Ep. 36: The Process of Belief (w/ Ian Madison)

Ian Madison rolls in with a background of ethically hunted animals (that's what he told us), evidence of like eight million Bad Religion shows, and some serious desire to talk about how traditional safety measurements are about as useful as a broken guitar string. Not a bass string, because a broken bass string is about as useful as the rest of them anyway. Seriously, though. Check out the video on YouTube to see what Ian has going on behind him. The episode title is one of the best punk albums of all time, The Process of Belief, from Bad Religion. It's a shoutout to Ian, and it's also a reference to the way we get hung up on our beliefs about what makes us safer and how we know. More on that in a minute. We've already had an episode on metrics, but Ian was driving this one, and even though it sounds like a lot of measurement talk and bashing on TRIR, it's really an episode about the things that take attention away from what matters. And bashing TRIR. Weirdly, Ian can get away with a lot more than Ron on that topic. Matt Hollowell and the CSRA get name-dropped for actually making sense, too. Not sure this podcast was the publicity they want, but you get what you get sometimes. The boys cover a lot of ground on this one: spiders, tailgate-to-person ratio, donuts and cheeseburgers, and whiskey. It moves almost as fast as Smelly's foot during Linoleum. And that's pretty fast. Back to the episode. It's seriously good. Like, just some dudes in a bar talking about safety stuff good. Ian has a way of simplifying concepts, smashing them into a story, and bringing people along in a way that makes a lot of sense. This episode has got a lot of exactly that. And the boys may have talked him into joining the Second Annual Punk Rock Safety Field Trip in LA this October.