The Disappearance Of Madeleine McCann | Robbyn Swan & Anthony Summers

Robbyn Swan and Anthony Summers are investigative journalists, authors & experts in the Madeleine McCann case. The disappearance of Madeline McCann is the world’s best known missing child case, and the recent Netflix series has reignited interest. From messy investigations to libellous press accusations, missing evidence and thousands of worldwide sightings, this case has fascinated and perplexed the public. Today, Robbyn & Anthony will take us through the most important elements of the case, tell us what the status of the investigation is now, and tell us their opinions on what really happened to Madeleine McCann. Extra Stuff: Submit Information - www.findmadeleine.com Looking For Madeleine Book - https://amzn.to/2YDXpiR Modern Wisdom Amazon Shopfront - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/chriswillx - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by Robbyn Swan and Anthony Summers. You may recognise them from the most recent Netflix series on the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Guys, welcome to the show.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  So you are investigative journalists, but you're also married and you've been working together for about 30 years, is that right?

• 0:30Speaker 02

  That's, I think, what my wife would say.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  One of us works.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  I've never really been fond of that description, investigative journalist.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  When asked, I suppose I would, as to nail it down, am I a bank manager or an engine driver or an investigative journalist, I would go for the third. But I always think that it's a misnomer in the sense that everyone in this business, in the journalist business, should, in theory, try to dig beyond the grass that you can see and find out what's underneath.

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  I totally get that.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  That is what we do, and that's what we've done in our career together.

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  Yes. So having a look at your back catalogue of books, 9/11, Pearl Harbour, Richard Nixon and Madeleine McCann, there's some high-pressure topics in there. Do you ever find the difficulty and the emotion and the pressure of writing with quite inflammatory topics ever? Do the lines kind of get crossed with the relationship at all? Does that ever kind of come in? Or are you able to kind of mediate those pretty effectively?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  As a thoroughly cowed husband and co-author, I will leave Robyn to answer that.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  On a serious note, always the one to introduce a serious note here. You know, frankly, we're incredibly lucky to be able to do the kind of work we do. You know, what a privilege to be able to explore, you know, some of the most important cultural and historical moments of the last century. And try to bring your own little bit of extra information into that, to try to write that story well. Sure, there's pressure, and we don't always agree. But I think the reason we have found that we're able to work together well is that we have, sometimes we have slightly different strengths, but we're both incredibly relentless

• 2:40Speaker 01

  when it comes to the digging. And, you know, we really are, you know, if one isn't pushing, the other one is. And I think so, so we have a real simpatico in that way. But also, I think each of us respects the other's talent, you know. Tony has an extraordinary ability to make the complex simple. You know, to drive what we call a coach and horses through a knotty problem and make it possible for readers to understand something in a really, you know, basic but interesting way. And I think, you know, I'm pretty good at, you know, getting the big picture of things

• 3:23Speaker 01

  and, you know, delivering, you know, to the project all the nuts and bolts so that we can do that, so that we can have that material to base the story on.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  You know, I think Robin's been talking rather as though, she said, we don't, we don't really clash on things. Well, quite often, we say, no, that's not right. No, it's not right because, look, this is what I was digging up, or this is of the X hundred interviews we've done on a subject.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Do you remember that so-and-so said this? So we have to think about that. And what the important thing is that...

• 4:04Speaker 02

  That we're playing mental ping pong. And it's a terrific asset, actually. I have a friend and sometime colleague in the United States, who already done one book about that seemingly eternal story, the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. And having done one book, which was a success, and quite a serious book, not just one of those books, one more of those books about the Kennedy assassination. He'd launched into the research for a second. He has been on that now, by my most recent count, for about 25 years, possibly more, on his own. And I think that's fatal for him.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  I've got a feeling he's going to die without the book having been published. But what he lacks is what we do have, which is someone to play intellectual ping pong with, to say, "Well, I've just written these couple of paragraphs. What do you think about that? Is that fair? Isn't that fair?" All he can do is rattle around in his own head. And it's a huge advantage to have two people who are sort of on the same wavelength about things, working together.

• 5:19Chris Williamson?

  I suppose as well, when we're talking about these inflammatory topics that are highly charged, it's the sort of thing that requires quadruple checking. And you don't want to be making any errors.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  You bet. And then, of course, at the end of each book trail, you then have not only the editor. And the art of editing in publishing is, except in some circumstances, is not what once it was when I came into the business at the beginning. But then, and this is a real discipline too, not least in this case, which has seen a lot of lawsuits. You then have the lawyer. And a good lawyer will make sure that you're not making huge gratuitous errata and getting yourself into great libel suit. On the other hand, a good lawyer will be one who does not just crush what you're trying to say.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  And one has to be very careful of that.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  But I I also think, and and perhaps more important than what any what we think, or what any lawyer thinks, or or anything like that, is we are trying to get to the historical truth here. You know, in our nine eleven book, we were writing at the time that all of the nine eleven truth movement was was at its height. And there were stories circulating about World Trade Center seven and, you know, what hit the Pentagon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that just had no basis in fact. And these are people's lives, their loved ones were talking about, you know, did a missile, was it not really a plane that hit the Pentagon? Wasn't it a missile?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Well, what happened to the to the to all of the victims who are on that plane? Are you not thinking of their family? Have you no compassion when you come forward with a wild conspiracy theory about what really happened there? Have you not, as I have done, looked at the exhibits in the Musawi case? With Musawi, Zacharias Musawi, another of the the suspects in the in the nine eleven attacks? The exhibits in that case show very clearly um some horribly graphic images of the victims of the plane attack on the Pentagon. You know, this kind of, you know, conspiracy theory, fake news, it's been around a long time. And you know, it's our job as as

• 7:50Speaker 01

  historians, or journalists, or whatever you want to call us, to try to get beyond that to the actual truth of the event. Because there has to be some reality there. You know, you you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. And and that that remains true, was always true, and it will be ever thus.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  You know, you know, these days, we talk about the trolls, the internet trolls. I we we didn't have the word trolls, although it existed in stories about magic.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  It it we didn't use the word trolls in journalism, we had the cracks. And you'd know you were getting a letter from a crack. When I did my first book, I got thousands of letters, letters, those those old fashioned things.

• 8:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  That you and through the post with a stamp on them.

• 8:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  And um, and I would know immediately the the nature of the person writing to me. Um, because they would either have um, bright red ink or green ink on the cut on the address in writing the address, um, probably in capital letters, um, and written sometimes very carefully. And you knew that inside there would be a communication from a crack, possibly with with an idea, um, suggestion about the story.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  But not usually vertuperative, not usually full of venom. Now, there's a totally different phenomenon which you've seen on shore regularly, which is the stuff that comes in over the internet, which is often from people who really should be locked up.

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  Well, the the problem is that it's so easy for people to just the distance from brain to fingertips or brain to mouth has been reduced so far, um, and with ease of access. And, you know, if you guys have Twitter or Instagram or a Facebook page or whatever it is, it takes them on two seconds, they browse on a mobile app and they can uh, they can delegate their opinion out to the masses, as as it were, uh, even when a lot of the time it's probably not worthy of that. Um, so I want to get on.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Without and and without consulting their conscience.

• 10:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Or.

• 10:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, they forget.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Their own, they're without consulting their own humanity.

• 10:12Chris Williamson?

  They forget that there's a person on the other end of this. And, you know, as you touched on there, Robin. People forget, and this is a key point that I want to discuss with regards to the Madeleine McCann case, that people do forget it's not just a story. And the same thing goes for this. You guys aren't fiction writers and they're not complaining at you because you've ended the story in a way that they didn't like. It's that you're reporting the facts in as virtuously a way as you guys can. And if they don't like the way that the facts come across, presuming that you've done it with to the best of your professional abilities, they're really just arguing with reality. Their problem is, I don't like what

• 10:50Chris Williamson?

  reality is serving me. I need someone to vent at. And it happens to be that your name is on the front cover of the book or in the credits of the TV show. So moving on to the Madeleine McCann case, the first thing upon watching the most recent Netflix series, and I'm sure lots of people who are listening will have seen it as well, the first thing that struck me was how, I don't want to say bungled, but how oddly the case was dealt with upon immediate investigation in terms of the crime scene, in terms of everything else. That was, that was probably the most, one of the most shocking things I got out of it.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  When you, you mentioned the crime scene. And I guess you're thinking about the accounts, which I've obviously also, although we were interviewed for the series, we weren't part of it. In the Netflix series, we are in each episode. So we have watched it closely. And we've found that virtually everything, and I mean 99.9%, was accurate so far as we know. And we, I think ourselves in the, in the shows, discuss what happened in the crime scene.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Woman, woman goes into apartment, apparently, finds child missing. Goes out, makes a terrible cry. All the considerably large party, nine or ten people, the other doctors and their friends, come, come rushing to the apartment. They're all there, all trampling around the apartment. Um, and, um, and then they called, the police are called. When the police eventually arrived, they come in, they trample around the apartment. At some point, dogs come into the, the search dogs come into the apartment. And that is completely contrary to what the police like, the way the police like a crime

• 12:53Speaker 02

  scene to be handled, in what they call the golden hour, the first hour. That is why, uh, when one sees, for instance, a shooting in the street, you see on the news nightly, um, scenes in which the police have put up tapes and stopped people, stopped people trampling over the golden evidence, the first evidence, the evidence was there. And that wasn't done in this case. But you talk about the possible bungling and so on. Well, there was bungling at some stage in the investigation. But it does, there's also a thing called human nature. When the police were called to the apartment, they thought there was a little girl who was missing. Had she wandered off? What had happened?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Where, where was she? Maybe she's going to turn out in, turn up in the, in the wardrobe, under, under the bed. Maybe she's there ready, maybe she's just hiding from mommy and daddy. Um, and of course, none of that proved, proved to be the case. But during that time, people are not, were not thinking of the crime, a possible crime. They, they weren't thinking of something sinister that wouldn't be solved for, for more than a decade. They were just trying to find that little girl who might be here. So there was a reason and, and a sort of a justification for why the golden hour was ignored.

• 14:15Chris Williamson?

  I suppose it's a short term pain for a long term gain that you need to make a judgment on upon the beginning of the case, right? They need to, they want to think, oh, well, if she is in here somewhere, or if it's not a crime, we need to work more expeditiously rather than delicately. But obviously, the benefit of hindsight is fantastic. And looking back, you say, well, why didn't they just close the case off?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  I think, I think what you say is true, but I also think it was a resource and division of labour issue as well. But the first Portuguese police officer to arrive on the scene were the sort of local beat cops who, who, you know, would not necessarily have been all that clued into the idea of crime scene preservation, et cetera. Whereas immediately, an hour later, when the more senior detectives arrived, they were themselves horrified by this, you know, tarnishing of the, of the, of the evidence by having all these people trample it. You know, they were none too pleased with their colleagues that this had happened. And I

• 15:24Speaker 01

  think that was then compounded, that the Portuguese police's initial mistakes in terms of the crime scene were then compounded by two other things. One, they failed to clear the parents of involvement. You know, usually in cases like this, it is always a family member who you look at first. And in the words of the policeman who was responsible for reviewing this case and deciding, you know, it wasn't handled very well, he thought that they had failed to clear the, clear the ground in front of them. And that's, that's an important mistake that should have been addressed very early on. Instead, it festered. And the second thing was the involvement of the British police.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  You know, you had a crime taking, a crime or an abduction or a missing child taking place in Portugal, but she's a British child. So therefore, the parents who don't speak the language are immediately reaching out for all the support they can get. And that's coming back at them in terms of multiple police agencies, all wanting to help, all wanting to get their patch in, all wanting to be the hero. And that also didn't play well. It felt to the Portuguese like the Brits were trampling all over them and being a colonial power and being arrogant. And the Portuguese themselves became very suspicious. What are all these, you know, British police officers doing?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  And we're having, or actually having their British police colleagues followed. So the bad relationship, again, didn't help in any attempt to find Madeleine.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Also, the British thought that the Portuguese were living in the Stone Age, in the sense that they weren't computerized in the way that people from, when Scotland Yard eventually became involved, or just the police that were sent out on the Aesop first from England. They saw all the, you know, cards in boxes and the sort of temporary headquarters with a lot of paperwork and so on. People, and guys typing with two fingers on old typewriters. That's not how it happens at police headquarters in England anymore.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  And so there grew a feeling that the Portuguese felt as though they would be being, at a certain level, thought they were being treated as though they were from the Third World.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  They're not presented.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  From us.

• 17:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they're not presented fantastically well, I suppose. And there definitely does seem to be a lot of friction that you can tell between themselves and everyone else. And you've got the...

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  Chief, I think it was the chief of Portuguese police being, the times he was going for lunch and coming back were being noted down in the newspaper and the British newspapers were being quite accusatory and stuff like that. So that takes us on to the press coverage. And a question that I really wanted to ask you was, why do you think this particular case captured such international attention, both at the time and then why is it still doing it now? Was it right place, right time? Was it the, did it have the right look?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Look, the real reason, the initial reason that there was huge press coverage was because the McCanns, quite wisely they thought, wanted it. In the end, it became the bane of their existence. But that night, when they were sitting in their agony, after the police had come and the police had gone for the time being at three, four o'clock in the morning, they sat with their friends in apartment 5A with their little girl missing. And they thought, what can we do? The police, are the police doing enough? No, maybe they took a long time to come. Maybe they're not. And maybe so we should do something. They tried

• 19:22Speaker 02

  to reach out to TV stations through relatives in the UK on the telephone. And by eight or nine o'clock in the morning, the news was, it was very brief, but there was news was being broadcast on Sky News and other stations in the UK, whereas at the time it wasn't on Portuguese news, I gather, at all. And during the case, it is, there's a Portuguese law which says that information cannot be given out, should not be given out by law while it's ongoing. Now, that's very different from the reality, which later on involved...

• 20:04Speaker 02

  You know, people saying things on the QT, saying on the quiet, saying to journalists, "We can't, we're not telling you this really, but..." happens everywhere. It's an old fashioned police tactic, but it got let loose. But anyway, from McCann's own effort, the press first knew about it. But what the McCanns, by their own admission, also thought was, "Wait a minute, this is the age of the internet." Gerry McCann, the father, had a sister, I believe, called

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Philomena, in the north of Scotland, who was hip to computers and who had students, and she brought her students, or former students, into a garage, a sort of makeshift shed, where they sat. And within, what, 24, 36 hours, people in New Zealand knew about this case, people who would never otherwise have known about it, which had the effect of getting Madeline's picture, the picture of the little girl, out there to millions, whereas in a similar case in the past, it would not have gone out to millions, or certainly not for

• 21:22Speaker 02

  a very long time. And in the end, though, starting an avalanche of chatter on the internet, chatter which was often far from responsible.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  I think you are totally right that it became a monster of its own and started to roll along on its own momentum. It's a difficult situation, you know, to the listeners at home. I wonder what they think they would have done in that situation. Would you have allowed the police to have conducted the investigation quietly? Would you have thought that that was the best route? Or would you have tried to react by getting as much information, as much exposure as possible to have this, have the photo of this little girl out there? I... I would guess that the vast majority of people would just want maximum exposure as much it feels like you're doing something, right, like you you're helpless in this situation.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  What can I do? What can I actually? How can I impact and help? Um, you know, you're not an investigator. You don't understand forensics. You don't have these sort of things. So one of the things you can do is disseminate, right?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  But that's that's not only your natural reaction, but it's also the best advice from from the experts in the field. You know, some of your listeners might be too young to remember it, but years ago, when, you know, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US first got going, for instance, they were behind a great campaign where missing children's faces were put on those those cardboard milk cartons. And that was a way of getting maximum exposure, because everybody got a carton of milk.

• 23:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  That was a way of getting maximum exposure for every missing child. And it's a brilliant tool. And the internet is a wonderful and enormous milk carton in that sense. But so we do, I mean, it could, it can be incredibly effective. And what we do know is that publicity does help. You know, there was a recent case, I believe in Minnesota, where a young a young girl was missing for a period of months, and she was spotted by a passerby because her face was recognized. You see these kind of things in the Elizabeth Smart case. Again, she was recognized. There was an oddity about the, you know, the scene she was seen in by

• 23:47Speaker 01

  a passerby and was brought to police attention. So the idea that maximum exposure isn't the right thing is actually wrong. It is the right thing, but it can turn around and bite you back.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  And it could, sorry, it could have been precisely the right thing in the case of of little Madeline McCann. Not least because Madeleine McCann had a thing called a color bulma, which is a scientific word, medical word for a blemish, in her right pupil of her right eye. Which if you were, if she was walking past you in a store or along the pavement, you wouldn't notice immediately that it was a blemish, it was an obvious thing. So in those first days when she was missing and even later, if you had, if people's attention had been drawn to this feature of her eyes,

• 24:43Speaker 02

  then perhaps she, she could have, might have been recognised and, and the police or the shop security or wherever could, could, could have been called. So it was, it was like the picture on the milk carton, it was a relevant thing to do.

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I understand. Why, why was there so much flip flopping and so many very inflammatory headlines about this case? I don't know how it works with libelous press coverage and stuff like that, but upon reading just a cross section that you see on the documentary, it struck me just how outlandish some of the headlines were, like Robert Murat being accused of everything under the sun. The, I think he's a Swiss national, the guy that was the computer programmer. Russian. Russian. Russian. He was being accused of everything under the sun.

• 25:39Chris Williamson?

  They'd flip flop from the police being at fault to the McCanns being at fault, to the dogs, to not the dogs, to, it just seemed like the most temperamental and maximally extreme headlines that could come out about this case at all times. Is, is that, is there an understatement, explanation for that?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  It sells papers? That I don't mean, I, this case continues to sell papers. It's, it's, it's a terrible, terrible truth. But the, the real thing that seemed to be going on during that summer of two thousand and seven, going into the fall of two thousand and eight, is that the, the, the police, the Portuguese police were becoming frustrated with the way they were being portrayed in the British press. So they were leaking to their Portuguese press contacts, little bits of information that they were developing that was counter to the narrative of the McCanns as victims. That would get printed in the Portuguese press and then picked up and reprinted in the British press

• 26:48Speaker 01

  with a few little nuances of their own, the translation issue, et cetera. That would then in turn come back and play again into the Portuguese press system. So they were reporting on the reporting, and, and they were reporting on the leaks, and it just kept building on itself. And then you had a point in the summer where, in their frustration, the Portuguese police did something that they had been offered at the beginning of the summer, which is they took the British police up on the offer of using these highly trained police dogs. And from the moment the police dogs arrived on the scene in Portugal, the entire sort of focus of the case turned from a missing child investigation

• 27:33Speaker 01

  to a, a sort of murder inquiry. And, and once that happened, it became open season on the McCanns. There was, there was virtually nothing that couldn't be printed about them, that, that editors wouldn't approve because they were getting it from multiple quote unquote sources. And, and, you know, it, it was, you know, they felt they had journalistic and libel cover to do that because there was such a plethora of reporting coming out of Portugal that the British media could pick up on. So it just fed itself.

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  It's so bizarre how, um... Fact being reported becomes the next story, not the facts itself. And it does, I can see how this kind of ever growing sphere of crazy stories starts to become a feedback loop and feed itself. So you touched there upon the dog, the cadaver dog and the blood dog, I think are the two, the two that were brought in. The dog handler himself says these, you can't ask the dog what it means, it's a very kind of rough hewn result, but it definitely seems like, am I right in saying that?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  It can give you, it's a hint, it could give you a clue to what might be physical evidence.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  As it turned out, it was quite the contrary. But in the, he told, he told me, she said, he said, she said, it became, and with the police by that time, being under, in Portuguese terms, extraordinary pressure and feeling pressured, they've got to do something, they've got to get somewhere. It was a great shining light, a moment of maybe truth.

• 29:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  The, this is, the dogs have discovered real evidence and the evidence points to Madeline's blood in the apartment 5A and doesn't this point to a possible accident? And the idea is, well, a possible accident in which she might have died and might it be that, that the McCanns had somehow accidentally as doctors, done something to lead to the death of their own child and then kept her body and the fable began to just grow like topsy. And journalists and reporters who ought to have known better and editors in London who should have known much better and should have said, wait a minute, what do we actually

• 30:12Speaker 02

  knew? No. Ran wild, it was a terrible circus and it took time within the police investigation for the circus to be, to be corrected. And Rob can talk, talk better to that because I think we should make clear that in the end, there was no DNA evidence that pointed to anyone at all.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  You know, the Portuguese police system is different from what we're used to in lots of places in Western Europe. It's a sort of prosecutorial system in which the police come up with a hypothesis about where, what they think the evidence may support. Whereas, we kind of come at it the other way. We have the evidence and then we see where the evidence kind of goes. So there are slightly different nuances there. And so, the scenario that Tony was just describing, which to us now, having read all of the evidence,

• 31:18Speaker 01

  actually is a scenario that is put forward by a senior investigator in the Portuguese Police Department in September of 2007. I, you know, that Madeleine, you know, met an accidental death in the apartment, that her parents hid her body, that they transported it later, and that the McCanns and their friends are all involved in a pact of silence. And in his words, that everyone was lying. And in fact, when we traced the actual evidence that had come in, back before he came up with this hypothesis, you could see that he was basing it on mistranslations, misreadings of incomplete reports, a lack of, a complete lack of evidence.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Not necessarily through his fault, but it was just a compilation of all of those things. So, for instance-

• 32:10Speaker 02

  And misinterpretation of a British forensic report.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  For instance, when the dogs did their barking and made their alerts, they went and they did some scrapings and lifts from various places, and started to do the DNA analysis of those. And what they found was that in none of the places that they actually lifted samples from, could they identify any substance as being blood. They identified no DNA as having belonged to Madeleine McCann, and they didn't, and identified no DNA as belonging to any specific member of the McCann family. They did find some DNA of Jerry McCann on a key fob. Well, they might have done, because he was holding the key fob, because it was for the car he was driving. So, there, you know, there-

• 32:56Speaker 01

  The DNA evidence was just not there to support the hypothesis the Portuguese police had come to bank on. And, you know, we put this evidence, the alleged forensic evidence, to a senior Irish forensic scientist. And she examined it and she said to us, you know, this is a whole lot of nothing. And that's what we had, a whole lot of nothing.

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  Is the only evidence which links the McCann family to the disappearance of Madeline the dogs and the subsequent DNA furor that came around that?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Well, it isn't the only evidence because the great feature of this case, and it can't be said often enough, is there wasn't, isn't any evidence, no evidence that we've known about and that we've all come to learn about it anyway. There's no evidence. There is witness testimony, lots of it, which is interesting to explore. But basically, there is no evidence.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  I think that is the only suspicious finding.

• 34:05Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  People have question marks over the timeline presented by the McCanns, but the police have concluded that the timeline discrepancies are the discrepancies of people telling the truth about an event they're being asked to recall, you know, in a time of stress. And people don't necessarily get things to the minute correct. They were on a holiday, you know, they were at a dinner table, they may be off by three minutes, they may be off by five, but essentially, people told the same story consistently enough that they were credible. You know, I think police officers quite often and other investigators, if somebody's story is too perfect, that's more of a worry than, you know, the nine people who are all basically telling you what they remember.

• 34:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  And everybody's memory is going to be a little bit different because she was tying her shoe at the time, or she was worrying about her own crying baby. But essentially, they all told the same story.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  I mean, anyone who's listening, who has ever tried to think back to a situation which occurred even a day ago, under no stress, being able to get your timeline perfectly accurate. And then on top of that, people who are listening as well, think about the last time that there was a even slightly big secret that was held by more than five of your friends. Like, it's lasted, it's lasted microseconds before everybody knows about it. The, the thought that the entire party of nine to 10 people were all complicit in, in a disappearance and then covering it up and then never telling anyone and no one ever slipping up, et cetera, et cetera. It seems very, it seems very unlikely.

• 35:41Chris Williamson?

  So you, you touched on it there. There's no evidence of where Madeleine McCann went. Is this almost as if someone's gone in and just plucked her out of thin air and poof?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, entirely. I mean, she, as I said, it can't be stressed enough, so I'm going to boringly stress it again. There is no evidence. It was, she just vanished, to all intents and purposes, completely vanished. What has been interesting down the months has been quarrying the, um, the testimony. Look, if, if there were three possibilities, how did the little girl vanish from the flat? Possibility one, did she, as the little girl who is about to be four years old, did she wander out of the, the apartment that night, maybe going to show mommy and daddy she was about to be four?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Look, mommy and daddy, I'm big enough to come to your restaurant table, which was just 60 yards as the crow flies, the other side of the swimming pool.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Here I am. And did she try to do that? Well, and did she, that was then an opportunist abduction? Maybe unlikely, that happens to bump into the one fellow or woman in the street who wants to steal a child? Pretty unlikely, but there is a possibility. The streets were riddled at that time with deep trenches.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  They were redoing the sewer and water system for the town. Deep, I mean really deep trenches. And it is not a stupid theory, hypothesis, to wonder whether she fell into one of these trenches and maybe got covered up by the first scoop of the bulldozer in the morning. But the workmen who were working on the trenches said they hadn't seen anything like that. So that is one possibility. Second possibility, which Scotland Yard pursued for quite a while, was it a burglary gone wrong?

• 37:55Speaker 02

  There had been a rash of burglaries, an awful lot of burglaries, which incidentally none of the people staying at that beach resort had been warned about. But people breaking into apartments to steal money, to steal a camera, steal a phone. Had a burglary gone wrong? Had the little girl started to make a noise while the burglar was there? Had something gone terribly wrong when you tried to silence her? Well, conceivably, there's no evidence of it, except that there were burglaries and there were some men suspected or being involved in those burglaries,

• 38:39Speaker 02

  whose phones were near the apartment that night, checks eventually found. And that they were interviewed and were, for a while, formal suspects. But there's no evidence that happened. There is, however, a third possibility, which we have leaned towards. We're not claiming to know anything that is special, but we have gathered all the information. And the information that makes us lean towards the notion that she may have been abducted deliberately, in a planned abduction from the flat.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  There is pretty good information from three or four witnesses that the apartment was watched in those days and on the day itself of Man and Disappearance. Man seeming to noticeably be leaning on a wall, looking, eyeballing Apartment 5A

• 39:45Speaker 02

  on different days and seen by the same witness on different days. And then on the very afternoon of the disappearance, when the McCanns and the children were out playing tennis or at the beach, doing the things you do on holiday. A woman in an apartment above the McCanns looked down and saw a man who seemed to

• 40:10Speaker 02

  sort of emerge furtively into the alleyway. This is in the afternoon. And then leave by the little gate that led to the main street, seeming to check the gate to see if it made a noise, as if to see if it made a noise. Did it squeak or something like that? It looked like somebody on a reconnaissance operation. Whether it was or not is another matter, but it did look like that. There is also the matter of the charity workers and perhaps Robin would like to describe that.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Well, there were in that period, just around the time Man and disappeared, men going door to door in the Ocean Club Resort and in the apartment complexes nearby, collecting for what they claimed was an orphanage in a nearby village. Well, we went to the nearby village and there wasn't and had never been anything like an orphanage there. We contacted the state agency that operates such programs. Never was an orphanage there. So these men, whatever they were doing, it wasn't collecting for an orphanage. Now, perhaps they were casing for burglaries later. Perhaps they were just pulling off a small fraud, collecting bits and bobs of change. But perhaps they were also doing something else.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  And one of the most troubling incidents we heard about and we were told about was one in which a charity collector came to the door. And while the mother of the house was dealing with him, she noticed that the man seemed to be talking to her but looking over her shoulder at her three-year-old daughter who was playing on the floor behind her.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Later that day, she noticed the man loitering about. The following day, while she was upstairs doing the laundry, she started to come down the stairs. And as she did so, she noticed that the man was in her living room with her three-year-old child. Now, as soon as he caught sight of the mother, he scampered away, back out the door and gone, and she didn't catch up to him. But given that, you know, charity collector, three-year-old girl, it does sound troubling. And those things were not properly investigated at the time, and were being investigated by the British police and their Portuguese counterparts in this latter investigation that has taken

• 42:34Speaker 01

  place since 2011.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  But the third possibility, and the thing that we've just described about the charity workers, maybe part of the third possibility, is, and it's really startling, it didn't emerge for years until Scotland Yard put it together and made it public, which is that in the years before and just after Madeleine disappeared, there had been twenty-eight, twenty-eight episodes of an intruder coming, getting into flats and apartments, usually with British children, within forty miles of Pride of Luce.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Now, that's a high rate of intrusions by any standards in a small place. And the man would come in, usually appeared to be from the descriptions of the children, as far as they could manage from being working in the night, was a swarthy man with stubble on his face, talking English but in an evidently foreign accent with a sort of funny smell about him which the children couldn't describe. And in one particularly chilling incident, which we found out about actually,

• 43:58Speaker 02

  that the man had come in and got onto the bed with a little girl whose sister was in the room, and she'd said something like, "Is that you daddy?" And of course it wasn't daddy. And the man though, had had a medical mask over his face, covering his mouth and most of his cheeks, and had cloth, towels or tablecloth or cloth round his feet. One would think perhaps to make sure he didn't leave footprints on the pocket floor, that sort of thing.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  And on that occasion, the little girl was not sexually assaulted in any way, but on other occasions, the little girls had been sexually assaulted. Now, the local constabulary, we described this before, there were two constabularies, two police forces in Portugal, the Guardia Fidel, which is the regular policeman, the guy who drives the patrol car around, the guy who does traffic duty and so on, and the PJ, the Policia Judiciária, who do investigations. Now, clearly, breaking into houses and messing with little girls

• 45:24Speaker 02

  is a job for the PJ, the Policia Judiciária. And in almost all occasions, the mothers of those other children have said, only the local cops came and took down a few details and then abled away and there was no follow-up. It is a shocking realization. It plays into the theory coupled to the man watching, the man testing the gate, and the suspect charity collectors. It all plays into the notion that she was deliberately abducted.

• 46:03Chris Williamson?

  That would also, the fact that the intruder was so prepared, it would appear with a mask over his face, with towels around his feet, would play into the fact that there was no prints that were found at the crime scene of Madeleine's disappearance.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  It might.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  It might, indeed.

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  Was there a partial palm print?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  There were a few partial prints. They were later identified, and please don't quote me on this, because most of them were not identifiable. One of them belonged to Kate McCann, one of them belonged to one of the police officers who was doing the fingerprint work, I believe. Again, not great disciplines in some cases, in terms of gathering the fingerprints.

• 46:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  One thing we haven't touched on, and again, it's important evidence, and it's important in terms of people as they're thinking about this case, is that there were two sightings that night that have been considered of particular possible relevance, which is that at about nine fifteen, please forgive me, I don't have the paperwork in front of me, the McCann's friend, Jane Tanner, was coming back from the Tappas area where they were having their meal, and as she was approaching the intersection of the street on which the McCann's apartment was located, she saw a man, a man who appeared to be dressed, not like a tourist, but in

• 47:32Speaker 01

  more sort of heavy, proper clothing than you normally saw the tourists in, a dark jacket and a kind of mustardy or tanny trousers, with dark hair slightly long at the back. And this man was carrying a child, and he was carrying the child like this, which you can't really see in your podcast, but with his arms outstretched, and the little child laying across them in a kind of awkward posture. But the child seemed to be deeply asleep. And she was wearing pajamas, he or she was wearing pajamas. And the reason I use the word she is because the pajama pants apparently had a light pink or florally pattern. Much as later was described by Kate McCann, the pajamas of Madeline had been that night.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Now, lots of little girls wear such pajamas. It's not a definitive thing by any means. That man was seen. For years, one didn't know who he was. Um, in twenty thirteen, the British investigators, uh, the, the police came forward and said they thought that they knew who the man was at this point. And that he had come forward originally and identified himself and had not ever found its way into the record. And that he was a British tourist, uh, another doctor in fact, who'd been carrying his own daughter home from the babysitting service from the creche.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Completely legit.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  There's only one oddity in that, and those of us who have looked at this case closely have all registered it. And that's that the direction that the man that Jane Tanner saw seemed to have been traveling in the opposite direction of the man that the man might or should have been taking, had he been doing that. Now, we can't explain that, we cannot explain that anomaly. It perhaps has been, uh, satisfied, satisfactorily explained to the police. I would note that the McCann family's website, where they keep a kind of updated, um, postings on this case, they remain, that, that, the, the police artist sketch of that man remains up and he is still considered a perfect person of interest.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  So I think there may still be some small doubt about that. And then there's a second incident, um, a second incident, um, at about ten o'clock that night, um, described by an Irish family, perhaps Tony would like to describe that one.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Well, it, it about ten o'clock that night, which is precisely the moment that back at apartment five A, um, Mrs. McCann found her child missing. Um, and another, another man, or a, a man was seen carrying a child coming down.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  The steps, actually, it's a sort of street of steps. By a family of, a large Irish family of, what, eight, eight, eight?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Nine people.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  A large, a large family. And he, the, the, the memory was that he didn't say anything. I, I believe they said, "Good night", because it was late, "Good evening", or what's that? And he did, just didn't respond, walked solidly on. Now, he, he could have been another innocent father bringing his child home. Or, could he, could he maybe have been, could this have been another sighting, a relevant sighting, of an abductor taking Madeleine away? There, there is no answer has been found of this. Much confusion has been caused over it.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Because at one point, the father in that family that saw the child, that child being, being carried, later saw, had, had seen Gerry McCann, Madeleine's father, arriving back in Leicestershire off a plane. And he thought, "Oh, that looks like the guy we saw that night." But the rest of the family didn't think this. I, I think the, the father in the family thought it possibly because of the way that he was, Gerry McCann was carrying one, one of his other children at, at, at the time that he was getting off the plane.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  And put, put, somehow put two and two together, made about twenty.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  They, they explained it on his gait, didn't they? They said that's the posture of someone.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. He thought it, his posture and his gait.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  His posture, it just reminded him. On the, on the, there are only so many ways to carry a baby.

• 52:06Chris Williamson?

  That's it, yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  And, and most of the point in, in this episode is the fact that there is multiple evidence that at that moment at ten o'clock, Gerry McCann was first at the Tapas restaurant with, with his crowd of, of friends, having his dinner, and then rushing to help his wife and searching, searching for Madeleine. So. The man on the street with the steps wasn't him.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  What was the distance between the Tapas restaurant or apartment five A and the sighting by the Smith family?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  We, when we walked it, it's, it's not five minutes. It's, it's very close.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Um, you know, it's.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not sure, but it wasn't, it wasn't.

• 52:48Chris Williamson?

  So if the, the implication from Jane Tanner, you said was nine fifteen?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  The Jane, yeah, so there's a, it, it seems odd for it have to have been the same man. That seems very unlikely. Unless he paused somewhere.

• 53:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Because there's a forty five minute gap, forty five minute ish gap between one sighting and the other. Now you are relying on both Jane Tanner and the Smiths being very exact in their timings, but they, they are pretty reasonable in their timings because of Jane Tanner was timing things sort of because of when she was doing checks on children and the, the Irish family. I, I think they timed, they were timing it to the time of, of sort of, but pub closings.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Bar, bar closing time. I forget the exact detail, but one knew the, the time more or less. You, you, you go to an important point then, though, here, here though, about the timing. You're on holiday, you're going out to dinner. There's no suggestion, by the way, that anyone was roaring drunk, uh, uh, uh, any, any of the individuals involved. But you're on holiday, it's getting dark, it's late, pubs are closing, and bar, the bars, coffee bar, they're closing. It's the end of the day and you're all on holiday. You're not watching a watch to see whether, in the case of the doctors, that they've got to go to another patient. They were relaxing on holiday. You can't. I don't know what I was doing at precisely two o'clock this afternoon.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  And I'm sure you don't either.

• 54:19Chris Williamson?

  Agreed. So I wanted.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  It isn't yet.

• 54:23Chris Williamson?

  No, no, yeah. In three hours' time, I'll work out whether or not it is. Um, so I wanted to touch on, on two things, uh, before we finish up. So, uh, firstly, I wanted to ask what the current status of the investigation is.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  The current stage of the investigation is that every year for the last couple of years, the Met has asked for a small tranche of money, a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to cover, you know, six months of work or three months of work. And they have scaled back their team from about thirty officers to only three or four. They have said repeatedly that they are pursuing a line of inquiry, that they want to finish before they conclude their investigation. They have a line of inquiry that they think important enough to continue to want to pursue.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  The money always seems to run out in March and in September, and they have just requested funding for a full year. Now, that's interesting. It's interesting to us, and this can only be conjecture, one would imagine they wouldn't be doing that unless they thought, A, that it was completable in that amount of time, or that they had something that they thought was important enough, but perhaps a little bit more complex than they originally had forecast it would be, that they really needed to work on for that time. So, so one wonders, the investigation is continuing, it remains an open investigation

• 56:02Speaker 01

  in Portugal as well, but as of this moment, we're in a, rather in a bit of a news vacuum.

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  How about, how about the McCann's private investigation? Is that, obviously, they will still be doing things themselves, but...

• 56:20Speaker 02

  My impression, and it can only be an impression, we have not been involved with the McCanns personally, person to person, for some time now, for a matter of years. But we, we, we had the impression that even then, as soon as Scotland Yard took over the case in England, and then the Portuguese who had shelved the case up to then, got back in to the investigation themselves.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Liaising anecably at that point with Scotland Yard. That the McCanns, who had previously used private investigators to dig all over Europe and further and beyond, that they ceased and left it to the police, which was only right. You can't have cops and private detectives all going at things, hammering chongs at the same time. My impression is that they are now waiting, being briefed by Scotland Yard when it is relevant to brief them, and trying to get on with their lives. A very

• 57:29Speaker 02

  difficult task because they are still pursued venomously by the internet trolls.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  So this touches upon-

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Who are still spreading poison about their supposed involvement in the death of their own daughter.

• 57:46Chris Williamson?

  This-

• 57:47Speaker 02

  I don't think we've had a moment to stress it. And if we are soon to complete this conversation, we should, we would like to stress the fact that in all the work we've done on this case, we never found an iota of an indication that the McCanns had in any way been guiltily involved in their daughter's disappearance.

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  That was the point that I wanted to finish on, which is, I think, because of the obsession, I have a number of friends who like to read crime drama, NCIS and true crime detective things, a lot of podcasts, Atlanta Monster, The Zodiac Killer, all of these stories, which are some fiction, some fact, and then somewhere between adaptations and all of the rest of it. There is a obsession at the moment, or a particular kind of almost romanticising of these cases in the general public. And I think very quickly what people forget is that there are real people on the other side of this.

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  It's what we touched on in the beginning, that when the internet trolls go at it with regards to authors like yourselves, they forget that it's not just a title, it's an actual person behind it. And one thing that kept on coming to me throughout watching the Netflix series was if, as the evidence would suggest, the McCanns aren't implicated in the disappearance of their daughter, if that is true, the extra degree of suffering that the McCanns have been put through is almost unfathomable.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  And unforgivable.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  You said it incredibly well, that is absolutely true. If, you know, the evidence suggests that the McCanns are the victims of a crime or a terrible tragedy. And to see them daily, having brickbats thrown at them, even seeing that there are those who, even having seen the Netflix film, which I think comes out firmly, they did enormous amounts of research, and it comes out firmly showing the flawed investigation that led to the McCanns being implicated. There are still people who are using that as an excuse to vilify the McCanns.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  And I just think, where is your compassion?

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  There is, you know, one thing we should say, we've sort of lost touch in this long conversation with Madeline herself. Is Madeline herself alive? Could she be alive? Well, the answer is, perhaps. The best of the child protection experts in the world say one should never leave hope, and there is a significant figure. The only published statistics on this are in the United States. Of children that have disappeared, the latest figures show 40% end up sadly.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Are found dead or known to have died. Fifty six percent eventually turn up even after ten, fifteen, twenty years. And so, parents should never leave, lose hope. And I think the clear indication is that the McCanns have not and refuse to lose hope.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  It's a very, it's thinking about what the McCanns go through. I'm an empathetic individual and for anyone else listening out there who is as well, it's painful to watch the way that they go through the situation and they're forced to do these press interviews and, and try and, they're getting scrutinized for the fact that Gerry McCann and his, his wife don't show enough emotion. And you're like, well, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to break down crying on air or do you want me to get the message across which we think will actually help our daughter? Should I be over dramatic or should I try and be productive? And, you know, I ask for the people who are listening to think, how would they have reacted? Like genuinely, genuinely, how would you have reacted in this situation?

• 1:02:17Chris Williamson?

  What, what would the, your capacity to hold your emotions have been? Cause I've worked on the front door of nightclubs for over a decade and I see when someone gets knocked back by a doorman that they lose their shit. Their, their, their arms are in the air and they're saying that their dad's a solicitor and this is gonna happen. And you think, right, this was a nat, a nanogram compared with the situation that these people go through. And how, how are you, but there's no way to prepare for this. One point that I thought was very, very interesting, which was done by the Russian computer programmer that was briefly implicated because he'd done Robert Marat's website.

• 1:02:57Chris Williamson?

  One thing he says on the Netflix show is, no one teaches you how to behave in this situation. And he's referring to when he comes out of the, his apartment, I think he gets into a car and he drives away. And essentially what he says is, at no point in your life are you taught what is the optimal strategy to do when this happens? And you extrapolate that forward to the higher degree of scrutiny over a longer term that the McCanns have been through. And you think, well, yeah, what, what becomes normal? What is normal in that situation?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  There's no such thing as normal when the child that you have, the precious child that you have come by, thanks to IVF, as in the case of Madeleine, disappears off the face of the earth, just like that. There's nothing normal.

• 1:03:54Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. Guys, I really appreciate your time for coming on today. Am I right in thinking that there is an updated version of your book now available?

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  There is. There is an updated version of our book, Looking for Madeleine. And if you would like to, we can, I don't know what you use for your publicity, but we can send you a cover of the book. We don't.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  We don't have the physical book in our hands yet.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  In our hands.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Because we're in Ireland and our publisher is in England. It was only, went on the streets at the moment, the Netflix series came out. But we can send you a JPEG of it, which.

• 1:04:35Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Well, to the listeners.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Very grateful if you would use.

• 1:04:39Chris Williamson?

  That's fine. To the listeners who want to, as you know, the Modern Wisdom Amazon shop front will have this book in the show notes below. All you need to do is click through. If you do purchase from there, you will be supporting the show at no extra cost to yourself. And also, you will be able to do some further reading on what has been a reignited and fascinating topic. If you have some friends who you know enjoyed the documentary, please share this episode with them. I'm sure that they would be interested to find out some more information about this. And I'm right in thinking that Anthony and Robin, you're about to go and begin work on another book. Is that right?

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Yes. You tell us, what should we be writing about?

• 1:05:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. Well, I'll tell you what, if the listeners.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Done. I even, in my foolishness, a long time ago, did a book that hasn't been torn to pieces by the hounds yet, on the Kennedy assassination. We did a biography of Richard Nixon. You've named some of the books we've done. What should we be doing next?

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. What was I like? Well, the Mueller report's just come out.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  A good idea.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  I think one or two other people might be paying attention to.

• 1:05:56Chris Williamson?

  I think a couple of people.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  And to a man called Trump. We have a thought of doing a book about nuclear warfare, nuclear matters. And because I find that whereas my generation and people younger than me were acutely aware of the nuclear threat during the Cold War and so on.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  That now you talk to anybody under forty, really, and to an awful lot of people under forty or younger and say, Hiroshima, and they say, what? Didn't quite get that. They really don't know what it was. And mention Three Mile Island to them, which of course is not a bomb, but a disastrous leak of radiation from a pipeline. And they say, Three Mile Island? Somebody said to me, Three Mile Island? Well, that must be where they dropped another of those bombs. So we think that since the nuclear threat is still real, that maybe we'll write about that.

• 1:07:08Chris Williamson?

  So I will put in the show notes below for anyone who would care to listen to it. But Sam Harris recently did a podcast with Professor Nick Bostrom from the Future of Humanities Institute. And this guy is the world's expert on existential threats, essentially. And the particular discussion that he had was very grounding. I've listened to a lot of Nick's work and some of the listeners will have done as well. But I'll send it to you guys once we finish. I highly recommend that. Another interesting point for people who listened to my episode with Jordan Hall, the owner and founder of Neurohacker, also the founder of the DivX codec from 20 years ago. He is thinking about how to redesign civilization as a whole

• 1:07:53Chris Williamson?

  from game A to game B, a game which is based on conflict to a game which is based on collaboration. And one of the things that he brought up there when you're talking about the nuclear threat and existential threats generally at the behest of humans in the world is that as technology advances, previously it would have taken huge resources to cause a small amount of damage. As time progresses and technology progresses, unfortunately, it swings to the other side. And as Nick Bostrom's famous example is, he says, "We didn't know what it took to create an atomic bomb." Now, it could have taken putting sand in a microwave.

• 1:08:37Chris Williamson?

  If all that it took to create an atomic bomb was to put sand in a microwave, you would have this emancipated, delegated, distributed capacity for destruction on a huge scale in the hands of people who have a kitchen appliance. Now, fortunately, because of the way that physics are put together, that's not the case. But it might not have been so. It might have been the case. When some of the first atomic bombs were detonated in the atmosphere, they didn't know whether or not it was going to literally ignite the entire atmosphere. And they were prepared to do those tests.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Take that chance.

• 1:09:12Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. So I think, hey, if you guys, if you go for nuclear endgame and that sort of stuff, we're going to have you back. I would love, I would love to discuss that one as well. Although if it takes 25 years, we may be, we may be waiting.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  No, we're not allowed, we're not allowed to take 25 years to do a book. We have, we have children to support.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  You know that the song that they play at the end of Doctor Strangelove, or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is, "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when. But I know we'll meet again someday. So maybe we'll meet again when we do the nuclear book."

• 1:09:50Chris Williamson?

  That sounds fantastic. Guys, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Thank you, Chris.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  Thank you.