I don't think I was incorrect with that, correct?

You are correct.

It was the biggest climb of the day, and starting at 15 miles in, it certainly felt it as well.

So you start up out of Treant, and you're running alongside, I guess, what could be called a river.

I think it was really still just glacial snow melt from the top of the mountains.

It's just this river rushing down, and you start on a Kind of gentle road following that up.

Absolutely beautiful views.

Do you

Okay

...

the sun.

It's all happening low in the west, so make sure you can see low down in the west.

And if you were looking at the sun over the last few days, like we warned people, between 6:00 and 8:00, roughly where it was the last few days, that's where it's gonna be tonight.

So make sure you've got no trees or buildings [laughs] in the way.

And when you get your best photograph, you can actually just hold the eclipse glasses up in front of your smartphone, zoom in and take a lovely picture, and send it to Astronomy Ireland Magazine, 'cause we're publishing at the end of this month a bumper issue, not only of all the best photos from Ireland of the eclipse, but also a lot of Irish people went to Spain to watch the total eclipse, so we're gonna put some of their pictures in, too.

Okay.

Yeah.

But don't worry, I won't be singing at the event, so people needn't worry about that.

But people will be singing the praises of what they see through the telescope.

So once a year, we set up giant telescopes.

People who have big telescopes very kindly bring them along, thousands of times more powerful than your eyes.

And they let the general public look through them.

So we invite the whole 8 million people on the island, just like the real electric picnic does, to come along and blow their minds with the views of things like the planet Saturn with its rings and its moons.

Is Saturn visible to the naked eye at the moment? Yeah.

Okay.

And for us looking on, from the Earth at the Moon, we see a full moon, and we can't see the invisible Earth shadow hanging there in space.

There's no- nothing for it to fall on.

But when the Moon passes into it, we can see the Earth's shadow, and this is what's happening.

The Moon moves into the Earth's shadow, uh, gets almost totally eclipsed, 96% of the Moon will be, uh, so, uh, will be covered by the Earth's shadow And then it comes out the other side.

So it takes a few hours for that to happen.

It starts about 3:30-

Yeah

Okay.

But if you're interested, you go to our website, which is astronomy.ie, and down at the bottom you'll see the social media, Facebook, X, Instagram.

And if you're on whichever of those you're on, we'll post every afternoon, usually around 4:00 to 6:00, well before the sun sets, whether there's going to be an aurora for Ireland that night.

So if it looks like it's going to be clear, you're interested in northern lights, check our social media and, you know, it'll either say no aurora due tonight, or that there is or there isn't one, and maybe how powerful it is.

But predicting the exact time of arrival is still a bit beyond science, and also how strong it will be.

So sometimes we're, it, even the scientists are out by 12 hours either way.

Occasionally it doesn't actually appear at all, and the odd time it catches us unexpected and there's an aurora when one wasn't predicted.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I thought speaking to you of all people as a wholesale credit risk guy, you could give us an idea about what's happening in the credit space.

Yeah, and look, I suppose my role, I get to see a lot of what's going on across corporate New Zealand and the bigger end of the commercial market and some of what goes on the wholesale markets via the Treasury team and our sort of bank counterparty risk.

Look, my general observation are things are starting to even out.

I still see businesses struggling.

They're still experiencing cost increases.

They're trying to pass those on from a pricing perspective.

And often I'll see accounts performance where the revenue line is going up, but But the actual, the bottom line is either unchanged or going down.

But actually speaking on that, whether or not businesses are essentially just charging more for fewer items because the costs have gone up or whether or not they're also increasing the volumes of sales that

Okay.

And if you were looking at the sun over the last few days, like we warned people, between 6:00 and 8:00, roughly where it was the last few days, that's where it's gonna be tonight.

So make sure you've got no trees or buildings [laughs] in the way.

And when you get your best photograph, you can actually just hold the eclipse glasses up in front of your smartphone, zoom in, and take a lovely picture, and send it to Astronomy Ireland magazine, 'cause we're publishing at the end of this month a bumper issue, not only of all the best photos from Ireland of the eclipse, but also a lot of Irish people went to Spain to watch the total eclipse, so we're gonna put some of their pictures in, too.

'Cause they're sort of Irish, aren't they?

Okay.

Like maybe there's a thunderstorm coming.

Why is it so dark? Um, and that's because most of the sunlight is gone.

So tell us, tell us, David, like what exactly is happening in the sky tonight and why is this particular eclipse so exciting for us?

Yeah, this is all covered in Astronomy Island magazine, so if you get it in the post, you know that this is weeks ago, and if not, you'd better sign up, because there's another eclipse coming up on August 28th this month, on the moon this time, and another partial eclipse next August, and another partial eclipse just six months after that, so three partial solar eclipses in 18 months.

Wow.

It's a great time to watch eclipses.

So what people should look like, just to summarize what's in the magazine article, is 6 o'clock... to 8 o'clock tonight, you've got to be standing outside for two hours.

Maybe just a group of family and friends.

You can have a chat if there's a few clouds around.

So, and reminder to people, while your smartphone gets solar eclipse glasses, your eyes get one too, just in case you forget.

So we shouldn't be expecting nighttime conditions, I presume.

No, you'll only get day turning to night at a total eclipse of the sun.

There hasn't been one of those since 1724 on Irish soil, and there won't be one on Irish soil until 2090.

So they're very rare.

A lot of people are going to Spain where there will be a total eclipse, but not this time from Ireland, unfortunately.

So we're just going to get what looks like twilight.

If there's a beautiful blue sky, you'd be wondering why it wasn't bright on the ground as it normally is, and that's because most of the sun is covered.

Okay, if people want any more information, where can they check out Astronomy Ireland, David?

And his

curt answer was, when I hear that question, I know I'm talking to a complete idiot.

And to be fair to the questioner, the thing about space is, first of all, NASA reckons, and they do studies on this, that for every $1 of taxpayers' money that's spent in space, They get multiple dollars back into the American economy.

If you think about it, the taxes you're spending ultimately is paying people, companies, to produce things to go into space, and that's their salaries.

What do they do with the salaries? They spend it back in the American economy.

So it actually boosts the American economy.

So the more you spend on space, the better for your country, it turns out.

What sort of benefits have people maybe received in their own lives from the expenses into space travel?

We really need to sort of look her in the eye if we're going to solve the case.

Well, see, the problem we've got here is a 3,000-year-old mummy, as a lot of those tissues have sort of absorbed into each other and become... attached to the skull and things like that.

So what we're really going to have to do is push the boundaries of the software slightly and try and really pick out just the material that we want.

know,

contamination, everything that goes with that.

What you've got here is an exact representation of what's lying within the casket.

Yet, you don't have to be delicate with it.

You can slice it in half, see what's inside.

Yes.

So we had bought some premium ones that would last, and we told people, you know, if you've got the Astronomy Hour magazine, put them inside that, put them in the bottom of a drawer, And, you know, in a year or two's time, there'll be another partial eclipse.

And with the eclipse glasses, you can see giant sunspots on the sun.

A few weeks ago on the social media, we were telling people a huge sunspot, 10 times wider than the Earth, had appeared on the sun.

And with my eclipse glasses on, I could actually just see it as a tiny dot.

Okay.

And so occasionally there are sunspots big enough to be seen in between the eclipses.

Yes, yeah.

And what will we see?

Well, it looks like a start of the naked eye because even from corporate, it flies directly overhead.

It's still over 400 kilometres above the ground.

But that means people up in Donegal can see it at the same time.

So it's great for a national organisation like ours.

Everyone can see it all at the same time.

We'll all be watching it together.

What's that about?

And what will we see?

Well, it looks like a start of the naked eye because even from corporate lights directly overhead, it's still over 400 kilometers above the ground.

But that means people up in Donegal can see it at the same time.

So it's great for a national organization like those.

Everyone can see it all at the same time.

We'll all be watching it together.

And it looks like a very bright star, but about 10 to 100 times brighter than the brightest star that's up there.

What's that about?

You two have worked together exploring this stuff for how many years, David?

Oh, well, Aliki and I have been working together for over two decades.

I got into this field over three decades ago in southern New South Wales.

I was actually in the right place at the right time, I suppose, knowing the right things to be part of the pilot project for of a process that Sue's already mentioned, a group conference is the terminology we use for these structured group meetings to deal with particular types of situation.

So yeah, I was teaching justice studies at Charles Sturt University not long after it formed and happened to be around when the advisor to the State Police Commissioner proposed that we use a process that was already being used in New Zealand to deal with youth justice cases.

And essentially the suggestion was instead of a police officer telling someone off, we would sit down all the people involved in a situation.

It could be a theft or some similar criminal activity.

crucifixion they're about actually bringing about healing for those involved so I'm curious because we're spoken about conferences and some of the techniques that might be involved here but when you're introducing the whole concept of restorative practices to somebody who's never heard of it before whose entire mind is locked in the cultural concept of they did the wrong thing how do we punish them how do you begin to introduce a the philosophy, the concept of restorative practices?

What, what

It was a, it was an idea we came up with, which was born from a, um, I had a social media lady throw some questions at me, said, "What do you, what would you drink with popcorn? What..." And I thought, "Oh, God, what am I gonna drink with popcorn?" So I answered.

Then she said, "McDonald's fries." I said, "Actually, I'm really very fond of McDonald's fries." Forgive me.

Um, and I thought, "Let's go from there.

Let's see where that leads us." So, um, went down to McDonald's and had a rucksack with some bottles in, tried a couple.

All right.

So it's not sweet.

It's de- I mean, sweet would, would not be good.

What, what are your, what are your concerns if there is a merger, and you've got Gisborne to the east, Whakatane to the west, Kawerau sitting inside Whakatane?

So, so on, on paper and, and, and like whānau connections and people, um, it would make sense for us to go towards Tairāwhiti, except there's a huge mountain range in between and, and there's a massive...

You know, they're still trying to recover from, um, I think that's the m- amount of weather events they've had is just incredible.

So look, it doesn't make sense on paper.

Um, but, but, you know, there's a push for a whole Bay of Plenty wide, um, you know...

And obviously the mayor in Tauranga was quite keen on that, um, big one, one huge super council.

Um, we, we are roughly 3% of the, um, um [laughs] the population of Bay of Plenty, so your representation is gonna be next to zero, um, no matter how you look at it.

So what would you prefer to do? Is there room for more cooperation that's a step short of, um, full amalgamation?

How about starting off with this exciting news about a mall, the Midway Mall, that's going to be developed?

What happened was we've had a blighted mall for over 20 years, and all the people used to do beforehand was talk about it.

So we did something about it.

There's multiple owners, so we had companies like the Cleveland Clinic that was interested, but it was under multiple owners, and they wanted to make sure They protect their brand.

And so what we thought, okay, we need to get involved through our port authority and through the commissioners working in partnership with some lost revenue ARPA dollars.

And instead of just giving it away, like the previous administration did with some of the money and not seeing it again, they call them grants.

But what we did is we invested in ourselves.

Can you talk about what you're doing to help ease some of that pressure A little

What kind of bacteria?

E. coli would be probably the most common and one that people would be familiar with.

Uh, and then there are three particularly nasty ones that you get from food, so salmonella, shigella, and campylobacter.

Um, I give him the full story, the suggestion that the CIA deliberately targeted Gordon Banks with food poisoning.

Um, goodness.

[laughs] So if I was going to do this, I'm thinking this through on the hoof.

I've not thought about this before, but let's imagine, so you create a culture of salmonella or shigella in the lab.

That's very easy to do.

he will show up at least once mandatory starts

up? Yeah, mandatory.

And I think that's been all indicated.

But again...

My question with George Pickens is that why wouldn't he want to— unless they truly are negotiating behind the scenes to get something done.

And with where his price point is and where the market is, I can't imagine that is happening seriously.

But if that's not going on, I don't really see the upside to him not being here in the voluntary part with his teammates— because the questions about him on the open market aren't about his skill set.

Which, please, I need something in my life.

Just can you lay it out for our listeners exactly what businesses like yours are facing at the moment?

So, just gone through...

We've come out of COVID.

We spent couple of years, um, bouncing along the bottom.

We came back out to, like, you know, it was quite a strong trade.

Uh, and then we've had 24 months of relentless inflation across everything.

Hmm.

it got to the point where my rates were more than my rent and I was thinking, "Well how can that possibly be ch- allowed to happen?"