that? I tried to put it as nicely as I could.

You want to go down and beat the hell out of Calgary.

It was just, you know, in your DNA, especially having, you know, I graduated high school here, played with the Huskies, played with the Golden Bears.

So those trips down Highway 2, there's actually many.

With the Eskimos and the Davios now, it was always a special thing.

You knew it was hyped up.

And you could watch kind of the transformation of the new guys when the light bulb went on.

But how was it for you?

I think I've left out something.

No, I mean, that's a pretty good start, I think.

Yeah, I mean, effectively, I think we should roll back and firstly, you know, publicly commend the Syrians for actually getting two bid rounds off the ground, you know, in quick succession, despite, you know, all the obvious domestic issues and, you know, the infrastructure and economic woes that the country still remains as they're finding its feet.

So I think, you know, we should start off with a positive on that front.

So, yeah, just as a bit about the sequencing.

So the award tender, which you're right, it's for, what was it, seven fields in, maybe we could call it the Euphrates-Graben, close to the Iraqi border.

That's another synonym we could perhaps might be more familiar with the listeners.

How does that compare from your perspective with what we're used to looking at here?

I have some sort of specific things that we could touch on, but catch us up i guess on what's happening in syria

sure i mean i think we've got to go back to what december 24 when when when our sad was was usurped coup whatever you want to describe it fled um and and the whole situation in syria you know flipped on its head very very quickly throughout 2025 And, you know, that has led to the lifting of European Union sanctions, which was, I think, mid-year.

And then towards the back end of the year, I think it was December, Trump officially revoked the Caesar Act, the US sanctions, after the new interim president, Ahmed al-Shahara, visited the White House, which is quite a significant event.

you know, high profile event.

And during that interim period or, you know, particularly since December and even before then, there has been a lot of movement and a lot of companies signing MOUs, sniffing around, going back into Syria.

Primarily, they are Western and US-focused companies, not explicitly.

There is a large smattering of Saudi firms and a couple of Qatari entities also going back in.

And then what were all those people doing when Syria descended into chaos? And now what's happening? Like who's come back? Who was sort of already there but went away for a while? Or who's entering anew?

Tell us a bit more about this.

Yeah, this was a, yeah, a l- a lovely campaign, and, and the, the inside of the heart of it was if you've got ADHD, you, [lips smack] you get peaks and troughs of how you feel with your mood, sort of, you know, anxiety.

Um, and a lot of treatments can just make you sort of plateau, but this was a treatment that actually allowed you to still feel emotions.

So the ...

Yeah, they had the pleasure of working with, um, Tim Jones on this one, and he obviously came up with this idea, and he was like, "Look, I think we should do something with a rollercoaster." And what was really interesting, we got, um, Claire Reid, the illustration visualizer in, and she, she helped Tim sort of re- sort of do it in lots of different ways.

Like, there was like the ...

There was like a table on a rollercoaster.

Tell us what you got here.

Mm.

And as I was coming out, Loretta Crawford ran out and said, "Hey, Tom, Tom, Tom, when are you coming down?" I said, "Oh, I won't be down till about, uh, May or June 'cause I've got, uh, some stage work to do." She said, "Oh, that's a pity." And then I came down, and they sent me a script for Ryan.

And that's how I came into it.

But I didn't want...

It's so funny.

It really is.

[laughs] I said to Heinz, "I'm leaving." They said, "What are you leaving for, Tom?" I said, "I'm going down to Melbourne to be an actor." "Oh, yeah, good." So suddenly the general manager's up there.

... ran a video production company.