But I think the, the more we see of Trey, the better we'll think he is.

I think after losing Tyler Morton and, um, you know, getting, moving Harvey Elliott on-

Yeah

...you know, we really do need to keep a couple of good young kids-

the conversation today?

So I feel pretty fortunate.

We are living on where my grandfather and my grandmother homesteaded in 1941, so we feel, feel pretty blessed to be able to do that, to be able to ride country that my, my family rode, I think, is pretty special.

So we're in the northwest part of Saskatchewan.

For your listeners who don't know where that is, we're north ea- or sorry, northwest of Saskatoon, about two and a half hours.

And we're north, well, more, more east than north, but of Edmonton, Alberta, about three and a half hours.

The closest bigger center would be Lloydminster, which is an hour and 10 minutes south and west of us.

We were at 2% on our second year.

Um, but the, uh, what was your guys' introduction to Mortal Kombat? The games, the movies, the whatever, like, what was your starting relationship with these games? I'll ask, uh, I'll throw it to John first.

Okay.

I mean, the, the original Mortal Kombat 1 for the SNES back in, like, '90, what was it, '92? I think it was '92, '93, something like that area.

Man, I, I played, I, I'm pretty positive, with very few exceptions, I have played absolutely every single Mortal Kombat game that has come out.

Um, I think I, I've even played Sub-Zero Mythologies, which is a, a long-forgotten mythology.

Uh, um, Shaolin Monks is one that has evaded me.

Um-

Gotcha.

[laughs] Good lord.

Uh, I, I, I, I think one of my favorite jokes, because it felt so, like, full circle, was, um...

And I'm sure there's a million ones that made me laugh harder, but I think one of my favorite, like, complete jokes was, uh, Tom completely botching his one-night stand because he thought that she was the sea hag.

Mm-hmm.

And I remember going to Machias, Maine, 'cause we had, like, family friends there of one of the band mates.

And it's like, it's very north.

It's like 40 minutes out of Canada.

Um, and it's, it was like every business doubled as another business because there weren't, there was not the-

Who do I have next? Probably Shoveler.

Hello, everyone.

This is John, AKA The Shoveler, uh, with Butch Caldwell and The House Always Wins six, mm, seven, and maybe eight.

I couldn't keep track.

Uh, also titled So Mistakes Were Made.

Um, so Cass, ED-E, and Butch head to Hoover Dam to save the president.

Um, so we get two options, um, for the quest.

What?

Uh, John, where, where do you stand on the matter?

I mean, without a big, you can't play ba- uh, basketball.

You know? Big is the name of the game.

So if we can't get a center, like I'm excited to see what Bruce Branch does and, uh, Rob Wright coming back and everything, but if we don't have a big guy up front, it's very concerning.

You know what I mean? So it's, uh-

uh-Yeah, they gotta do that soon.

And I know, you know, it's the day of the portal and all that, so options can come back up easily.

Mm-hmm

Well, they would have to spend, like, 400 or $500 million to get there.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, the, the one thing that I can think of off the top of my head as an example, I mentioned it earlier, Street Fighter II the movie, right? We played the video game.

And Ryu, you see he does his hurricane kick, right? But in the, even in the video game, he just jumps up in the air and he spins around.

But in Street Fighter II the animated movie, he actually ducks down, throws a freaking roundhouse kick, and then leaps up in the air and follows it up with a 360-degree kick landing every single foot.

And you're like, "Holy crap, it actually looks amazing here." Right? But try to translate that to live action.

W- John, you feel the same way?

[gentle music] So now we're talking with John, AKA Smoke and Coffee on Facebook, and, uh, you have a couple of stories for us, don't you?

Yes, I do.

And, um, I'll start off in the beginning, and we'll go back in time to when we lived in Chicago.

This is where I lived up to the age of 13.

And, um, the strange thing that happened there was, it wasn't a ghost.

I had reoccurring dreams as a child.

And, uh, what happened was is I'd go to sleep, and in the middle of the night I could see myself walking, getting out of bed and walking down the hallway.

Okay.

Mm

... towards the sunlight, and they were this sort of shape.

We couldn't do it with the building, unfortunately.

But that concept of heliotropism then, from a building to a plant to a human being, choosing a positive path, choosing a joyful path, turning towards the sunlight, which leads you through the color palette of yellow, which is my happy color, and all these glorious plants.

Few heliotropic, phototropic plants in here, but just really, um, lots of rotation and joy.

Yeah, optimism.

But are there any particular favorites of yours?

Do you know what? It's a classic, but the oxalis triangularis, I mean, that color, [clears throat] especially with the other palettes, it's a plant that everybody's tried to grow, everybody loves, everybody responds to when they see it in our shop.

Yeah, we'll play you.

Hey, man.

I've been meaning to talk to you.

[laughs]

I don't think you should be speaking the way you do.

I think it will come back to haunt you.

One day, you will be ashamed.

[laughs]

Yeah, I had a BMW I had, had to do a coolant pressure check on, and, you know, first comment a- on, even on the internet, coolant, uh, oil filter housing cooler.

John, what's going on today?

Well, uh, I've had this Explorer since it was new.

It's a 2000.

I think it's a 4.0. It's a six cylinder naturally.

And, uh, uh, the wife...

I wasn't in the car.

Okay.

I mean, I, I mean, I talk to...

I'm on a couple of different websites, but, like, I...

That was, like, that was my messed up, you know what I mean? Because, uh-

[laughs]

Uh, not just on Tinder, but, like, on a couple of different websites, and, uh, I just, uh, I'm not into that.

I, I, I thought I was meeting somebody else.

I thought I was meeting a different chick.

Comes with the territory, yeah, right.

Um, I don't, I don't even kn- I mean, I can't see them taking the captaincy off him.

But even though he's 35 and, you know, clearly not as brilliant as he was five years ago.

Yeah.

And you need, you really need him at the club, but, you know, uh, he's 35, so how long he can continue and, uh, how, how much of a drop-off you get season by season, I don't know.

I'm going to have this breakthrough." Tell us about that, John.

Um, I, I would say it has to be that time when Tony and I sat face-to-face and we took the gloves off, no cameras, and it was like, if you...

You know, this is it, you know? This is it.

And, um, it hit.

It was like I, I looked at my kids and, uh, I've gotta do this.

And there were, there's been other moments that, through the process, that were that, that moment, and I could, I always look back at that.

And, um, that's when I say, "This man's putting his hand out and I'm pushing it away.

Bye-bye.

Mm-hmm.

And they're trying to get their own colleagues on board with it, say, "Hey, this is a good series for this company to make," et cetera.

But what we didn't know till, until today is that there were, uh, two dry runs of episodes three and four.

We knew about the episode three one; didn't know about one for episode four.

Both directed by Michael Scott.

And, uh, I think what that was was the practice for actually to get every- everybody up to speed with making two episodes per week, as well as trying out further actors in the parts who they felt hadn't quite worked out in the first episode.

Although, to be fair, the only person there, I'm thinking through the cast who appeared in both, was Nita Valerie-

Mm-hmm.

But you've continued to get your skill set to continue to rise to help you grow into your current role, right? Can you just talk to me a little bit about, you know, over 20 years, continuing to grow inside organizations, have success, still build those relationships, what are the biggest lessons that you've learned?

Look, um, very early on, I was maybe three years with, uh, with U.S. Surgical Tyco Healthcare, um, m- m- actually, it might've been shortly after the spin to Covidien, but, uh, I spent some time with, um, an individual, Christie Calver, um, who is a, a, a consultant, um, you know, sales process consultant, and she had this theory around, uh, unconscious competence.

And, you know, this is when you become so competent at something, you do it just out of habit, rote memory, right? And, and she, she spent some time in, again, in, in sort of a sales workshop, she spent some time talking about, um, you know, how individuals that reach unconscious competence, right? Eventually fall off in performance.

Because the habits start to erode.

You're, you're not, you're not thinking about the process behind them.

Um, and what I took away from that, you know, from that time I'd spent with her, was the need to constantly be learning.

That sta- like, like when, when you, when you say, "Hey, I'm good.

... can you just talk to me as, like, especially, like, a young man going through that climb of being in sales, having a lot of success? Like you're saying, finding people who trust you and will be willing to give you the hard feedback, but like you said, you have to be able to know, discern who's good enough to listen to and how to actually take it.

But you've continued to get your skillset to continue to rise to help you grow into your current role, right? Can you just talk to me a little bit about, you know, over 20 years, continuing to grow inside organizations, have success, still build those relationships, what are the biggest lessons that you've learned?

Look, um, very early on, I was maybe three years with, uh, with U.S. Surgical Tyco Healthcare, um, m- m- actually, it might've been shortly after the spin to Covidien, but, uh, I spent some time with, um, an individual, Christie Calver, um, who is a, a, a consultant, um, you know, sales process consultant, and she had this theory around, uh, unconscious competence.

And, you know, this is when you become so competent at something, you do it just out of habit, rote memory, right? And, and she, she spent some time in, again, in, in sort of a sales workshop, she spent some time talking about, um, you know, how individuals that reach unconscious competence, right? Eventually fall off in performance.

Because the habits start to erode.

You're, you're not, you're not thinking about the process behind them.

Um, and what I took away from that, you know, from that time I'd spent with her, was the need to constantly be learning.

That sta- like, like when, when you, when you say, "Hey, I'm good.

... can you just talk to me as, like, especially, like, a young man going through that climb of being in sales, having a lot of success? Like you're saying, finding people who trust you and will be willing to give you the hard feedback, but like you said, you have to be able to know, discern who's good enough to listen to and how to actually take it.

[laughs]

Um, but the members, they're all modelers as well, and they're all dead keen.

Um, at the present moment, there's 20 of us in the club, and as you've seen, we do produce quite a nice display.

Tell me about that one.

Oh, that there, that's Angie.

Angie's a kit boat produced by a company called Crick, but a very, very popular boat with the, the younger modelers because it's a fiberglass shell and wooden construction.

Some of the later kits now are all plastic, and it's not quite so...

No, not quite so nice to handle plastic as it is plywood.

Mm-hmm

...

many people who were a part of that team.

So I, I can't say that, like, I've had this full experience myself.

But I...

From what I know of vendors, there is so much work that goes into creating all the things that they're going to bring, packing it up or shipping it, right, carrying heavy boxes and things, right, transporting things, lugging it in, and they want to offload as much as possible, not just for the sake of making money, but so they don't have to schlep all that stuff home.

And it can take hours to set up their displays and make sure everything looks good and is priced right, and there's, there's just so much work that goes into it.

But people bought tickets, and you have to follow through anyway, you know? And I think that that's something that people need to consider, too, is like if their pie-in-the-sky dream doesn't follow through with this convention, will you still want to do it?

You could do your hair in that, couldn't you? [laughs]

Y- y- you absolutely can, so hence why there's lots of people taking pictures with it.

Leather is absolutely all customized, as you can see.

It's all stitched.

The whole floor of the car and the top of the car is exactly the same, so it's all been buffed up at top and bottom.

Uh, completely on 17-inch wheels, which I don't think there's a Stag around that's on 17 right, right now, and it's on air ride as well.

So it goes up, it goes down.

You should leave 'em original," that sort of thing?

And if they're outrunning you, you, you've got serious problems.

Jürgen Klopp didn't create Liverpool's identity.

Liverpool got Jürgen Klopp in because his i- 'cause his ideologies were very similar to ours.

We need to get away from Jürgen Klopp made this Liverpool.

That's not what happened.

It's been happening f- Liverpool have always fought.

They might not have always won trophies.

Yeah.

Um, can you just, um, tell us a little bit about you and your role at The Holy Post and then, um, what you're planning to do with the storytelling grant?

Yeah.

So, uh, unnecessarily lofty title, but my title is CEO of Holy Post Media.

So, um, Holy Post Media is a, it's a for-profit company, so it's structured as a for-profit almost entirely for the sake we th- that, that we think it gives us greater editorial freedom, um, than kind of looking over our shoulders and not offending major donors.

And so what that has meant is it, it, we, we take on, um, more often polarizing topics that the incentive structures of Christian institutions and churches is often to avoid those things, um, because the preservation of the institution, um, is kind of dependent on them not offending their funders.

And so w- to receive this grant, we have a fiscal agent, um, that is sort of technically the recipient of the ga- grant that will then hire us to create content.

Um, and Phil Vischer is the founder of VeggieTales, um, and, or the creator of VeggieTales and, and one of the founders of Holy Post.

Or not-- mm

Yeah.

I wanna, um, change gears a little bit, uh, to John regarding Langdon.

Um, Sarah...

I don't know if you heard the, the episode where I interviewed, uh, Sarah, who is a ICU nurse and, uh, a listener of the, the Lore Hounds, and we had her on.

She was sending in all the emails over the course of our coverage.

Um, I'm curious as to what you think about Langdon's arc.

Uh, he's gotten this great redemption arc.

"Is that my leg?" [laughs]

The DNA profile came from semen recovered at the scene of the crime where Diane Sindel was murdered, but...

Sharp intake of breath.

I think my jaw dropped.

I thought, "I'm sure that's Diane Sindel

SindelAnd what about the people local to the story, like John, the Birkenhead reporter?

When I saw Diane's picture on the television, first and foremostly announcing that the Criminal Cases Review Commission had referred the man convicted of the murder of this young girl to the Court of Appeal, I was very shocked.

Where at the time, and having covered the trial, there seemed no doubt that the police had got their man and that the right man was behind bars.

Here he is to tell us all about it.

Hi, I'm John, VK6ASK, and I thought I'd just do a little talk on Silos on the Air.

It's a great little program, a bit like Parks on the Air or POTA, um, except it's all about the silos around the wheat belt of Western Australia.

So we'd like to think we might get a few more people interested in doing silos.

Great little activity, and the main difference between silos and POTA, well, obviously is the silos, but with silos you only need three contacts.

Uh, one of them has to be single sideband, but once you've, uh, got those contacts in your bag, that's all you need.

So if you're just passing by a silo somewhere, easy to do an activation, um, no doubt about it.

So that's Victor Juliet Two Lima, Lord Howe Island, first two weeks of June.