Hey everyone, welcome to Nintendo Prime, and this is gonna be sort of a single topic video. However, I'm gonna throw something else in there just briefly in a moment, because Nintendo did drop a massive overview trailer for a big game coming up. So I wanna make sure that people are aware of that and go check it out if they would like to. But before I jump into that, hey, welcome everyone. We are about to talk about a major Nintendo IP coming back to Switch according to an extremely credible leaker. Stay tuned. Editor, hit that. All right, meant to say hit that intro, but you know what? One thing we are gonna hit up quick is I'm gonna remind you guys that, hey, you know what? If you wanna really, really support our channel, you know the best thing you can do? Drop a like on this video. That would just be swell. Now, another thing that you can do is enter a giveaway. We have a giveaway going on down in the pin comment and the description. This is just something I'm doing for you. It's a $300 item based around the original Game Boy. It's very hard to get into a description of exactly what this product is. You just gotta go check out the giveaway. There's some images included with that giveaway. I wish all you guys luck. I just ask you to be subscribed to the channel. It's not a big ask, I don't think. It's a giveaway for my subscribers. Now, let's get into this news and let's start first with the little bit of a amendem, the second story that I wanted to add to this just because this happened this morning and I think it's a cool thing. And that is because Nintendo has dropped a eight minute overview trailer for Xenobite Chronicles 3. So yes, this includes voice acting and story details and hey, if you are looking for some big information on Xenobite Chronicles 3, this is the video to go watch. So go check it out. I'll put a link down in the description because I do think this is worth checking out. It'll be the top link in our sources section. Again, not spending a lot of time on this. You saw a couple clips of it here. I just wanna make sure you guys are aware that this is out there. So you guys go check it out for those of you really looking forward to the game that don't care about spoilers. Now, moving beyond that, we need to actually talk about our big topic here and that is Nintendo supposedly bringing back a massive IP from their back catalog that they haven't touched in forever to Nintendo Switch.  So here we see Silex Hunter or just Silex. This is an account that was interviewed by SwitchForce a few days ago talking about, well, you know, all things leakers and Galactic Federation and taking out Samus getting into a cryptic hint at a new something coming down the line. And you know that here I have been interviewed by SwitchForce about video game leaks and my hatred for the Galactic Federation scourge. I was also asked to give a cryptic hint which you can see in the video. Now, notably Silex has gotten a lot of credibility over the last month because they knew the exact date for when Bayonetta 3 was gonna come out. They knew when the Bayonetta 3 news was gonna drop and they actually got like five other things right. They haven't posted anything yet that hasn't come true. Now, Silex know that nobody has been able to interpret the code successfully so far. I don't normally like to be cryptic and I'm only doing this because I was asked to. Silex has been very direct with all other leaks. I will watch and see what you come up with Silex out. Nate, the hate comes in here and other well-known insider to show camaraderie due to your acknowledgement positive words in the video because they did say positive things about that. Now, this is where we get into somebody who actually figured it out. Someone who made a new account on Twitter specifically because they figured it out. The cryptic code meant YGBP or you got boost power which is from F0GX. That is the GameCube F0 game. So, Silex said do you make an account just to tweet this and they said I felt the need to reply. So yes, while you were right, you win nothing but well done and then they said that's great. I've been waiting for an F0 game since GX at the same time I never thought it would happen again. And then Silex says hey, maybe manage your expectations but yes, you were right. Now, this leads you to wonder why do we need to manage our expectations and maybe it's because this person who got this hint right at a future game was expecting there to be a brand new F0 game because again, I've been looking for a new F0 game since GX. Well, maybe it won't be new maybe there'll be a remake or remaster of the current F0GX. It's also notable. Silex didn't tell us when this game is coming, when to expect it, when we're gonna see it.  That's how sure he is of Metroid Prime remaster coming out this holiday. He's not doing that and Silex probably would have never even teased this until it was much closer to release or reveal if it wasn't for that interview and the question that was asked. Again, Silex, if you look at prior things Silex has said, if we just go back in the account, you'll see that they're very direct about their leaks and very direct about fake leakers, like when they go after a Samus Hunter here. But yes, Silex has agreed to be interviewed by one of your Earth YouTubers, which they're more about the Galaxy's coolest bounty hunter and maybe some other things. Watch this, dude. I love how committed they are to this and trashing other ones. But if you go back in time and see that's like banned into three, we'll release in October. This is October 28th. This is posted all the way back on June 25th. So as I said, Silex Hunter is very direct in how they leak things, which is what makes it so interesting. This is a very indirect leak, which I think really just exists because Switch Force basically asked him to create this sort of crypticness. So I don't expect Silex to actually go out there and clarify any of this until much closer to when this could be happening. Some people have speculated that this does mean F-Zero GX specifically is coming back like the OG, AKA GameCube is coming to Nintendo Switch online. None of us actually know what this means but Silex. But yeah, Silex did note in the interview that he really only puts information out that he knows to be correct rather than information that he's heard but can't verify will ever actually be a thing. So the fact that he was willing to throw F-Zero out there means that this is highly likely something Nintendo is doing in some form and the reference was specifically to the GameCube one, which again, that gets to the remake or remaster or the Nintendo Switch online or maybe that's just a reference in general to F-Zero and that just happened to be the F-Zero game part of the reference. Again, those Silex is pretty direct. So probably has something to do with F-Zero GX in some form, in some way, but it's all speculation at this point. And this is one thing I find really, really interesting about leak culture and we're actually gonna dive deeper in this tonight on the Nintendo Prime Podcast. We have a first time guest coming on tonight in Sunbro Nation, another fellow on Nintendo YouTuber who does cover a lot of the leaks and rumors like I do. And we're gonna get into a deeper conversation on this. I've also got a community poll running right now in our community section to get your guys' feedback. I want you guys think about this stuff and how much you enjoy it. And we're gonna have a grander conversation about this kind of stuff. By the way, this conversation doesn't mean I'm gonna stop covering leaks or rumors if we decide that they're ultimately a bad thing. It's just, it's one of those things where I wanna have an open conversation with other people who do what I do. And I think this is gonna be a really great opportunity to do just that. We also have some other topics we're going to be talking about including the way Nintendo's choosing their market games this month. And hey, is this like how Nintendo's gonna handle directs moving forward? I know it's a bit of an overreaction to say this right now. I'm mostly pointing out that maybe there's some merit to Nintendo not doing a direct versus what they're doing now, we're gonna dive deeper into that on the podcast tonight as well. And yes, we're gonna touch upon in future Nintendo hardware. No, I said Nintendo hardware doesn't have to be Switch hardware. We're gonna have a very interesting conversation on that tonight as well. Be sure to tune into the podcast at 8 p.m. central time. Hopefully it's even set up before this video goes live. So you guys already probably got a notification for it or can go set your notifications for it. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. I am Nathaniel Robledance from Nintendo Prime. And you know what? I'm gonna catch each and every one of you in that next video, whether it's later today or tomorrow or it's just the podcast. Hey, I have no idea. The news comes as the news comes.


I think, yeah, yes, I put it there, so it's up. Good morning, everybody. Yeah, it's finance, it's more about risk. When Matteo asked me to come and present something to a conference on ecology, I said, oh, but that's not really my field. Then he talked about time horizon, and I said, oh, yeah, yeah, risk is my field, and I believe that risk has something to do with the way we want to manage the world. I'm giving a course in the University of Zurich that I'm calling the Economy of Risk in Insurance. And when the student asked me, why did I call this course like this, I said, because I believe there is value in risk management. Something the students in finance learn have no value. If you do the CAPM theory and you do that correctly, you will see that for CAPM risk management has no value. So I thought maybe working on that would show the student the value of it, and I want to show you also here the value of risk management in terms of assessing the problems we have with climate change. So now, how do I, oh, here it is. This work I'm showing you today has been done with Professor Katz at the ESSEC Business School. We had a seminar on philosophy of complexity, and they asked us to talk about risk management, so that's where the work comes from. When I think about a word, I always go to the dictionary. I like to see what the dictionary saying about the word. So about the word risk, I took two dictionary, one English dictionary, and one American one, to see what were the position of those different culture about risk. And you will see that they look very much the same, except that the American, they've added one thing, which is the degree of probability of loss. But if you read at this, the only thing you hear about risk is danger, commercial loss, person considered as a liability or a danger, amount of possible loss. So you wonder why, I mean, I'm working in reinsurance, why reinsurance would like to take risk. The reason is in the definition of Wikipedia that I like very much, risk is a concept that denotes the precise probability of specific eventualities. Technically, the notion of risk is independent from the notion of value, and as such eventualities may have both beneficial and adverse consequences. However, in general usage, the convention is to focus only on potential negative impact to some characteristic of values that may arise from a future event. So as often, I find Wikipedia very useful in those kind of thing. And yes, the notion of risk is relatively new, actually. It started with Bernoulli, who wrote a book on probability at the end of the 17th century, and the 18th century with the Enlightenment became a notion that was very much used. Here I'm quoting Etienne de Condiac, French philosopher. He defined risk as the chance of incurring a bad outcome, coupled with the hope if we escape it to achieve a good one. And in this movement about risk, the 18th century is a time when the notion that a social institution could protect people against risk started. Before that, when there was a disaster or something, the king would take the money from his cassette to pay the things. And the first time was in 1786, when the king of France, 16th, there was a big flood in France, ordered the state to pay them. So it's a change in mentality. And this contributed, of course, to the development of insurance afterwards. Life insurance, for instance, was not really acceptable by religion because it was a bet against God. And it's interesting to know that the first life insurance was actually built by a priest in Scotland. And that gave birth to the Scottish widow, the first life insurance in the world. Very often, risk and uncertainty are used indistinctly, but in economics, the tradition wants to distinguish between the two concepts. And this originates from the dissertation on risk from Frank Knight, where he makes a clear distinction between the two. He defines risk as a randomness with knowable probabilities, which is a measurable uncertainty, while uncertainty is a randomness with unknowable probabilities. Donald Ramsfeld is somebody I don't like very much. He put us in many difficulties with the war in Iraq, but he had two statements that I really liked. He said, there are two sorts of unknowns. The known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. And if you want, the risk is the known unknowns. And uncertainty is the unknown unknowns. And you'll understand why Warren Buffett, who has made a lot of money in insurance, always says you should insure what you understand because insurance is about risk and not uncertainty. That's why, for instance, war is excluded from insurance. If you now bundle risk in a portfolio, the risk of the portfolio will decrease. And that is the idea of insurance, is socialization of risk. It's very old, by the way. The first insurance contract that we found in history was written by the Babylonians, farmers there, got together to insure crops. And then the Greeks with the, with Navy, et cetera. So it's a very old concept, socialization of risk. If the different risks are independent, you will see from probability theory that it can be reduced almost to zero. That would be the perpetual mobility. Unfortunately, and that is going to be part of my lecture today, risk is rarely, I would say even never completely independent. This dependence, of course, limits the diversification benefit and risk cannot be brought to zero, as we know. There is, though, only one free lunch is diversification. So it's the only place where when you invest money or when you do work that you can hope to reduce your risk is by diversification. There is no other possibilities. And that's why when you go to invest, you have to be very, very careful about where you invest and how you diversify. A stochastic world. I made a small exercise putting on this graph the events that happened in the 21st century, the events I remembered. And you will see it's quite interesting. It's all started with the 9th, 11th, big shock. Then we had the internet bubble in 2002, 2003.  And we also had Katrina Vilma that flooded New Orleans and actually was a big loss for insurance. By the way, I usually give this example to my student. The Katrina Vilma costed the reinsurance business 50 billion dollar. The whole premium of reinsurance at that time was about 150 billion all over the world for all the risk in the world. And one risk cost about a third of it. There was one bankruptcy out of 125 reinsurer. We were going to move to subprime crisis and Lehman Brothers financial crisis. The subprime market was about 700 billion US dollar. The real estate market in the US was 12,000 billion. So 700 billion, 12,000 billion. The whole world is on its knees in terms of finance. A third of the premium was a non-event for reinsurance. You wonder why? And I think one of the reasons, I will show you that a bit later, is the models that the bank use for the risk management are completely flawed. By the way, at the same time at the Lehman Brothers crisis there was a Georgia crisis with Russia which is after the Chechen war one of the first step taken by Putin that will bring us to what we are now. Then, I don't know if you remember, but in 2010, this volcano eruption that stopped all flights in Europe. I had a friend who was supposed to come to visit me. He was in Egypt. It took him a week to get back to Switzerland because of the volcano eruption. And this is one of the dangers that we identified in reinsurance to be quite big at one point, that a volcano eruption could stop all travel, airplane travel in the whole world. The Pinatubo eruption in the beginning of the 19th century would have done that. Arab Spring, Christ's Church Earthquake, Japanese Tsunami, Thai Flood, same year, 2011. Sandis in the U.S., sovereign debt crisis. Ukraine, First War, ISIS. Charlie Hebdo, Vir Shafandas, the big immigration crisis in Europe. Ebola, Bataklan, Brexit, Trump election. Fires in Canada that evacuated half of the city unrest in Iran, a big one at the end of 2017. The election of Bolsonaro, which is another sign of populists growing in the world. Fires in Australia in 2020. I don't know if you remember, but I had many friends in Australia that were very, very shocked by the size of those fires. COVID, and last but not least, Ukraine. So I think you would agree with me that we are really entering in the face of stochastic work, where lots of stochastic events put us off balance. It was always like this in the past. The history is full of those events. But what happens now is any of these events has consequences somewhere else, very quickly. The pest plague took about 10 years to come from Kyrgyzstan to Europe. COVID took few weeks. So when we are facing such a stochastic work, what happens, and this is a bit, the diagnosis that we posed at the time, that's already 10 years ago or 20 years ago, that big risks are growing. They're growing for insurance, but I think they're growing for society in general. What are the reasons for that? Demographic changes, concentration of population. We had yesterday an interesting talk on population, but wasn't concentrated on what I am interested in, which is really the concentration of population in cities and movement of population, the spread of disease. Climate change, so the risk of natural catastrophes are increasing, and we can see that in the numbers of claims that we ensure get on natural catastrophes. Social and political changes. I think one part is good, that the better living standards make people get more insured and they, of course, claim more when disaster happened. New technologies, internet of things, cyber attacks, we have seen during the COVID phase a surge of cyber attacks, particularly interesting enough on hospitals. I don't think the people were so interested in hospital, but they're cynical. That's the place where they could attack, so they did. New financial products. We have also seen during the financial crisis how those products, which are supposed to be capital protected, can all of a sudden go down the drain because they were protected by lemon browsers. Here is interesting graph, I think, about population. You see that around between 2000 and 2010, the population of the world in cities became higher than in land, and of course that has consequences on the size of the problems. When it hits somewhere. The next graph is interesting, and you will see that with the one that comes afterwards. When I showed this graph to a friend, they said, but why, you are showing me the same graph, no, no. This graph shows you the concentration of population in cities, and you see there in 2013, that's the prediction that they did in 2019 at the UNO, you see all those dots of big cities and the red ones that are cities of more than 10 million, there were only three in 1970. Now, this other graph that my friend said is the same one, this is not the same. This is a graph that shows you the natural catastrophes that happened until 2007 in the world. But you see those natural catastrophes are exactly in the regions where you have those big cities. So, that is where this problem of peak, yes? This we, those are the claims that insurance had. And of course, you can see that you also have claims in Africa, you also have claims in, so it's not only in developed countries. You know this, but I like it because it goes far, far back. This is the temperature change, the average temperature change per year, and you see this hockey stick graph that many people give, so I think I don't have to convince you about climate change here. Another interesting thing that we saw already yesterday, this is the life expectancy from 1945 where pension funds started to be developed to 2010. So you see that in the US, the life expectancy grew by about 13 years. The total fertility went down by 19%. Japan is the most dramatic case. 31 years of life expectancy grows and 70% fertility downward. France is somewhere in between, but you see 26 years of increase in life expectancy is huge. So pension fund funds have to provide funding with much fewer productive people. So how do you do this? By looking at higher return. How do you get higher return? By taking more risk. And when you take more risk, you increase the volatility. And if you now look at the volatility of financial markets in the last 50 years, okay, I'm not going to enter in all the details because it depends on the frequency at which you look at it, but if you look at it at high frequency, the volatility has increased a lot. So which also means the risk has increased, the financial risk has increased. So managing risk. Distress and risk attitude over the years, I think in the few centuries ago, people lived, had lives that were very uncertain. They fragility gave people a strong sense of vulnerability and that also reduced their willingness to take risks. Although this idea of risk did not really exist. And you had very slow growth in the middle age. The advent of industrialization combined with the philosophical critique of religion were strong causes for the change in perception. As a consequence, people started to take more risk. The idea of lending money became very popular. And we had a phenomenal economic growth. I'll show you an example of that. And the first in science was very hard. The 19th century is the time when science was the hero. In France, Pasteur had national funerals when he died. I doubt if any of the scientists of today will get that anymore. Yeah, that's phenomenal growth. I took Sweden because Sweden didn't have the war and it's quite impressive. If you go back to 1720, how fast the GDP grows. At the same time, of course, it had enormous environment impact, as we know. This growth was done at the price of consuming the commodities our Earth is offering us. By the late 20th century, individual existence in developed countries appeared to be boringly secure. Epidemic disease were out. Peaceful and war between great powers seemed impossible because of nuclear war. And skepticism about science started to grow. Weapons of mass destruction, environmental problems made people question the validity of all those scientific discovery. Was it useful? Is it just not surprising that the perception of risk has once more dramatically changed over the course of the economic development? Managing risk should help us lead more predictable lives. And it's quite interesting when you go through the newspaper, society as a whole demands a word where the vulnerability of mankind is diminished. In the old days, when the natural catastrophe happened, preacher asked people to repent and were pointing to God's anger with human behavior. Today, we rather look for the responsibility of people. Letting the disaster happen without having prepared enough for it. Governments are made liable. I think it's quite also interesting to look at reaction about the war. Oh, it's terrible, it's criminal. Yes, it is. Yes, it's, but war is criminal in itself. And it produces those kinds of events. When you allow people to kill, don't be surprised. They will do other things too. And simultaneously, I think people are not ready to pay. You know, it was quite interesting when soldiers died in outside wars, there was an uproar in countries. I mean, when you send soldiers to war, there will be soldiers killed. So the change of mentality is quite important here. At the same time, people refuse to pay the price of risk.  We pay for the production, but we don't pay for the recycling. If we would pay for the recycling of that, it would cost four or five times that. So we're not ready to pay the price of risk. The same thing, you build a nuclear power plant, it's very expensive, but we don't pay for the risk we bring. Same thing with the carbon power plant. Rating agencies were distributing this triple A rating to structured product like mortgage-backed securities on subprime loans at a very doubtful credit worthiness if you would do the model right. CEO of big banks proposed to make 25% return on equity. I remember that was in 2007, I was presenting our capital management structure to bank analyst in London. And one of these analysts asked me, Mr. Dakaranya, it's very interesting, you only talk about capital, but you don't talk about return. I said, sir, you don't understand me. When I talk about capital, I need to protect myself against the risk. I'm also talking about return. And you should throw stones at Mr. Ackerman when he says he wants to do 25% return on equity. If he would do that for 10 years, he would multiply his capital by 300. Is that sustainable for the German economy? Does it make sense? I understand that a company, a startup company that comes with a new product make 25% return on equity. When you get to Deutsche Bank office, do you feel the startup atmosphere? I mean, it's a bank, okay? Today, Deutsche Bank is struggling very hard because putting such a target on their profit is criminal, that's my opinion on that. Because it is, you have to take enormous risks and not with your money to reach those returns. All of these examples points to the necessity of being better aware of the realistic price of what you're doing. The demand for more safety can only go with, I think, more sophisticated risk management that thrives for making the system more resilient. Risk and complexity. There are two phenomena that contribute to make risks more complex and difficult to handle today. The first one is a shortening of the time scale. I mentioned this question of the Pest Plagd, but we see that in many, many aspects. I gave you a few months ago a talk on high-frequency trading. When I started working in finance, the high-frequency trading was few times a day. Now, high-frequency trading is few thousand times a day. And the increased interdependences. And so that has consequences on long-term. So that's what was interesting. At one point, you have your time scales at shortened and at the same time, because of this interdependence becoming very big, the consequence of what you're doing have very long-term effects. We have multiple networks that have developed. And these networks are working at the faster space. What took months before would take hours today, sometimes even minutes. With the advent of those technologies that we also heard about a few minutes ago, the human brain might be overwhelmed. Our brain does not function at those speeds. Computers do. We need, when we think, or at least I do, I need time. I need time to understand. I need time to decide. Will we be able ourselves to adapt to this new timescale? The example of cyber risk is interesting. This map here was done by experts about dependence of different things. As we progress in the 21st century, the complexity of society appears to become more apparent. Cyber risk is inextricably linked to the rise of hyperconnectivity and through the physical world around us. An example, when Russia attacked Ukraine, they launched an attack against a communication network that stopped people communicating in France. And they did that because this network was used by the Ukrainian army. By the way, it made a big claim for insurance and big discussion, is this war, act of war excluded from the insurance or not? I was at a seminar at Lloyd's where distinguished lawyers discussed for hours on that. But because that's the other thing, war is about destruction and the exclusion of war is about destruction. Here, nothing was destructive, just communication. Predictions that we do with our model become much more dependent on the assumptions that we have used for this dependence. I'll show you an example when I'm finishing my talk. There are interesting things also. I said our brain could be overrun, but at the same time, in our lifetime, we leave many outcomes of risks. This might give us the opportunity to study them better to see, we can often see their immediate consequences now. So for instance, the COVID pandemics we've had it and so we've seen the consequences of it. Although we knew about it before, when you live through it, you might learn more. And the appearance of new interaction could help us change our views on phenomenon. It was interesting, you talked yesterday about the way you do the taxonomy of the vegetation. So you see new interactions that we hadn't seen before or we hadn't understood because maybe they were there but we didn't see them. And here, that's my strong belief that scientific approach consists in distinguishing the main contribution to the phenomenon and in modeling them. So I am personally quite skeptical on those extremely complex model with lots of parameters that at the end do not for me explain much. I remember when I was studying physics, this professor who was telling us, imagine that you have the computer that model everything. It's very good in modeling everything. You would not understand. That was 50 years ago, we are almost there. I'm preaching for that science should help us simplify, reducing the problem, putting it on grounds that we can be treated and experimentally proven. If you do this, I think this scientific approach will be crucial to handle this complex world. For the inherent risks or the risks that we already had and the new ones born from our connections, studying the dependence between risks is essential for understanding their impact on consequences. Just before coming here, I was contracted by a big insurance company to look at their insurance risk model. And my criticism to them was exactly this. The way they modeled their dependence was not good because very often in risk, dependence increases when the situation gets bad. We've seen that. You see certain dependence that were not so obvious before. And that's the difficult part. I talked about diversification before. And there is a saying in trading rooms, diversification disappears when you need it the most during the crisis. So modeling the dependence is becoming something very important. We have less and less time to take decisions and their impact are more and more longer. And we are facing this contradiction today. So notion like linear correlation, copulas were introduced to treat statistically the problem of dependence between random variables and we should use more of that. The realization that risk are more interdependent in extreme situation led us to develop the notion of systemic risk, which is the risk for the whole system and what we also call systematic risk, which are risks that are a component of many, many systems. During the last financial crisis, reality reminded us that the new quantitative tools might be used with the full, because I remember going to a conference in Washington where Alan Greenspan at the time said, oh, financial crisis will disappear because we have very good risk management tools. How wrong he was. Because I think many of those tools, I told you, one of them is this CAPM theory that says that risk management has no value. These assumptions that are used to do those model and one of the assumption of CAPM is that the market works without friction. Ridiculous, what makes economy interesting is exactly what makes also sex interesting. Those are the frictions. Without frictions, the economy would not work and without frictions, there would be no reinsurer because insurance would be enough. The problem, there is no market for insurance liability and the reinsurer to this market for the liability. Many of the models that are used in banks rely on Gaussian assumptions. They grossly underestimate the probability of extreme events. However, there were already other models based on extreme value theory that would attribute reasonable probabilities to what actually happened and that's what I want to show you at the end. This is something coming out of our economic scenario generator model that we developed in 2005. And here is the prediction of the distribution for the third quarter, 2008. The yellow is the forecast. The blue is the distribution forecast. The purple is what really happened. And if you look at the probability of what really happened in the distribution that we predicted, it was minus 9%. So both models were not very right, but that's not bad. The bad thing, so you have the Gaussian model and the one that we developed with extreme value theory. The next one is much more interesting. That's the fourth quarter of 2008 after the crash of the Lehman Brothers crash. So here, of course, the forecast was completely wrong, but what is interesting is that the Gaussian model would give you the probability of this event to be one over 1400 years, so impossible, basically. And our model gave one over 100 years. Is this the right probability? I don't know. What I can tell you is I have about, historians have reconstructed the S&P 500 from the beginning of the New York Stock Exchange. And if I look at the data from then, this is the second largest shock. So one over 100 year, maybe, maybe not, but certainly much better as a probability than 1000 years. If you're a risk manager, if you have a one over 100 year probability, you will care about it. If you have a 1400 year probability, you will not care about it. Okay, that brings me to my conclusion. Living in a rich world subject to large stochastic shock demand a level of sophistication in handling the risks that we have not known in the past. At the same time, we must, and that's something that sometimes I feel people forget. We must accept that risk. It is an inherent component of innovation and progress. We cannot completely refuse a risk. You see what happens now in China.   So we need to accept the risk, but we need tools to apprehend and manage the future outcomes and hedge the worst scenario. And that's where I think insurance, well done, and the financial system that works are very important because they help us go through those crisis with as little harm as possible. Climate change, as we know, political instabilities that we have seen, the Trump election, the Bolsonaro elections, and many others. The over reliance and complex IT systems, the other day I almost lost my iPhone and I got crazy. I really got crazy because I have my train ticket on it. I have my visa card on it. I have my passport on it. 20 years ago, I did not notice those kinds of instruments. So to help us prepare a better future for the new generations, I am so lucky to have now grandchildren, but I'm afraid for them. Risk management should be given the aim of improving the efficiency of our work by optimizing risk and return together. We cannot live without return, but we must live with risk. So we need to bundle them together and understand when we take decision that there are risks and return and do a compromise. 25% return on equity means that you're going to take very, very high risk. Sometimes it makes sense. Develop a new vaccine, come up with new things, but for a bank, it is criminal. I think, and I want to finish with an optimistic touch, the future is wide open to good scientists and managers to provide society with both security it demands without losing the creativity and the entrepreneurship we need. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you very much, Mikhail. So I think there are many questions, but I have one. So do you think the private sector can provide a risk insurance to cope with the challenges that are ahead like climate change? Or do you think that the finance in the private sector will not be able to do that and we need institutions? We need... You know I'm Swiss, so I'll give you a Swiss answer. We need both. I think we need the private sector. Because capital allocation with restricted resources is a very difficult task and we need many people to work on it. But I don't think the private sector will do it without strong regulation. One of the reason why financial crisis all of a sudden started to become very high is because the Glass-Steagall Act was put away by Clinton and the Glass-Steagall Act was a law passed by Roosevelt after the big depression. So yes, we need regulation. Financial sector, private sector cannot do it without that. We need intelligent regulation is not always easy and that's where science is very important. The last work I did now was to prove that the way we measure risk today is intrinsically pro-cyclical. So mathematically pro-cyclical and that's very bad because it means that during quite times we'll don't think about the risk and when situation is very bad we ask for much more capital than what we actually need and then we make the crisis even worse. We have seen that in 2008, 2009. So both. So I have a question regarding the relation between known unknowns and unknown unknowns, right? I mean, this is clear, it's also intriguing but even the known unknowns are always based on a model of reality on what you think you know and there is a risk that what you know is wrong, right? You have seen for instance the banks. The banks were thought that they can measure the known unknowns but actually it was based on a model that were completely rotten, right? So in some sense, I would like if you can comment you know on the risk of getting in wrong and known unknowns, all models are wrong, some are useful, right? I think those that are not useful tend to be dangerous, right? Because based on wrong models you take wrong decisions. Not only the banks can get the model wrong but also the economic system is based on a model of economic behavior which maybe we will find out in a few years that is as rotten as the very simplistic Gaussian assumptions in 2008. So maybe we also the illusion of controlling the risk based on a model that maybe is a bit less simplistic than the one based on Gaussian independence assumption maybe is more elaborated but don't you think that is still a risky illusion that you can really handle the risks as opposite to understand the source of the risk and maybe mitigate the risk, prevent the risk, maybe accepting the idea that we are working on the wrong model of society of economy? Yes, but what is the alternative? So yes, you're right, model can be wrong. By the way, I would like to say that the bank was using, we're using wrong model willingly, knowingly. I know that. I, a good friend of mine was the chief risk officer for credit risk at one of the big Swiss banks. He showed me the email he sent to the CEO on those triple A MBS. Saying that he actually modeled it and he wasn't triple A and he warned the CEO and he said you use, you must use rating agency thing. So I don't think he's a model that brought us the financial crisis is greed. Okay, this being said model can be wrong. Yes, definitely. And that's why scientific approach is important because science is about fighting the error. If you remember Popper. So that is why I think we need to be, to try at least to be as rational as possible. And also in the model we developed, we also included what we called model risk. Or some of the assumption you put in the model, you can actually quantify the error. Yes, uncertainty and risk. The boundary is difficult. And I think the role of science is to push the boundary between risk and uncertainty, to push this frontier. And that's what it has been doing. Not enough, I agree, but I don't see any other alternative. And here I'm talking like Margaret Satcher. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you, here we go. Two comments and a sort of question. The first one is just the irony of your closing statement that you exhort us to optimize risk and return and then tell us how foolish you are with your phone, which is sort of interesting that someone who has the understanding you have can't translate it into your own behavior. So you put your passport, your credit cards and everything on one device. So that's rather alarming to me, but that's just an observation that somehow the intellect doesn't translate into behavior. The second point, comment, is simplicity for complexity. And this is something that we debate endlessly, of course. And I would make a distinction between simplicity for publishing, which is 50% at least of papers. There's simplicity for tractability. You are very optimistic. And maybe I'm not, very okay, but simplicity for tractability, which is sort of okay. And then there's simplicity for understanding. And this is an interesting debate I have with physicists. So tractability is not understanding. It's understanding the mathematics, not the world. Okay, so that's another comment. And the third, now here's the question, which is, is insurance becoming reinsurance? Is that sort of the evolution in terms of methods that the world is now moving into this kind of extreme value phenomenology which you have expertise in? Is there a sort of a migration from the methods of insurance to reinsurance? For the last question, here I can answer definitely yes. If you look at the evolution, more and more in insurance, there rely on methodologies that were developed by reinsurance. And this thing I was talking about, the validation, it was an insurance company asking me a reinsurer to validate their model. Yes, yes, because peak risks are growing for insurance as I showed you. The question of simplicity is a very important one. I agree with you. And I think your comments I share. By the way, I have my passport in paper and the credit card in plastic. Thanks for the presentation. I'm encouraged by the fact that the insurance industry is one of the leading industries taking climate change seriously because it touches them so closely and I think they're gonna help move the rest of the market in that direction. But I'm also worried about, as you presented that as their, as risk goes up, they're looking for returns that are higher and unrealistic.  And I mean, I think we're in a very much growth limited world. And so this kind of, this collision that's coming between end of growth in some ways, as we're used to at least and the need for more. So I don't know where you see that going. Agreed. I mean, I could have, and I thought about that before, show you some of the model we have developed about pension theoretical models. And in those models, what you see is sometimes to reduce the risk the long term, you have to take more risk shorter. This interplay between the two, the two horizon are very important. I find sometimes paradoxical that we ask the pension fund to invest in government votes. I mean, all these savings that we've put now and we want to do pension fund with that is put in inefficient investment. I'm physicist from training. So I know what I'm eating now is what we produce now, not what we produced 30 years ago. So you have to look at this in a dynamic way. If we want to feed the people in 30 years, we need to become to put the society in a path where it is more efficient. If we don't do this, whatever saving you do now will not help. On the contrary, what will happen is what you have those huge volatility. We should invest in new ideas, new ways of solving the problem rather than in safe investment. It's a difficult problem. I have no full solution, but sometimes I'm very surprised the way people think about it. That was my mission, such we need to take risk. If we want progress, we have to take big risk so to stop the climate change, very big. And we have to change a lot in the way we live. We don't want that. That's why we are in the situation we are now. So one comment is, I mean, it would be nice to have some quantitative measure of where we are going. I mean, say you said there is an interplay between long-term risk and short-term risk. So are we, I mean, can this be measured quantitatively at the global scales? Are we building up risk in the future? Or are we, say, decreasing risk in the future? Or, say, there is a sense that, say, finance is disconnected with the real economy. Can this be measured? And can one understand what the trends are? So, I mean, can these questions be made quantitative? I think this conference is very useful for us. Those conferences where we confront different methodology in different sectors will help us build things like, for instance, I would like that the models that look at ecological decision get inspired by some of the model we use for this long-term investment. Because we have developed models for this interplay that could be used. I've not done it, but I think they could be used in this field to estimate quantitatively what happens if you increase the risk now, reduce the risk later, or the reverse. Because it's not in all situations that you have to take risk now to reduce the risk in the future. There are some situations, not all of them. So, depending on, it's a derivative that is sometimes positive, sometimes negative. And you have to find the boundary conditions where this is true. So, I think we could use such approach in such model also for ecological decisions. Okay, so I think we have a coffee break. Maybe we reconvene at a quarter past 11.


Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome Weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. While you're listening, you might want to check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com you can find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated, streaming video of horror hosts and old horror movies, plus you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, anxiety, or thoughts of suicide. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness, Charles died in a horrible train accident. But before anyone knew he was dead, his family received 35 calls from his phone after the tragedy. Weirdo family member Krista Arendt describes something about herself that is somewhat unusual. Unusual to her and kind of creepy to those around her. You see, sometimes people think she's dead. Army First Lieutenant Paul Byron Wipke was as brave as he was handsome. After telling his fellow troops that he was going out for a drink, he never came back and was never heard from again by anyone. And Final Destination is a massive franchise with numerous films, novels, and comic books in the universe it's created. Fortunately it's all from the minds of horror fiction authors. Or is it? There are real cases where some narrowly escaped death, only for death to catch up to them soon thereafter. Very soon.  Mysterious phone calls from the dead make for excellent horror movie plots, but this eerie phenomenon also happens in real life. Many stories of unexplained phone calls show that they're not just the result of grief-stricken imaginings. Although people try to explain these odd occurrences by blaming malfunctioning cell phone technology, reports of phantom phone calls go back to at least 1967. Charles E. Peck's Metro Link death is one of the most prominent and creepy stories about phone calls from dead people since author Dean Koontz's deceased mother phoned him to give him a warning.  But before anyone knew Peck was dead, his family members received 35 calls from his phone for several hours following the disaster. Whether it was due to phone damage or Charles reaching out from beyond, we may never know, but it's nice to believe that even those who have passed are only a phone call away. 49-year-old Charles Peck worked for Delta Airlines. He was considering leaving his job in Salt Lake City International Airport for a job at Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles to be closer to his fiancée Andrea Katz and had an interview there. Although the couple was ready to get married, the fact that they didn't live in the same state was an issue. Then the disaster occurred. Katz was on her way to pick him up from the train station when she heard the news of the accident on the radio. Peck had three children from a previous marriage, one of whom was on his afterlife phone call list. Andrea Katz heard about the crash on the radio as she was driving to pick up Peck from the train station and was relieved when she received a call from his phone. Other friends and family members of Katz were in the same position. After the crash, Peck's phone placed calls to his son, sister, brother and stepmother. In all, about 35 calls were made during the 11 hours that followed the accident. According to one source, the final call from Peck's phone came at 3.28 a.m., about an hour before his body was found. Charles Peck was a passenger on a Metrolink commuter train traveling through the San Fernando Valley in California on September 12, 2008. It collided headfirst with a Union Pacific freight train at 83 miles per hour when the conductor failed to stop at a red light. The impact was devastating, and of the 225 people aboard the Metrolink, at least 25 died and more than 100 were seriously injured. The engineer sitting at the front of the train was killed instantly as well. The freight train was carrying only three crew members but it was demolished in the accident. The disaster later became known as the Chatsworth train crash, and it still considered the worst commuter train accident in the history of California. At first, Peck's loved ones must have been excited when they saw his name pop up on their phone screens. As the calls continued, they had hoped that he was still alive and trapped within the rubble of the crash. Unfortunately, they were unable to actually talk to him. All they heard when they answered his calls was static. However, Andrea Kats used the opportunity to communicate with their fiancé and to let him know that she was with him shouting messages of encouragement like hang in there baby we're going to get you out you're going to be okay. Other people who claim to have received phone calls from beyond also report hearing static or a voice that seemed very faint and far away. Before rescue workers discovered Charles Peck's body in the wreckage, they had no reason not to believe the calls placed to his family meant he was still alive. As it became clear they probably weren't going to find any survivors in the crash, their rescue efforts turned into a mission to recover bodies. But when yet another call came from Peck's phone, they decided to trace it to find his location. Unfortunately, they discovered his body and knew that he died on impact. Police never revealed if Peck's phone was found. Although rescue teams were excited because the phone calls might mean Charles Peck was still alive, that wasn't the case. They discovered Peck's body an hour after the last phone call was placed. According to anecdotal sources like forums and unsolved mysteries sites, the coroner was unable to find signs that Peck had survived for any amount of time after the crash, confirming the calls were not made while he was still alive. Anyone who has ever butt dialed a number knows it's possible to make a phone call accidentally. Perhaps an object was sitting on top of Peck's phone, causing it to make random calls. The phone was most likely severely damaged during the disaster so it may have malfunctioned. Peck's broken phone may have called his speed dial list. When this story was posted on Reddit, several users shared their own creepy stories of malfunctioning phones and posted eerie phone activity stories from online forums. The possibility that Peck's phone suffered from technical issues shouldn't be overlooked. Although rescue workers were able to locate Charles Peck's body successfully, his phone was never discovered. It's possible that it was completely destroyed in the disaster or damaged to the point of malfunctioning, but why it made calls to several of the people Peck was closest to we may never know. Perhaps he was reaching out to tell his loved ones not to worry or say goodbye. Maybe he took it with him into the afterlife, like ghosts who are seen in the clothes they're wearing when they passed. Since the rescue team was able to trace the calls to locate his body, maybe Peck was simply leading them to it. No one will ever know for sure, so this story may forever remain a mystery. Investigators believe the conductor of the MetroLink train was responsible for the crash after he failed to stop at a red light. The commuter train was running on the same track as the freight train and was directly in its path. It's likely that the conductor was distracted by his phone and was too busy texting to notice his mistake. After the disaster, a team came forward and admitted that they had received a text from the conductor immediately before the crash. The last text sent from the conductor phone happened 22 seconds before the impact. Intrigued by the many stories of people receiving phone calls from the deceased, Psy Investigators D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Baylis did research and published a book about their findings in 1979. Their research has recently been continued by another paranormal researcher, Callum Cooper. While some people have reported seeing the name or number of a deceased acquaintance appear on their caller ID, others claim to have spoken to someone they later discovered passed away before the call was made. According to a list of true accounts by a paranormal researcher, someone named Crystal S shared, I was at my mom's house and I was calling a friend who lived nearby. She was at her cousin's house so I looked up the number in the phone book. It was the only Owens in the phone book so I knew it was my friend's cousin's number. I called and it didn't even ring but an old lady answered. She said, Hello. I asked, Is Amelia there? Amelia is my friend Jessica's cousin. The old lady said, No dear, Amelia isn't here. I should be expecting her any minute now. So I thought nothing of it and hung up. I told Jessica about it and she said, Amelia's grandma is dead. And we were there all day long. We were sitting right by the phone. It never rang all day. In another anecdote from the same list, a salesperson named Mary B remembers, I made a sales call to Pennsylvania. It started just like any other call. Yes, I need to speak to Mr. or Mrs. B. The woman identified herself as Mrs. B and I continued on with the normal sales call. She seemed very interested and asked a lot of questions but when I came to the decision making she quickly stopped me insisting that I had to talk to her husband. Her objections were the same every time I attempted to close. She also quickly pointed out that since his retirement he spent a great deal of time fishing and was not easy to get in touch with and it'd be best to try early in the morning before he left for his favorite hobby. On the callback the husband did answer the phone. I introduced myself in the normal fashion and explained that I'd been talking to his wife the previous day and she'd suggested that I speak to him. You can imagine the shock and horror when he stated to me distraught, lady, I don't know who you were talking to but my wife died and I'm not in the mood to speak to anyone. With that he quickly hung up the phone. People who've passed on aren't limited to phone calls or hauntings in the modern age. They often use email and social media sites such as Facebook to contact their loved ones. For instance, Jack Fries passed unexpectedly in 2011 from a heart arrhythmia only to contact his friends through email approximately six months later. Fries' friends reported emails sent from his account that included details from some of their last conversations. One friend tried replying but never received a response. People sometimes claim their deceased friends have liked their posts on Facebook or sent them messages like the viral Reddit thread about messages the deceased Emily allegedly sent to her boyfriend. But I'll let you read those for yourself. I'll place a link in the show notes. Charles was already dead but one of our weirdo family members who is still very much alive has the problem of people mistaking her for being dead.  And speaking of living and dying, it appears the premise of the Final Destination movie franchise might not be all that far-fetched as there are numerous stories of people barely scraping past a fatal incident only to meet their demise shortly thereafter. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. Have you ever noticed that when George Bailey is on the bridge, it doesn't start snowing again until after he says, aw man, the power's out? No problem, because you're prepared with the Patriot power generator from Four Patriots. While the rest of the city's dealing with the weather outside is frightful, you can have the power that's so delightful inside your home. Flip the switch and suddenly you're back to the TV and radio for weather updates, your space heaters are keeping you toasty warm, your phones and laptops are charged, your fridge is still running and you're back to watching It's a Wonderful Life in time to hear out of Boy Clarence. The Patriot power generator has zero fumes so you can use it indoors and it's solar, so if the outage lasts a while, you're still good to go. Grab a Patriot power cell CX2 and everybody can charge up at the same time. Don't let the unexpected put your family in danger. Grab a Patriot power generator today at fourpatriots.com slash weird. That's the number four Patriots.com slash weird. Free shipping for orders over $97.  Visit fourpatriots.com slash weird for the Patriot power generator, the Patriot power cell CX and more. That's the number four Patriots.com slash weird. I don't think this is exactly scary, per se, but to me it is weird. There have been exactly four times in my life that while sleeping or even just laying still, I have apparently appeared dead to people. I can't exactly explain why. Maybe my breathing is too shallow to where they couldn't even see the rise of my chest, but whatever it was, I definitely appeared to them as if I were dead. The first time this happened I was 15. I only remember the age because this was the two weeks during the summer my grandmother paid for me to go to a camp, and I only know that I was 15 because that was the last age you could go to the camp before being considered as a possible counselor, ages 16 to 18. It was nighttime and everyone in my cabin decided to go take their showers for the night. I was too tired, so I decided to stay behind and just take my shower in the morning. It must have been at least 20 or 25 minutes before anyone came back. At this point I was just awake enough to hear them. She looks dead, one of them had said. At the time I didn't think much of it other than this is the perfect time to pull a prank, so I shot the upper half of my body up out of bed and said, Who looks dead? They screamed, I laughed and apologized to then promptly fell asleep. The second time happened a year or so after high school, around 2015 or 2016. It was the summer, two friends and I decided to take a week long vacation from our individual jobs to go to a water park. My friend who planned the trip decided to get each of us our own separate rooms, so after a long day we wouldn't get on each other's nerves. Our rooms were located on a low floor, half finished due to construction. I don't know if it was because we were two hours from our home and this was the first time being in a hotel room by myself or that the part of the building we were in was under construction but I didn't like it. The only nights I actually spent the night in my room were the first and second nights, usually with all the lights on. The rest of the days there I slept with my friend in her room, even she was creeped out by the hotel. The night I appeared dead to her wasn't anything unusual, we had went to the mall there earlier in the day, I'd gotten a pullover sweatshirt to sleep in, we went to eat and then back to the hotel to sleep. Nothing was unusual when we went to sleep but later I woke up feeling a pressure on my chest, it was her hand. What are you doing? I asked. It looked like you weren't breathing and when I tried the finger under your nose thing I still couldn't tell. Couldn't even see the rise and fall of your chest so I put my hand there to test if you were breathing she told me. The next thing I noticed was that the pullover sweater I had on when I went to sleep was completely off, I had a tank top on underneath.  Did you take off my sweatshirt? I asked her, thinking maybe she did because she couldn't tell if my chest was rising. No, it was already off, she responded. I'm not saying I wasn't the one to pull it off but I had never had an article of clothing come completely off when I was asleep. The next morning she told me what caused her to think I was dead. I had a dream, she said, where I woke up and you were still on the bed? I thought you were asleep, I was getting ready for the day and Jay came in, he sat on the bed next to you and just looked at you. He said you were dead. I told him that couldn't be but sure enough when I checked you were dead, she concluded. That's when I woke up and I had to check on you to make sure. I was a little freaked out having remembered the summer camp incident but once again thought nothing of it. The third and fourth times were by my mother. Nothing special really about these times, just she had to come check on me when I was sleeping just to see how I was doing and both times I woke up with her hand either on my throat or chest trying to see if there was movement to make sure I was breathing. The same response from her as all the other times, I thought you were dead. I don't really know why to some I appear dead in my sleep. I actually find it quite funny what for the love of the mysterious and paranormal along with my love of horror movies. Another weird thing I've noticed was that it doesn't matter that I shower every day or even if I'm in a room with five other people, flies will just always come to me almost as if I were a decaying corpse but still alive. I thought I'd share this story to see if anyone else has ever experienced the same thing that I have and I recently got really into your podcast so I thought why not the guy I spend my work hours listening to. Love the podcast and can't wait to hear more stories in the future. The final destination films have exposed audiences to bizarre accidents that could happen to anyone. Although the movie version is over the top, freak accidents are a lot more common than one might think. There are many instances in which people survived tragic experiences, events that most would likely never have walked away from, only to perish in an equally unlikely incident shortly thereafter. The following true stories depict people who have evaded natural disasters, insect attacks, mid-air malfunctioning, mass shooters, car crashes, fires, terrorism and drowning, only to later be felled by unexpected circumstances and in one instance an orange peel. In October 2016, Austin McGuff, a 21-year-old soldier stationed at Fort Campbell on the Tennessee Kentucky border, was on his way back to base after attending a party. Reportedly, he was disoriented and tried to break into a nursery. While attempting to do so, he struck a wasps nest. Toxicology reports indicated McGuff was intoxicated. In an attempt to evade the wasps, he inadvertently ran onto Highway 41A, where an oncoming vehicle fatally hit him. In April 2013, an unnamed California driver lost control of his SUV on the windy Malibu Canyon Road. The man crashed onto the mountainside's ledge and was able to jump out of the vehicle onto the road. He barely managed to escape plummeting off a cliff, a fatal fall. Moments after abandoning the car, an oncoming tour bus struck and killed the man. On July 6, 2013, 16-year-old Yi-Mang-1 survived the plane crash of Flight Asiana 214 at the San Francisco airport. She laid down 30 feet from the crash site. Injured and waiting for help, Yi-Mang remained curled up in a ball. When first responders arrived, a firetruck didn't see the team and ran her over, killing her instantly. City officials cited the chaos of the wreckage as the main factor, but Yi-Mang's family sued the city for negligence. Jessica Redfield was an up-and-coming sports broadcaster from Denver, Colorado. In 2012, she died at the hands of the Aurora shooter, who entered a midnight screening of the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, and opened fire on the audience. Before Redfield was a victim of the Aurora Theater shooting, however, she had survived an attack at a mall in Toronto, only a month prior. Redfield managed to sneak out of the Eaton Center when the gunman started shooting. 26-year-old Hilda Yolanda-Mayle worked in a restaurant on the ground floor of the World Trade Center. She was present during the September 11 attacks in 2001, but miraculously was not injured.  At the time, many feared that the crash was a second terrorist attack, but the accident was attributed to the pilot's mishandling of the rudder controls during turbulence. In 1977, the entire University of Evansville men's basketball team, except for one player, died in a crash only 90 seconds after the plane took flight. An ankle injury prevented 18-year-old David Ferre from playing with the purple aces, so he skipped the flight that would ultimately fell all his teammates. Although the team had previously only ever traveled by bus, the coach requested they fly in style for this one particular away game. Two weeks later, Ferre and his 16-year-old brother were involved in a driving accident that resulted in both of their deaths. Jessica Dalima Roll had spent weeks organizing a university party at a local Brazilian club in Santa Maria Rio Grande da Sul. However, when her boyfriend asked her to stay in and skip the event, Roll agreed at the last minute. This proved to be a life-saving decision. 233 died from a fire that broke out in the nightclub. A week later, 21-year-old Roll and her boyfriend died when their car collided with an oncoming truck. 5-year-old Aidan Evans and his family escaped a massive tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. The May 2013 tornado did enormous damage and the Evans left their son with family in Jesseville, Arkansas while they dealt with the aftermath. According to police, the boy threw a tantrum while his parents were out. Reportedly, 50-year-old Lynn Yeeling, the neighbor of Aidan's aunt, went to comfort him. But her 150-pound bull mastiff reacted aggressively and attacked the boy. Yeeling screamed for help and tried to pry the dog's teeth away, but the boy sustained fatal injuries. The dog was euthanized following the attack. In 2007, Bud Warren and his daughter, Phyllis Ridings, survived a potentially lethal emergency landing after crashing in an open field. The father and daughter were a part of the Experimental Aircraft Association. The incidents near Magnolia, Texas did not change their passion for flying. Four years later, the duo's plane again malfunctioned. Warren, 70, and Ridings 52 were on their way to an airshow in Temple when the cockpit began to fill with smoke. Their plane crashed near Montgomery County Airport, killing them both. In June 2007, 6-year-old Abigail Taylor from Adena, Minnesota experienced near-fatal trauma after an accident in a waiting pool. Abigail got caught in a pool drain at the Minneapolis Golf Club in St. Louis Park. She had extensive damage to her organs, but survived. Nine months later, Abigail died in a special surgery intended to transplant some of the organs that had been damaged in the incident. Her death sparked outrage, and Minnesota state officials instated new laws to make swimming pools safer throughout the county. Bobby Leach was a famed daredevil in the early 1900s. He was a professional stuntman in the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and he performed many of the stunts in front of live audiences. His most notable and illegal achievement is surviving a barrel ride over Niagara Falls in 1911, the second person to ever do so and survive. Leach traveled internationally and he toured New Zealand in 1926. While there, Leach reportedly slipped on an orange peel and gravely injured his leg. His wound ultimately developed gangrene, leading to doctor's decision to amputate. Even still, Leach passed two months later from his injuries at approximately 68 years old. Typically, the obituary comes after the death, but not in this case. Considered a trailblazer for the Black Nationalist movement, Marcus Garvey was a fierce Jamaican politician who advocated the return of those affected by the African diaspora. It came as no surprise to Garvey that he had many political opponents. However, the politician was shocked after coming across a fake obituary in the Chicago Defender. The obituary, which was reportedly negative and demeaning about Garvey's opinions, enraged the man so much that he suffered two strokes and passed away on June 10, 1940. And I've left this one for last because it's the strangest of all. In 2011, medical professionals had declared a cousin Russian woman dead at 49 years old. Her family began the grieving process and arranged a funeral. At the memorial, the woman who everyone thought was dead awoke in the casket to the sound of prayers as the family prepared her body for burial. Realizing that she was now attending her own funeral, the woman reportedly bolted upright and screamed for help. At that moment, she suffered a heart attack and subsequent heart failure, which resulted in her death. With stories like these, you have to wonder if perhaps the Grim Reaper isn't in fact a real entity, and once you're on his list, you must be crossed off. When Weird Darkness returns, Army First Lieutenant Paul Byron Whipkey was as brave as he was handsome. After telling his fellow troops that he was going out for a drink, he never came back and was never heard from again by anyone. Do you keep a journal or diary? If not, maybe you should consider it. It's been shown that journaling can help you reduce stress, help relieve depression, build self-confidence, it boosts your emotional intelligence, helps with achieving goals, inspires creativity and more. In fact, my friend, S. N. Lenees has created a Weird Darkness-themed journal just for you, full of blank pages for you to use as a diary, make notes for class or office meetings, jot down ideas for that novel you want to write, use it for keeping a mileage long if you travel for business, whatever you want. In fact, she has numerous styles of journals to choose from. Along with the Weird Darkness journal, there's one for dealing with grief, or teacher's notes, for medical residencies, keeping track of your meds or health routine, and several others. Journals make a great gift for others, but it's also a great gift for yourself and your own mental health. No matter what you might want a journal for, my friend Ann has it, and you can see all of her journals, including the one for Weird Darkness, on the sponsors and friends page at WeirdDarkness.com. To paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan, Paul Byron Wipke was the very model of a modern Army First Lieutenant. The 26-year-old was smart, brave, serious and disciplined, described as an all-American young man and a superior officer. He was, in short, one of the last people you could imagine being enveloped by the Weird. However, since he is featured in this episode of the podcast, you've probably already guessed that this is exactly what happened. The young aviator and company commander were stationed at Fort Ord, California. On July 10, 1958, he told some friends at Fort Ord's Bachelor Officer's quarters that he was going into town to get a drink. Instead, he drove to Mojave, hundreds of miles away, and checked into a motel. The next day, he bought 14 gallons of gas. After that, the Lieutenant was never heard from again. Five weeks after he was last seen, Wipke's car was found in a desolate and forbidding region of Death Valley, about 400 miles from Fort Ord. The car appeared to be in perfect order, containing the missing man's suitcase, dog tags and other personal belongings. There was nothing indicating what might have happened to the car's owner. Wipke's bank accounts had not been touched immediately before he disappeared, and they had not been used since. The Army listed Wipke as absent without leave, and then as a deserter. His superiors seemed curiously incurious about what had become of this highly promising young man. According to the FBI, the Army made only the most cursory investigation about Wipke's disappearance, assuming that he would eventually return. There matters rested, until the spring of 1982, when the Army Board for Correction of Military Records held a three-day hearing into Wipke's disappearance. The Board concluded that Wipke died the day after he vanished. They added enigmatically that his unauthorized absence is excused as unavoidable, but his death was incurred in the line of duty, not due to his own misconduct. The Board theorized that Wipke may have wandered out into the desert and succumbed in the extreme heat, and that the shifting sands have made it a near impossibility to find or recover his remains. The Army Attudent General's Office issued a certificate of honorable service, and as far as the Army was concerned, that was that. The military offered no possible explanation for Wipke's unauthorized absence. All this was not nearly enough for Wipke's brother Carl, though. An Army veteran himself, he was convinced from the start that the military knew far more about Paul's disappearance than what they wanted to say. His suspicions were first alerted when, just the day after his brother vanished, he learned that officers were already packing Paul's belongings for shipment home. This odd haste he commented dryly left him super hyper, super quick. They must have known he wasn't coming back, Carl argued, or they'd have waited before writing him off. Carl also dismissed the Army's contention that Paul had deserted. They said he ran away into Death Valley. Then they hinted that he killed himself. I can't buy that.  Carl was of the belief that members of the Army drove Paul's car into the desert sometime after the lieutenant disappeared. The government knows what happened to my brother, Carl said in a 1983 interview. They can't shake me of that. There are so many questions still unanswered. Carl Wipke made it his life's work to find the truth about his brother's end. In June 1977, Carl sought information from the FBI under a Freedom of Information Act request. His petition went unanswered until 1978 when he was informed that the FBI had destroyed all their files on the Wipke case in December 1977. Undaunted, Carl accumulated thousands of government documents as well as many sympathetic allies in Congress and the military. But all these efforts just left him going down darker and darker rabbit holes. Carl claimed to have discovered that Paul flew in five atomic test explosions in Nevada. His theory was that Paul was exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, and may have seen evidence that the Army was conducting classified experiments on human beings. Although the Army confirmed that Lieutenant Wipke was assigned to temporary duty at Camp Desert Rock, Nevada, between July and October 1957, they dismissed Carl's other claims as unsupported by the evidence. However, even the Army report acknowledged that after Paul returned from Nevada, he developed black moles and planar warts on his hands and body. Wipke began to complain of unaccountable feelings of sickness. He lost a large amount of weight, and the normally cool-headed officer became nervous and depressed. Several months before he disappeared, the Lieutenant had all his teeth removed and was fitted with full dentures. A fellow officer, Charles Lewis, recalled that after Wipke's Nevada flights, Paul was interviewed by Army intelligence agents. It was noted that these interviews left Wipke nervous and uptight. Paul's actions were always ethical, on and off base, said Lewis, but Paul became suspiciously silent to others when the agents were mentioned or appeared on the scene at the airfield or the officer's club. Carl Wipke developed even more sinister theories regarding his brother's disappearance. He believed it possible that Paul was a secret agent murdered by his fellow spies, or that he flew covert missions over the Soviet Union only to be shot down, or that he died as a result of Army testing of nerve gas or atomic weapons, or that his discovery of the military's use of human guinea pigs led him to be murdered. Just to make things even stranger, Carl also learned that his brother may have used the alias Paul B. Wipper for reasons unknown. I'd be satisfied if the Army would say they can't tell us for security reasons, but until then we can't rule anything out. The truth about Paul Wipke's fate probably cannot be called unsolved. Paul Wipke was very likely correct that someone somewhere knew the truth about what had happened to the young lieutenant. However, to date, this information has never been revealed. Until that day comes, Carl Wipke once said there will be no peace in our family. If you follow strange disappearances of military personnel, this story may have sounded somewhat familiar. That's because it does have a resemblance to another bizarre disappearance of another young Cold War era man, West Point Cadet, Richard Cox. It's a curious fact that many of history's most bizarre mysteries center around people who would appear to be the most normal or even ideal figures imaginable. An outstanding example is Richard Colvin Cox. The 21-year-old West Point Cadet was handsome, highly intelligent, ambitious, well-liked, hard-working and clean living. After a fine two-year Army career, where he was stationed in Germany, he achieved his life's great dream when he secured an appointment in the Military Academy. He was very much in love with his fiancée, a pretty girl from his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, and appeared to have a sterling future ahead of him. In short, he seemed to be the last person in the world to have his life engulfed by the weird. But that was exactly what happened. Cox's golden boy existence began to tarnish on January 7, 1950. The Cadet, who was in charge of quarters in Cox's company, received a phone call from a man asking if Dick Cox was there. The caller left a message. Just tell him George called. He'll know who I am. We know each other in Germany. Unfortunately, the Cadet who took the call could only be fairly certain the man gave his name as George. When Cox was told of his phone call, he claimed to have no idea who the man could be. However, when George came to see him later that evening, he recognized him at once. The two men seemed happy to see each other, and they left together. It was presumed they were headed for the Hotel Thayer, the one dining establishment open to Cadets other than the mess hall. Instead, they sat in George's car, drinking whiskey. When Cox returned to his room an hour and a half later, he was drunk, which was very much out of character for him. He was so inebriated he immediately fell asleep at his desk. When the 1030 tattoo sounded, his two roommates were startled to see Cox suddenly spring to his feet and run into the hallway, shouting something peculiar. The two roommates thought it sounded like Alice that he was screaming, but it's also been speculated that he was crying Alice Kaput, German for all is ended. We'll never know for sure what Cox was saying, or what this unguarded heart cry could have meant. Cox quickly pulled himself together, somewhat. He returned to the room and, ignoring his roommate's questions, fell on his bed and went instantly back to sleep. The next morning he told his roommates something about his experiences the previous night. He claimed that his visitor, whose name he never mentioned, had been part of his outfit in Germany. Cox described him as a morbid guy who liked to talk about all the killing he had done in the army. Cox added that this guy had also impregnated a German girl and then murdered her. Despite his expressed disgust with his acquaintance, he'd had another meeting with the stranger that afternoon. The following week seemed perfectly normal. Cox's grades remained high and his behavior impeccable. Then, on January 14th, despite the fact that he'd expressed hope that he wouldn't have to see that fellow again, Cox was seen talking with George near his barracks. Soon afterwards he told a friend that he'd be having dinner with his mysterious acquaintance, although he did not appear to relish the idea. His fellow cadet later said that Cox seemed to think of seeing George as an unpleasant duty but one that, for whatever reason, he could not avoid. A little after 6 p.m., Cox left his room to see George. That was the last indisputable sighting of Richard Colvin Cox. Although he had signed out, no one reported seeing him leave the barracks. There's no record of him dining at the fair that night or anywhere else for that matter. He simply vanished. When Cox failed to return the next morning, the police and CID were called in. The search for the cadet became the biggest manhunt in West Point's history and it was all in vain. Although the case has spawned much fanciful theorizing, no one has ever determined what became of this young man whose promising life ended so quickly and bizarrely. George has also remained a phantom. Rigorous investigation never found a clue indicating who he was or where he went. Although it is generally assumed that he was behind Cox's disappearance, it is a complete mystery how or why he would spear it off the cadet. As can be imagined, the usual wild theories floated around. Did the cadet flee and fear for his life as a result of his testimony in a court martial? Was he somehow involved in the murder he claimed George had committed? Was he kidnapped by the Soviets in retaliation for his counter-espionage activities in Germany? Most speculation about Cox's fate focuses on his earlier military career where he had been part of an intelligence unit. 1950 was the height of the Cold War and it has been suggested that Cox was involved in some sort of espionage program that led to him being enlisted as a secret agent by the CIA. While this is probably the most plausible, least implausible theory, no real evidence for it has been found. In their book about the case, Oblivion, Marshall Jacobs and Harry Malehafer presented a claim from a retired CIA official that Cox was given a new name by the intelligence community and spent the Cold War smuggling scientists connected to Russia's nuclear program across the Iron Curtain. Allegedly, Cox died of cancer sometime in the 1990s, his true identity still a secret. These authors believed that Cox was likely gay, a theory, however, based mainly on thin rumor. They argued that this secret, which would have jeopardized his career, inspired the cadet to stage his own disappearance. For what it is worth, Cox's family rejects this entire scenario, insisting that he would have found a way to contact his mother to whom he had been very close. Mrs. Cox died in 1986, still tormented by the puzzle of her son's disappearance. It is impossible to say if Jacobs and Malehafer's source, who offered no proof whatsoever for all of this, was credible. Their theory also fails to satisfactorily explain why it was necessary for Cox to disappear and take on a new persona to his very grave. Jacobs and Malehafer also mentioned a curious link to the case. They learned of a suspect in a 1985 murder named Robert W. Frisbee. Many years earlier, Frisbee, under the name of Robert Dion, had been stationed at Fort Knox at the same time as Cox. It was probable that the two had known each other. Frisbee, or Dion, who had once been involved in making phony IDs, was said to resemble descriptions of George. This was all intriguing, but as no one was ever able to conclusively tie Frisbee to George and Cox's disappearance, it all proved to be just another brick wall. There are at least two reports of someone allegedly seeing Cox after he disappeared. In 1954, Ernest Shotwell, who had known Cox in the Army, told the FBI that two years earlier he had run into Cox at a bus station in Washington, DC. The two men spoke briefly with Cox mentioning that he was on his way to Germany. Shotwell said his old friend was clearly displeased to see him. Cox was agitated and curt and after a few minutes abruptly broke off the conversation and stalked off. Shotwell said that he had not spoken of this encounter before because he had not known at the time that Cox was a missing person case. Another reported encounter with the vanished cadet supposedly took place in a Florida bar in 1960. An undercover FBI contact made the acquaintance of an RC Mansfield, who eventually admitted that his real name was Richard Cox. When this FBI agent later learned of the Cox mystery, he tried to set up another meeting with Mansfield, but he never heard from the man again. While these reports are considered plausible, they still don't answer the question of why Cox vanished. Or to take the simplest theory, did the sinister George, for who knows what personal reasons, murder the young cadet and hide the body somewhere in the woods around West Point or deep in the Hudson? Richard Cox will likely always remain one of America's classic enigmatic disappearing acts. If you made it this far, welcome to the Weirdo Family. If you liked this episode, please share it on your social media or tell a friend or family member about the podcast and maybe they'll become a Weirdo Family member too. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction, click on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. He kept calling his family after he was dead is by Aaron McCann for ranker. I Am Not Dead is from Weirdo Family member Krista Arend. The vanishing Lieutenant and the disappearing cadet is from Strange Company, and You Can't Escape the Reaper was written by Ryan Davis. Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. 1 Peter 5 verses 6 and 7. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that He may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you. And a final thought. No color, no religion, no nationality should come between us. We are all children of God. Mother Teresa. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.