Speaker 1: Jack JP laps Fan Solar System. This is Dicky Bird
Speaker 1: here from Australia. The date today is the twenty fourth
Speaker 1: of December Christmas Eve on twenty twenty four, and it
Speaker 1: is exactly ten years to the date that I first
Speaker 1: listened to an episode of The Lapsed Fan. That episode
Speaker 1: was the WrestleMania X seven episode. I can't remember how
Speaker 1: long it was. I want to say it was like
Speaker 1: seven hours long. It was probably not even that long,
Speaker 1: maybe just because it sounds like the short end of
Speaker 1: a twenty twenty four episode of The Lapsed Fan. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: it is a day that I will remember forever, and
Speaker 1: it is an episode that I will remember forever. Funnily enough,
Speaker 1: I was actually put onto The Lapsed Fan through Twitter
Speaker 1: by someone called Simon Miller, and probably a lot of
Speaker 1: people know who this is. He's actually a wrestler now
Speaker 1: and for a long time was a contributor on What Culture,
Speaker 1: but at the time he was none of these things.
Speaker 1: At the time, I listened to a podcast where he
Speaker 1: was the editor of a video game website, and I
Speaker 1: listened to their podcast which he was frequently on, and
Speaker 1: I followed him on Twitter and on Twitter. Ten years
Speaker 1: ago today, he wrote, if you've ever had any interest
Speaker 1: in WWE slash F, you need to listen to the
Speaker 1: latest The Lapsed Fan on WrestleMania X seven. It's an
Speaker 1: audio documentary for your ears, and that piqued my interest
Speaker 1: a lot.
Speaker 2: I checked it out.
Speaker 1: And the one thing that I was immediately taken by
Speaker 1: was the duration of or should I say, the length
Speaker 1: and girth of the episode. Of course, you hear a
Speaker 1: lot from people saying, oh, it's too long, and da
Speaker 1: da dah and blah blah blah, But the truth is
Speaker 1: I was actually looking for a lengthy podcast at the time.
Speaker 1: I needed to listen to podcasts to go to sleep,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the podcasts that I listened to,
Speaker 1: you know, they were like thirty forty minutes long. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't that I couldn't get to sleep in thirty
Speaker 1: or forty minutes time, but the idea that I only
Speaker 1: had thirty or forty minutes to get myself to sleep
Speaker 1: created enough anxiety that I would not be able to
Speaker 1: get to sleep in that time, and often my phone
Speaker 1: would then play something else afterwards that I probably didn't
Speaker 1: want to listen to, so I would have to stop
Speaker 1: trying to get to sleep, put on the next thing,
Speaker 1: em ronson repeat, do this.
Speaker 2: So whether it was.
Speaker 1: Three hours, four hours, five hours, seven hours, you know,
Speaker 1: the truth is once I found this, I slept a
Speaker 1: lot better because I did not have any anxiety about
Speaker 1: what if I'm still awake at the end of this episode.
Speaker 1: But what was actually more interesting is what happened about
Speaker 1: a week later. Exactly a week later, my girlfriend at
Speaker 1: the time, who is now the mother of my children,
Speaker 1: she was living in.
Speaker 2: Melbourne, had you know.
Speaker 1: We had we had met each other, and then she
Speaker 1: decided that she was gonna move there, and we were
Speaker 1: still kind of like, you know whatever, seeing each other,
Speaker 1: and I was going to go and.
Speaker 2: Visit her for New Year's Eve.
Speaker 1: New Year's even Melbourne is absolutely delightful.
Speaker 2: I recommend it to anybody.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful city and New Year's Eve there is
Speaker 1: it makes it even better.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I was gonna like leave my job.
Speaker 1: My contract on my job was like expiring in six
Speaker 1: months anyway, so I was like, well, you know, if
Speaker 1: we're still together by then, I'll just move to Melbourne.
Speaker 1: So I went down to visit her, spend a couple
Speaker 1: of days in Melbourne and New Year's Eve. And so
Speaker 1: New Year's Eve rolled around and we.
Speaker 2: Went to a friend of hers place.
Speaker 1: And the friend offered me some speed.
Speaker 2: And I took that speed.
Speaker 1: Because I, you know, if I'm going to do drugs,
Speaker 1: they got to be uppers, not downers. And it was
Speaker 1: a great time to be had. Went hard, drank my
Speaker 1: weight and alcohol, sniffed my nose off and in speed,
Speaker 1: and then you know, the sun started to come up
Speaker 1: and we were all caked out of our brains on
Speaker 1: the front porch of this house in Melbourne, and you know,
Speaker 1: you know that feeling. Maybe you don't, some people will
Speaker 1: know that feeling where it's just like you know that
Speaker 1: you know this is the end of the party, the
Speaker 1: end of the good time. It's coming to an end.
Speaker 1: You don't want to let go, but your body cannot
Speaker 1: give anything else.
Speaker 2: And then her.
Speaker 1: Friend turns to me and says, would you like a
Speaker 1: tab of LSD? And at this point of course I
Speaker 1: should have said no, because I've never had LSD before,
Speaker 1: and I've just been on a you know, twelve hour
Speaker 1: drinking and drug fueled binge.
Speaker 2: Probably not a good idea. Did I say that? Fuck No?
Speaker 1: I took that LSD and as soon as I took
Speaker 1: that LSD, I just said to myself.
Speaker 2: I'm quite tired.
Speaker 1: I'm going to just have a quick lie down, lay down.
Speaker 1: Immediately fell asleep, which I would not recommend doing after
Speaker 1: you take LSD before it's kicked in, because when I
Speaker 1: woke up, it was in full effect. And I cannot
Speaker 1: describe this feeling to anybody, because it's not just oh,
Speaker 1: I took LSD. I took LSD at the end of
Speaker 1: you know, abusing myself so much. The only way I
Speaker 1: can really describe it is that when I woke up,
Speaker 1: and I was asleep for a couple of hours, so
Speaker 1: I did not get enough sleep. But I woke up
Speaker 1: and I was in a hole. I was in a
Speaker 1: big hole in the ground that I could not get
Speaker 1: out of.
Speaker 2: It was very.
Speaker 1: Difficult to walk, it was very difficult to talk, it
Speaker 1: was very difficult.
Speaker 2: To make any decisions or anything like that. And I had.
Speaker 1: Made a very big mistake. So we get ourselves. You know,
Speaker 1: my girlfriend at the time, who had done the exact
Speaker 1: same thing, by the way.
Speaker 2: So she was fucked to I was fucked.
Speaker 1: It's like midday the day on New Year's Day, and
Speaker 1: we are just trying to survive, and we get ourselves
Speaker 1: an uber to get back to her place so that
Speaker 1: we can just collapse and.
Speaker 2: Just try and ride this thing out.
Speaker 1: I at one point told the uber driver to pull
Speaker 1: over because I thought I was going to die inside
Speaker 1: of the Uber, but my girlfriend is just like, hang on,
Speaker 1: it's okay. It was, you know, it basically like fear
Speaker 1: and loathing in Las Vegas, except like really lame and
Speaker 1: in the back of like a mini van on the
Speaker 1: way to just a a suburban in Melbourne. Get back
Speaker 1: to her place, and just thought, okay, it can relax,
Speaker 1: just chill out or whatever. But every time I closed
Speaker 1: my eyes, I would see things, and this made sleeping
Speaker 1: or recovering very difficult.
Speaker 2: And this would last for forty eight hours.
Speaker 1: So I was no better now that I was like
Speaker 1: in a bed trying to relax. In fact, it felt worse.
Speaker 1: I many times thought about just running onto the street,
Speaker 1: onto incoming traffic, but there was one thing that saved me.
Speaker 1: And I listened to this episode of WrestleMania X seven
Speaker 1: over and over and over again, and for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: the one thing that I remember the most is Paul
Speaker 1: Hayman not I don't specifically know what where, But when
Speaker 1: I just think back to this time, when I have
Speaker 1: you know, an LSD flashback or something to that point
Speaker 1: in time, it's Paul Hayman and his baseball cap and
Speaker 1: you know, skull, scullet ponytail that I can see during
Speaker 1: this time, and I just, yeah, I just listened to
Speaker 1: this episode and wrote out this extremely terrifying and terrible experience.
Speaker 1: And it's a shame because a lot of people I've
Speaker 1: talked to afterwards have been like, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: LSD is great, and I'm like, yeah, I probably would
Speaker 1: have been great ifight have, you know, taken it with
Speaker 1: clear mind and healthy body, But I did not, and
Speaker 1: I have never done it since, just because there was
Speaker 1: a traumatic experience. But yeah, that was that was That
Speaker 1: was how the lapse fan got kicked off for me.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's it seems to be since then
Speaker 1: for me, like a story for every you know journey,
Speaker 1: some some Some journeys last quite a while and have
Speaker 1: a few different stories associated with them. But I think
Speaker 1: most importantly is that you've been there through times that
Speaker 1: were quite difficult in my life, that you know, it
Speaker 1: really came in handy something that genuinely. I don't think
Speaker 1: a thirty or forty minute podcast would ord do.
Speaker 2: A review series.
Speaker 1: On you know what happened on Raw last night? That's
Speaker 1: not probably gonna be great either. You know, these were
Speaker 1: like just they were really your podcasts were.
Speaker 2: Really calming effect.
Speaker 1: Because they just they took their time, you know, and
Speaker 1: they were just they just felt it just felt like home.
Speaker 2: You know, other things as well, like I.
Speaker 1: Needed very invasive sinus surgery and I was in a
Speaker 1: public hospital for seven days while they continued to pump
Speaker 1: me full of penicillin to make sure that, you know,
Speaker 1: that the infection didn't come back. And I shared a
Speaker 1: room with three other people and it was hell, but
Speaker 1: I had the LABS fan there. And this was during
Speaker 1: the WrestleMania journey still as well, and just remembering the
Speaker 1: episode of you.
Speaker 2: Know, how how You'd.
Speaker 1: Book I think it was how you'd book the nWo
Speaker 1: in WWE.
Speaker 2: Or something to this effect.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's it's it's just something that I can't
Speaker 1: stop thinking about every time I think about a journey
Speaker 1: or something like the T and H journey. You know,
Speaker 1: my son was born during this and I even remember,
Speaker 1: you know, messaging my friends in my group chat with
Speaker 1: a photo of me holding my son. What did the
Speaker 1: caption say? It said dialed in. I mean that is
Speaker 1: a real, you know, screenshot, that is a real snapshot
Speaker 1: of time there. And you know, of course the first
Speaker 1: response to that was turkey dude. So you know, that's
Speaker 1: how much that you've that you've really penetrated everybody that
Speaker 1: you said that you were going to.
Speaker 2: You say that you go hard and you penetrate, and
Speaker 2: you really have.
Speaker 1: My ass and many other things, most importantly the other things.
Speaker 1: You know, So ten years, you know, a lot has
Speaker 1: changed for me in ten years. I feel like you
Speaker 1: guys are still exactly the same. Your podcasts are a
Speaker 1: bit longer, the journeys are a bit longer, but I
Speaker 1: feel like that's just more of an evolution than anything.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I just wanted to send this in on
Speaker 1: this exact date. I've been thinking about it for a while.
Speaker 1: Seeing you guys, I've seen a live show of yours
Speaker 1: and meeting you on person this year was a bucket
Speaker 1: list especially on the tenth year. That was a bucket
Speaker 1: list item that I'm so glad to have been able
Speaker 1: to achieve.
Speaker 2: And you know, now I run.
Speaker 1: Chop teas with some fucking hilarious looking TLF merchandise. But
Speaker 1: you know, even that is a way of me trying
Speaker 1: to open up a stream of revenue for the people
Speaker 1: who have kind of been there for me in the
Speaker 1: times that I've needed them. Not that they knew that,
Speaker 1: but you know, I run the chop Teas website to
Speaker 1: give back to people like yourselves for helping me not
Speaker 1: run in front of incoming traffic. So yeah, that's pretty
Speaker 1: much all I wanted to say. You know, big fan
Speaker 1: of everything that you do. Obviously, as you've heard, and
Speaker 1: you know, I guess I wanted to also shout out
Speaker 1: the solar system.
Speaker 2: I think that there's really never been a.
Speaker 1: Cooler group of people than the laps Fan Solar System.
Speaker 2: And I interact with a lot more of them than I.
Speaker 1: Used to because obviously when people have questions or just
Speaker 1: want to send feedback or have comments, you know, they
Speaker 1: always get in touch and they're always very very nice.
Speaker 1: And you know, thank you to anybody who's ever bought
Speaker 1: anything of chop Teas. I really appreciate the messages people
Speaker 1: saying just love the concept and the idea. And to
Speaker 1: anybody who's gotten this far into this rant, and if
Speaker 1: you're if you like the merch, I will say that,
Speaker 1: stay tuned because pretty much the first week of next
Speaker 1: year there is going to be a huge lapsed fan
Speaker 1: drop and some stuff that you will not want to
Speaker 1: you will not want to miss, so keep it dialed
Speaker 1: in and yeah, hopefully, hopefully, here's to another ten years guys.
Speaker 1: If not more, god knows what the fuck you'll be
Speaker 1: talking about then, but I guess there will always be
Speaker 1: more wrestling, So until then, Bye,