Triforce! - The Brindley Comedy Festival | Triforce #335

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Triforce! Episode 335! What if Josh Gad was the Godfather (Gadfather)? Sips gets a bountiful apple harvest, Lewis shares his Jingle Jam related comedy set and Pyrion begins some much needed house work! Go to http://expressvpn.com/triforce today and get an extra 3 months free on a 1-year package! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pickax Hello everyone and welcome back to the lovely TriForce I'm excited to be joined today by my friend Perian Flax Hello, you're good, your grumpy bugger. The, the Perian Flags? Yeah, people call me grumpy, grumpy. They don't know that Lewis is the grumpiest dude. He is such a grump.

He can be a pretty grumpy. I think everybody can be a bit grumpy. The thing is, I think a lot of people put all this emphasis on people being grumpy, but like we're only human. We're only human after all. We're going to be 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. Or at least hope that the editor makes portrays 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 if God edited the podcast. Maybe you get AI to 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? I don't use Twitter anymore.

I haven't used it for years. 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 GROC. And they'll be like, GROC, and they'll ask it a question. And GROC will say, no, that's not true. And they'll be like, shut up, GROC.

Like, it's just like, why do you ask it? As soon as they get the ass and they don't like, boom, 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 Gott goes, no, that's not true. They're like, Elon, fix your AI.

It's gone woke. It's quite funny. I've gone woke as well. Have you? Oh, yeah. What time did you go woke this morning? I woke up. I woke this morning.

I went woke at 7. Oh, nice. That when I woke, I went woke. I went woke at 7.55 a.m. yesterday. God, I hate that. I hate that term. So much now. Like, woke. Yeah, you see, you hear it all the time. It's a big red flag for me now. Any, anytime somebody uses it, I'm immediately just like, I don't even want to talk to you. Yeah. It's, it's just crazy. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty cringe. It is, it is pretty cringe.

You're right. Yeah, there is, it's, it's certainly a matter of time, though, before we can literally just say, AI, make us a new podcast and make it funny. Yeah. 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 meandering 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 megabonk. Here we go, here we go. Oh, mega bonker. Not another mega bonker. Oh, gosh, great. It's so much fun. I love games like that.

It's just a vampire survivors, but 3D. It looks like, it looks like vampire survivors on sort of risk of rain, and it looks like absolute shit. Oh, that's great, though. I mean, it looks. When I say looks, I mean, the graphics are dog shit. Yeah, I bet I mean. But it's popular.

It's fun, though. It is actually fun. Well, the 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, to actually render the fucking thing. You know, everything could only have about four polygons each. Yeah.

If it's 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 John Cusack high fidelity. That's what we're going for. What would be? If there was a-Fidelity? Yeah, like low fidelity.

What would it, who would be the actor in low fidelity if John Cusack was the actor? Who would be in low-poly? The movie Low-Polly. It would be that chick from. That chick. That chick. That chick. 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 Franklin? You never watched? Laura Smith? I've never watched it.

She was brilliant. No, I've never watched it. I did watch the Pee We Herman documentary recently. And another thing that I've been watching is the newsreader. I've been watching the newsreader. newsreader, which is pretty good. It's an Australian drama series. I went to the cinema.

No way. I saw one battle after another. Oh, that's meant to be really good. It's excellent. Yeah, it's meant to be really good. It's 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 GAD. How do you spell GAD? GAD. He was.

You won't recognize him, but you'll know him. Is that the guy for Josh Gad? Baby Rain Deer. 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's 44 years old.

He was the voice of the fucking snowman in Frozen. Oh. That's Richard Gad. No, this is Josh Gad. Yeah. He's also been in the Angry Birds movie. He just looks a cunt, doesn't it? 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 just good. He's known for voicing Olap in the Frozen franchise. Oh, my name's Josh Gad. Yeah, I'm just dead. Oh, he was in the Book of Mormon as well on Broadway.

Yeah, so I'm sure he was good at that. He played Elder Arnold Cunningham. Yeah, who's a massive dweeb, I think. He's the one who's like a failure. Oh, well. He's just, if you just look at the way, like his fucking face, oh my God, I hate Josh Gads 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 Steph Rogan. I think Seth Rogan's are likable enough, dude. He's married to Ida Darvish, who is... I wonder if she's related to you, Darvish. She's 50 years old.

She's married to Josh Gad. That's the rare Hollywood. Dude marrying an older woman. That's the rarest of rarest. And Jonah Hill. Josh Gad and Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan. They've all got... They're all that same slightly geeky, nerdy guy.

How did Josh Gad 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 they have two daughters he's godfather to Bryce Dallas Howard

oh no wait a second there's no way he's godfather to Bryce Dallas Howard don't you flex she's older than him how an earth can he be the godfather to her she's not older than him they're both 44 that makes no sense that he's 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 God has the godfather You didn't even think to offer me coffee Hey I'm the godfather

He made him an offer he couldn't refuse Either his signature or his brains Be down the contract It's fucking 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 Gadfather. It's me. The Gaddhaven. The Godfather. Yeah, how can he be her godfather when he's the same age? Yeah, it's madness. Some Scientology shit. Oh, no, no, no.

He's godfather to... No, Sips has read it wrong. He's godfather to her chair. Yes, of course, of course. No, he said he is godfather. Oh, sorry, yeah. He's godfather to Price, Dallas Howard and Seth Gables, two children. Sorry, yeah, you're right.

I didn't. I stopped reading past a certain point. 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 about.

Okay, one battle. One battle after. 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. 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, it's amazing in it. Leonardo DiCaprio. Who's very good in it? Benicio del Toro. Regina Hall.

Yeah. Tiana Taylor. Chase Infinity. Oh my God. That is like a Chernobyl Hope named Chase Infinity? Yeah, he was a revolutionary. He was a revolutionary like 15 years ago. Right.

And it all goes to shit. He has a daughter. He's now raising the daughter. And he's basically still on the run from the law. And that's the setup. And it's like a sort of revolutionary thing going on. And they're sort of fighting the power. And Sean Penn is a dickhead who's embedded deep within the sort of, you know,

find the revolutionaries is his whole job. His name is like General Lockjaw or something like that, which is a really funny name. 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. 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, there's a lot to it. It's quite deep. So there's a, yeah, there's a Thomas Pynchon novel.

Yeah, yeah. 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, 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election. Re-election in 84. Holy shit. That's crazy, eh?

Yeah. And so it was the pre-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, you know, you know how it works. It eventually merges and edges and twists its way through to something different. But no, I'm glad you liked it. I would say quite a few people that listen to the podcast don't like it when we talk policy.

Which means any time we mention fascists, they're like, stop talking politics. That's not politics, though. Well, apparently it is, bud. Oh, okay. So they don't like it. Yeah. 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. It's not, I'm just, uh, that's my, I'm just filling in for YouTube. It's ridiculous.

Oh, you're welcome. Why are we defending fascists now? So, no. When did we decide to do this? Do what? Defend the fascists? I don't know. I don't know.

It's just, you know, don't be so, don't be so fucking woke. Yeah, I was always taught that they were bad. Dude, stop being woke. Don't be so quick to judge. Just because Grop, told you that fascists were bad. 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 Grock. I asked Grock. I think that is it. Yeah. That's the, oh,

fuck. Let's move away from that. That is, that's fine. Let's talk about, um, real world things. Uh,

how's, how's the garden doing? How's my garden doing? How's the bins? Let me tell you, we had an absolute bountiful apple harvest this, uh, this year.

I've been eating my own apples. I, I, an apple. Yeah. Well, yeah, I've got a bag of apples here that,

um, me and my partner went and collected. Right. Well, Listen, I got buckets apples. I got so many apples. Like tons of apples. We've been given 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? Yeah, we're at war with New Zealand. We should be in 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, they train fish to, like, bob them. It's like that island of 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. Oh, 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 we, I was staggered. It was like, the tree is like bending over. There's so many. Man, that's what my tree was like this year. It's crazy. It's amazing. There's so many freaking apples on there. Yeah.

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've done for lunchtime. But it's not, it's so much of it is water that it just kind of, it doesn't, doesn't work. Yeah, but an apple a day still keeps the dog. He's walked her away. He does. You know.

That's why they're all unmarried. It's a nightmare. 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 make cider because I don't know how. And it seems like it's something I need to do some preparation for it. I can tell you how you make the baby. 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.

Just ferment it. You stick it in a big fucking vat. Right. And you just leave it there at a right temperature. 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 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've picked off the tree have been great. We gave a whole bag to one of my daughters. 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, yeah, they definitely have like a, uh, really? I always thought they were quite, uh, quite tart a Granny Smith. Yeah, I think, I think you, I think that's right. I think they are tart, but like, I think they are a bit sweeter. Like, it's like, or like maybe a bit more sour or something? I don't know.

So there's, Grady Smith is like the classic bright green apple. It's bright green, yeah. It's a really tart apple-y sort of. Golden delicious are more of a yellowy green. Yeah, yeah. And then my favorite is the pink lady. Pink lady is nice, yeah. My kids love pink lady apples.

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. And then I had an apple. So the ones we've got, like, these hitmasters in China, they're like smaller, and they're yellow, right yellow. They've got them in France. They grow them in Spain.

They grow them everywhere. They grow them everywhere an apple can thrive. 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 they can, a lot of them can just be put in a cold room and you can just leave them there and they won't, they won't rot instantly if you've picked them, unless they get a hole on them or mark or something. Yeah, once something gets in, if a little, if you get a worm in there or like a seagull pex it or whatever, then it's the inside of the apple, the moment it's exposed to the air, it'll just start browning. 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 slurped it up?

That was like shocking. No, it just disappeared back into the apple court and crunch it all up. It was gruesome. Yeah, gross. But no, 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. If you harvest all, eventually we'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 a exchange thing. They obviously make the 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? They're like, it's like a barter system. If 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.

I always, I've always used apples weirdly as like a, am I hungry enough for an apple? And if I find that I am, 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. I find it, I find I avoid heartburn if I have an apple every night before. It's like the last thing I eat every evening is an apple.

And then I just don't have harperin anymore. And I'm sure it's because of an apple. Because on days where I don't eat an apple in the evening, sometimes I get harper. So I wonder if I thought the part of harburn was your stomach. So 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 Harperin 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.

So common triggers for Harper. 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, is the big trigger. If I have a lot of sugar in the day, I will definitely be doubled over in the evening with 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, no, that's fine. That's fine. 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's actually quite low sugar. You got to need low sugar, sugar. Ask grok. See what Grok says about all this. At grok is 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 cooked in a, like, I know. Because sometimes we're cooking, it's cooking something. like, oh, let's cook this, let's cook this. Then we didn't actually eat until like 9.30. And I tend to over-eat dinner. And then I would go to bed, I don't know, like 11 or whatever.

And I just have like, 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 ketchup tube thing, you know, like a squeasy 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 bread and 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. That's just something that makes you happy like that, the familiarity of it, right?

And it's, it's, it's, you got to get good cheese. You got to get nice thick bread though, like just like like, like some sourdough bread is pretty nice too. But like, or, you know, like when you get the like that really thick and fluffy bread, you know, it's not it's not hard bread. It's like really soft, but it's thick. That, 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 a bloomer i guess it's like

a like a round bread oh this is specific to jersey how about and uh and they 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 it like a hint of flavor but i i probably think it's a throwback from the occupation because there was a lot of it in cabbage leaves yeah there's a lot of uh there's a lot of uh 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. 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 cabbage leaf. Well, fuck, it's either that or nothing. Like 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 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. But it's delicious. I've done some research. I've done my research. Apparently, the use of cabbage leaves in baking goes back to the 18th century. Oh, sorry. 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 very thick, soft bread and it just has like a, it's just got like a hint of a different taste in the bread because of the cabbage leaves. Interesting. I do love bread. Bread is, bread is just shout out to bread. God, I can't get enough of it. What was that

That Norm McDonnell joke. That Norma Johnnall joke, your 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. It's called Brad.

I've got this incredible idea. It's bread. His jokes could, like, it's only, only he could tell his jokes. Yes. Like, the way he wrote. jokes for him himself to tell, not just as a gag, but of so much of his jokes was his delivery. Some of his, some of his, his very cutting jokes worked well, but his jokes worked really well when he had somebody to tell them to, like, to bounce off of all the, all the famous

clips of him and Conan. Oh, he's so funny. 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, he'd almost like give you that look, you know, that he has that. He'd look, he'd look the people straight in the eye and like make him laugh with it. Yeah, he's brilliant. His delivery on 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. He's a big sports fan. He loved sports. He was a big gambler and a big sports fan, yeah. If you watched, if I were back in the day when Twitter was good, he, he would be watching a tournament, he would be commenting on every shot. Like he was, he was there watching, he was like real, really, really into his sport and stuff like that. I don't know, I know that he gambled a lot. I'm pretty sure from what I read, but I don't know if he went broke or whatever. I never got the impression that Norm MacDonald was like rich.

He's from Ottawa and he went to the same colleges that I went to. Hell yeah. He's notable alumni. Norm MacDonald, yeah. What a guy. 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? Most people have no idea, Sips, but your browsing history can still be monitored and even recorded unless you use ExpressVPN. VPN, VPN it up, baby. Without ExpressVPN,

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Fire it up. I've got it running on my desktop. It's one click. You can get onto all those not safe for work subreddits that you want to browse and all kinds of shit. And you know what I use it for is when I want to watch Netflix and I know that a movie is out in one country and not in mine. VPN, VPN, baby.

Don't let the bastards get you down. Get ExpressVPN so you can go. to town. Amazing. Yeah, I use X-R-E-F-N is great,

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and you can get up to four extra months for free. Four months! ExpressVPN. Thank you very much. On with the show. God,

what did I do yesterday? Gosh, yeah. 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 thing.

Yeah. And risk assessment. Rich asked, 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 sort of was jingle jam season and we're trying to do lots of things. And one of the things we did was, which was suggested, I can't remember who by, but basically because we worked so close with all these charities, one of the best things about coming together and working with them more closely is that they have different. They have different ideas of doing things. They have different things that work or don't work. And they all share it. We're stronger together, basically.

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 Warchal came along and did a little five-minute chat about some of the impacts that Jinglegebs had and

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 Lewis and his personal trainer It was very cringed. I'm angry. I'm angry on behalf of everyone who was in attendance. What did you do?

So what did I? Was you reading? 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 first. Jingle coin. It's a it's even worse. It's a Chris MoCurrency. I don't know. And I was

jokes, a couple of jokes like that. It's a jingle coin. It's Chris MoCurrency, P-Flight. This is a lot. tell me this isn't an actual coin and I'm on board as long as this is just 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 going to keep everything exactly the same in fact that's actually a good idea if we just run the same streams we did last year then we're not going to have to do any work this time so it'll be a lot easier for everyone 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 I just thought, 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. It was good to see it still thriving, you know, being used for something.

Still absolutely killing it. For these types of apparently, you know, this is where all the, this is. the one that's all the moneyed folks used. Anyway, it was me, and they 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 they 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 sent to the people who couldn't come live. So I'm making these jokes. And, of course, everyone is silent, right? No one is responding in any way. Everyone's webcam, apart from Rich, God bless him. Everyone's webcam was deadpan. Oh, no. They did not get any of these jokes.

But, you know, 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. quite serious. Do you think you succeeded in that endeavor? Or do you think you put them more on it? Obviously, the charity's talking about their impact. It's 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, the charities about what they've been up to in some of their stories. And I think it was, I think it was fine. I haven't any complaints. No. 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 an advert for on Reddit or something, and it's called The Lift. Supernatural Handyman simulator. The idea is it's like you are playing house flipper style, i.e. you're like cleaning benches and like, you know, putting new light bulbs in and fixing plug so. 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 and it's it's kind of it's like it's like yeah like they've advertised it a lot and there's like a play test and that you can just or that I play it anyway that 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 ups mop up charge things do a little bit of crafting put thing in hole I don't know it was like weirdly kind of I No, there's a lot of this house flipping gameplay put into a story-based game. Do you mean, people love cleaning stuff. Yeah, I do like, 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. Is it? 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, I wish, I wish Blood Bowl was a bit better

because I like the idea of that. Oh, my God. Don't get me started on. Blood Bowl, maybe. 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 was 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. What would you change? Fundamentally, the games, like, in terms of the actual

board game. I don't play the board game. I'm talking about the online version, Blood Bowl 2 and Blood Bowl 3, 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, 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 with 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 York 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 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 with a couple of unlucky dice rolls. How, he's dead. And for some people, 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 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. The Ork 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 one-nill 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.

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. I used to do in Blood Bowl, too. 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 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. Mutant bowl or whatever was the original. Mutant ball. So that was what cyanide made,

and they got sued by Games Workshop and told, you have to make a Blood Bowl game. A 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 they fucked it. First of all, it's incredibly greedy. You know, the way these companies like NACON 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 that is always going to be difficult because when it's a board game, I've experienced this so often with two, with miniatures games, it's a 1v1. You're going to win 50% at the time, which means you're going to lose 50% at the time, which is kind of a feels bad. You know, people expect to win more than they lose. But you don't really feel it, even if you're winning more than 55%. That's a great, really good win rate, you know. It still sucks to lose as much as you do, and it hurts.

And I think obviously the AI as well in Blood Bowl is notoriously terrible. Who plays against the computer? There's a full solo mode now, but the single player game of Blood Bowl, who gives a shit? Like, if you're playing that, you fucked up. Like, 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. Whank, 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 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 weren't in the base game. It was really fun. It looked like 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 learn a lot about playing the game because they're very good. Right. But they'll defend all the terrible design decisions

in that game. They love it. They think it's a perfect game. It's not. It's really badly designed. Well, Steam reviews says it's not. It's mixed. Yeah, but I'm doing about fumble.

I'm usually bad. I'm doing about fumble. I mean, mixed. Here's real talk. Mixed reviews on Steam means bad. Yeah, yeah. Right? Positive means eh.

Mostly positive means fine. Very positive means good. And then overwhelming positive obviously means excellent. But, you know, if you see something that's mixed, you're like, okay. Oh, yeah. Mixed is the end of the world. Mixed is like a mix is next. Mix is either.

They've been brigaded because they did something. People are downvoting 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, too, has not done very well, though. It's just been... No, they're getting there, but the point is the mixed review is...

I mean, let me see. If we look at the store page for City Skylines right now, we should do an episode where we look for funny reviews on Steam because some of the angry reviews are the funniest. So, reviews, they've got 30,000 reviews mixed, recent, mixed. Like, it's bad. And Steve knows that because it highlights it in orange, which is like, ooh, you know, be careful. Which game you're talking about here? Skylines 2.

Oh, yeah. So in the past 30s, 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 game. 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 Sky or Sea Skylines, you know, that really turned themselves around later on. But in this case, it doesn't look like City Sky and has turned itself around.

Well, not based on these reviews, some people saying, how is this, like some people said, this is 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 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 1, but they haven't, there's a whole bunch of things that just have not done. Because I think the release was rushed. It was, yeah. playing catch-up to try and get it up to code. Apparently, they still haven't released the asset editors

that you would need for proper modding. 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 Skyline's 1, some of the mods are like quality of life improvements or expansions of things that exist in the base game.

Most of the Skyline's 2 mods, and awful of them 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... What do you haven't done? I apologize for that.

I'm not having anything done. Stuff is being done. A large-ish project in my area is being done. And the peepin and the beeping and the beepin and the it's going to be endless. So maybe at some point in 2027 when we record this podcast, there won't be so much beeping. Do you know what? We just finished up. We were finally done our house stuff.

We had the last bit of... carpet was laid on Sunday. 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 find me. Sort it out. Take some trips to the dump. Yes. A couple of dumb trips. The old tip trip. We are about to have worked on, which is why I had to step away. I'm having a phone call. We've got some cracks appearing in my youngest bedroom, they're on the one wall. There's a bunch of cracks. 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 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. 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. I failed you as a parent. I do apologize. You're not going to believe what 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. We've had moth problems. We've had mouse problems. Our current problem is a moth problem. A slugs, 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 in copper tape down. We've tried to put, like filling in gaps.

How big are these slugs? Variety of sizes. Right. Have you ever seen those really big ones that have like, like, almost like an orange. Yeah, yeah, I've seen like detail around the side of them. They're not that big. They're pretty big, though.

No, no, no, sorry, the ones that we have are not as big as those ones. 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 there are a couple of solutions people have offered. Put salt everywhere. That's no good. The dog will.

definitely lick the salt up. She's an idiot. 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 and you and filled it with foam. I'd be like, oh yeah, God, who was that? Who the fuck did that? That's my house. Must have been that foam band who comes, breaks in. Well, looking left to right, real shady, like, 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 until eventually they've created enough of a crusty slug trail that they could go over, like a bridge over a river, I imagine how it works.

Because it worked for a little while, and now it doesn't work. But that copper will oxidize as well over time, I'm sure. You have to keep polishing it up or whatever. We're like, oh, yeah, you ain't gold day. You want a permanent solution. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I'm frightened by all this stuff. Yeah, the slugs are, when I finally move. We get loads of them around here, but luckily none of them can get into the house.

Our house is pretty, it's 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 like stuff getting in other than well it's like daddy long leg season now so if you leave the door open for too long they 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 like 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. Yeah, it just closes. No, no, no, you don't kill them. You let them out. You put the poison in.

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 bought houses all over the places they would be living. Yeah. I've got a lot of respect for animals that can live alongside human beings. Yeah, I think I know.

I don't actually mind. I was just kidding. Rats, though, I wouldn't want rats. Well, no, there's something else about rats, isn't it? I don't want a mouse infestation. Like, I know that they leave, they're completely incontinence, so they're 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. Yeah. The moth problem, we've resolved. Right. We figured out what that was. But now the slug problem.

But, ah, they're pretty inoffensive. They come out at night. I'll tell you what. If you've, listen, we, we, 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 don't get in the duck. No, I wish we had hedgehogs in the garden, but our garden is all fenced. You got to, you got to do the old lady. There was an old lady who swallowed a, and there was an old Lewis who swallowed a 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 at 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 lion because a lion will just eat anything

the apex predator I think the real apex predator is man so really the last thing you should 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, can you already do that? Okay. Okay. Interesting. Well, taking that one step further, if I may, in 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. No, she swallows a horse in the, end and it kills her, I think. She died, of course. Yeah. Of course.

Yeah. Right. 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 pickax 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. Okay. You do some. Ask Grock. Grock up some weird news.

So, it was reported. Oh, fuck off. Funny news today. Oh, okay. I'll stop reading this one. No, no, go. Okay. August 21st, a UK snack company launched corn chips this summer that tastes like

licking a 9-volt battery. Apparently, this was a fan in the 90s, getting electric tingled by licking a battery. It was. It was. 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. Clear Williams of Leavenworth answers. We wonder why we're all fucked up. Was found guilty on August 25th of sexual battery.

See, it's a battery joke. I'm trying to tie it together. 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 gets sentenced for assault against the law enforcement officer, but 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 owners have been tackling the blaze since August 11th. So this is old news-ish. Yeah, that's pretty old. August 11th, that's like, 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 Meso-American long-count calendar used by several pre-Columbian Meso-American civilizations, notably the Mayans, begins in August 11, 3114 BC. Right. So there you go. Spanish-American War? No, this year. No, I mean like this, August 11, 2025.

He meant this year Not look it up In history Grok What happened What happened On August 11th 2025?

It's probably something terrible that we didn't hear about Because Donald Trump Had Why are we asking Grok? I'm not

I was just joking That day Oh We're not It's the feast day of Claire of Assisi Oh Claire of Assisi

Is he related to France's Mountain Day in Japan And here's a good one Independence day, it's Chad's Independence Day from France, 1960. And it's flag to Chad to Afghanistan. To Chad.

To Chad. Chad's flag looks exactly like the flag of Romania. That's interesting. Does it? Yeah, it really does. Maybe they're like, like, uh, like twins, you know, like twin cities. Do you want to know some, some Chad facts? What do you think the population of Chad is?

I'd say it's like, uh, 10 million. Oh, that's good guess. Any other? I like that. I'm going to guess, uh, I'm going to guess, uh, I'm going to guess. 6 million. Oh, I really like your guess. It's 19 million. Fuck. It looks like I win again. It's more Chads than we thought. It's a lot of Chads. So the GDP of Chad is estimated at around $32 billion. Right. 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, is it like they're having to sell off natural resources and stuff. So when they run out of those things, they're just fucked. Well, no, the GDP is, includes the stuff that they use themselves, right? Yeah, but how they buy in that shit? It's not, 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, they might be buying stuff as well on going into government there or 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 Mullah coming from? Well, they must be making some stuff. Like, they have to obviously produce food to eat and things like that. And then they'll have some natural resources that they will also sell.

It says here that Chad exported $3 billion worth of crude petroleum. There you go. But that's only a fairly small amount of their GM. So, yeah, I guess it's what is it, government spending? They, you know, their biggest export partner. is China. They do oil, livestock, cotton, sesame, gum, Arabic, and shay butter. China's big in sort of developing Africa now, aren't they? It's very big. They bought a lot of shit.

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 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 I'll sort of leave you alone. There's all these videos of like a Chinese worker in

Africa and a bunch of the local sort of corner them. And then he just whips his Chinese passport out. And they'll 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, there are all kinds of 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.

They can put up like a big office building in like two weeks. Imagine you were a business though, right, which China has a lot of. They want raw materials as cheap as possible. and they're going to get those things 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 it's main steel they're building so much stuff I mean so TI next year the international next year is in Shanghai wasn't it already in Shanghai? If I get invited it would be interesting to go there where you've been before though

I was there in 2019 I think I also went in 2018 wow and I would go 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, he'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 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. ago was to Shanghai.

Oh, nice. So it's all been done up. And all the industry that used to sort of ruin the environment of Shanghai, they've fucking moved it to the countryside or something. Oh, right. Which is a very, like the Chinese government would just say, right, all your 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. Yeah. That's right. it. 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 of them. Yeah, that's why that's why the government just

invested like two billion dollars to keep steel, a Land Rover going. Land Rover, like the fact that it's owned by an Indian company. And they've nationalized some of the train lines again. There's like, was it one or two of them? Yeah, we're in great shape over here, lads, everyone. We're doing fine. We're not talking about politics.

It's in politics. This is economics. This is not politics. Yeah, this, you know, 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 didn't even, when it came to building this nuclear plant, when it comes to making new trains for our train 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 we were like we don't need any of this we can get some money

in the short term we can get some money whole country's sold yeah we've lost the ability to do this stuff is a disgrace I would trust

French or Germans to do it though to be honest let's be honest I don't want Johnny Britt we used to make this shit we used to make things

where are those skills gone what happened now we just fucking serviced and now what we do is say hello Virgin Media

technical support and then that got sent over to overseas as well We don't trust you, you bridge 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 a big into it for a long time now. Because when I used to work at HSBC, it was all, all of the call centers were out in. Yeah. This isn't a new thing. You know, even when they were doing, when they do anything, they get the lowest tender on, on, on, it's been this way since the Victorian era where, you know, they'll just take the lowest beard 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 the way.

It's always the nature of the world we live in. And if it's working out for Shanghai, it sounds like it's doing, it sounds like they're doing great. I saw I was watching a, 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, it's got like a little, it's like very, it's very 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 mad. It looks like a like, like, you know, what we would think of as a future city sort of thing, you know, like yeah, like something like a blade. Or something like that. How about The Lime? Did they ever build that thing? They started it. Yeah.

Did they actually? They're doing a mile of it or something. The lime. It was so dumb. 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? It's Saudi Arabia. It's the dumbest idea. And I think they were, they've decided to build this. It was going to be a mega city. That's right, yeah. It would have been miserable to live in.

But it's a disaster. I mean, it's an absolute disaster. no way it's going to be good or work. They felt the original draft would be completed by 2080 and cost $8.8 trillion. I know.

This stuff is a dream project that these incredibly rich leaders can use as basically their own Lego project. That 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. It's crazy. They did it with Dubai and... They commissioned this project, this concrete factory, a multi-plant concrete factory

capable of producing 20,000 cubic meters of concrete a 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, terrible idea. I'm getting told off for my fucking, you know, not putting a yogurt pot in the right.

fucking... I know. You're the problem. It's you. When I don't 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 can. 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 in a paper thing. And I'm like, the fuck am I doing with my life,

you know, this is not going to save the fucking planet. You know. And then meanwhile, 20,000 cubic meters of concrete. are being churned into some idiot's vanity project to sink into the desert in a hundred years time and that's poisoning the planet

or just to make 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 second. Well, every little helps. I want to know what percentage of the problem? What if I'm on the other side of the world? I need two bunkers, one of my home

and obviously one at my holiday home. What percentage of the problem is solved by me recycling this paper Eclair box. I bought two acclars from Waitrose. I bought my two acclars, 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 fucking bin bag or whatever. It gets sent to India. Yeah. What happens here? And then I pay a charity to build a thing on the river to fucking fish out my chocolate

Eclare 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 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 It needs its own sun in there to like burn your shit In Japan they burn a lot of shit They fucking incinerate everything in Japan They even got the room for dumps right So they incinerate stuff They incinerate every singular poop

No, a lot of they're rubbish You've got a big biomass burner in Jersey That you're rallying about And I'm a big fan I like that That's no way to talk about Let's get back to burning shit again Fuck I'm sure it's good

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. Sorry? Dr. Simon Clark, you mean. Thank you. Sir Dr. Simon Clark. Carry on.

I want to know, like, sometimes, though, you know, people, this was the thing like Gay's Workshop did. They were like, oh, you can return your plastic spruce. 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 were doing to take it there? If you're putting plastic in your car, mate, no wonder you're not a driver. Well, 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 an efficient way. Because my dad used to do this, you know, I'm sure, like, you know, mom would say, oh, you know, take this stuff to the dump.

And we'd drive half an hour to dump to dump. 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, 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 can't even see out my rear view. Like, it's insane.

It's like, it's loaded. I love that. I like going the dump, though. I love the recycling center. I just like the idea of it. I like how, like, 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 confusion and the spilling of the leaky bin bags on your shoe. You know, there's, and wear your clothes get dirty.

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 of it. I just love a bit of recycling. I love sorting. I love crushing. I love I love sorting. I love those fucking laser guided conveyor belts that go really fast and they know like they use like a little sprits of air to like knock plastic off the metal belt and stuff. Shit. Yeah. I live for that. I love that. Give me that. That's that's that's my dream. Yeah. So God. God bless America. God bless waste. God fucking bless. Bless this mess. they say without it honestly less this mess um let's go fuck it thank you everyone good podcast

i love you guys yeah see you next time god bless goodbye chow love you