that shit.
Wank. Absolute wank.

The actual base game against another person, that's the fun thing.

I used to play on Fumble, which is the JavaScript version of Blood Bowl back in the day, F-U-M-B-B-L, which was like a literal, literal JavaScript game. And it was a tiny, tiny client.
I played that.

And it was fun. The games were quick.
The animations were quick. You just moved your units around.
It was all the right rules. They'd added a bunch of races that went in the base game.

It was really... It's still going, dude.
Oh, yeah, it's still going. Yeah, yeah.

But everyone on there is a mega, mega Blood Bowl fan, but you can can learn a lot about playing the game because they're very good right um but they'll they'll defend all this terrible design decisions in that game they love it they think it's a perfect game it's not it's it's really

steam review says it's not it's mixed yeah but

usually bad

mixed okay the real here's real talk mixed reviews on steam means bad yeah right positive means eh mostly positive means fine very positive means good and then overwhelmingly positive obviously means excellent yeah but you know if you see something that's mixed, you're like, oh, oh, yeah, mixed is the end of the world.

Mixed is like never mixed is next. Mix is either.
They've been brigaded because they did something.

They've been, they people are downvoting them because it costs more than they think it should. Yeah.

So like DLC for any paradox game is going to come out with a mixed same with City Skylines, pretty much everything there. City Skylines 2 has

not done very well, though. It's just, it's just

they're getting there, but the point is that the mixed review is uh i mean let me see if we look at the store page for city skylines right now um we should do an episode where we look for funny um reviews on steam because some of the angry reviews are the funniest so oh they are reviews this is they got 30 000 reviews mixed recent mixed like it's it's bad and steam knows that because it highlights it in orange which is like

you know be careful which game are you talking about here skylines 2 oh yeah so in the past

people saying after a long time i tried it again froze three times, needed to restart my PC. Fourth time, I got as far as placing four pieces of road, and it froze again.

I mean, I don't know if that's this guy's PC, but he's having a very bad experience with this guy. I mean,

the nice thing about it is that you can look at the recent reviews, you know, and that is like it's a really nice thing that Steam have done to sort of help out these games that had a terrible, shaky release like No Man's Sky or City Skylines, you know, that really turned themselves around later on.

But in this case, it doesn't look like City Skylines has turned itself around because the rest of the faces are also some people saying, how is this?

Like, some people say, here's quite a good one. Two years in early access and still, wait, what do you mean it isn't in early access? Which is exactly right.

Like, it feels like an EA game, but it's not.

It's, it's a shame. It's actually three years old this month.
Two years old this month. So it was released on 24th of October, 2023.
So it's two years old on the 24th of this month.

And I remember playing a very, very early version of it.

And you could see immediately that there was so much potential there compared to Skylines one um but they haven't there's a whole bunch of things they just have not done because they're i think the release was rushed it was and they're playing catch up to try and get it up to to code apparently they still haven't released the asset editors that you would need to for proper modding um so a lot of the mods in the game i think when you look at the mods when most of them are fixing things in the base game you've got a problem like i feel like skylines one Some of the mods are like quality of life improvements or expansions of things that exist in the base game.

Most of the Skylines 2 mods, an awful lot, seem to be fixing shit that isn't in the base game. So that's a problem.

By the way, for the next couple of years, you're going to be hearing construction noises outside my house whenever I'm recording. What are you having done? I apologize for that.

I'm not having anything done.

Stuff is being done. A large-ish product project in my area is being done.

And the peeping and the beeping and the

is going to be endless. So maybe at some point in 2027, when we record this podcast, there won't won't be so much beeping.
Do you know what? We just finished up. We're finally done our house stuff.

We had the last bit of carpet was laid on Sunday and we're done. Well done.
I know.

Now we just have this like endless task of sorting out all of our stuff that's been displaced, including in the garage here, which has been

not the best, but it'll be nice to finally sort it out. Take some trips to the dump.
Yes.

The old tip trip.

We are about to have work done, which is why I had to step away. I'm having a phone call.
We've got some cracks appearing in my youngest's bedroom.

They're on the, on the, on one wall, there's a bunch of cracks. Uh-oh.
And some of them are quite big. Right.

And we had a structural engineer out earlier this year to come and analyze it and figure out what it was. And he thinks it's when we had the extension done downstairs, like the kitchen redone.

that is adjoined to the house, but he doesn't think there's these things called helical ties,

which are like ties ties that go into the brickwork to secure both structures to each other.

So when they're next to each other, but not 100% secured in that way, they move against each other and water can get in between.

And as that expands and contracts based on the weather and the slight movement, obviously something's got to give. And it's the brickwork often gives.

It's not subsidence. It is literally one part of my house is bumping against another part of my house and causing cracks.
Right.

So it's

annoying, but it shouldn't be that bad to fix. But it's her little bedroom, her little room is all cracked.
She's like, Papa, there's all cracks in my bedroom.

I failed you as a parent. Papa, Papa, you're not gonna open windows.
Santa Claus left me this year.

Cracks in my wall.

The other problem we've got at the moment, I don't know how many other people live in a slightly older house. Most of the houses in Twickenham are about 100, 120 years old.

They were all built around the same kind of time,

a lot of them. And our house has a slug problem.
All right. We've had moth problems.
We've had mouse problems. Our current problem is a moth problem.

A slug problem. Big ones.
And the slug problem is that at night, they just, they're all over the fucking living room. And you'll come down in the morning.

And if you put your shoes in the wrong place, there'll be a little slug trail over it.

Sometimes we'll go to feed the dog and you pick up the bowl and there's three, three or four slugs on it.

We've tried putting copper tape down. We've tried put like filling in gaps.
How big are these shoes?

Variety of sizes. Right.
Have you ever seen those really big ones that have like

almost like an orange

detail around the side? They're not that big. They're pretty.
They're smaller than that. No, no, no.
Sorry, the ones that we have are not as big as those ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, they're not as big. They're not like the mega slug.
They're disgusting. Oh, man.
But the thing is, we don't have, like, because it's an older house, there's always a fucking hole somewhere.

Yeah. And they'll get in there.
And once they get in, they make like a nest in the walls where they all live. And then at night, they come out.

So so there are a couple of solutions people have offered: put salt everywhere, yeah, that's no good. The dog will definitely lick the salt up, she's an idiot.

Um, number two is get something and fill in all the gaps, like a gun that expanding foam and fill it all in.

But I'm like, geez, I don't want to go shooting foam into everything in my house because it just seems like something will happen where someone will be like, Well, we can't fix it because some idiot shoved a foam gun in you and filled it with foam.

I'll be like, Oh, yeah, God, who is that? Who the fuck did that

must have been that foam band who comes and breaks in

while looking looking left to right, real shady.

So I don't want to do that. And the copper tape,

it kind of loses its potency or some of it. Like imagine that you have,

it's sort of like the tide. You know, when you build, when you go to the beach, you build a sandcastle and the first wave hits it and it resists, but you lose something.

And then the next wave comes in and the wall still holds, but it loses a little more.

So I figure slugs are gradually inching out onto the copper and going, ah, because I think it creates like an electrical reaction or something for them going across copper, something like that.

So, gradually, we're inching more and more.

Slugs are able to get just a little further each time till eventually they've created enough of a crusty slug trail that they could go over like a bridge over a river.

Is I imagine how it works because it worked for a little while and the copper blocks as well over time. Yeah, that kind of you have to keep polishing it up or whatever.
Like, oh, yeah, you egg all

day. You want a permanent solution.

I'm frightened by all this stuff. Yeah, the slugs are open.

We get loads of them around here, but luckily none of them can get into the house. Our house is

pretty tight, especially after we've had so much done to it. I feel like I know every square inch of my house intimately now as well.

But we don't have any problems with stuff getting in other than, well, it's like Daddy Longlegs season now. So if you leave the door open for too long,

they tend to get in. But I mean, whatever.
They're not too bad.

But slugs and stuff getting into the house would be a nightmare. Or like a mouse.
Oh, no, thanks. We had a rat around here.

Well, mice aren't too bad. They're so sweet.
We got a little trap. It's like a little sort of rectangular tube.
Yeah, and they go in and they die inside.

No, no, no. You don't kill them.
You let them out. You put the poison in.

It's it's like a little tunnel they go in they go around the corner they eat it they die in the box and then you can just shake the box a bit yeah there's a corpse in here

throw it in the garbage oh no they're so sweet it's just a little animal i mean we built a house in a field we built a house we built houses all over the places they would be living yeah i have a lot of respect for animals that can live alongside you yeah i think i don't i don't actually mind mice i was just i was just kidding rats though i wouldn't want rats well no

i don't want that i don't want a mouse infestation. Like, I know that they leave, they have completely incontinent, so they just pee and poo everywhere.
Yeah.

We don't currently have any mice problems. We did.
Sometimes when we leave the back doors open in the summer, we'll get mice in.

And, you know, very, very rarely, but we haven't got a mouse problem touch wood. The moth problem we've resolved.
Right. We figured out what that was.

But now the slug problem, but they're pretty inoffensive. They come out of the mouth.
Maybe I'm going to. I'm going to say what.
If you've listened.

There are solutions to this. If you have mice, you can get a cat.
If you have slugs, you can get a little duck because ducks love eating slugs, right? Yeah, they go crazy for them.

I'm not getting them.

No, I wish we had hedgehogs in the garden, but our garden is all fenced.

You gotta do the old lady.

There was an old lady who swallowed a, and there was an old Lewis who swallowed her slug. I don't know why he

swallowed a slug.

Perhaps he's drunk.

Yeah, and then you have to find something that you can swallow so that it'll go out, like you just said, the chain reaction,

the circle of the hierarchy of the animal kingdom or whatever, you know? I mean, I'd love a hedgehog, but you can't have a hedge.

So the last thing that you have to eat is a lion, because a lion will just eat anything. The apex predator.
I think the real apex predator is man. Man.

So really, the last thing you should eat should be a person. Eat a man.
Yeah, you just swallow a human being to kill all the other animals. Nice.

Okay. but on that logic,

you already do that.

Okay, okay.

Interesting. Okay.
Well, taking that one step further, if I may, and applying logic to your problem. No, go on.
What's your problem? Well, you know, surely it wasn't a problem at all because

is that how the song ends? With it being like, oh, she died. No, she swallows a horse in the end and it kills her, I think.
She died, of course. Yeah,

of course. Yeah.
Right. Yeah, yeah.
Well,

happy ending. Do you have a lose news for us? Oh, yeah.
No. Fuck.
What? No, not today. Unbelievable.

Sam, the podcast man, is busy. I think after pickaxe week, he's tired.
Right.

Lazy shit.

He hasn't had a chance. Weird news,

October, September 2025. Here we go.
First result: The Shepherd Express. Can you do some ask Grock? Grock up some weird news.

So it was reported. Oh, fucked off.
Funny news on August 20th. Oh, okay.
I'll stop reading this one. No, no, go.
Okay.

August 21st, a UK snack company launched corn chips this summer that taste like licking a nine-volt battery. Apparently, this was a fad in the 90s, getting electric tingled by licking a battery.

Rewind now offers a snackable way to revisit one of the 90s' weirdest shared experiences. No batteries required.

And the chips deliver a hard-hitting acidic zing to the tongue, followed up by some salty metallic notes. That is awful.
No, thanks.

That was a thing we did that was very stupid, probably. Cleo Williams of Leavenworth.
We wondered why we're all fucked up. Was found guilty on August 25th of sexual battery.
See, it's a battery joke.

Oh. I'm trying to

tie it together. You're trying to,

although sexual battery, not as funny against a law enforcement officer. During a domestic disturbance call late last year at a Leavenworth apartment complex.

Cleo Williams kissed an officer's neck as he was being arrested, which apparently is frowned upon.

So he got in trouble. He got sentenced for assault against a law enforcement officer for kissing him on the deck.
I don't have any weird or offbeat news for you.

I was just looking at a page with weird or offbeat news, but none of it seemed worth mentioning. You know, there's a man pulling a semi-trailer with his teeth, for example.

Oh, you don't want to be doing that. No.

Firefighters battling a wildfire in northern Yorkshire, England are struggling, North Yorkshire, are struggling with a large number of World War II bombs and tank shells that were left behind in the area.

On August 27th, County Chief Fire Officer Jonathan Dyson said the area was a training ground in the 40s and previously hidden explosions had been detonating in the fire.

We've now experienced over 18 ordnance explosions within key areas, he said. Firefighters and local farmers and business centers have been tackling the blaze since August 11th.

So this is old news-ish. Yeah, that's pretty old.
August 11th? That's like...

Yeah, name me one thing that happened on the 11th of August apart from that.

Let me Google August 11th. There's nothing.
On Wikipedia, I can give you some.

The Miso American long count calendar used by several pre-Columbian pre-Columbian Miso-American civilizations, notably the Mayans, begins on August 11th, 3114 BC. Right.
So there you go.

Spanish-American War? No, this year. No, you mean like this? Maya gets to the August 11th, 2025.
Even this year. I'll look it up in history.

Grok,

what happened on August 11th, 2025? Somebody something terrible that we didn't hear about because Donald Trump had, you know. why are we asking Grok? I'm not said something awful that day.

We're not going to lie. It's the feast day of Clara Vassisi.

Oh, Clara Vassisi is Friday. It's Mountain Day.
Frances? Mountain Day in Japan. And here's a good one.
Independence Day. It's Chad's Independence Day from France, 1960.
And it's flying to Pakistan.

To Chad. Just to the Chad's flag.

Chad's flag looks exactly like the flag of Romania. That's interesting.
Does it? Yeah, it really does. Maybe they're like flag twins, you know, like twins.
Do you want to know some Chad facts? Yeah.

What do you think the population of Chad is? I'd say it's like

10 million.

Any other? I like that. I'm going to guess.

I'm going to guess 6 million. Oh, I really like your guess.
It's 19 million. Fuck.
So there we go.

Looks like I'm winning it. It's more Chads than we thought.
There's a lot of Chads. So the GDP of Chad is estimated at around $32 billion.

Now, I always wonder, you get a country like Chad, which I'm pretty sure is a fairly poor country, where's that money coming from? Does anyone know their economy? Is it mainly just selling shit? Like,

is it like they're having a sell-off natural resources and stuff? So when they run out of those things, they're just fucked. Well, no, the GDP includes the stuff that they use themselves.
Right. Yeah.

Yeah, but how are they buying that shit?

It's not the balance of payments on how much they, it's not their trade exports and imports. It's it's how much is how much value is generated by industries in their country over a year, right?

So they might be buying stuff as well and going into government there. So is this like if I am a Chadian or a Chad and I buy something from another Chad, does that add to GDP? Not really.

No, it's the value of the goods and services produced. So I suppose you would technically, if you bought something from someone else,

yes.

So it says here the major components of GDP are consumption, government spending, net exports, and investment. So where's that moolah coming from? Well,

they must be making some stuff. Like they have to obviously

produce food to eat.

I can tell you what they produced, but in actuality, and then they'll have some

natural

resources

that

they will also say that Chad exported $3 billion worth of crude petroleum. There you go.
But that's only a fairly small amount of digital. So yeah, I guess it's what is it, government spending?

The government spending spends a lot. The partner is China.
They do oil, livestock, cotton, sesame, gum, arabic, and shea butter. China's big in

sort of developing Africa now, aren't they? It's very big. They've bought a lot of different things.
They're doing a lot of development in Africa.

And in exchange, I think they have set up a lot of trade

deals with

countries in Africa.

Although there are some weird things going on with China in Africa, I know that one of the things that I saw, this is quite funny, is that one of the more popular pieces of sort of like a, almost like a propaganda meme that is put out by, I assume, as the Chinese government, is this idea that if you're, if you just show your Chinese passport, people in other countries will be so stunned, they'll almost recoil like you're holding up the Ark of the Covenant.

They'll be like, oh, he's got a Chinese passport. Look out.
And they'll sort of leave you alone.

There's all these videos of like a Chinese worker in Africa and a bunch of the locals sort of corner them, and then he just whips his Chinese passport out, and they all go, Oh, and sort of run away.

It's really bizarre.

So, yeah, I don't know what's going on.

It is odd, but yeah, they there are all kinds of like little Chinese communities all up and down Africa in the developing place where they're like, Hey, we'll give you a load of money.

They do a lot of that like prefab build stuff as well. You know, they can they can put up like a big office building in like two years.

I think if you, if imagine you were a business, though, right, which China has a lot of, um, you know, they want raw materials as cheap as possible, yeah, and they're going to get those things.

Like, like, I think iron ore is Australia's main export, and those huge, like railways, it exports like thousands of tons of iron ore a day. And I think most of it goes to China where

they're building so much stuff. I mean, so TI next year, the international next year, is in Shanghai.
Wasn't it already? If I get invited, it would be interesting to go there.

You've been before, though, or wasn't there? I was there in 2019. I think I also went in 2018.
Wow.

Jeez. You know, next year.

I imagine it's actually changed quite a lot in six years, seven years. Apparently, Shanghai now is massively different.
My friend Jin, who's one of the translators

for Chinese Dota, works with the EM broadcast doing translation stuff and also works for the Chinese broadcast. He said that he's a Shanghai native.

He said that compared to when you were there in 2019, it's it's now all changed. And it's like they've gone from being, it was a fairly grim at times, bad air, didn't feel very welcoming.

They've redone it. And it's like, this is where we want the tourists to go is to Shanghai.
Oh, nice. It's all been done up.

And all the industry that used to sort of ruin the environment of Shanghai, they fucking moved it to the countryside or something. All right.

Which is a very like the Chinese government would just say, right, all you factories move, which is nuts. Because if you tried to do that in the UK, they would say, fuck off.
Yeah.

So yeah, it's kind of interesting that they can just do that. But that's what you get when you have a government like the Chinese.
Yeah, in the UK, we just shut the factories down. Yeah.
Yeah.

We sell them to foreign countries and then they shut them down. That's what we do.

That's right.

Or they just run them really badly and then our government pays for them to carry on. Well, no, we stopped doing that.
And that's why there's so many. Yeah,

that's why the government just invested like $2 billion to keep

Land Rover going. Land Rover.
The fact that it's owned by

nationalized some of the train lines again. There's like, was it one or two of them

that have been bought back? They're going to be in great shape over here, lads.

We're not talking about politics.

This isn't politics. This is economics.
This is economics. This is not politics.
Yeah, this is. It's not politics when it comes to economics.
These things happened. How do we deal with it?

There is a nature of selling anything that we have of value in this country. That has just been the way that businesses have done things since the 80s.

is if we can sell it to foreign overseas owners or investors, we'll fucking do it. And we've sold off everything.
Fucking everything. We can't make shit here anymore.

We have to, we didn't even when it came to building this nuclear plant when it comes to making new trains for our trend lines new buses all of that we've got to get it made by the germans or the french or someone else

we just can't fucking do it because people were like we don't need any of this we can get some money in the short term we fucking sold off

the whole country from sold yeah we don't we've lost the ability to do this i would describe it i would trust the french or germans to do it though to be honest let's be honest

we should be able to make this shit we should build a nuclear power plant where are those skills gone what happened now we just fucking service it.

And all we do is say, hello, virtual media technical support. And then that got sent over to overseas as well.
We're like, we don't trust you, Brits to do it. You're fucking useless.

We'll get someone else to do it. So now it's Kuala Lumpur does it.
Yeah, that's a nightmare. It's been like that.

KL's been

big into it for a long time now. Because when I used to work at HSBC, it was all of the call centers were out in.

This isn't a new thing. You know, even when they were doing, when they do anything, they get the lowest tender on, on,

it's been this way since the Victorian era, where, you know, they'll just take the lowest bid on something. And if that happens to be from, you know, some other country, then that's what happens.

It's bullshit. It's always bullshit.
It's always

the nature of the world we live in.

And if it's working out for Shanghai, it sounds like it sounds like it's doing, sounds like they're doing great. I saw it.
I was watching.

It was on,

I don't know if it was a TikTok or something, but there's this huge apartment building with a train that goes like an elevated train, like a monorail type thing.

And the train goes like through the building, you know, like it's got like a little

vertical, like wherever it was. It's somewhere in China, but they've just got such momentum.

They have these insanely tall buildings, but then you can look down and there's like all this crazy infrastructure like going through the buildings and stuff. Like it just looks mad.
It looks like

what what we would think of as a future city sort of thing.

Like something on a Blade Runner or something like that. How about the lime? Did they ever build that thing? They started it.
Yeah. I think they're doing a mile of it or something.
A lime.

Line. L-I-N-E.
Oh, line. It was going to be a city that's just a fucking line.
Yes, yeah. In

somewhere in the Middle East, right? Was it Saudi Arabia? It's Saudi Arabia. It's the dumbest idea.

And I think they've decided to build this. It was going to be a mega city.

that's right yeah would be would have been miserable to live in um but it's a disaster i mean it's an absolute disaster there's no way it's going to be good or work they they felt the original draft okay by 20 would be completed by 2080 and cost 8.8 trillion dollars i know nice it's this stuff is is a dream project that these incredibly rich leaders can use as basically their own Lego project.

It looks terrible. Buying a Lego city isn't enough for them.
They have to actually build it in real life and just spunk huge amounts of the government money into it. You know, that's what it is.

It's mad. That is mad.
It's crazy. They did it with Dubai.
They commissioned this project,

this concrete factory, a multi-plant concrete factory capable of producing 20,000 cubic meters of concrete per day. Wow.
Isn't that insane?

Think how much fucking carbon dioxide that's pumping into the atmosphere every day for this stupid vanity project that no one's going to live in. It's awful.
It's a terrible thing.

Yeah, and I'm getting told off for my fucking, you know, not

a chocolate pot in the right fucking.

I know. That's the shit.
It does. You're the problem.

You do recycle and Mrs. F is like, you can recycle that can.
I'm like, yeah, that'll fucking tip the balance when it that fucking. Exactly.
I'm there like ripping the fucking.

I'm like, they're getting like a paper cut, like trying to rip the plastic out of this fucking window in a window when the paper glares or something.

And I'm like, what the fuck am I doing with my life? You know, this is not going to save the fucking planet.

And the meanwhile, 20,000 cubic meters of concrete are being churned into solar system. Board into the desert.
It's a hidden insanity project to sink into the desert in 100 years' time.

And that's poisoning the project. And here's

Zuckerberg's fucking second bunker or whatever on a fucking

on a Hawaiian island. He's like plowing a million fucking trees to build his well every little helps.
I want to know what percentage of the problem is. What if I'm on the other side of the world?

I need two bunkers. One at my home, and obviously, one at my holiday home.
What percentage of the problem is solved by me recycling this paper Eclair box?

That I bought two Eclairs from Waitrose, bought my two Eclairs, carefully took the plastic window off so I could recycle it, folded it out, put it in the recycling bin.

Some guy comes in a truck, puts it in a van, takes it to a facility, it gets mulched or whatever the hell they do, eventually ends up as a button.

It's put a shit, gets sent to India, they dump it in the river.

And then I pay a charity to build a thing on the river to fucking fucking fish out my chocolate clair fucking box again. And then it fucking goes back into some sort of other thing.

They sell it to Chad. Chad dumps it in a river.
It goes down some African river. I have to pay to build a thing that fishes it out of the river again.
It's a fucking super cycle of garbage.

Just don't get it.

We should all just have a big pile of rubbish in our back gardens. And when it gets too big, you just stomp it down.

Do you ever see those incinerator toilets? The ones that don't need to be plumbed, but you just need like a fucking, like, like, it needs like its own like sun in there to like burn your shit off.

In Japan, they burn a lot of shit. They fucking incinerate everything in Japan.
They've got the room for dumps, right? So they incinerate stuff. They incinerate every singular poop?

No, a lot of their rubbish. You've got a big biomass burner in Jersey that you were rallying about, and I'm a big fan.
I like that.

It's no way to talk about it. Let's get back to burning shit again.

Fucking shit.

Well, here's the thing. I was asking Simon Clark about this, and I want him to make a video.

Excuse me, who? Simon Clark.

Dr. Simon Clark, you mean? Thank you.
So, Dr. Simon Clark.

I want to know, like, sometimes, though, you know, people, this was the thing like Games Workshop did.

They were like, oh, you can return all your plastic sprues, but if you're driving into town to return, like, you know, a couple of crappy plastic sprues, isn't that using up more plastic, you know, in the petrol than you would do in to take it there?

You're putting it in the middle of the drugs plastic in your car, mate. No wonder you're not a driver.

You don't put plastic in there, you put petrol. But there's a lot of times when I'm sure some of these decisions that we make are

just creating more pollution in order to take your stuff to the dump or to take it to the recycling if you're not doing it in an efficient way.

Because my dad used to do this,

you know, I'm sure, like, you know, mum would say, oh, you you know, take this stuff to the dump, and we he'd drive half an hour to the dump to dump one thing, you know, one box of stuff, drive all the way back, you know, with me in there, and we'd stop off somewhere.

You know, I don't know, it would be this, and I'm sure that the trip was not efficient because he'd be doing it the next day with one other box of stuff.

When I go to the dump, it's like the fucking Beverly Hillbillies. Like, I got like a, like a just shit on the roof of the car, like threatening to fall off.
Like, I gotta see out my rear view.

Like, it's insane.

it's like it's loaded i love that i like going to the dump though i love the recycling center i just like the idea of it i like how like you you have to put all the stuff into like their own containers and stuff yeah i don't like going there because of the smell and the people and the busyness and the noise and just the the confusion and the the spilling of the leaky bin bags on your shoe you know this and and where you have to your clothes get dirty or you have to wear your specific set of dirty clothes You know, the whole process is, but yes, I'm in love with the idea.

The idea,

you know, I love sorting, I love crushing, I love compressing. I love sorting.

I love those fucking laser-guided conveyor belts that go really fast and they know, like, they use like a little spritz of air to like knock plastic off the metal belt and stuff.

Yeah,

I live for that. I love that.
Give me that. That's that's that's my dream.
Yeah. Um, so God, God bless America.
God bless waste. of plastic.

Bless this mess. Where will they be without it, honestly? Bless this mess.

Let's go. Fuck it.
Thank you, everyone. Good podcast.

See you next time. See you next time.
God bless.

Ciao. Love you.

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