Welcome to episode four of the Risk Cast, the official podcast of the Risk Management Monitor blog and of Risk Management Magazine. I'm your host, Bill Coffin, head of the tutorial director, and with me is my band of mutual suspects, editor-in-chief, Morgan O'Rourke, hello, and editor, Jared Wade. Hello. Okay.
So we're getting back after the holidays, our first podcast of the new year. Hopefully we're going to go to a bi-weekly production schedule, so we'll be putting out a lot more podcasts. So guys, new year, I'm just a kind of a trike question, I have to ask you. We talked about you walking uphill in the snow for Christmas time and all that sort of thing.
It is cold as hell outside. It is really, really rough. Have you guys been following us to be going on in Europe at all over winter? Morgan, be in the head of winter?
No, no, no, no, no, apparently all of the UK is locked down in the snow, and the Netherlands is completely under snow and all that. And having major salt, salt, salt, sort of, they can't even clear the roads, airports are in the start, have I? And it makes me wonder- And that popcorn is very bland, exactly. It strikes me odd though, that they're that ill-prepared for winter.
I don't know if they just don't get a whole lot of salt. I think it's ridiculous that everywhere, not even Europe, but it seems like every year everybody's ill-prepared for winter. The first snow that comes by walking to a supermarket is like, they've never seen snow before. Oh my god, we're never going to get out of our house.
This is the modern world. You're in your house for a day because you chose to be. You didn't feel like shoveling that day. We don't get snowed in.
I don't understand it. Have you guys ever gone to the supermarket the night before snow? It's the tea, the tea, the tea, the tea, the tea, the tea, the tea, the tea, the tea, the things, when I used to do this, they will buy things in bulk quantities that don't make sense. Like buy like five gallons of milk, which no, remember milk has an expiration date.
So when are you going to drink five gallons of milk in any month, summer, winter, or whatever, or buy like 40,000 rolls of toilet paper? The plumbing is never going to exist again. That was the always thing that used to crack us up. I understand you make a run on stuff because you look in your cabinet and you go, you get some snack food or maybe a dinner or maybe I need milk, but you don't need all of the milk in the whole store.
No, people buy so much milk, eggs and bread before a snowstorm. You would think that like, you know, snow requires you to make French toast. You know, we're going to have breakfast a lot. Exactly.
You're going to go for breakfast. Exactly. You're going to come over to snowshoe. It's not crazy.
I don't know. It's funny for me because I don't know. I just never really look at the weather. Like I'm specifically doing like an outdoor event or going somewhere.
Like I might check the weather in a different city. I'm not kind of like being surprised by weather, like even the modern age I guess. Seems like that one last thing where it's just like, I don't really know what the more I can. I used to feel that way until I got surprised a couple times walking to it from work.
I'll never forget one time. This is back when the room's off. It used to be over on the eastern side of Manhattan near the United Nations. So it's a good 20 minute walk from there at the train station.
And this snowstorm kind of appeared in the middle of the day. I don't think it's a surprise to anybody. But I wasn't following the weather. And I didn't have a hat with me.
Now I'll never forget just walking home. I was like just getting coated in snow and my head was covered in snow. And I'll walk by these two construction guys and what looks up me goes, they snow at snow. I don't know why that bothered me so much.
But I'm like me. I'm shocked. I can't structure right from you. I just brought it back to like seventh grade.
I was like, that's it. That's it. That's it. I never heard your mom in the back.
I'm like, you're gonna catch your death. It's a cold. You're gonna catch your death. It's a cold.
You're wearing your head. You're gonna hide your escapes from the top of your head. Yeah, because you don't pay attention to the wind. Now you have a little story.
Ah. Whereas otherwise you were just fine. I'm not really. I walk through a snowstorm.
And that was the story. I don't ever watch the weather. I get that every day. I know we call it.
There's a foot of snow and I grew up that way. Got ever cared about the weather. So you see you know, news footage of something just like doing donuts on like a quarter interest snow, like dude, just lay off the gas. You know, it's okay.
It's alright. It's okay. It's so cute. It's fall.
It's falling. Oh my God, there's snow we're all gonna die. We're gonna have a pair and that's what you're gonna get. I remember being in San Diego and they don't have anything on rain.
I was there in Marijuana and the newspaper headlines were describing what drizzle was. Like the definition of drizzle. Like, because people must have thought there's some rational downforce like, no, actually what we had. It was drizzle.
It was drizzle. Like, it ran so seldom leaving like words for their local vocabulary. I can only imagine what happens in this album. It's like how Amazonian has no word for snow, you know?
And we'll have all of them. Well, what's weird is, now it's looking at the BBC's website. I mean, they're really serious to be a serious problem, which is lack of salt type stuff to keep the roads clear. Apparently, it's going to be a big issue because they're calling for...
It's not just like they've had a storm. It's been a relentless kind of storm season. They're saying that it's been really, really cold. They're expecting it for another couple weeks and they're probably going to get a bunch more storms.
And it's one of those things where you see interviews with town managers and whatnot. They're all trying to pass the buck off to somebody because I know that soon they're streets going to fill in. And there'll be no getting around. But it's silly because I don't understand.
Why don't you just buy like 50 years worth of salt in 1980 and be good? It's not so bad. You can't buy your house or something like that. That's a really, really good question.
I don't know. I mean, when I was in Pennsylvania, they had these huge warehouses by the road and they would just fill them with salt. I think it was a matter of they filled in capacity and then that's how much they held on to it. I never...
There's only one winner in my life I remember where there was even a close to a shortage of salt. And that's because the winner was unusually brutal and unusually prolonged. It was like the winner of 1994, right? It just kept going on.
But even then it wasn't like it was right out of salt. It was just like, oh, it's going to get close. Apparently, there are towns in Britain that have ordered salt and haven't gotten it yet. And it's like what you said, Jared.
How could you be sitting there in summertime going, no salt? Maybe we should get some, maybe we should get on the stage. It's January. Like I could see if this was happening, like it was still snowing in March.
Yeah, we started snowing in October. But perhaps if your budget was cut earlier than the year because of a bad economy, you weren't able to buy all the supplies. You kept your fingers crossed hoping it wouldn't be a lot of snow because you don't really have the resource to pay for removal. That happens a lot.
In this area, at least, well, not on island it does. We're just hoping that you can't do it because there's no budget. You've got to cut some service somewhere. So what do you cut?
We'll go to the fire. Because we'll hope that there won't snow. I know what happens because I have people who work in the plows. When it's snow, they work for 48 hours straight, except when they don't want to pay them overtime.
Then it's like scaling crews and sometimes they don't get the jobs. They're not called in. If it isn't ridiculous winter, it's still kind of a man-made problem. Not truly.
At some point, nobody should. It's like nowhere to put the snow and we're just under 18 feet. You don't have the proper resources to deal with it, which you know what the proper resources were. You just show them how to fill them.
It's critical failure. It's critical. Let us know. Let us know.
Let us know. So what I said, I couldn't sit a bit of myself. So did you guys hear about this plane bomber? Of course we did.
Apparently that happened over Christmas. Which is weird because I was offered two weeks and I didn't read a newspaper for two weeks, which is kind of somebody in media. You think that's a little irresponsible? It was a little irresponsible but it was a break.
People were talking about like, oh, did you hear about that bomber over like some New Year's party or Christmas party? It was like blissfully unaware that something important happened. Evidently it did though. I only just found out the story like last week, like really in depth of what actually happened and it was all like, you know, the- Sorry, where your media source there folks.
We're just finding out this next. That's right. Let me essentially know it's the guy from Nigeria came through Amsterdam and he, in most people's estimates, should have been caught on multiple watch lists. His father in Nigeria had approached the US Embassy of the CIA agents there and spoken with them talking about how he had become increasingly distant, increasingly radical.
He had actually been kicked out or he had gotten his British visa revoked because he had gone to a dubious school that wasn't really like a school and applied. That's how he got in his British visa in the first place. Obama actually came out today saying there were giant errors, failures about the process and he should have been on the process. He bought his ticket in cash and all that other stuff.
Everyone's aware of it at this point. But way I guess the more meaningful thing, luckily nothing happened on the flight, but what's going to happen to airport security and airline security going forward. I think it's a huge thing with international airports trying to converge and have some sort of a general policy to get on the same page about everything, let alone all the things in the United States and there's privacy concerns about the screening and all that stuff. It's going to be crazy for the next couple of months.
I feel like now Morgan, I had been living under a self-imposed media blackout over the holidays, which I can't stress enough is probably one of the things he keeps me saying in the next year. Because on summer time, I take time off. I just don't follow the news. It's wonderful.
I feel like it's weird too because I didn't know what happened with Tiger Woods. I was like either Thanksgiving Day or the day after Christmas with this and then New Year's was like sports the world. I was like, I'm not going to lock a room. Every time I go into a media blackout, I'm big happens because when I did the summer, Michael Jackson died.
The world took interest, but it's not like it's not the same thing. Anyway, I just heard a piece of the story. I haven't really done a full reading of it to be honest with you. Part of it is because I just sort of shudder at the thought of what's going to come out of this whole thing.
This guy was going to try to do a shoe bombing attempt. He was having the explosive hidden in his underwear. I heard this maybe a day or so after the story broke. One of the security protocols that was being talked about would be preventing people from going to the laboratory up to an hour before landing.
I don't know if this is actually this stuff or not. I have to wonder how much more can you do to inconvenience people who are flying for the sake of protecting an airplane? What knocks me out is, and this is where I'm going to make people unhappy in the airline industry, but you've got the physical value of any given plane. Much more so is the liability value of its passengers.
I remember when I did some research on this guys 10 years ago, the average liability value of a US air fatality was $2 million. You use a whole flight of plane. You use a whole flight of passengers. The liability can be massive.
Obviously, you've got a big problem there to deal with. In the grand scheme of things, though, what's the cost of any of the analysis of all the security as far as it's really preventing an extra layer of protection? Or is it just creating a security apparatus that feeds itself and manages to take off leading passengers such as myself? The whole thing, I think the general thought on most of this stuff is there's no way to be 800% catch everything everywhere all the time across the globe.
That's just the common sense. But what everyone seems to think is we're always fighting the last war. We take off our shoes now because of the shoe bomber. We can't bring it like we did because they had liquid explosives before that.
That takes me off. Personally, I'm kind of for that one. I'd actually throw out big balls of contact solution and that kind of hair. I didn't have time to repack it.
I threw out $50 worth of stuff. I was just like this. I was wearing my own drinks for the airport. Not having to buy the local thing if I had the bottles of water.
Yeah, exactly. I like buying them. I just want to bring my own. But I guess the whole thing is that killing 280 people on a plane is not the worst thing a terrorist can do.
They can't find nuclear weapons that can do biological attacks. But I guess the biggest fear is that because of an 9-11 thing, it would be hijacking a plane and using it as a weapon. Oh, I see. So it's not a thing.
You're figuring it out. You're figuring it out. Landing a giant statement killing tens of thousands of people. I had to look at it from that point of view.
I forgot about the whole notion. This also is a weapon creating another $60, $100 billion and killing tens of thousands of people. But from a terrorist standpoint, it relates to the snout, right? Can't let a terrorist win type of thing.
But if even a failed attack, it puts the whole system in disarray. So I would think if you're a terrorist organization, whether you blow up the plane and kill a bunch of your supposed enemy or whether you don't, you're going to ruin that whole... We're going to deal with security measures now that are going to be back from 2002 to 2001. I don't know if anybody flew that, but it was pretty long to run out process.
I can only see that it's going to get closer to that. All right. Well, we didn't kill anybody, but we sure as hell have added more expense. You're now spending money.
You didn't have to spend. People are miserable. Even at the very least, it's a consolation prize. I'm not saying it's the same one, but hey, it's not all lost, because at least now they're spending a billion dollars in security where they would have been spending it on the war effort.
Yeah, sure. I don't know if your plan is to rid the world of infinels. I understand that, but I'm just saying I took convenience of your life. It's consolation prize, though.
I'm saying it's not the worst thing in the world. There's no lose. Oh, we got caught? Whatever.
I mean, just like right after that, like a week after in a new work effort, there was a guy that went in the exit after the security check. Yeah. I wish goodbye to his girlfriend. I think it turned out to be.
And they stopped the airport, all flights out of Newark for like three or four hours while they tried to show it out. The fact that some cab driver saw the guy go in the exit door, and then they looked around on the film and they saw him leave a different door. But just because somebody broke that security line, which obviously you want to check this sort of stuff, put everything on the wall. I hear it close into the entire terminal.
And if you've not been to Newark, I mean Newark is a really, really big deal. One of the major reports in the New York City area. Yeah, I mean it's really hard with the JF Carolina community. I'm just saying, and that was just simply just somebody who, you know, completely anaki was sort of like going the wrong door type of guy.
I mean obviously you can't do that. Well, security has always been very touchy at Newark ever since 9-11 because one of the 9-11 planes left from Newark. And so I always got a feeling that people who work with the security app is there. Oh, we have a mind.
We actually, you know, we have a part 9-11 happen on our watch specifically at that airport. So I would imagine you're the head of security. You have that. You know, you want the next 9-11 to happen under your watch.
No, it's because it's completely aside. You know the guy who created Family Guy? Seth in the Farland? Yeah, yeah.
He was supposed to be on the flight. The first plane I think they hit the towers. Really? But he just overslept and it's a flight.
Really? Definitely. No, that's off the strange. Was Family Guy running at the time?
I think it was. I think it was like on his first run because he was able to get cancelled and then got picked back up after he was I think so. I think it was like nice. What makes it all about that story?
Isn't a Family Guy that has that bit where Osama bin Laden is trying to do a tape? It's like Osama bin Laden is a little bit real where he keeps screwing up. He's trying to record a tape message. He keeps getting it wrong.
He's doing all those things. Like movie stars doing movie cool burials and laughing and trying to get the last out. You know, and then of course no stuishos often beat someone up. It's the way the guy's thinking Osama bin Laden jokes.
He could very well have been one of his victims. It's kind of a strange thing. So, I mean, at this point, it seems like it would be pretty hard for someone to retake over a plane, kill the pilots and actually hijack and use as a weapon. I think that new door policies have been there.
I mean, I guess there's still debate about having weapons on the plane or not. I'm pretty sure that this point to most most most most uh, most uh, airline passengers. Passengers. Thank you.
Most groups of passengers probably would not sit as idly by these days. I mean, I know what that's happening in the movie. Oh, they would have near? Yeah.
Yeah, he was my understanding. He was pretty quickly overpowered by passengers. And that's one of the things I find very interesting is how despite the success of the earlier in 11 attacks. Yeah, I mean, prior to that, I don't think you could really fault people for having stayed in their seats kind of shocked because there's no mental context for that event.
But with 9-11 in your memory, you see something like that happen. People are definitely going to make a take actions because you know what the alternative is and you have nothing to lose. So, passengers kind of been put against the wall in terms of actual tactical responding to an event on a plane. It strikes me as a sort of thing that actually, perhaps that, perhaps that more than all the going through hoops and going through scanners and going past dogs and sort of thing.
I would have met with a greater deterrent to planning a terror attack than the walls of planes because how are you going to manage 200 people in a plane of whom you can probably expect 20 to be ready willing and able to take immediate action to thwart any kind of terrorist plot. Especially when you have reinforced doors now in the cockpit. It seems like you can't get access to anybody in that plane. Even if it's like a Nuns and Girls' Convention trip, you know, like you're still like every 100 people, a cabin door and all that enough to use the plane probably.
And if you're happy to be an Air Marshal, we'll forget it. You're completely shot. You now just count on this image of a bunch of Nuns and Girls' Scouts getting up and just laying the beat down on fun force associated with terrorists. That'd be pretty vicious.
That might even self-mites out the terrorist. I've never been done from airplane, I'm trying to talk in all that. So, you need to police itself and then when it comes to that point. I think the answer is that these four guns and girls' scouts on planes frankly.
So, what you still need to do is just protect the people. I mean, there's 200, you know, whole grand scheme of all the flights every day, you know, it's always tragic. Always try to find crashes regardless of whether it's terrorism or not. And just to keep people flying and keep the economic interest up and to not have the post 9-11 era where no one flew and the airline industry was falling apart.
You do need to have protection there and everything, obviously. So, I guess what the next thing people are trying to do is these new kind of scanners. There's like a millimeter wave scanner, the backscatter X-ray, and they have different levels of what they can see. Now they can see essentially big blocks of things.
Yeah, right on metal and whatnot. But they can see pretty much eliminate your clothes if they want to. Yeah, you would make it. There's actually one of the senators.
I'm still going to work out before. Honestly, I've seen uncensored images. You're pretty much looking at great naked people. If they go to that sort of level.
One of the senators. With everything, obviously, attack like a porn movie or like a Barbie doll. That's like a Barbie doll. You know, and then you get on the stick and the market against it.
You said, you might, yeah. You might want to do set up before they get on a plane just in case. You can close on. It doesn't even matter because it's just an X-ray machine.
It's just a two-way machine. But still, it's something that has to work. Security, it works. Strike me a little sketchy.
I mean, I'm sure that after you've seen 3,000 naked great people go past your scanner in a day. You know, but you're not really worried about it. I don't really care. I mean, I don't know.
You don't know me. Now, is there any technology that is just to catch any kind of inorganic object on your person? Or is it actually looking for a particular kind of thing like explosive compounds or items of metal over a certain mass or, you know, that sort of thing? Well, there are two kind of major ones.
One of them, the TSA, has 40 of them already in their 19 airports across the United States. And they're the ones that show pretty naked people. So you could be able to see like a belt attached to it. And Time Magazine had a little graphic and they were saying that this one probably would have been able to just be by seeing the mass on someone's...
That's clear. They're just understanding. They would have been able to see the size bomb that this guy had in his shorts. That sounds so inappropriate.
Take that out of context. It's not a context. The comment's gonna get you fired. There's so many different ways to go with that.
They're all wrong. They're all wrong. They're all wrong. Moving on.
This one is like the fact scatter X-ray. This one actually can detect organic matters. So it would have immediately... It shows you pretty naked as well.
But it also shows that it detects things like whatever I can be the exact bomb. Like matter. Like trace chemical compounds, you mean? Exactly.
It's just like explosives and even like cocaine or drugs. It's also an element that would help. But I mean, there are privacy concerns. Obviously, one of the senators in the US said, you don't need to see my daughter and wife naked to protect this airplane.
Like you know, like... Right. But then again, you know what? That's great.
Whatever. But I also need the weapon blow up because you have a little bit of a puritanical like, Ooh, dare you see my naughty parts. I don't really care. Just how about we protect people?
Yeah. Well, I mean, because if the difference between blowing up 300 people and not is because somebody was a little squeamish that you might see them naked sort of naked in a grave cartoonish looking pixelated way, shut up. You know what? There's bigger concerns than your...
than your modesty. My concern over this though isn't necessarily the modesty. And I think you raised a really good point, which is a matter of its a matter of its a modesty or safety. You know, what we're living now.
I think safety's got to win out. What concerns me though, is just a matter of cost. Because I remember after 9-11 there was a huge push to buy a lot more x-ray devices and that sort of thing. I mean, it's a huge amount of money spent to upgrade security to airports.
But what always boggled my mind was the fact that a good bonsnipping dog costs about $100,000 to train and it's that additional deterrent, the fact that honestly bad guys are scared to see dogs because they're going to get turned on. And bonsnipping dogs are actually more accurate than bonsnipping machines. At least they were back in 2001. I don't know if the technology was going any further.
But I was wondering, is this technology really what is required to address the problem most efficiently? Or are there lower tech, lower cost of things that could create an equivalent level of safety but they just aren't as highly powerful? I mean, it's a science fiction movie thing. I forget what movie it was.
It's a totally call, right? That's what people walking by and just being completely extra down there. They go skeletons. I don't see how that's fine.
But the dog is not a human. So we've got to have judges' reactions and hope that we figured out that dogs barking because it's not because it's hungry but because it's not. Because it's not because it's not. I just think if you have a screen of people walking by, it's going to be pretty hard for anyone else.
I think if you're x-raying everybody down to their skin or whatever and you're able to see that there is nothing on this person, that's as safe as your body. That's as safe as your going to be able to make it aside from literally strip searching every single passenger. And then the next threat will be something and we'll have to find a way to good grief internally test people. I hate the fact that I just found another.
Don't eat 12 hours before a flight. It's like going to the doctor's. I thought 100% safety. I think Jared's pointing out the way the line, how safety you want to be.
It's really a question. Well Obama did today actually. He actually was directed. He sped off the insulate of $1 billion in advanced technology equipment.
I think of himself that was already budgeted for perhaps. You're marked up. Maybe. I don't know whether it was the next couple of years.
But now he's said we're doing this. This is what I've always wondered about. Do airlines have to help defray the security costs of airports? Good.
I mean, you would imagine that they would have to somehow share the cost because I think it's like a mall. I think you rent a space. You rent a space essentially. Right.
If you want to be at this airport and you delta, you pay JFK, which is owned by the city and lots of other people as well. So they must be sharing security costs. I mean, it happened because they're there to help defray their own liabilities. I don't know.
Yeah. I imagine your rent gets raised. The airport basis. Interesting.
No. I have to wonder, you know, at what point might we see airlines institute their own levels of security that go beyond the airport? You know, because like a value-added thing, like by a ticket on blank airlines. Well, I remember one time talking about it.
I remember I was talking about it better than normal. I remember I was in JFK one time and I remember seeing there was a flight of passengers on L.L. going to go into Israel. And there was a whole separate security area just for them.
I don't know if that was because the airport instituted it or if L.L. Put their own measures in place. Put their own measures in place. I got the feeling the airline may have put their own measures in place.
But it got me thinking, what's the stop in airline from putting their own measures in place? If they feel an airport security system is not adequate. I mean, if you have, say, one more embarrassing situation in Newark, you know, happen, and if you're continental, what's not continental from deciding? It might be worth it for us to put something extra in place to help protect the passenger.
It's hard to sell though because everybody wants things that will happen faster. I mean, most of the airport innovations have been, now you don't have to go to all these kiosks and take electronic. You can get a boarding pass online before you get to the airport. So everything, the trends have always been to make things faster quicker and easier for the flight for the passengers.
So I would imagine adding any other level of security is just going to slow things down. And it would be, you have to sell that to your customers because this is a better thing than you know, this is better for you. What seems to me like the more you are, the less you fly, the more worried you are about security. So you're like, I'm flying once this year, you know, I go once your vacation and I'm really worried because I've heard about these plane things.
I mean, statistically it's, you know, way less chance that you'll get even in a plane crash or anything than car accident or anything. And there's all those ads and obviously terrorism plane related plane crashes happen once in the last decade. So do the math, you know, there's been a lot of flights. Probably going to happen.
And then the people who are flying, you know, every day for business travel, they just want to be quick. They just want to be quick. They realized they're probably not going to die today. Well, that's why they've only, they've had, it was last year, the year before with like certain airlines had like expresses like for, like you almost had to gauge how experienced you were as a passenger.
Yeah, right. So like if you had been on left flights, you go to this line. If you know what you're doing, go here. You know, like express line, which is all the guys with briefcases in their shoes and their hand.
Yeah, you know, and nobody's like, you mean, I have to take my shoes off this is B.S. which always goes to the other thing. You see that? Every girl is always resisting as if you were personally being singled out.
No, this is what you do in airports. Stop holding up the frigging line. Yeah. Right.
That's funny. It's funny. It's moving on, but like up in the air with George Clooney. Yeah.
Yeah. He goes like, oh, go behind Asian people. He got slipped on shoes. They're really quick.
I like travelers. He's like, that's terrible. She's flying with someone he knows. I'm like, I'm like my mom.
I stare at type. It's quicker. I was like this though. I steadfastly refused to wear lace shoes to the airports because I'm going to have to make my feet in and out of quickly.
If it's if it's at a warm, I wear flip flops otherwise I'll wear a low-person. That's just that because it's because I got a laptop. I got, I got, I just got to like fillet my entire online bag, you know, and put it in like 16 different bins and just read something about stuff. It's like having to lace up my shoes and one less thing I'd rather do with.
Yeah, I was wearing a belt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But as far as I'm good, but that's, I mean, we, that's trade off. We're willing to, you know, we're willing to do that for safety. If you've got half a brain, you know, that you do it. There will always be, I'm sure there'll be a level to which though, which gets to be too much.
But you know, you have short hair only because you can't hide something. You might be able to hide something in your hair. You need to pull it all up and shave it or something like that. I don't know.
But you know, if some, if some whack job gets on board a long, long range bus and starts waving around an enble, a talcum powder and scares everybody, you know, full well that, you know, some bus companies probably not going to put into effect the same amount of security measures that the airlines are going to put in. So just the level perceived risk there isn't nearly as high. So it's, it's, it's, it's just annoying that this one, perhaps it's because where bus travel is, is, just feels different than plane travel. The plane travel feels more risky in general because you're doing something that you can't do.
You're flying in here. I can stay ready because you don't do it much. Yeah. All right.
Yeah. If it gets to be flow, right? If you flew every day and you treated the plane like a bus, you would probably have a different perspective. I also suspect that people can imagine themselves driving a bus, right?
They can't imagine themselves actually flying a plane. Oh, but drive a car. You think you can drive a bus or at least. Yeah.
Right. You know, you're supposed to do it. And driving a train, how hard is that? There's a stop.
Right. It's going to break out in the same place. Yeah. Exactly.
So I don't know. I'm all for having having more security. And if X-rays make it simple to have security, think about this. If you put technology in that makes quickly, makes people airport security personnel quickly able to judge whether or not you have your threat, you know, actually ends up speeding up the process because if we're all going through an X-ray machine, how, you know, total recall style, it's just a walk through machine and a quick up.
You're not good as opposed to 55 different steps. That's certainly making it all worthwhile. You got to check my luggage and then you have to check my shoes and then you might have to wind me up. You can walk the security with all your stuff already packed.
Put the stuff there, one belt and put the stuff there and actually have enough people who can try to find that. That works. Well, that makes it all go down a lot better if I think of it in terms of what I'm really doing is I'm doing all the beta testing for that once they're actually all security for one day, they'll make it all seamless again. Just everything's automated and you just walk through it.
If you had a gun, well, you're not in that line anymore and we don't talk about what happened to Johnny. Things are different from international flights like Europe and Canada are not going to be nearly as on board. They have more privacy concerns about this stuff than a lot of the US do. And granted, the US does have decent amount of the naked, not even as you said earlier too.
But I think it's like medical reasons and some of it too. You know, like, I don't want to know if you have a amputee leg and half of a leg missing or what's going to cost me back. Or like, that should be your private stuff. And there's no reason that a government official should know that just for you on the plane.
But then again, if you keep it anonymous to the point that say you have it so that these people are walking through and there's a person monitoring it, but not like physically standing there, like in a different room, you're just a parade of images. Right. You know, it's not, you know, it's not, you have to connect them. You can't connect them to person.
You know, you can't be like, look at that guy and then, you know, or look at that girl and be able to look at the person in real, because then, yeah, you connect, even if it's a disability, you connect that with the person and I can understand the violation of privacy. But if you're anonymous, you know, just blow out the faces or something. I don't know. There's ways to do it.
I'm all for making things. Technology seems to, it has a lot of problems, but it does make things easier in the long run. So let's go for it. Well, we've got to wrap up the section.
But before we do, you know, the one last point I wanted to bring up is, you know, one thing I haven't looked into yet, Jared, and I'd love to find out is, you know, I know that the commercial airline insurance market is a very specialized one. And it's one that, you know, I know that anybody who buys insurance on the market, getting a good price is always very, very difficult because it's a very tough market to negotiate with. I'd love to see what kind of distortions in price something like this has had on the market. You know, you know, what I guess would have asked when you're a mere terrorist event.
That could have been a massive liability loss. And so it'd be interesting to see, you know, how the airlines are having to now, you know, they're having any kind of shock with the fact from insurance. I mean, I would imagine, you know, as renewal season comes around for all these people, it might be something that they're going to have to feel some pain on. And that's the case.
That's something that further rose the bottom line of the operation. So, you know, I feel like whatever liabilities and assistance and failures in the system, they've identified, it was more of a public identification of them rather than the people who were that in tune with the stuff. Wouldn't have already known about. Yeah.
Like, I mean, I guess there's a lot of like watch lists. Like this guy, the reason he actually had a USB is still, he was when he tried to renew it. And it's like four levels of watch lists, I guess, in the US. He was on watch list one, which doesn't prohibit you from flying.
It doesn't revoke your visa. How do you been on watch list two? He made up on a no-fly list. But it turns out from an internal report from an state department of the CIA that one of the reasons his visa hadn't been revoked or hadn't even really been looked into is because his name was actually spelled wrong in one of the databases.
People always spell check. Come on. Well, then I'm just wondering, you know, a lot of these Arabic words and Arabic names that tend to be the ones we're talking about on these watch lists. They seem to have a lot of different spellings.
I can't just over the last 10 years, how many different ways Al Qaeda has been spelled in pronounced. Well, that's more mark it off. It was the same way. They're like 40 from commonly held spellings.
That's probably a pretty big issue. Well, this is what I happen to be one of those hundreds of people. I don't know. I'm talking about terrorism prevention.
You've got what they call signal intelligence, which is the NSA guys listen to airwaves and sort of things and tapping phones and all that. And there's human intelligence, which is basically agents doing secret agent type stuff. Human intelligence is a field operative who has the wherewithal when a Nigerian man walks into your office and goes, look, I have concern about my son. I think he's radicalized.
He's going to do something knowing how to take that seriously and how to get that information through the system so there's something meaningful comes out of it. And that's where the capability really needs to be stepped up. And fortunately, that's one of the things where, if you're a risk manager, this could be a real major source of concern because this is the first line where the problem could have been stopped. And it wasn't stopped.
And now granted, the guys don't manage to get explosives. He managed to put them on his body. He managed to get them through an airport and get onto a plane. So there are multiple failures of security here.
But God forbid, if this event somehow impacts it at price of liability insurance for a commercial carrier, it all started with the CIA's inability to recognize the terrorism. It's a problem with the system in general, but there's a fallout that you're pointing out. There could be a commercial fallout. I'm from the human tragedy and political tragedy and everything else goes with something like a successful terrorist event.
This is a podcast for commercial risk management. And the truth is, there could be a commercial fallout from this event, even though it was actually hurt. And that's tough for risk manager because you can't manage the CIA's ability to get a job done or the system is screwed up. You're really kind of dulled a rough hand and it's impossible to make anything really great out of that.
If this year the rates go up, I would imagine that this is identifying flaws in the system that are theoretically fixed or at least... I'm sorry, 9-11 though too. True, but I mean you were thinking that post 9-11 world, something like this would have been a no brainer and it would have found this guy and he would never even have left Nigeria, let alone get on a plane to the end of the world. It's more likely not really going to happen and it may come back around and get closer when we're all dead, like in 2006, but never fear regardless of that.
If for some reason these calculations are off, Russia is going to save the day. How do you say this? Well, the chief of the Russian Space Agency of which I don't know its name. Anyway, he said that what they're going to begin, the Russian Space Program is going to begin a figure out a way that they can knock this asteroid off course, create some sort of spacecraft apparatus, whatever.
They've obviously got a few years of its 20-30-something or something or something. They realize that there's a potential for this sort of thing and so they're going to make sure that they intercept it a lot like the movie Armageddon or something. We can't go through one of these segments without mentioning movies because we're assessed. Deep Impact I think was similar.
Yes, well I think they were both kind of just kind of riffing on the same theme. Deep Impact, along with Morgan Freeman as the President? Or was that... Yes, that's...
Well, there were a couple afterwards going to destroy the world movies in a short time after Armageddon. Armageddon was obviously never in doubt, they were going to stop the Aftermarket. There's Deep Impact, what's the other one? No, no, no, no.
No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. It's not where the world was actually going to get hit. No, no, no.
Regardless. The point is, Morgan Freeman was present. Well, and he has a question, is it a calling, Morgan Freeman? I believe that their Space Program should consist of either four words.
Morgan Freeman or more aptly, Bruce Willis. Exactly. I think once you name your craft or whatever it is, Bruce Willis, and it sure succeeds at that point. I think this is good because of the Bob Barker.
I think it's good because normally what you got out of the Space News from NASA particularly. NASA by the way, they said, yeah, great, they should do that. That's really cool. They pretty much were like, we're all about you.
Go ahead, panel them back. I'm not sure you guys will not agree with this whatsoever. I feel like NASA's got to the point where there's this organization that shows us pretty pictures of space. They send up other craft, it's orbit to get more pretty pictures of space with better cameras.
And that's what we do. Now the only thing that really affects our lives in space or could really affect life on Earth is an asteroid strike or, you know, in other things, do not show solar flare or things like that. But we tend to seem like NASA doesn't seem like it actually really cares about these sort of things. Even though there's some sort of infinitesimal, you know, oh well, it's only one to two hundred thousand.
We just talked about airplane security and the odds are probably about the same. You're going to get blown out of the sky by a terrorist and we spend billions and billions of to protect against that, you know, that slim chance. And yet we have the potential getting hit by an asteroid that will wipe out life on Earth and kill all the dinosaurs 47 times. And we're like, nah, you know what, it looks cool?
That galaxy we saw forming way, way, way deep in space. If it comes down to the Russians are going to be the only people that are actually going to save our asses when the time comes. Well, that's good because somebody needs to. Well, I respect your opinion as we put together in a nice fashion.
I know I almost got you with terrorism thing there because you're like, wait a minute, you're right. I managed to step away. Allow me to, allow me to retort. By all means I expect this and I'm going to disappear.
The cash-drap Russian government, which can't seem to go three years without having one of its nuclear submarines sink to the bottom of David Jones's locker, is perhaps looking to Jerry Brokheimer to give them reasons to justify the continuing existence of their decrepit space agency, which has not managed to do much of anything except blow up a couple of rockets on the pad and try to figure out how they're going to build a new cosmodrome now that they no longer own Kazakhstan. So is this really a viable effort for them to stop an 8-8 global killer asteroid? Let me stop you there for a second. You guys have Star Wars?
No, we have a real Star Wars. No, it doesn't matter that it's Russia. It's me. Yeah, first of all, you know there's a guy in the Ball of your Putin up there?
He's going to bear wrestle to Ashford or something. And you're saying like the guy in Dr. Strangelove at the end on this one, that's actually a plan. He's going to ride it out there.
He's staying there with a big, silly flag laughing, he's looking at the anthem. I don't think it's important to crack in half with his hand, you know. Russian Judo chop. Sure, let's look at what's on that horse.
Yeah, exactly. It's not important that it's Russia. It's not important that it would be anybody. It could be any other country.
Interestingly enough, however, it's not the US, even slightest bit concerned, and we seem to be the ones who have the most presence in space. I mean, as other countries send up satellites and whatnot, but we seem to do the most research in space, right? I would imagine. Space research, scientific based research.
Not like let's put another communication satellite so we can have cable in. We do compare to other countries with Facebook a lot. So why is it that our space program doesn't actually have any sort of, even vague inkling of let's just at least have something in our back pocket. Again, like Jared said in the first section about why don't we buy a ton of salt for the kit, you know, and save it for when we need it when it snows.
Why don't we have some plan for occasion? Oh, you know, and that's always 50 years out. Why don't we stop this thing instead of, oh, you know what? It's two years out, you know, we just found out Bruce Willis doesn't really know how to drill.
So it's like a real life. It's like a real life. I would like to have a friend. I don't think that in 30 years I can come up with them.
I'm sure they could. I just don't. I'm talking about the only 30 years. I suspect if we knew with certainty that an asteroid had a really serious chance of hitting this planet and we had 12 months, well guess what?
We're going to have the biggest rocket in the biggest long you ever saw built in about 16 weeks. Except that may well be not hard and it's not like, it doesn't take 30 years of planning. It just seems, I don't think all your planning is probably more important than finding out that we'll look at galaxy was here's the big thing that's between like this and this and this aerofol snow thing in our first segment, which is this. It's a pretty good chance you're going to have snow every year.
So it kind of requires and you have a lot more present for it than you do for having world crushing asteroids in the planet. What's the dinosaurs about that? Yeah, it's an event measuring geologic time. I understand the impact is slightly different.
The impact is slightly different. If it's always really heavy, I get back pain because I had to shovel. If it's an asteroid, it's an asteroid that's my house. I don't have anything to talk about anymore.
Exactly. When you're ratchet, I understand, but still we protect it against everything else. I'm sure they could come with a plan. I just would like them to say that they have one just in case so that Russia doesn't trouble me in a press release and we sound like we're wasting our money.
I get all upset about it even though there's a plan for 50 years ago. My guess is that NASA is not a defense agency, but I would imagine they have severe goals. Yes. I would imagine they have some people talking to Pentagon on occasion and saying, hey, heads up, 30 years from now, we might have a problem.
Tell us when you want to start, when you need more information. That's a good point. I will concede to that point. I did necessarily.
There's also the thing you have to keep in mind with this. The Air Force has its own space program going on. Air Force is owned through to space vehicles, its own space on capabilities. I'm guessing, I'm not certain, but I'm guessing, Air Force might have more ready access to nuclear weaponry than NASA would.
I'm just throwing it out there. Maybe NASA is not my problem, but maybe the Air Force is my problem. Yes, I'm an apartment of playing Bruce Willis and Gordon Freeman and Ashford. I have the Air Force probably has some sort of plan in mind.
Now, speaking of plans, the Pentagon has a plan in big Canada. It doesn't mean that the plane needs anything. I'm just having a plan. And frankly, this is a matter of we come across and contingency planning all the time.
It's a kind of problem, whether it's a Black Swan event, a low probability, high effect event. Are you saying that's what Ashford is? Low probability? High probability high.
More answer is high probability. It's a low probability. Over a long time, the chance of NASA hitting the planet are 100%. The question is, is it going to do it in a time where it's going to matter anything to humanity?
One of these typewriters are also going to recreate space for your own infant's timeline. Space for your own infant's timeline. Space for your own infant's timeline. Space for your own planet.
Space for your own planet. You've all mocked my fear of asteroids. I only fear a couple things. Asteroids and giant light car-sized spiders.