illusion of hope you know kept me going for a bit and it's anyway it's not an easy place to kill yourself in the Taijo who the hell am I for decades I ran a courier and contraband smuggling network across 50 cities built my own equipment created my own disguises and used almost every device imaginable to escape detection retired now I bring you the experiences of the underworld admit the worst and the best of 10,000 criminals and no people at a glance you get the fine details of 40 years crossing borders concealing goods escaping hiding and becoming something else is this a life you could survive no that reminds me of when you bought you're trying to buy drugs and someone promises you the world you just kind of know yeah right and then suddenly your money's gone and they don't come back and there was a great drought in London just about everything back in 2010 and people were cheating all the time and it goes somewhere and now if you find yourself on the 10th floor of you know the council block and there's three or four people in the same stairway you kind of know you're in for a rough time so I don't know and perhaps perhaps we learn some kind of forgiveness for that up to a point depends how much damage done of course yeah I there's a couple of things I sort of wanted to ask you really David while you do it I'm just gonna drop my backdrop because I'm a bit of a perfectionist and it's a centimeter too high but I'm listening a centimeter that's a look fix that up immediately you might be you're missing out on Spitzberg and then scroll about yeah so yeah I've been to as Iceland I've worked in the north of Norway which was just an absolute delight just one of the best years of my life working on a small island in the North Atlantic you didn't find it you know I mean did you have any company yes it was there was a small population there no more than sort of 3,000 people if if that really had to get a ferry to get there obviously which which complicated or you know probably made it less attractive for a lot of people right and the vast majority of the island were all employed by the local fish factory and hence why I rocked up there okay and I know how to fill it salmon very very quickly yeah I've always been impressed by somebody who's good with a filleting knife I knew a Chinese guy Jimmy Wong he could bone a chicken in four minutes that might sound like a generous enough time but it's a little fiddly bits with that because he had a bad temper so being a good fileter and boner and a bad temper you won't be surprised to know that it was in a prison that I met him his bad temper got away from him he was Vietnamese he'd escaped if you want to put it that way from Vietnam been caught on the boat taken back and he was telling me that of course the soldiers who captured him relieved him of and all the rest of them of their money so he had the only thing he had left were some diamonds which he swallowed and his hands were you know that awful position where they your upper arms are tied with wire behind your back so you can't really do anything so he had to pull out this diamond every so often give it a bit of a wash as best he could and swallow it back down again it but he eventually got to freedom so it was a happy ending nonetheless you were going to ask me some things yes I understand you were in Northern Ireland with a company or group and I guess you were pretty young at the time weren't you what was it 1920 yes I was gosh I probably had my 20th birthday in Belfast right did you find that this is a sort of kind of a comparison I'm thinking of I found in the having moved from the hippie drug world into the smuggling business world and there was a kind of a group you could say of fellow smugglers and scallywags and as a group you felt kind of a disconnect from the rest of society in a way you know you started observing them as well at worst potential witnesses at at best people who might help you in your path or just get in your way did you get that disconnect being in a troop and you could rely on your fellow servicemen of course and and they were your friends but did you start to look around especially in Northern Ireland with great suspicion that just the general populace yes yes and no it's it's a difficult it's not cut and dry in Northern Ireland because obviously you've got the Protestant community who who has a English or British servicemen you're very much in favour with right and then of course you've got the Catholic community some of whom are I don't know if ambivalent is the right word but politically they just want to live in peace of course there is a percentage of that community that doesn't want you there and doesn't want the United Island so you really go and of course when you look at somebody in the street that you can't tell someone's religion by looking at them if not not not in Europe anyway or not sorry not a not a no no that doesn't stand out there's no real features except I suppose you'd start to get perhaps a feel for people who might be dedicated to your destruction well it's interesting you say because one of the chaps I served with one day said he said fellas you know like as servicemen we wear a second uniform when we're in our civilian clothes and we did we we would wear desert boots faded jeans and a sort of surfing t-shirt right these infamous heli-hanson jackets that the lads would buy to wear in Norway they're kind of a fleece jacket and the instant you saw that rig as we called it no that's a fellow Marine is it is no no no question especially if they've got the skinhead or a or a crew cut yeah and so one of our chaps came up with a notion that the IRA players as we called them they had the same thing and that they would wear so that they could recognise each other and then I came across this again in Hong Kong in the nightclub I worked in which as you know the nightclub communities worldwide especially in Asia are run by the criminal yes fraternity and these young gangsters in in triad speak they call magi little horses they would all wear or the 14k who was the gang that own that ran the club I worked in they would all wear white shell soup tops like sort of England football tops and white training shoes and to me being in that environment and having come there as a you know from the service community yeah it's glowingly obvious that this these guys you know they reckoning I thought so anyway when I pointed it out to my sort of non-service person counterparts or friends they they thought I was absolutely crazy which I later became so haha well you know to go crazy you've got to work out it doesn't come overnight you've got to try hurt any vice I suppose um are we recording now yeah I just I've hit record just because yeah why not I don't know when you're David I don't think I've ever not heard something fascinating come out of your your your mouth from yeah I've no I know you've met Sean yes he's a great guy isn't sure Sean very kindly have me on his show twice now have you met James English yes but not I haven't recorded anything with him yeah okay yeah oh James James is a great guy and then I've seen you on the television obviously and my yeah well you can tell that you've lived and you're also very humble with it which is a yeah well I suppose I should if this is somewhere near the beginning of what what you'll send out I suppose in in brief to introduce myself to somebody who's just stumbled out of out of the blue for I'm 64 now but from the ages of 20 to 50s I suppose I was a smuggler began with a bunch of retired safecrackers who had nothing much else to do with their ill-gotten gain but they were very trustworthy group because they had to be and it was probably a better introduction to the underworld than say coming in from the from the drug side and failed in quite a few things had some successes again smuggling gold video heads believe it or not you know whether wherever there's a price discrepancy between anything there's suddenly a black market you know and I ended up using couriers but I worried about them so much Chris I I was actually traveling with them on the edges making sure they didn't wander off risks I take myself kind of just to push the envelope I wouldn't allow them I used to dress them I made sure their belts had no metal in them their shoes didn't trigger off any detectors not because they were perhaps doing a body pack it's not that you know yourself once an official starts to take an interest in a person that can elevate and go on and on and on and get worse so I wanted them to you know travel smoothly and the best of them were by nature gamblers but fantasists they lived in a kind of fantasy world one of my best ones is to imagine he was an international tennis player or a music producer or something like that and his confidence radiated out from so he just sailed through but in after some operations in Australia they went all bad and I ended up well it was a massive arrest my wife was arrested too there were no drugs you know if you are ever arrested Chris touch wouldn't ever happen on something where there's really not much evidence no solid thing it turns ugly because on one side the accused think they're going to wriggle out of it the police are not happy they start short-cutting and inventing things it can be vicious my wife ended up being held without bail and my partner's wife too both of them killed in a prison fire three weeks after our arrest I ended I was in super max because of that because the police put it about that I was getting rid of witnesses starting at home served 10 years there and pretty much went straight back to it the operation in Thailand Afghanistan India and Columbia all source countries and twice ended up facing death penalty I guess really only seriously in Thailand and managed to get over the wall from Cronk Prem prison and then I'd lose complete lives and then rebuild another one always under a new name new identity you don't have a house people friends with it then that would be destroyed again eventually I just ran out of years to do it and the will to go on so did you ever meet Howard on your Howard Marx yeah yes a couple of times the connection there was the Philippines and the late great underhanded snake Lord Tony Moynihan disgraced peer fled England under a cloud of fraud allegations set up base in Manila I went there to see him back in 79 wanting to get him to friendship a container of tie sticks now what I wanted from him was perfectly straightforward but he really put on such a show of I mean stick with President Marcos who was a dictator at the time people might remember Imelda Marcos Ferdinand Marcos's wife who was famous for her 3000 pairs of shoes I'm just Howard Marx we were talking about and I've Lord Tony in the Philippines was trying to trick me into betting on a rigged cockfight game now these cockfights you think what are they some backstreet garage operations with a few pesos being bet that they weren't there when we're in huge kind of boxing arenas and the cockfights it be over within seconds really that they're these little rangy looking birds were equipped with the six inch size attached to their legs and how can you bet on them you don't just the wrong peck in the wrong direction goes straight through the skull of the eye of the other bird but he thought that if we killed our own bird we could bet on the other one now the whole thing as you can imagine it was very flaky I by the way that he came to me because I had a kind of technical interest in electronics and the idea was to put a capsule in the scruffy neck of our chicken and explode it remotely into its jugular and end it stays before it actually killed the other bird whether that would have worked too well I don't know you know explosives don't always do what you hope they'll do that's for sure and his idea was that he would say on the test one now that worked perfectly now I'm going to put in 50,000 they would come on jump in on this and he would have taken the quarter of a million and then something would have happened you know that moment that and con men like Lord Tony they live for the pleasure of deceiving you you know I bet you that the ones you've come across they've been something their real enjoyment is less their financial gain out of it than some kind of glorying in that they've got one over on you and they have that now I wonder how about him especially after Lord Tony had helped the Australian federal police get a better conviction by sending a fake SAS commander to Australia to arrange a helicopter escape from the prison I was in it was patently that this guy was really okay it was plain enough he was another con man like Lord Tony but why they wanted Lord Tony insisted that he go to the docks that he make inquiries about helicopters Lord Tony said to Percy that was his name there would be SAS commander now they might be watching you so you go around to these places now the real reason for all of that because it was arranged with the federal police that they would film all of this Percy commander man doing these things and four days before the trial began the big drug conspiracy trial Percy was arrested my accountant was who was giving him five thousand dollars hush money in a hotel it was all over the paper so it's not a great way to start a trial when you're the first thing your jury hears is that the four of you were trying to get out of the maximum security prison by helicopter you know kind of smudges your copy book a little bit nonetheless it was pretty clear that oh he liked to tell people to that he was he worked for MI6 which is the the foreign branch isn't it of our intelligence services I'm sure he was they might have used him in the past he was stationed in West Africa for a while and he eventually shopped Howard Max and Howard ended up with an eight-year stretch in Florida courtesy of Lord Tony sadly Lord Tony appears to have died of a heart attack in Manila a few years ago or as I like to think of it met with an accident can imagine that happened a lot in your line of work yeah that was the catch phrase of my earliest mentor who taught me a few things you know if I'd ask about somebody who you know one of our friends had been ambushed and killed and they wouldn't give back the body his parents were very upset about that and when I asked about Dennis the guy had been behind it my mentor said Dennis no I heard he met with an accident so I knew what that meant how did you what made you did you find it cathartic writing your stories no whatever the opposite of cathartic is that was frenzied and anxiety-causing was it well it's like this I think the way the human body works or the mind and the mind and body together is things are in the past for a reason and we move on right and that helps us to cope with trauma and this kind of stuff when I left Hong Kong which was what so let's just say 20 years ago now 1996 so was that 24 years ago and how long were you in Hong Kong I was there 13 months after leaving the the Marines right and in that short amount of time I managed to get myself so chronically unwell through crystal meth addiction when I came back to the UK the doctors the mental health community told my dad the look you're gonna have probably have to put him in an institution no and it's unlikely he will ever leave okay so the reason I'm saying that David is it I don't have any any regrets in life I just believe in experiences but I was really damaged coming back from that place right when I look back I was a shallower person physically and mentally very very unwell how many days would you be you know up nights on the meth the longest was nine well lights without sleep you know that can be really damaging after you know as a interrogation device sleep deprivation is used and normally people don't last more than about four or five days yeah that's the incredible thing about meth in the UK it's not really a drug that many people are aware of a lot of people confuse it crystal meth with what we call meth amphetamine but they're too yes yes I understand is the purified version of base amphetamine which is a very very strong yeah yes you don't need much is there any by the way is there any connection with I knew a guy who is quite a slick futures trader and also a bit of a scoundrel with taking on people's identity and all of that but he he had his real passion was I think he called it not methadone but methadone or something like that it was one of the your video is gone again it'll probably bounce back in a second but I think it was in that group of you know amphetamine type of things that the slang in the UK for that is meow meow all right meow it or bath salts I think it was under the name of it one point I think because you could buy it on the net I might be getting my stories mixed up but yeah that was them they're all in the same kind of chemical molecular obviously I'm not a scientist but the meth is just so incredibly strong it it's got to be damaging really it's so strong I've always and even when I was young and I had a bit more interest in speedier drugs I felt more than just a hangover I felt like brain cells had been fried after a while yeah they say with meth because you smoke it as a vapor or that's at least one of the ways you can not not as a smoke like for example heroin but as a vapor and of course that vape is going into the I'm guessing it goes through the blood barrier in your brain by nature of the fact it's well it gets into your bloodstream doesn't it yeah and then of course if something's vapor it can recrystallize and the permanent potential I think to do permanent brain damage is there I was I never did an awful lot David I had a I don't even know if I had a compared to some people in Hong Kong had a very low tolerance some guys would inject oh gosh enormous amounts of this stuff like four times a day really then they would go off and function as lawyers and blooming bankers well hats off to them I don't know how they could function to me I all of my experiences with that category I believe that what I'm doing is useful make sense and the next you know when I've come to a couple of days later I've looked at what I've written down and it's even more gibberish than those bits of wisdom when you've had a power for a joint or something and then three o'clock in the morning you say wow Chris why is white white and it goes on that's that line yeah oh but if you ever I find to if you want to torment somebody in a teasing kind of way who's a bit of a stoner and pothead when they've had a good old lung full start explaining something kind of technical to them now you can make it up as you go along it doesn't really matter what it is but part of their brain will be clawing to try and follow it and another part will be tormented by it they'll end up running away and hiding I think I I don't I haven't really smoked pot for a long time now it just it didn't agree me for ages the only times it did agree me was when I had a few beers first and that combination stuck with me for way more years and was probably healthy yeah but it did get to the point where when I was stone it I just almost got the point I couldn't remember my own name at times and I didn't even smoke a lot maybe half a joint or something right and it it would be potentially highly embarrassing especially if you met someone that you knew really well right but it it's just it's either there or it's not there right from a brain perspective and but you can't remember the name it was just it got to the point where it became acutely embarrassing and I I'd be in the middle of talking like this and then I'd stop hmm and I I had no idea what what the hell was it I was what what will we just talk and I just have to say to the person sorry what we talking about again yeah right okay yeah I think probably yeah because it just seems to me too because all of the recreation just about all of the recreational drugs are illegal there there's no proper pharmacological control or not you know big companies making sure you know exactly what you're getting and how long the effects are and there's also no off button it's only really the first even if you have a drink it's the first 20 minutes that are kind of really great and then you end up chasing that little first buzz and it seems to me it applies to almost everything the onset of whatever it is you've taken is good and then it's kind of all downhill from there I pretty much these days I just can't be bothered and I'm but the interest or the will for it and there's nothing it's never moved on it's not as though there's some you know great little bit of entertainment you can have when you've got a couple of hours and you take tablet a and then when you're sick of all of that you take tablet B and you can just go to sleep happily and wake up without a hangover gosh yeah that that would be utopia wouldn't it but it I think eventually all of us old hippies we just get fed up of the muck around oh yeah yeah fed up of it fed up of being street cornered and being sold rubbish there was a guy on and this little clip went viral complaining about the poor quality of pub grub you know those wraps of coke they're absolutely rubbish God knows what and it must have chimed with so many people that have been disappointed it kind of went everywhere I picked it up and did a video on it on my own channel but I don't even know why I do my own channel Chris said that I mean it's got a few thousand subscribers five or six but that I think out there people have the illusion that because they see us from time to time places that we scratch out a living on all of this but it's quite a battle that I wrote escape because that was of the Bangkok thing at the encouragement of Stephen Leather he's a thriller writer he has kind of knocks out a book a year he is successful he sells reliably 250 300 thousand copies of his book of the year it's got a reoccurring character I think he's a cop who sort of ended up retiring out I mean really all thriller characters seem to me perhaps I'm getting over the same we could sit here you and I invent one couldn't we let's see if we make him I've got one here where is he but this is I've got a whole pile of books here that oh there we go yeah they have that genre of this is my hands Larson character okay these are this going to sound really cliche but he is a former Navy SEAL but I wanted to write I wanted to write this kind of fiction yeah make it more human than the sterile kind of hero gets the girls got a flashy gun you know yeah know what you mean yeah and and from your own experience you can give him a good back story in the past and you know use I expect incidents from your own life that you probably would hesitate to reveal as biography but you can weave them into some fiction yeah I only just picked up on that I was looking on Amazon at your books and I saw what appears to be you've taken is this right a character from Larson and written stories around the same vein it's my hands Larson series is a two book series so far only because David you know how long it takes to write a book yeah forever I've just finished my third memoir which is state of mind I think on my podcast there's a picture of it yes I've seen that it'll be up there this is the story of how I ran the length of the country I think that's always of interest to people because you know now okay you don't have to be a fitness fanatic to wonder you know how you could make the most of yourself in such a thing and then overcome that point of exhaustion where you're looking for any reason to continue I from some of the things I've read on you you've had your own way of dealing with that and the only thing I can compare it to I guess in my own life I suppose when I cut the bars of the Bangkok prison at midnight I found myself at about 333 45 with such a long way to go I don't and found I had I was in a prison within a prison like the maze and I had seven more inner walls to get over before the outer one which had electricity on the top and it really was only the threat of what happened to everybody who turned themselves in at that point they'd all been tortured and killed so that's pretty much motivation but how do you do you suggest your personal will not to fail to go on with something when your body is telling you Chris you should stop now you're gonna do yourself a mischief yeah I to be honest David I just keep going I can't really there isn't really a secret you just keep going and and there was an expression I heard once in the Marines and it was the the troop was speed marching along so they're running walking running walking quite quite a fast pace in full equipment and I think it one of the guys that I knew he was like he was looking at the verge and he was thinking if I just collapse onto the verge I can get out of this and and people just think I've got heat stroke or something and man that one of the corpus in his training teams just could tell why the look on his face that's what he was contemplating and he went oh he gave you said Davey if you can put one foot in front of the other you can keep going you know you put one foot in front the other and till you lose consciousness and I'm lucky I've not yet lost consciousness now and also I suppose you know that there are some safety angles of pushing too far I think there's been a couple of marathon runners who've just ignored something quite seriously going on in their legs and the whole chemical thing in their muscles has become imbalanced and I think somebody staggered to the finish line but when he stopped the the combination of acids and opposites kind of melted the tissue in his legs he never walked again after that maybe that's a real rarity I'm sure it probably is but I don't know I think we have to accept our bodies you know have some limits do you find I mean as you get older you just get more stubborn despite the years I'm 51 now and in four weeks time with and I've done no training except I did a run on Sunday all I do Dave is I jog around the block about five times a week and that's just for my mental health it's not right it's not like to get fit or anything although I suppose it keeps me ticking over but in four weeks from now I'm kind of planning running 200 miles non-stop well well it will be in 48 hours which doesn't really if anyone knows ultra running knows yet doesn't give you any time to stop yeah I might be able to snatch an hour of sleep here and there and I want I've got permission to do it around my local running track okay I've already had my second person tell me that I'll die and that's okay that's quite normal when you do these challenges the problem is it's when it comes from a professional ultra runner that they tell you that you go okay I'll just pretend I didn't hear oh well that's a good way of dealing with it and may I ask why are you doing this particular challenge well several reasons first of all just the personal challenge David's you know I'm a great believer we get one life and if you live it right one is enough and preach into the choir here I suppose so though I think I wouldn't mind being a science fiction character and you know after I die wake up with another one in front of me but would we ever get it right well this is the thing isn't it why am I doing it well we've currently got the veterans crisis we've got a lot of veterans committing suicide here suicide the great ignored yes cause of death throughout the land so my my last two charity challenges have been to erase awareness of that issue have you got a sponsor or something like that to throw some money into the charities or not really I had a sponsor when I ran I had two sponsors when I ran the link for the country that very kindly chipped in 500 pounds each towards my expenses yeah well it's funny you know it sounds like that's alright but your expenses would be close to that anyway if you're running the length of the country my expenses were probably about if you include the money I lost by not being in a job oh well yeah then it's probably about 7000 pounds but I don't think of money in those terms if I just think of the experience and that's true I mean and also I think I find it now I'm into my 60s I really just evaluate everything in terms of time you know how much I've got during the day what I can allocate to it and because we'll run out sooner or later and problem I mean you've done really well to have written as much as you've written taking everything into account I think the fictions are great stuff because you can kind of you said that in no way was writing biography cathartic but the opposite sure but at least with fiction you can wander around in there and of course you've probably oh I don't know during periods of you know when you're in the services what do they say most of the time you're sitting around waiting and then five minutes of absolute terror but and then recovering from various disasters you've had no doubt time enough to read quite a bit over the years so you know you're in a position to really enjoy along with your readers what you're writing in fiction so well done on that for sure how are they being received people enjoying them yes it's some God going back to what you originally said I sat down at the computer one day it was back in the days when I used to be let's just say off my head quite a lot still and and I was at just a point in my life where I'd seen so much of the world I'd seen more of the world than anybody I knew had all these experiences that that really sound like the stuff of fiction or could be could be and and I thought one day look I'm just gonna make it work you know you get written off when when you're a when you have mental health issues people write you off especially if it's around addiction because they mistakenly tie in addiction which is a mental health condition with drugs yeah there is a lot of preconceived ideas isn't there so I just thought look I just got to make it work you know I've got to make it work for me and and show that there's no regrets in my life I've had a great life whether it's even being chronically mentally unwell I'm was an experience for for me right hmm I just put the computer on one day I was a bit worse where I thought right right a best-selling book and and I don't mean that arrogantly I'm what I mean is that was the goal there's no point writing a crap book and it had written a crap book I wouldn't have published it David you know we would have just gone on my shelf and at least I've written a book right but I thought no you know I've always been a reader so I've got that kind of grasp of wordplay yeah yeah I had through the learning process I learned how to edit which is in your mind it's not a physical thing it's how right what do the audience need to hear about this story at which particular time yes I know it you mean you find that and don't you find that the more experienced you get with the structure of plot lines you start to watch things in a different way than younger people for example you're watching something on television you're saying to yourself right this is the what's being revealed in the opening 30 seconds these the characters being presented that last you know the more professionally the thing is written the neater is the 45 seconds that showed you that dad has on the surface a perfectly legitimate career is a dentist and it's good to his kids and fine with his wife but has a secret and and that can be you know on screen can be done in a short time then you've got the luxury in writing of doing it in a somewhat different way but nonetheless you know you could have the last sentence of the paragraph change everything that's come before and that can be quite enjoyable counter you structuring things yeah it's been an incredible learning curve for me I'm completely self-taught I taught myself GCSE English in them in the Marines on a correspondence course right when I my first draft I approached people like yourself who were published authors and I said look could you could you look at my first chapter and I'm not gonna say there was only one of them that didn't come back to me and that's not gonna say the person's name but but well we'll call him a loser anyway well not a particularly savory character but the other three did and they came back with unbelievably kind on the ball advice and and it was basically Chris par it down yeah I had to ponder that David for probably six months I was going I'm not cutting my story out why should I it's my yeah I know every word is golden every moment is precious they they didn't mean that they just meant don't use 20 words when you can use 10 and once I such that simple philosophy hmm came a really good editor yeah I think if I've always recommended to somebody is planning on writing something to look at the best journalism just to get an idea of how a lot can be contained in in a short space like a description of I don't know the 500 passengers on board the SS Laura had expected the a relaxing three-week cruise but when the volcanic ash landed they knew that such and such you know a good journalist will not throw in words that don't work you know don't learn the living those words have got to pay off as they go along so it's often a good place to start with that there used to be a pay at the International Herald Tribune which was a mixture of I think the Chicago Herald Tribune in the New York Times they used to have a kind of email edition back when the weight of things countered before the electronic age you could actually roll up cigarettes with this the email edition it was quite handy if you'd run out of Bible paper to roll cigarettes with but because they were shorter space that it was very lean and you got all you needed to know in a short amount of time and and you're right if if your correspondents were being you know encouraging yet a useful to you they would have been a young guy I knew started a book and and I always say write what you know so it's a bit about his kind of life but it's fiction so he can clean it up or make it more exciting in spots where it's just embarrassing and what he sent had the often the usual kind of mistakes that I've made myself when I mean really I needed better advice than when I wrote escape which was the first book I'd written it as though trying to impress my friends in the first draft and the the publishers for the UK or a Scottish company called mainland public mainstream publishing based in Edinburgh took me to a very liquid lunch in Soho completely blotto I just couldn't drink that I drank me under the table but I think that's about as much editorial input as they ever made and but they did at least have the decency to give me a good sub editor and she I'd written some very flourishing bit of crap paragraph about men in prison missing the company of women and you know I thought that it was very poetic the words I'd chosen and she kind of ruthlessly said to me mmm sub par Mills and Boone it was kind of like not even as good as the trashy romance novels that were done in the 50s for bored housewives and but she was right it didn't move the story forward it was no reason for it to be there just because I liked it it's got nothing to do with it so I learned quite a bit from that one and got better at it my books very my story is very simple I was a damaged young man I joined the Marines it didn't did what Marines do you went on active service blah blah blah when it got to Hong Kong my past caught up with me in a way that my brain whatever tried to deal with was through this drug crystal man and I just became very very ill and I was living in a in psychosis on and off for for months right yeah now it it just so happened that one of the many jobs I got over there most of which I either most of which I got fired from right yeah you were you were bartender way for a while I was a dorm a doorman in Asia a doorman isn't quite it's not like a bouncer although that was like a little bit of my role right it's more when you work in a triad run club which as you know in Hong Kong the all the clubs they're either run by the Scottish or the run by by the triads they're owned by private businessmen but if you're in one try you get the 14 gay are gonna run your club whether you like it or not right so in again in very loose his terms I was implied by the dialogue who's the big brother of this particular gang to be their doorman and a doorman's role in in in that kind of club is as much a go-between between the eastern face and western drunken ignorance can we say no right now as you know there's certain things you don't say to certain Asian gentlemen hmm if you want to keep all your fingers and toes right no because that I'm very sensitive to embarrassment yes I found that in Thailand that a lot of decisions and a lot of actions were taken mostly to avoid embarrassment of something being other than it was there was I had a friend who was a journalist and he was into confronting a Japanese businessman about some wrongdoings of his company and he said the stronger my points the more silent he went he just just froze up but you know you'd understand Chris living in Asia that that there's no way of dealing with that so it's really even I'm thinking of the words used by hero Hitto in announcing to his people in Japan that they had surrendered to the Americans and the word surrender was never one of them his description of what have happened was not we lost the war it was and also spoken in high court Japanese so it was doubtful that most of the population would have understood much of it but the phrase was events of the war in the Pacific have taken a turn not necessarily in Japan's best interests and that sentence was as close as he ever came to saying we were defeated and I think there's a word for it in Korean that I don't know what it is this showing deference to superiors at all cost and not embarrassing people and it came about because of investigations into air careers terrible record in the 70s of plane crashes they had pilot error crashes beyond normal and too many of them so after analyzing the recordings it became clear that the where the co-pilot's job is to wake up the captain when he's doing something wrong or to draw attention to something because of the cultural setting he couldn't say it he might say I don't think I checked the alternator properly or something kind of blaming himself but he would not directly criticize the captain say you half what you've dialed in the wrong coordinates for a direction whereas we as British quite enjoy you know ridiculing our friends and I thought it you know we can take and not not even ridicule but certainly correction without having to go out and kill ourselves and commit supuku or whatever it is Richard Dawkins the biologist is always fond of talking about a memory in his university days of there was a visiting professor from somewhere I don't know where Germany or something and his own professor who had for 20 years thrown up proofs of his theory about such and such you know the following proteins of cells or whatever and dedicated his career on it and written about it and these 20 years were utterly occupied on it and he was gonna this visiting a German professor gave a talk and explained how all of that was wrong that that professor had sadly wasted his time but fruitlessly gone down the wrong Avenue and this was no way near the truth and this was the way to go now Dawkins and the rest of the the students burst into applause which took a while to die down when the professor had spent 20 years on the thing and and being British went up to the visiting German professor and shook his hand and thanked him for genuinely thanked him for you know straightening that out and that looks like a use a little more time than was necessary and so we're in the West and I think that's part of the success of the West versus anywhere else that and it's still I think it's taken a lot for in China for example for them to have technical innovations because of accepting what's gone before and and certainly when you were in Hong Kong that's that's no different it might be a more glitzy town but the Asian mentality is still there all bad yeah so you were the kind of got ironed out the troubles one way or another that that clash between east and west on the on the has made to do the door yeah it was it's a funny time what I found is the Chinese were very bad at communicating stuff to you so for example I was a DJ in China for a while very very short live career and the manager I had a Hong Kong manager but he was away for a week so the Chinese one of the Chinese managers kept coming up to me and saying I'm there DJing you know DJ my heart out something I don't teach myself what were you playing what sort of music oh over there it's very sort of not so much house music but more the dance he pop stuff so back in the day it was corona rhythm of the night and strike you sure make me feel like loving you real dance he tracks and so this Chinese manager kept saying you don't control the crowd and I'm thinking western DJ terms that he meant like I'm not taking the crowd up and down with the music yeah in this record into and I'm like I am I'm you know I'm doing there with me they're jumping around and a friend of mine and I was doing what Brandon Brandon would do right no what it was when they fired me and my replacement flew out from England he said control the crowd Chris no what they mean is you're not getting up on stage and playing silly games you know like a like a Buttlin's Redcoat all right oh I see like one of those Chinese embarrassed to compare sort of thing you know and why did they advertise for a DJ then because what they wanted wasn't what we would call an emcee he said Chris they're Chinese they don't understand the difference no no DJ and emcee or a FBI funny enough the guy that flew out from England to replace me I think his name was Rob I said so where you from in in England Rob he went are you wouldn't know that I will try me he said our place called Robra just outside Plymouth and I said they meant something to and I said at the time as I live in Whitley half half a mile down the road all right well yeah it's funny that six degrees of separation seems to be a lot narrower for people to get it out and travel the world I mean how often have you been someplace and met somebody who you only have to take two steps to somebody else in you in in the Marines wherever you go you always meet another Marine it's just this weird thing that happens I do you think you can kind of spot each other across a crowded room in the sense that okay it might turn out that the guy's not actually a Marine but could be services of some kind or another it's almost uncanny that if you think someone's a Marine they pretty much turn out to be one occasionally they're in another branch say they're an army commander or something right so there's got to be a body language that goes with that or beyond a body language a manner of approaching the room I guess maybe I'd a guess I'd say somebody with that sort of training might go in and kind of scan it look at the exits size up the more dangerous people dismiss the half wits you know break the room down into its component parts for that I sometimes in in my travels I often would have to do assessments of where I thought if I return to a hotel or if I went back to a particular airport or I went to a stash or where I had something secured in an office building and the air conditioning ducts or something I'd have to get a feel for if that place had been compromised when I walk in there and sometimes you can be wrong but for sensible reasons I kept I was in London and after being away for many years or pretty good phony documents went back to my hotel now I was wrong on what I thought but at least I was wrong for the right reasons as I walked up to my desk okay as I walked into the small lobby there was somebody sitting down at a chair reading a magazine people do that nothing wrong with that but he was a guy he was within a certain age range he wasn't unhealthy no problem there was somebody else over on a payphone corner but he was swivel around not huddled to the phone like you're trying to keep a private conversation but have turned around looking at what's going on behind the counter when I went up to ask for my key it was somebody new on so two people then one came in from the street and one descended the stairs at the same time and it made a little body movement in everybody else in the room and I was ready for anything at that moment I thought that's it it game on you know how can't you when something yeah it used to happen in Hong Kong you'd get undercover policemen and they'd be British because back when I was there it was you know still a colony apparently it still belongs to Britain apparently it's only the northern territory or the new territories that were that's true the Hong Kong island was given in perpetuity yeah but the leasing arrangement it was just Hong Kong wasn't big enough that they had to take the new territories and Hong Kong can't really be good today who knows but it really doesn't function without the new territories from water supply and in a lot of practical reasons well now having had interest there and spent time there what I personally I've always been disappointed with Britain's dealing with the handover the agreement and everything that followed but what do you think would be a better way to go if you think there is one do you know ordinarily on something like this I sit on the fence because I don't see it as my right to talk about someone else's culture land what whatever you know it's like the northern island thing I'm just a guy I shouldn't be you know I can have an opinion of course I can right but I wouldn't start like writing them out or anything but when it comes to Hong Kong oh god they the British should have just stuck to their guns and even if there was an agreement 100 years ago I mean which there was but even if it was for the islanders but they should just listen folks that was 100 years ago this this is a unique blend of Anglo-Sino-Sino culture society history here it doesn't belong to it isn't a part of mainland China once we it gets back to China there's gonna be an influx of mainland Chinese speaking different language different pretty much different culture it's gonna you know there's gonna be more draconian measures all the stuff we know about you know big brother never think that's happened and the British should have been firmer and and and as we know now that the Hong Kong island was never the Chinese is anyway that's always been that was I suppose I thought that I ran across some cabbie I think a few months ago and this story was in the papers about potentially changing the holders of or allowing the holders of British overseas citizen Hong Kong passports Hong Kong British passports to have the right of residence in the UK effectively saying well this is a threat to China you're gonna lose everybody if you mess with our agreement of one country to the system but I and China rattled its saber over that one and of course strictly speaking yeah obviously speaking China is much more powerful than but and Britain was never didn't succeed with an empire by being powerful in a direct way sure it had the Navy but that was really I think a strategic thing as well as a powerful force but it was through careful handling of I mean you think how could it be that some measure of control was maintained on India a country of hundreds of millions of people by what was a British presence of less than 200,000 in some ways it was I think it was done by the great finessing of absorbing of local cultures to know what to do I think the the sons and daughters of the Nabobs and the Maharajas their children wanted to be fine English gentlemen and so it was easier to get them to go along with something when they they felt that was the thing to aspire to now that wouldn't apply in any way in Hong Kong but it seems to me that there would have been okay there would have been to go with saying it we're going to hold on to it I think might have inevitably led to more of a problem but perhaps this if Britain had said well it's been so long now we'll put it to the people you Hong Kongers do you want to be an independent nation and if you say yes we'll fight your case in the UN for recognition now China wouldn't have been happy with that either but it's a harder battle for them to do it you know it don't you think so often it depends on how you phrase things if Saddam Hussein had had a decent publicity agent he could have instead of thundering in heavy booted into Kuwait he could have said look I'm supporting the movement for the democratic students movement of Kuwait they're objecting to the oppressive regime of the royalty of a monarchy an absolute autocracy that gives them no democratic powers whatsoever and of course we support these young people who want the freedoms that you in the West and that relatively speaking in Iraq I allow as a dictator of Iraq so it would have been and if this phony democratic movement that Saddam had set up in Kuwait had been persecuted as they would have been by the security services of the Kuwaiti government then he could have said look they I just sent in some technical officers giving them support for their logistics to try and install a government and also Kuwait was slant drilling into Iraqi soil they had drills right along the edge of the border and still drilling down they were going sideways and and that was a legitimate enough issue to to make some complaints about but here he had no he was playing to a local crowd wasn't he he might have been a big man at home and you know smoking a cigar and shooting into the air all yes all great stuff lots of statues and pointing again and look at attacking the Iranians for all those years waste of time fought backwards and forwards huge waste of munitions and men for bits of territory that will ultimately all return to their own spots anyway really if you want to get away with international mischief you have to make sure you look good doing it and the British always managed to look good up until a certain point. Well you've also there's another factor you've got to be signed up to the central banking system haven't you? Well it's... I don't think Saddam was was he?  Oddly enough as long as you weren't involved in politics in Iraq back then they're walking around town was it was quite westernized you know they were relative freedoms including even under the what was his name? Pahlavi Russia Pahlavi the Iranian you call himself emperor but was more than a king anyway it's a ridiculous thing if you've ever got nothing to do look at the party he threw in the 70s the Shah of Iran celebrating I forget what it was three four four thousand years of Persian history it was he built this oasis of tents in the desert it's a massive thing and back at the time it was astonishing the resources that went into it but there was the Tehran Film Festival girls went to university there wasn't any trouble all those you know half-witted mullers came in and and really set the clock back as far as terms were concerned but the trouble with the dictators they just needed better press agent I mean that could be a job for us Chris really I mean you know why don't we put ourselves about it look many of experience what do you want I've actually done that job in Iran funnily enough really yeah I drove a coach of volunteer journalists from Norway to India and back by land yeah overland on a 12 tonne British Leyland school bus so that like the coaches we used to get to to go to comprehensive school and our mission was to write articles on not just communities living in poverty but communities that were different like for example Iran and and it was interesting I mean didn't you have you would have had to some parts of that back in at that time it would have had to carry quite a bit of supplies not just tires and water but how many how many journalists for whatever they were we left with about 17 from Norway and by the time we got back everyone a jump ship except about five of us I have a jump ship or been fired sir all right but they found more interesting things to do along the way I guess you when you work for organizations especially voluntary ones yeah or NGOs or whatever there's there's always so much bloody bureaucracy and and over tightening of safety rules which apply to certain people but not others and everyone just got sort of I mean just one one example when I worked in Africa with this organization so I taught street children in Mozambique and the very first thing they did when we landed in Maputo for having come obviously from South Africa that was they took our passports office always a worry yeah and they're in their minds it's like we've had too many volunteer teachers lose their passport on their six months experience in Africa so we keep them here and that's kind of okay but as you and I know should never really give your passport to anybody no no it's why it's always good to carry a spare you see a guy what was his name WG Hill he could issue you with a passport to a country that everybody thought existed but in fact no longer did he you could get a passport for British Honduras which became believes and salon he issued quite a few from there which became Sri Lanka so things that were plausible but so you keep this thing and the plane got hijacked that's the one you'd hand over you know you wouldn't hand handle hand over for example an Israeli passport or an American one with a New York address and Harvey Weinstein was your name now you have something very bland in one of his with all the technology now that are the holistic watermarks and computer systems is it still possible to get fake passports I quite a few years ago when biometric passports were being introduced with the chip I I shared the same concern I thought I don't know whether it's going to be so easy to duplicate a birth certificate or find somebody that died in infancy and put applications through but my Malaysian friend and a class forger they were knocking out US dollar sold a lot to the Iranian he said oh biometric don't worry we have for you one week they they pointed out to me that the biometric chip it when it the information on it is a matching comparison with the photograph that supplied not with some magical database that is able to analyze facial features it used for example the the ratio between the pupils of the eye you can imagine if it's a person standing in front of a camera or a supplied photograph that distance between the eyes won't very much and if it does it's because the head is tilted now it's not supposed to be tilted in the passport photo but you can work out from the holes in the nostril and the end of where the mouth line is what that tilt might be and then does subtraction so the point is it's only comparing like with like so that if the biometric data had to match the photo that was in it so sure enough you couldn't have one of the pickpockets go and grab you a passport from some traveling swede with a biometric passport simply take the photograph out and change it especially since the the photograph now is not a physical thing it's printed on it if you look at the the UK passport now it seems to have two photographs the kind of color one and then a little black and white one and if if you find yourself with a few minutes to kill with the sunsets as I sometimes do with a magnifying glass in my hand and a microscope at about 90 times magnification you can see that the that black and white picture of Chris Thrall is made up of your name repeated as script and in all sorts of swirls in in darker and lighter registrations of ink as a security device so there's a bit of work to be done but all it really means is that if you want a second set of identity documents it's not simply a matter of changing the photograph and reprogramming the but you the Malaysians can do the reprogramming of the little chip that's in it it can be wiped and then a program back in so that you're a new photograph or at least the biometric part of it the the top to bottom length of your ears and and that measured in half the size of your head it's only about six metrics that go into that match so you know people have a fear that they wanted the streets and some camera will pick them up and match them to we'll be able to identify oh yes this was a guy who got convicted for you know growing a lot full of weed back in the 90s it doesn't work that way all the all the photo matching can do is say yes this person in the street has got a 90% match with this photograph so you have to throw up suggestions as to who it might be if you're after a group of terrorists or something you can have all of their pictures and if you think there might be one amongst them who's part of that group sure it'll it'll help but it is not nearly you you can't ask it to those parameters for what a face is made up of and not fine-tuned remotely enough to identify I mean you think of how many biometric pictures are out there are passports and driver's licenses are pretty much all of that I notice now I can get things renewed or approved by just doing a scan of either driver's license or passport because that photo is held on the the government's computers I suppose that's why they abandoned the ID card they just do it by other means but that no that ultimately that if you if you really want to have another identity you know so either come the revolution or the end of the world or the Russians get serious with us you know whatever it might be or we surrender to China you want to have some way out I would recommend a European passport of course especially after this peculiar Brexit business which will only end up being a massive 11th hour compromise in which everything else strangely look the same but you want a European passport and this is what you do about it you do you go over to say Portugal and get a residence put yourself down as being a resident while you still can and after three years you get permanent residency and can apply for a Portuguese passport now they don't know whether you've been staying there or not it doesn't matter there's lots of sort of half-ass solicitors lawyers that will collect your mail for you so that's your address but like with most ID things start early and plan ahead now here you can change your name by Deepol which is an old-fashioned way of saying I have changed my name and it has a kind of fancy looking piece of paper that goes with it but it's actually nothing to do with government it's it's a kind of this private lawyers do it I've got a box full of them and and so that when you start your Portuguese identity you started off in that other name and the the the passport that you supply you you're only giving them photocopies anyway so they don't really you can change the name over that that won't matter by the time you actually apply for your Portuguese passport all of that will have been accepted because it'll be in the system for over three years so you've got one and you've got your Deepol thing that changes your name the only thing that stays the same is the date of birth but that won't really cause you any problem and you know one it's it's like guns on a battlefield of the foreman one gun begets many as you travel on collecting ammunition and weaponry and it's the same with documentation as as you find yourself you've got your other identity you can go somewhere else as a visitor but plant the seed for ultimately residency and there's a couple of other ways that I don't really want to give away but for students of the mechanics of society who will be interested they should think about the remaining places in the world where your parents nationality still gives you the right of citizenship of that place now who's to say Chris that unknown to you in reality your parents turned out to have Swiss citizenship because of their own parents you know the Irish used to allow you to get a passport an Irish passport providing your grandparents and even great grandparents were Irish now it's it might seem an odd thing to do but there are a more American Americans born in America who have Irish passports than there are Irish people six million people have Irish passports that have a wistful kind of east coast fantasy that you know their great great grandfather was one of the five points gang in New York City you know when the potato famine people came over and you know that was the IRA used to scrape up a lot of money in with the fifth generation Irish in the US that they had some of the best lawyers in town when the IRA got arrested in New York State for something yeah these have no nor aid wasn't it North American aid to to Ireland yeah that um yeah that was part of a a wider charity but and I suppose if you which does kind of lead on to another thing if you have to be tried anywhere in the world for a crime the US is not a bad place to do it you can do things that they won't let you I mean here you're not allowed to um ask the jury any questions but there when you're selecting the jury you can do a kind of ask a couple of basic questions about their outlook on life and even once upon a time too in the UK you could challenge up to 12 of your potential jurors just because you felt like it they call them pre-emptory challenges and that's gone with the wind too along with their right to only one trial for the same offense that's gone too they're being whittled away Chris it's uh um I think um you know don't you find a really young people don't care that their names all over Facebook and Snapchat and TikTok and every single thing about their lives is known to um pretty big companies and and they're scrupulous ones then um say the very big big ones like Instagram and so on and Google um kind of the subcontractors the the black ops of the um the tech world and we know don't we that um as you type something into your machine some bit of analysis is creating the music of your fingers the motion the fact that you damaged your ring finger once on a um frantically pulling on a trigger a roundless gun or whatever it might have been on a tank door so that finger doesn't move quite as quickly as there is identifiable as that the things you look at the camera on your own uh laptop watching not simply if you were taking an interest in something but how you're taking an interest where your eyes travel on the screen a screen of which it knows and uh breaking that down into character choices decisions you'll make I mean it's alarming enough that you'll um scratch your chin and think I must get a new gate for the back fence and suddenly the next time you're on Facebook or somewhere there's a little stream of ads going down the side for uh um gates and posts and all things rear garden it's uh it doesn't bother the the young ones but it gives me and I suppose a few older generation people a little pause to think it wouldn't be quite as easy as it once was to just step out of this life into another so um and it's still fortunately there's still ways but one you know one of the reasons I stepped away from the crime world apart from there it was becoming boring was um that there's just too many imbeciles I can't count the number of times that I'd have a thing going on uh like a little operation and I'd have everybody there uh in the right place where we could talk and issue the phones out this is the phone you're not supposed to you only turn it on in this area the SIM card is linked to that that that and then what do you get they call their mother or their girlfriend uh because um their own phone charged too much for they didn't have credit or they found themselves in a hotel room that was you know didn't allow international calls off the the room thing um and it all blows up completely compromised um and underestimating I mean if we were if I was a policeman today uh I wouldn't have to wear out shoe leather I'd just sit there and ask my computer computer all right let's start breaking it down let's take uh pay as you go telephone got all of them oh million sir millions all right I know that but let's say in this area what uh Clapper my road oh yes all right and let's use the cell data to confine it to these um blocks of flats now give me the list of these pairs you go phones that have a disproportionate number of incoming and almost no outgoings and uh this is busy from say uh midday to two o'clock in the morning peak time uh so you know the phone that is getting all these income incomings and almost no outgoings and virtually no text messages no data nothing like that um is the runner for a dealer um then um what you do is you ask it for uh the phones that are not making enough calls that a human being living a life would use it for maybe two calls a day brief short to the point no doubt um you would you would get the the second phone that the runner uses it to call the boss um and got the number on that one um you've got it within 100 meters anyway because of your transponders so I'd consider as a policeman my my my work is done for the day I can land upon this guy when it suits me yeah this um it's the way it's all going now isn't it it's reality now and you know what the dealers keep those SIM cards because they've got uh their mainline for the customers and auction them to each other there was a SIM card that was fought in the bloodbath only a couple of months ago uh between some dealers this was and this treasured number had gone down seven years and had more customers you can shake a stick at because um we should say children are not that I recommend it but don't think all smuggling is wonderful because then the end it comes back to your customer base and you haven't got one and somebody else would be on top of you and not like you very much for it and no don't go out and buy one of those highly priced SIM cards with all those wonderful names of people you don't know on it because you're walking into a trap from two directions but if it's matter than all of that good luck to you David I've got to ask you what what's at what point was it clung-pren did did you realise you were going to get the death sentence and and how how does that affect affect you when I first went in I was so depressed anyway after the arrest I'd taken a elaborate precautions not to be arrested but nonetheless I was um when I say elaborate I mean really elaborate that um they didn't know about the the other passports I had anyway because it went so badly I was more interested in I wanted to escape but only because I couldn't kill myself within the prison there was no not enough privacy to do it no means you never had a second on your own there wasn't anything high enough to throw yourself off um I even had the hotel in mind the Ducatani because I knew how to get to the the top floor and how to get to the rooftop there but once I kind of got over that um I never had any intention of staying anyway uh everything I looked at was from the point of view of escape which building I was in what the bars were like in a kind of old-fashioned way I kind of knew enough about the place that I couldn't trust anybody but I knew when there was an American lawyer there from Hawaii that he wasn't really a lawyer he was a vacuum cleaner salesman whose wife was Thai and had a flower shop and he set himself up as a kind of um lawyer to the American guys who'd get arrested asked for $12,000 flat fee he'd say and I can get you four years you'll be out in four years and well they'd get the four years was nothing it was just that they'd be transferred home with their sentence in four years providing they finished everything but I kind of exposed him for the fraud he was because he was just so irritating um and he he was also feeding information back to the DEA in the US Embassy and he was the one who told a friend of his all that McMillan he sees for the drop they explained that they the Thais wanted to um had always wanted to execute a Westerner but for diplomatic reasons never could that um we in the west always lodge you know very strong objections to the execution of our citizens except sometimes I mean there was a French girl in um Malaysia who was sentenced to death it was within the last few weeks and finally the French ambassador got onto the Malaysians and said look we don't say anything when you're just mouthing off about yes drugs da da death all this crap you're not seriously going to do it the Malaysians said yeah we were like fuck oh oh you don't want us to no of course I can't go around killing French said but oh all right sorry and they released her a few weeks later but I found out that in my case I was leper enough um I mean you can't you know the good thing about having the reputation is that in the worst trade in the world you know having sold and smuggled heroin you can't get any worse off than that so no one can that's why my correspondents who get my signed copies or whatever are always telling me the darkest secret because they figure they might not be able to trust many people but somebody is as such a social outcast as this that even banged up abroad put a you know uh no thank you stamp on about 15 different producers attempts to do my story on there not this guy now there's the elephant in the room he's unrepentant uh which is not entirely true I mean I wasted a lot of time you know you know I could have done something better um that's not really repentant though isn't it just just wishful um so uh it was okay to execute me um and I thought oh I better bring my plans forward a bit um and there were about probably 20 schemes to get out uh one of them they had on auto repair shops the guards used to bring their cars and their family's cars in to get repaired they do so and then when they were ready they drive them out went ahead of a vw combi van and I was going to get kind of welded into a plate at the back of the passenger compartment but I didn't rather nervous feelings about being welded into anything as you can imagine the bones of an Englishman found 20 years later in a scrap yard on the outskirts of Bangkok um and also I realized too that I couldn't trust anybody very much with the apart from my closest friends and um I mean trust was a very big thing can you imagine you two hours after I escaped or less and I'd taken all night it was about seven o'clock in the morning I got I've got a key sandwiched in a um looking wooden decorative tag I have to break it like a fortune cookie to get the key out it's in there because if I was caught and tortured uh they wouldn't be asking me where's this key belong to you know you never know what you say under torture you don't want to put it down of course the ties don't really know how to do it properly I had to wait for Karachi to find out that um so go to the apartment where my Chinese friend is supposed to have a passport and I know from the experience of terrible things that had happened to people that if you stay in Dodge City past noon you're in for it so uh I let myself into the apartment actually some young kids sleeping in there that other morning uh Harry told me about you might come but not likely because they didn't think it was going to work um I had a lot of luck on the night but I'm in the bathroom because that's where it's supposed to be in the toilet cubicle because that's where it's supposed feeling my hand up a mirror against a wall waiting to strike this passport and bear in mind it's not just some phony document with my photo in it this passport has to have been stolen from a a viable and working one within the previous month because it's got to have gone through the computer at Bangkok airport as an entry it's got to have an immigration card into it not only filled out with that number also on the computer it's got to have my face on it of course and it's got to have the ultraviolet ink in pink and green uh ultraviolet colors showing over the photograph there's lots of things with it plus I mean how many people Chris can you say yeah he's my friend he's going to do all that go up nights find the Chinese gangs that work at the airport have all that stuff done with it have the thing place it in there so I'm thinking hugely unlikely yeah and this is a guy I met in prison it's not like somebody I knew from before and sure enough I struck as something that felt like cardboard and I slipped it out and it's an envelope and I opened it up I thought all right there's something in here but it's going to be all wrong all wrong it'd be unusable no it was there it had the stamps and everything of course an hour and a half later there was a tense moment as the immigration officer was typing in the details into his computer and that pause as he frowned and looked at the screen and held my thing but it wasn't it was just a delay in the information coming forward a very satisfying thwank of having departed that country just imagine had you seen um or was the film midnight express out by before the old midnight express the one was made in 78 you were what sorry you you're talking about midnight express yeah film that made in 78 it was yeah the one um obviously set in Istanbul yeah I mean it was quite a drift from the book uh the skate park was yeah uh I mean silly thing can you imagine what force you have to push somebody against a a clothes peg to actually render them dead quite a bit I would think and uh but it had a nice look to it that film you know when I saw that film first I was on board uh an air India flight um heading into New Delhi uh on what was I think it was my second hash run uh to pick up six kilos so there are much and none of the way they used to show movies back in those days is how old it was it was on eight millimeter film on a you know clunky old projector that dropped down from the ceiling of the jumbo jets and he's being patted down and they find the hash on him and he's in for some horror but um the uh and and I uh but it didn't put me off of course it can't be deterred by uh those little things can be you know some don't you find some people something will happen that'll be coincidentally connected with whatever you're doing you know say you've got if you were in the services and by chance they they get a call from their old friend Bobby who lost a leg in another campaign like isn't he calling me by chance but it's a sign that's a sign we shouldn't go ahead in the morning it's all going to go tits up there there's those people who are looking for an excuse to get out of something or or to somehow throw their responsibility for the final decision on you and others who look at some new bit of information and say no that's just something good to take into account and consider but I really um it was lucky I ended up on my own the night of the Bangkok escape rather than even it was whittled down to there was still one willing uh partner in that but even he dropped out at the end and um it turned out to be a good thing um because sometimes if this if you're doing something it's very critical and you come across new staff and you've got to figure a way around it if you're with somebody else lots of bad dynamics happen then it's even worse if the three people is a sort of a manageable group but the night the five ties got out of their dormitory and went to the wall and found they'd all lie to each other no one had a hidden cell phone no one had a hidden rope no one had any friends on the outside uh it was all shit um and each of them had been too embarrassed to tell the other no I haven't done this thing I've been telling it for weeks I've done but if you're alone none of that problem and even with one other person this big Swedish guy now he was strong and quite tasty so I mean and he helped me on the night I just couldn't cut as many bars as I needed to and he he bent one up and up I think he was strangling a guard's neck the way his neck was straining and the muscle standing out as he levered just a few inches open up this bar for me to squeeze through and get out and you know the oddest thing too as soon as I was out that window in the dead of night um and clinging three floors up they didn't trust the foreigners the farang on the ground floor for some reason um as soon as I was outside looking in on the cell in which I'd been a prisoner not a minute before everything changed I felt somehow even if I died the next minute I was a free man for a moment but if I'd have had somebody else with me the dynamics there would have been so different when we would have found ourselves at I don't know 530 uh that glow of dawn threatening over in the east there um there was a moat just below the big outer wall and the big outer wall led down to what was no more than about a foot of walking space before the sludgy moat which was never mind it was full of uh shit I mean we called it masbar creek but it was full of very tangly barbed wire so you couldn't just throw this um bamboo ladder that I'd made up over the thing had to work out a way of getting over to this little one foot stretch and somehow getting a 24 foot ladder upright uh which was heavier than would have been heavier than both of us now if somebody else had been there I would have been sitting around there arguing with him about what was the best way to go but have you ever found that that you've made better decisions than by yourself than those you know operationally than those that might have been made as a group or yeah I've been in a group where I've I've been the only person that can see the way in this situation and and you're arguing with free people that just can't see what you can see and because of that you're all going to do this the hard way and yeah yeah human nature I think no it is true and Chris it's coming up to about two hours now I think um if you don't find it too dull I should come back on time to time I was hoping you were gonna say that um he uh as I've got older I rate uh meals and sleep very highly on my uh list of life's activity I don't play and I can smell lunch calling me not too far away so um I think uh perhaps your viewers if they have any abuse or questions they should put it down in the description box and we'll do our best to give either lame or useful answers yeah and you could even come on my live show I try and do a live show every Friday all right and then our friends on YouTube our friends at home can put their questions in the chat it's a very pleasant way to spend an hour or so it is it must be quite tricky to follow sometimes those streams you get um in between uh higher joey and yucky yucky I can silly emoticons you'll see a question there and then you've got to kind of pluck that one out to uh I asked them to put them in capital so my aging eyesight can lunch five minutes thank you darling so I can quickly zoom in on them but yes that's an option that we have but you asked me writing a book about what happened 20 years ago is cathartic no but this chat has been extremely cathartic I'm I'm uh the most I'm glad for weeks I think well I suppose sometimes that you get that way and as I feel myself with you that uh you know somebody's been through some experiences that uh kind of leave you breathless um you don't have to explain the silences and the things that don't need explaining so that's always a bit relaxing isn't it yes and I look forward to coming back on this and uh I know what to get you for Christmas another cat all right then okay thank you very much and I'll see you again sometimes thank you so much you've been an absolute gentleman thank you all right see you bye I'll enjoy my lunch please do hello friend I hope this finds you well my name is Chris Thrill I'm a former Royal Marines commando and I fought my way back from chronic trauma and addiction to live work and travel in 80 countries across all seven continents achieving all of my dreams and goals along the way now I pass my simple system on to other people but I can only help you if you like and subscribe so please do so because you get one life and if you live it right one is enough


I'd like to enter this next speaker. This time, Professor Matsuda talk about utilization of carbon dioxide, absorbent, and substrate for biocatalysis, so please. OK. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. I'd like to begin by thanking the organizers and the AMANA enzyme for inviting me to this first North America enzyme technology symposium. It's a tremendous honor to be here to speak and to share my study on and utilization of carbon dioxide as a substrate and absorbent for biocatalysis. As all you know, atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing and causing an environmental problem, so it's urgent to think about how to use it. Actually, pressurized carbon dioxide is very good green solvent. It's sustainable, and it's practical. Because it's chemically inert, it's no-flammable. It has low viscosity and high diffusivity, so you can improve the reaction rate, possibly. And because it's non-popular, so it's this hydrophobic, pharmaceutical-important compounds. And the product can be easily recovered without purification step. You just have to decrease the pressure to the atmospheric pressure. Therefore, in the industrial process, they have been used since 1970s. For example, extraction process of flavor and caffeine from coffee and cholesterol from mayonnaise, and also for the dry cleaning process. When you think about carbon dioxide as a substrate, it's not good substrate, however. Although it is attractive as a C1 building block, it's challenging to use it due to its low reactivity. However, pressurized carbon dioxide is better. It has high density of carbon dioxide, which makes the reactions using carbon dioxide as a substrate favorable, and shifts the equilibrium of the carboxylation, de-carboxylation, to other carboxylation. But you need catalysts to do it. And there are enzyme and also chemical catalysts have been developed. But I use enzyme because of these merit. It's sustainable, it's selective, and it's versatile. And I think these are all have been demonstrated from this morning, so I just skip this part. As a solvent for bio-catalysis, beside aqueous solvent, there are organic solvents, ionic regin, and also pressurized carbon dioxide can be a solvent for bio-catalysis. Today, in my first topic of today, I use supercritical carbon dioxide for the lipase catalyzed reaction. And I also use the CO2 expanded liquid, which is a mixture of organic solvents, and pressurized CO2. I don't want to use conventional organic solvents due to the environmental concern. I use bio-based liquid. This is monophasic. In my second topic of today for carboxylation, I use water and pressurized carbon dioxide by phasic system. So I use carbon dioxide as both substrate and products. I mean, solvents, sorry. So this is the drying, and I'll start with lipase catalyzed transethic acidification. Lipase has been used widely due to these merits and its catalyzed hydrolysis and its catalyzed transethic acidification in organic solvents. So the replacement of conventional organic solvents to green alternatives, such as carbon dioxide, is important. This shows you the phase diagram and the image of carbon dioxide. This green square is carbon dioxide. There are solid phase, liquid and gas, and there are one more phase, supercritical fluid phase, above its critical point of 31 degree and 73 atmosphere. If you mix carbon dioxide with ordinary liquid, then you can get the CO2 expanded liquid. This shows you liquid and gas as carbon dioxide, and now it's getting to be a supercritical state when you see only monophasic system. Supercritical carbon dioxide and CO2 expanded liquid. Both have these gas-like high diffusivity and liquid-like high solverizing power. Bio-catalyzes in pressurized gas has been reported for the first time in 1985, and high enantiose reactivity of lipase catalyzed reaction around the critical points and acceleration of the reaction by using lipid-coated beta D galactosilace in supercritical carbon dioxide have been reported. But when I began this kind of research topic in 2000, there were no practical organic synthesis using supercritical carbon dioxide. So I established a flow reaction using lipase for chiral synthesis using supercritical carbon dioxide. I beautifully introduced this. So in this system, substrate, racemic substrate and carbon dioxide, supercritical carbon dioxide, is sent to a column reactor packed with lipase, and then product will coming out here. Before the back pressure regulator, the carbon dioxide is in supercritical states so that it dissolves substrate and product. But after this, it's get to be a gas. So it's escape, and the product can be easily recovered. I did a three-day operation of this system and the conversion said that 50% and E-value were 12,000. Using 1.73 gram of immobilized enzyme over time, 221 gram of racemic substrate was converted to the product of 99% EE and the remaining substrate of 99% EE. And the spacetime yield was improved by 400 times, compared to the batch system. The proton NMR spectrum of the product without any proliferation is contained no byproduct at all. So without using any organic solvent at all, racemic substrate was converted to chiral products. So after successful success in this, establishing this process, I tried to decrease the pressure. So I moved to the liquid carbon dioxide and then now I'm working using CO2 expanded liquid. It's a mixture of carbon dioxide and the liquid. So pressure and temperature can be any pressure or temperature. So the pressure was decreased. When you pressurize with carbon dioxide on the liquid, it's expanded like this. And transport property, like diffusability, are improved by dissolved carbon dioxide of just like characteristics. When I compare organic solvents and carbon dioxide expanded liquid, and the liquid or supercritical carbon dioxide in terms of viscosity, diffusability, solubility of polypone compound, and amount of CO2 waste solvents generation and working pressure. This carbon dioxide expanded liquid is just in the middle of these two and has a merit of both. When you work with carbon dioxide expanded liquid, you need the liquid components. And as a liquid component, I use bio-based liquid. One of them is methodative. This is one of the most attractive bio-based liquid. However, when this reaction is reported, the conversion is very low. So I decided to expand with carbon dioxide. At first, I put 1.0 millilitre of carbon dioxide, and then if I pressurize it with carbon dioxide to 5.8 megapascal, it's expanded to 8 millilitre. Other bio-based liquid, as well as conventional liquid like hexane or vinyl acetate, also expand like this. So CO2 fraction can be controlled by the pressure. And the solvent properties are tunable so that the enzymatic reaction can be controlled. At first, I tried this reaction, trans-acetic refaction of one adamantel ethanol by carbene lipase. This is difficult to substrate because it's bulky. So when I do this reaction in bio-based liquid without CO2, then conversion was low. But when I expanded this by carbon dioxide, green is bio-based liquid and blue is conventional solvent. Then conversion dramatically increased. It's also increased in the case of hexane. So hydro-phobicity, well, hexane is hydro-phobic without expansion, but it is expanded. So not only other factor other than hydro-phobicity affects this improvement. I examined this reaction in detail. I changed the temperature and pressure. More fraction corresponding to the pressure and the rate increase, but rate is affected by the temperature. So it's normalized based on the value at the zero fraction. Then it's get on to the same line because I also re-prodded this data to using polarity on the x-axis and then I normalize it. Then it's correlation between polarity and the normalized activity reaction rate is also unseen. So that end-dimetric activity are controlled by solvent property, which is controlled by temperature and pressure for the first time. I also checked other substrates using other various bulky substrates. These are all difficult substrates for the right base. When I compare method DTF and CO2-expanded method DTF, the difference is obvious. I expanded this system to also substituted one phenyl ethanol because these are important pharmaceuticals, important components. And the results was that needle disturbance afforded only low conversion where CO2-expanded liquid reaction gave higher yield. This shows user detail. It was seen using method DTF and also in Hexam. When I tried tetralol derivative, same thing happened. I mean, I use this compound because it is important pharmaceutical. I used more hindered one tetralol derivative and less hindered two tetralol derivative. For both substrates, it is improved by expanding with CO2. When I compare the rates, then in the case of one tetralol, it was 2.9 times improvement. This is more hindered. And for the case of two tetralol, it was only 1.3 times improvement. I also tested other one tetralol derivative and I changed the substituents. Then when I compare between and without carbon dioxide, it was improved up to 40 times. And when I compare between substrates, in the case where without using carbon dioxide, it was the difference between the substrates was 13 times. But when I used carbon dioxide, the difference get to be only 3.8 times. So I think about why the improvement was obtained. There are several factors we have to think about. First, hydrohobicity. For the case of methyl derivative, I think hydrohobicity affected the reaction rates. But for the case of hexane, it is, hexane is a hydrohobic, so it did not account for this. Flexibility of the endomethic is probably the most important factor to explain this. Calvary structure in the conventional sorbents has seroselective pocket. But in the liquid carbon dioxide, it's calculated it has more flexibility. So I think same thing may happen to the CO2 expanded liquid. Transport polarity of the sorbents is maybe affected by the carbon dioxide. It may be affecting a little bit because the degree of acceleration by CO2 depends on substrate. If transport property is the main factor, then all substrates will be improved. Pressure is maybe no because I did the reaction using pressurized methyl derivative and the pressurized hexane at 6 megapascals without carbon dioxide did not affect the activity. So flexibility of end time is probably the most important factor. So I so far explain the success for reaction using supercritical carbon dioxide as a sorbents. And I explained about rate acceleration of the reaction of bulky substrates using carbon dioxide expanded bio-based liquid. Next, I will talk about carbon dioxide as a substrate for carboxylation. I will introduce two reactions. They carboxylase catalyze carboxylation and isocytrate the hydrodynamic catalyze reductive carboxylation. I'll begin with the first example. In nature, carbon dioxide is used by photosynthesis by enzyme and everything necessary is produced. We should do it also using enzyme to make everything we need. From 1970s, light-based catalyze reaction was found to be reversible so that it's the hydrolysis in the presence of water but it's the esterification without carbon water. Our goal is to use the carboxylase for the reverse reaction of the carboxylation in the presence of carbon dioxide. Professor Nagasama and Yoshida in GIF University found the carboxylase from Bacillus Megathenium which catalyzes the carboxylation by law efficiently. And I wonder if equilibrium is favorable for carboxylation and the high concentration of carbon dioxide. With collaboration of their group, I tried this reaction under supercritical radical carbon dioxide and keeping pressure to be ambient. Then the yield difference was obvious. When I checked the pressure dependency, it's the yield was highest just before the critical pressure but it decreased maybe because of the carbon dioxide dissolved in the water layer decreased the pH or the activation by the carbon dioxide happening. So in this first example, high concentration of carbon dioxide was effective for the carbon dioxide but at the same time we also need better enzyme. Then I moved to the second example. Group of enzyme including are acetylate dehydrogenase and the malate dehydrogenase catalyzes the carboxylation and reduction. I used some of plasma acetophenome acetylate dehydrogenase and glucose dehydrogenase to do carboxylation reaction using gaseous carbon dioxide. In the reference, it is reported that organic solvent tolerance of the enzyme is related to the thermostability. So thermostable enzyme is also tolerance to organic solvents. I wonder if thermostable enzyme is also has high stability to add high pressure carbon dioxide. So I used the thermoplasmastophenome enzyme. At first I tried using commercially available enzyme and when I checked the stability, CO2 stability as well as thermostability, it decreased, it was very weak. And then I started using thermoplasma acetophenome because the DNA is commercially available over expression of the enzyme, these three enzymes were successfully done by using E. coli. And then I examined the thermostability and carbon dioxide stability of these two enzymes. Then we found out that it was very stable in CO, under high pressure 10 megaspascal of CO2. And then I did the reaction using at first the IDH. But the reaction unfortunately didn't proceed smoothly and only 4% of the product was obtained. Then I added glucose and glucose dehydrogenase for the recycling of the coenzyme. Then it improved dramatically to 67% from 4%. After that, we tried to further improve the versatility of these two enzymes. To make it more stable and useful, I immobilized these two enzymes by forming enzyme in organic hybrid nanocrystal. This immobilization method is reported by in 2012 and I use this method because it is a very simple method. You just have to mix the enzyme solution in phosphate baffled saring and the metal ion solution. In this case, we use manganese. Well, we tried several and we found out manganese was the best. After mixing these two solutions, you just have to incubate, then you can get precipitated enzyme. So that you just have to do the centrifugation to get this immobilized enzyme. When I compare the activity, reminding activity of the enzyme, then activity of the IDH shown in blue improved to around 200%. However, TA-ZDH activity showing orange decrease, but this is slightly get better using higher ratio of TA-IDH. Then I did the carboxylation reaction using a core immobilized enzyme with an optimized ratio. Then carboxylation yield was obtained here, was better than free enzyme or separately immobilized enzyme. In this case, I use only one megapascal of carbon dioxide. So to conclude my presentation, I utilize carbon dioxide for biocatarsis. First of all, investigated the solvents engineering. Overlipase catalyzed reaction. Flow reaction is successful and CO2 expanded by a very sticky is also useful to expand the substrate. Secondary, I need the carboxylation reaction. And for this reaction, carbon dioxide pressure was necessary to shift the reaction equilibrium to our carboxylation. But for this reaction of reductive carboxylation, NADPH recycling was necessary. So at last, I'd like to acknowledge the individual who did this work. I appreciate my students and staff in our laboratory since 2004 and the core average for dedication and hard work. And I also appreciate my supervisor in graduate school and professor Tadah O'Hara there. He was my boss where I was an assistant professor for guidance and support. And also I appreciate the funding I got before. And thank you very much for your attention and I'm happy to answer your questions. Thank you for a very nice presentation. I'm intrigued when you tested your hypothesis about the supercritical CO2 influencing the flexibility of your enzyme. Is there a way, and maybe this is a naive question but please bear with me, is there a way of changing the concentration? Basically, can you change the liquid dynamics or the fluid dynamics of the solvent by changing the ratio of the supercritical CO2 with a co-solvent in order to see whether there's a concentration dependency that you can demonstrate as far as enzyme flexibility or the consequences of enzyme flexibility is concerned? Well, conversion increased according to the CO2 pressure but for the flexibility of the enzyme is actually impossible to actually measure because it's high pressure. And I only can do it in the simulation. And I haven't done the simulation using a different concentration of carbon dioxide yet. I need to do it, but when it's obvious that hexane and carbon dioxide is different, so yeah, I will do it. Well, actually I have to ask my collaborator to do it. I mean by changing the concentration of CO2 to see the fluctuation, I mean the how root mean squared, well, how much the amino acid, each amino acid, well, some of the amino acid fluctuate, move very much after changing from hexane to liquid carbon dioxide. So I hope I can see the increase gradually when I change the carbon dioxide concentration. Yeah, thank you very much for your good suggestion. So flexibility enhance the activity, but sometimes it increases the selectivity. So if you apply the chiral synthesis or something's needs, the reaction needs specificity, is it some negative effect or not? Well, in this case, we didn't have any negative consequence. In terms of E-value, it stays high, but another example using supercritical carbon dioxide, I'm sorry, it's only in Japanese, I'm very sorry, it's Japanese, but when I use this substrate with low enantio-selectivity, this is pressure and this is enantio-selectivity. When I did the reaction in the three temperature, according to the pressure, it's decreased. Around here, it has high density, and here it has low density, so that when the density is lower, so which means the flexibility is higher, enantio-selectivity is higher, so it's opposite of what we expect, but enantio-selectivity changes sometimes, in this case, especially. Very interesting, okay, thank you. Any other questions or comments? Okay, so I'd like to close your talk. Thank you very much. Thank you again.