Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 351: Wall of Molasses - A Sticky Death

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

LIVE SHOW TICKETS: https://lh-st.com/shows/08-22-2026-chilluminati-cox-n-crendor-live/YETEE MECH: http://www.theyetee.com/chilluminatiAlex shows Jesse and Mathas how the story of a giant encroaching wall of killer molasses is really sort of the story of all of us. Or something. CHILLUMINATI is a weekly comedy podcast hosted by Mike Martin, Jesse Cox and Alex Faciane. Hold on to your tin-foil hats and traverse the realms of the mysterious, supernatural, spooky and sometimes truly horrible - and your third eye will never be the same!Subscribe to our Patreon to support us and for extra content like full video episodes, weekly Minisodes, exclusive art, and more at http://patreon.com/CHILLUMINATIPODThank you to our sponsors:Factor: http://www.factormeals.com/chill50off CODE: chill50offMike Martin - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - https://www.youtube.com/@StarWarsOldCanonBookClub/Editor: DeanCutty Producer: Hilde @ https://bsky.app/profile/heksen.bsky.social Show Art: Studio Melectro @ http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Logo Design: Shawn JPB @ https://twitter.com/JetpackBragginSources:https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/without-warning-molasses-january-surged-over-boston-180971251/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-26/all-evacuation-orders-lifted-orange-county-chemical-crisis-garden-grovehttps://news.google.com/newspapers?id=s6s0AAAAIBAJ&pg=949%2C3011666https://youtu.be/HAZlPuL3Qhwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMWrk_94L8Yhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1FnQmAsajc 

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chulamani podcast. Episode 351, as always, I'm one of your hosts. Mike Martin joined by my two co-pilots from the skies and the sea, Alex and Jesse. From the skies and the sea. We're like Sora. The Sky's in the sea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're like Sora.

Oh. Which is like nine of them apparently. No, no, no. There's only one Sora. Yeah, the one from Kingdom Hearts 2. Oh, I was thinking of the one from Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop. distance. Is there any,

any kingdom hearts references in Final Fantasy 14? I can't even front. I don't know the mythology. I don't think so. It becomes impossible to discern after the second game, Alex. And I will die on that hill. I should have done in April Fool's reverse in like backdoor into doing,

just explaining the kingdom hearts mythology. I would, I would, I was a real mystery. I mean, in a lot of ways, it kind of is. It really is, especially when I find people that are really into the side.

Like, Aqua's my favorite character. I'm like, who the hell is that? Either you actually understand what the Patriots are or you know about Kingdom Hearts. It's either Kojima or Kingdom Hearts. Right, right. It was only the two. Gojima was my poison. Or you're like me and you actually know what the difference is between the C and Falsi, which is like.

No, that's not a real thing. No, that's a whole other. That's a whole other. Yeah. All that's trash. Guys, welcome back one and all to our fine and fruitful show of mysteries, fine tales of the bizarre, which we bring to you each week for your entertainment and perhaps just maybe a little more. Just kidding. I mean, I don't know.

Maybe. I don't know. What's a little more? What do you mean? You could have just left it at that and let the audience pondered a little more. Like it sounded suggestive. It did. Leonard Nimoy didn't die.

Anyway, this week, as Mathis probably already mentioned is what I wrote in the script. As Mathis probably already mentioned, I'll be running the episode. And so, that true to form. I mean, look, did he probably already mentioned it? No, that didn't happen ever. But did he? In the quantum nature of reality where everything sits in superposition, there is a point where I probably did. Did he?

Probably. But did he actually? No. Well, there's a quantum super position where Mathis is hosting this episode. That just, that just blew me away that I wrote probably already mentioned. That is like a strange tense to be writing in. Just saying, I'll be running, I'll be writing the episode today. And so true to form right at the top, I bring you tidings of how you can spend some money on us in these tough times.

And boy, it's such a, look, it's such a stretch to be like, in these tough times. how about Patreon? That's a place, guys, right? They're tough times. Like, I know there's gas, but like, you know, like, Patreon knows. And we, everybody's having tough times. We make you smile. Why, line?

I need a beer. If you're one of the people who tries to limit, if you, if you're one of those people who tries to limit their access to the news day to day, take it from me, guys. The alternative is absolutely mind melting and will drive you insane. So instead of doing that, head over to our. Patreon. We got a merch thing going on right now. New merch in the shop at the Yeti.com slash Chuluminati. Yeti, of course, being spelled with one more E than most people spell it with. But hey, yep, links in the description for that one, so you don't have to think too much about that.

First off, we have our second set of top secret stickers, which you can only see the designs of at patreon.com slash shumni-di pod. Otherwise, the secret. By the way, they feature the absolutely fantastic illustrations of one Muddly, who originally just blew us away with some fan art on Blue Sky until we tapped them for some top secret stickers which, you know, maybe

if you got some art skills hit us up because... I love them. These stickers are so sick. I love them so much. Because, yeah, if you buy them, you are still directly supporting Mudsley as well as well as us because we split that shit 50-50 all the way to the end because Muddly is our guest

artist. So we're both in, skin. in the game. You know what I'm saying? Also, speaking of true artists by popular demand, our own house artist, Studio Melectro, has taken our wonderful channel art from last season. I don't know, whatever you want to call it. The Valentine era. Yeah, the one that had the sexy four-armed mantis alien riding a rocket ship, which just sounds awesome just from me saying it with words. So just imagine what it looks like and expanded it into a glorious and limited edition shirt, which is also now available in the shop. And just to sort of like sweet in the pot a little bit, right? We've got four, count them, four amazing comic cover style posters featuring such

hits of our past friends of the pod, such as the Greys, the Chupacabra, Jeff the Mungus, and Hair Hypnosis, all with incredible retro sci-fi horror stylings. which are on par with like true comic book art. It looks amazing. It really does look like a strange tales cover. And which I must say would look great on your living room wall in a suddenly very affordable for a poster set, 70% off all the posters.

Anyway, I have five of our posters hanging up in my living room wall. They are sweet. They are literally fucking sick. I'm not even fucking around. Go buy one. They're 10 bucks. Go buy all that stuff at the Yeti.com slash Tumani.

And then if you still got some more money left to spend on us or a special occasion coming up in these tough times, why not come visit us in Chicago, Illinois on August 22nd, where once again, we're having our annual Chaluminati slash Cox and Crendor double bill featuring probably Davis too, at least. Last time, we tried to get him to date Crendor, who was pretending to be a chupacabra or moth man or something like that. Yeah. Anyway, tickets are selling out fast, and August 22nd is much closer than it seems. It actually is really approaching quickly. It's like only three months away, less than. I know.

Crazy. I feel like we just did this show like already once. We did, but it was also in November. Like it honestly wasn't that long ago if you think about it. If you want a ticket, follow the link in the episode description or go to Chiluminaipod.fm. Right? Yep.

There's a link there. Of course. Or, as always, if you know, If you want to stay boned up on all our deeds, join up at patreon.com slash Slimonati pod, where even free members are welcomed and even encouraged because we love you. Oh, yes, we do. If you just want to go over there and look at the stickers, just do it. You can do it for free.

Yeah. The range for Harry sticker, go check it out. Does that sound good? Does that sound good. It all sounds good. Disclosure Day. I can't wait. Oh, man, dude.

I hear it's a good movie. just barely starting to see reviews come in, but I don't even want to open one and read it. Because I want to go in so raw. I think I might watch close encounters before I go in. You can, hey, hey, you guys can plug your ears late quick if you don't want to hear this.

But I heard it is both his best and weirdest in years. That's, dude, the teaser, the last teaser trailer, the job, never mind the fuck that in his interviews. And I know it's for press. And I know he's like a master at promoting a shit.

Same way that when like movies come out now, the two lead, the male and female lead are like all over each other during the press stuff. And then the minute it ends, they never talk again. Same vibe. Except this time it's like aliens. It's like, okay. He's basically being like, it's all real basically. But like the latest trailer has like a shot where it's a close up on a deer and it rotates around the deer's eyes to the other eye and it transitions to a gray. And the takes I've seen is like, oh, great, aliens are deer.

And I'm like, no, it's so much fucking weirder than that. Spielberg is, I would put money on it. The whole thing is consciousness. Like the movie is going to be like, no, these things operate on our consciousness. And like it's not a deer, but it's what they want us to see because that's what they can do. It's like if Dr. Strange was in the movie, he could talk to the aliens. But if you're a Chaluminati fan, you're going to be primed for this shit. You're going to be ready for this movie.

Yeah, you're ready for this already. If you've seen all the rotten popcorns, you're going to be, if you see all the Neil Breen ones, The Neil Brie ones are really, yeah, the truth is in the Neil Breen movies. Yeah. So just go over to our Patreon and check it out. And we're excited about it. On with the show. Oh my God.

What? Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring today's episode. And I want you to do me favor and just picture this for a second. You know, it's the back half of your day. Your brain's what, like running on fumes at this point. And then suddenly that hunger hits. And you know, just like I do, that there's stuff in the fridge that you're, You're supposed to turn into a real meal if it hasn't gone bad by now.

But standing there in that moment, the gap between ingredients and actual dinner might as well be a wormhole. That's the impossible wall that I tell myself. And here's the thing I figured out all by myself. For me, eating healthy was never a willpower problem. It's a setup problem, the cooking, the planning, the grocery run, and that's part of why I am with Factor at this point. Factor solves a setup problem entirely, fully prepared. meals designed by dietitians made by actual chefs delivered right to my doorstep so i'm hitting my nutrition goals this season without the planning or the grocery runs the truffle parmesan chicken has been on

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last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. On with the show. Today's episode is based mostly on information I got from a book called, here's what we're talking about about a fucking good title. Ready? This book was called Dark Tide, the great Boston molasses flood of 1919 by Stephen Pileo.

That's a great. That's how you name a fucking book, Dark Tide. But I also used... Or a sequel to Warcraft Two. Warcraft 2, dark tide. That's different.

That's, you know, that's a dark tide. That's one thing. This is a tide, which is dark. I think it's tides of darkness, right? Rather than water, it is in fact molasses. But I also use the information from the LA Times, the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Hour, which is a newspaper out of Connecticut, scientific American, Boston.com, Wikipedia.org, support it.

Also, the tasting history, that history guy, puppet history, ink, and GBAH News, YouTube channels, and more. But that's all going to be, I think, and more. I'm not sure. I usually miss one. But the links are all going to be in the description. So check them out if you want to check them out. But before all that, I want to tell you about how I was reading another comic book recently, yet again by Alan Moore, but this time it was his relatively recent masterpiece, which is called Providence.

Now, much like From Hell and Promethea and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before it, Providence is yet another almost maniacally researched graphic novel, which expands on Moore's own theories of magic and occult and literature. you know, the thing about words and English and, you know, just like writing itself being magic. Except this one is about the mythology specifically of HP Lovecraft and the sort of world that he spawned and what it sort of maybe symbolizes for humans and stuff like going underground means like going under society kind of and stuff like that. And how maybe there's a thinner line between imagination and nightmares and our minds and reality than we think. And I don't want to spoil it too much, but it's really interesting Lovecraft story, really fucked up and scary. Before we go any further, though, to recommend. But I don't want to recommend this book to anybody at all unless I put like every trigger warning possible before it. because truly like the idea of me suggesting this book after reading it and its little prequel, which is called Neo-nomicon, like the stuff that actually happens in the stories is like so like fucked up like in the way that like fucking hereditary is fucked up like just like one of my favorite horror movies.

And like just weird shit and like sex stuff and like mind fuck stuff. and violence and gore and just fuckery. It's all in there. So please be careful if you read this. Just like reading the necronomicon, it might drive you crazy. Reader beware, they're in for a scare. Yeah. But this last read-through, even more than the content of the story itself,

it was the strange synchronicities it seemed to be creating in my real life that were actually disturbing me. And what I mean by that is that before I even felt like I could try and read something as dense as Providence, which again is like a meticulously researched H.P. Lovecraft biography in some ways. I wanted as much context for it as possible. Can I just really quickly? You mic me up on this book so much that I went to go see if I could order it online, right? Yeah. And I saw this review and I just, it's, I just want to read this one line. Please. Twelve issues of some pointexter traveling around New England who has to interview

with occasionally something grotesque every three issues. Yeah. What the fuck? It's so crazy. That's some point next to travel around New England. That's somebody who thinks reading is a chore. That's somebody who likes summaries.

Oh, it's so funny. That's somebody who prefers a summary when it when it's shorter. Also, if you really want to get a copy of Providence, I think there may be one way left to get it for a reasonable price, but I'll talk about that later because I don't want to blow it up. Oh, yeah. No, I just realized it's being sold for 120.

Nope, never mind. Never mind. Yeah. There may be a way to get it, but just ask me if you want it. I wanted to make, I wanted to get context for this. So in this case, that meant reading every single story that HP Lovecraft ever wrote first, which started like last December. Okay.

And if you've been listening to the show closely and what? things I talk about. You probably tell when I was reading Lovecraft because of all the like weird Cthulhu shit that I would probably say in it. But that is beside the point because what I really want to point out is that I plan out my reading months in advance. And I plan out my upcoming Chaluminati episodes even further. You can attest how long this molasses massacre episode has been on my. Yeah. It's true. It's been on the radar. Yeah. It's been on the schedule for about a year at this point. Like, same thing with like Salem and all that stuff. We plan out. Yeah. So believe me, when I tell you, there was no way I could possibly predict, especially with

my busy schedule, exactly when I would be reading Providence compared to when I'd be writing which Chulubinati script. That would be impossible. And yet, Providence is the story of a journalist, some point, Dexter, in fact, who in the process of researching a book about many of the stuff Lovecraft also based his stories on travels all throughout New England, especially Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts, where the majority of the story is set. In the first few issues, much of the action is set around Salem, Massachusetts. And as you can imagine, just as Mathis was telling us all about the Salem Witch Trials, so too was it being mentioned in the pages of Providence.

Was it? Yeah, a lot. And then, almost immediately, as our protagonist, Mr. Black, makes his way to Boston, without any way of knowing they would sync up, characters in the story began to talk about the time, very contemporary to the time in which the story is set, by the way, when a giant tank of molasses exploded in the Boston Harbor,

which is exactly what we're going to talk about today. But it doesn't even end there. It doesn't even end there because as this first bit of reading from literally this week's LA Times will show us, so Mathis, I guess for this reading, your motivation is like modern day newscaster, I guess. Yeah, I promise, will be in more of a period piece vibe by the end of the news. I don't really watch the news as much

as I read the news. All remaining evacuation orders were lifted in Orange County on Tuesday evening as authorities declared there was no remaining danger of an explosion, chemical leak, or fire stemming from a hazardous material incident at an aerospace manufacturing plant. Around 50,000 people in six Orange County cities were told to evacuate during the crisis when an overheating tank filled with 7,000 gallons of chemical called methyl meth. Holy shit. Methylmetachrylate. Methylmer. I'll take it.

A highly flammable liquid monomer used to manufacture plastics were at risk of causing a massive explosion. According to a recent report from the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, the sudden heating of the tank caused the storage tank to bulge and fumes were released for about five minutes before employees at the company activated a manual fire suppression system. Fire officials initially offered the dire assessment that the unstable, tank would either explode or fail, causing a massive leak. But as families were told they could return to their homes, neither of those options had come to pass. So this was like 25 to 30 miles from here. Oh, damn. So this week, while I'm writing this episode about the fucking giant tank of

shit that exploded and causes this thing, I'm like on subredits monitoring this situation where there might be this like runaway tank explosion that like shoots particles into the air that could like disrupt everybody for like miles in all directions. It's three miles away from Disneyland. Shit was crazy. Shit was crazy. But luckily they apparently found a crack somewhere in the tank that was actually venting a lot of the pressure that might have led to a much worse situation, which I guess is a win,

even though it was a crack in the tank that saved the day. but A, how crazy is it that that happened over Memorial Day weekend and B, how did it happen on the very same week? I'm writing a story about another exploding tank disaster while that same disaster also appears in a book. I'm currently reading about imaginary stuff waiting to finally become real. I mean, it is weird. It's nuts. They talk about this. Jesse leaned in like he was going to say something.

No, no, no, dude. That was a disclosure day. It's all connected. Yeah. They sprayed 9 million gallons of water. I'm saying what needs to be said. If one of us is an alien, it's me. I mean, if you're an alien, that would be the coolest twist of my entire life probably.

I was like, uh, gray. Yeah. Just like straight out of like like the like the Fox 11 like special from the 90s. Oh. Yes. Yes. Yeah. All right.

So they, they sprayed nine million gallons. water on this tank. They peeled back the walls of the tank using drones to let the water in deeper. It is so insane that something like that could be in the middle of a neighborhood when it could possibly require that huge of an evacuation because if it blew up, it was going to blow up like other tanks. Yeah, it's good chain reaction to the shit. There's going to be a whole situation. And the reason that that didn't happen in this case was because it was in a neighborhood like Orange County where it was close to Disneyland and like they spent a bunch of money. and they spent all this time on it,

and they had the drones to go in and peel it and do whatever. And not even the spill that they were considering a foregone conclusion at the beginning of the crisis happened. Everything's fine. That's one. Human ingenuity when they have the desire and motivation actually do something. Yeah, that's one way this type of thing could go. Anyway, back to the actual story at hand.

This all went down in Boston, which I'm sure is a city. we're all quite familiar with by now. Shout out Bean Boy, shout out Mathis, shout out Mel. In a time before the brief 100-year period where Americans temporarily actually understood how angry they should be at rich people, it was before that period. We're now after that period. In an area known as the North End, which originally started out as a kind of it place, is the home of Paul Revere. One of the colonial governor's mansions was there. I think. It was a hotbed of the American Revolution. A lot of like, you know, action went down there. Eventually also centered itself in a bunch of commerce, shipping, manufacturing, stuff like that.

As the country grew, you needed more harbor space, more ports. But after a couple of decades, by the middle of the 1800s, as people from financially strapped parts of Europe heard stories of how nice it was and came over here to live for various reasons, especially lots of Germans at the time. And then the big one hit, and it was the great Irish potato famine, just hit and just like that. Much like London's East End, which I mentioned back in the Jack the Ripper episode last year with Mark, the North End became this sort of huge slum that was made up of displaced German, Irish families. like lots of German, lots of Irish at this time, including that of John Honey Fitz Fitzgerald,

who was a grocer's son, who would eventually be the mayor of Boston and whose daughter would give birth to another friend of the pod, JFK. Friend of the pod, hell yeah. Friend of the pod, friend of the show, friend of the pod. By 1880, we're talking about 26,000 people slumming it up in the North End, mostly still Irish at this point in 1880,

but also now slowly adding more Jews, Italians, Portuguese people, slowly filtering in from other countries until over the next 40 years, as over 4 million Italians come to America, mostly from Sicily and southern Italy. The North End basically becomes like the center of the entire Italian community in Boston to the degree that within this one single neighborhood, they split everything up by design into these different. like, I forget with the paises or something like that. I forgive my shitty Italian. But it's like the regions of Italy could like come to parts of the neighborhood to live so that they could be around people who had the same culture as them. So it could feel like home to them. And you didn't have to change your values too much or look too far for work

because somebody was going to look out for you because you're from the village or whatever. And you didn't really have to assimilate into American culture that far or into government. stuff or civics or anything like that very deeply or even honestly really learned to speak much English because of how just totally still saturated you were in your own like culture from home right? Yeah, it's like my great grandmother is exactly from that era. She was born in 1911 she in Sicily and her father came over to the U.S. first for a few years, lived in the area like did all that stuff to build up like a place and then when she was like three or four came across and lived right in the North End area

and was like kind of grew up in that area. She lived to 100. She died just a few years ago. It was crazy. Yeah. Basically same deal. I'm from San Pedro, which is the neighborhood of Los Angeles.

We want to be our own city. We should be. But it's the harbor. So LA says no. But in my in my local area, like it's a lot of like my family was from Croatia, but there's also Italians. And they would come and like make wine together

and hang out in the same little areas. And there'd be like social. clubs in the neighborhood where they would all go and they would all participate in things together. The local parks have like weird things like a bachi ball court, which is like just for old Italians and Croatian people to go like bachi ball. Like it's a thing. It's a thing that kind of happens. But also like, you know, I feel like there's a lot of positives to that.

It's a very like reflective of like the American experience like being this melting pot that we are and sort of like letting people have their cultures without forcing them to assimilate to. much if they don't need to, sort of, right? But what that meant in practice was that while the Jews and the Irish sort of became slightly more American, or the Germans or whatever, the Portuguese, slowly assimilated more to the American identity, they were able to, like, were able to, like, educate themselves better because they belonged more in the larger community and were able to earn more money, which eventually got them to buy their way out of the north end to South Boston or East Boston, right, where it was a little bit nicer at the time. And so what this ended up with was because the Italians didn't really need to like, there were so many Italians, they didn't need

to like really go out of their community groups. It, they kind of got left behind in this neighborhood as cheap, unskilled labor that kind of took care of itself, right? To the point that by 1910, And there was 30,000 people in the slums total, and 28,000 of them are Italians. So now we're talking a crazy, a crazy shift in ethnic groups, like huge crazy shift. Just for like interesting socioeconomic reasons that you can't really necessarily, like by design, I don't think that's what it was. You know, like when you go look into the history of this area, you also find out about like the Italian language newspaper that like reached out and unified everybody together.

and there was this community and all this stuff. But just because of the way that it was and because like even today, I would say that most Italian people, you know, like don't have a much, aren't super involved with government. I don't think that's like culturally that big of a thing in the same way, right? And to sort of underline that vibe of that time, here's Jesse, who's got a quote for us from La Astoria, five centuries of the Italian-American experience. by Jerry Mangione and Ben Moriali about life in these kind of Italian immigrant neighborhoods, which the book I read also quotes.

So I guess your motivation here, Jesse, is like an Italian-American history scholar. Get used to that one. Great. Anyway, here we go. Above the streets, the fire escapes of the tenants were festooned with lines of drying a laundry, while housewives exchange the news and gossip with any neighbor within shouting a distance, the roofs became the remembered fields of Italy, where residents could visit one another on Sumer Sunday,

while the young played in the Tarfield air. Here's another quote about this for Mathis to read from the director of the Italian-American Post-Gazette newsletter in Boston. This actually did used to be the Italian language newsletter, but over now, like a hundred years, it's become an English language, like weekly newsletter in Boston about, and this quote is about how the legacy of Italian culture continues to live on in that area, even today. So Mathis, that means you're like an older lady for this one. Oh, don't do this to me. Yeah, very, very proud of a European heritage. We all know this type of Oh, oh, every, everything that happens down here is from the beginning of time.

I mean, if you go to a corner and talk to a bunch of guys, they'll talk about when the grandfathers and fathers did this on the corner and did that over here, and this was here, and that was there. It's family to family to family, and it's passed on. The most fun thing about the North End is that you hear these stories all the time. You get a bunch of people together, and they all remember the story. There are reasons why families do want to still be here. They want to be in the city.

They want their children to grow up in the city instead of growing up in suburbia. And you know, you don't know your neighbor. Everybody knows everybody down here still. You know, you can walk out the door and sit and talk to people. You're never alone when you're here. You just couldn't be alone. One guy even said living in the north end was like you look out the window and it's just like a parade where you see all your friends. Like, hey, Michael.

Hey, Lorenzo, Luchiana. Hey, hey, just like every time, like Beauty and the Beast type shit. Just open the door. Hey, hi, how are you doing today? How are your children? Like stuff like that. Like, romantic across the way to your neighbor. Is this how like not to, not to, you know, history this, but based on what you're saying,

it makes the reasoning behind the mob taking over these communities so much easier. If they're very insular and they aren't going to government bodies to protect them instead. they have local communities do it and the people that have the power locally are going to be the ones that are hooked up back in the main, you know, the motherland or whatever. And so that's how they jump straight across like that. Yeah. Because people would go back and forth too. Yeah.

And so like, you know, you got to go to someone. And plus they can say, well, I'll protect you and this. Like it all starts to make sense when you just think of it like, oh, yeah, no, these are just people trying to get by. And this was like the reasonable solution. And then, of course, it blooms into, you know, crazy. like why didn't they trust the government right? You know, in today's world, that translates to the North End being sort of like it was when it

first started again, right? Like, and I'm sure you're from, you've been in Boston for many years, Mathis, right? Like, it's kind of an upscale, expensive neighborhood now. Yeah. Like, nice. They still got good Italian food, though. Yeah, it's still very Italian. It's brick, like red brick old school.

But it's also like a place where now it's nice because the Italian. community like kind of built it into this sort of like fancier version of itself right so now it's it's still very much an italian like little italy type zone but it's but it's but it's nice uh but back then uh though the community was strong and vivid and alive and sicilian as hell and just living and loving together not many of these still very extremely italian people were citizens which meant that they really had a tough time mobilizing or getting a vote when stuff went down, even on their own doorsteps, you know, which is a large part of the reason why this giant, ugly, suspicious, ominous tank was even able to be built smack dab in the middle of such

a heavily populated area. This is a slum. You know what I'm saying? These people don't have bathrooms. Like, then they're so compact together. And this is where they decided to build a giant dangerous tank. You have a huge part. of the reason, of course, being racism.

And so for a more direct historical perspective, here's Jesse with a quote from Dark Tide by Stephen Palo, a guy who, by the way, Jesse, is also a rather salty old Italian Bostonian gentleman that kind of, you know. Right, no, I got you. Yeah, no. Yeah, sure, sure.

Boston guy. At the heart of the discrimination against sudden Italians and Sicilians considered inferior to the countrymen from the north was the widespread view that immigrants from southern Italy belonged to a different race entirely. The Bureau of Immigration reinforced these biases, classifying Italian immigrants as two different races, northern and southern.

There were other reasons for the discrimination against southern Italians, the ethnic group who made about 80% of North End's population in 1915. Most were not citizens, and many traveled seasonally between Italy and the United States, a migratory pattern that earned them to label birds of passage from other Americans, many of whom perceive Italian immigrants as uncommitted to the United States. Yeah, so basically just like, yeah, fuck them. They're not even really American, so we'll do whatever we want. And they're extremely disgustingly sadly packed neighborhood where people still don't even have bathrooms or whatever.

That's basically what every stupid angry American thinks today. I mean, thought back then. The amount of people that just today are willing to like, and this is like, this is like such a low bar already, right? Because we already know that American people are horrible at differentiating between Asian countries. And I'm talking about white Americans, right? They're terrible at differentiated between Asian countries and African countries.

and Middle Eastern countries. But European countries, we all know white Americans love to like say they're from them, even if they're just related to somebody who is from them. And so it's funny to me to see today how often people are like lumping all of Europe together into one place and talking shit on it as if America is better than it. But it's not that surprising thinking about how Italian people were literally split into two races because of how they look. Yeah, I mean, it's like a, like a hundred years ago.

Definitional of white thing. Yeah, it's crazy. Like Irish people were like not white at first, even. But then they like met, they like, they like got their card in and then Italians did the same thing. Now Italians are just white people again. It's crazy. Yeah, basically. Although, unless you're on the internet, in which case it's, I'm not white, I'm Italian, which is a, I like, it's incredibly funny to me that like it's one of those thought so hard to be included in the in group.

And then we're like, but we're different though. Same with Irish. Same with everyone. You know, like you have to add that like, but I'm Irish though. It's like I feel like when you claim your nationality is from a country that you've never visited that you know maybe like one or two people who are from there, you need something. You're, you're grasping for something that you don't have.

Like you're looking for a storied history. Yeah. And I just, it feels kind of sad as an American myself, right? It feels kind of sad to think about. But I don't know. What's the alternative? rock and roll what's wrong with that i imagine there's an even deeper conversation to be had if you were talking to someone who was black and asking about like african-american because you would think

oh i'm from africa i came to america but like you know where does that line same thing here like how far back do you have to go before you're just a white dude you know what i mean well and i'm speaking out of like how white is walk and roll anyway well yeah absolutely completely correct. It's definitely one of those things where I'm sure the slash American, be it like Asian American or Irish or like, like I don't, I don't know many people who are like, I'm Norwegian American. You know what I mean? Like that's got to be somewhere someone has to have an article about like, I'm 30% Norwegian like a dog. You know what I mean? Like it's just weird. Yeah. Like I'm always curious about where those designations are and who decides on them or who accepts

them because, uh, yeah, there's like a lot of different versions of that. And sometimes it's just what we say because we don't know what to call someone when really just to be like American. But they can also use it to be like, where they're not full American. It's like got a lot of stuff going on. Yeah, we're young, we're a young country for being so famous. Uh, point is Americans have a lot of anxiety around that and a lot more even than it seems like we do. I don't know. There's a lot more of a conversation to have about where are you from type conversations in America. It's fucking weird. But yeah. So as you know, when a company

with a lot of money wants something badly enough and there's a villain like Southern Italians, which is like a made up race that they made up, which is, you know, demarcated by country lines. I don't even know. That's exactly the kind of shady sentiment that they'll use to sneak something right on through before anyone really has a chance to notice or put up a fight. And in this case, there was big money to be had, right? So now that you are righteously mad on behalf of

poor innocent Italian people who just wanted a better life. It's time to talk about the thing that blew up and sent a deadly goo tsunami hurtling through their streets, aka a gungami. And that is molasses. Okay. Basically, you guys know what molasses is, right? Yeah. It's brown and sticky.

It's delicious. Yeah. Basically, molasses was always kind of a big deal as an ingredient in things like sweets, baked beans, right? Boston brown bread from the can. And right? Oh, God, dude. You're making me so hungry.

I feel brown bread. That shit's good. It's so good with raisins in it. You also distill a grain alcohol to make rum from molasses, stuff like that. But for USIA, aka U.S. industrial alcohol, aka purity distilling, ever since World War I broke out in 1914 over in Europe, and everyone suddenly needed way more munitions and dynamite and smokeless powders

and high explosives shit like that. The main way that molasses was about to make them buckets of money was by distilling it into the industrial alcohol, which was a main ingredient in the production of all those items. So this molasses situation was not about confections. It was about fucking weapons. What? They were using this shit to make explosives. And suddenly, as 1915 drew near, rumors were that even though President Woodrow Wilson at the time promised that we would remain new. neutral in this war in Europe, the great war, as they were calling it at the time, because they didn't

know there was a two, that it was getting to be about the time that the U.S. itself was going to get involved in the war. So this was going to drive demand for molasses up even higher because now we need weapons for the war also instead of just selling them to Europe, which is why U.S. I.A. decided it was now eating into their possible profits not having a tank right near the harbor for tanks to unload because otherwise they would have to like buy the the molasses that they needed to do their distilling off of secondary merchants of it who could fit the molasses in their facility so they decided let's skip the middleman and just put one right there so that we can just get it straight and make a shitload more money um and that is why the us ia

treasurer a man named arthur gel uh after just barely getting the lease agreed Again, treasurer just barely got the lease agreements settled by late September that they nevertheless committed to a completion date for the 2.3 million gallon tank of December 31st of the same year. So they started in late September and they said they're going to be done before the end of the year. Here's Mathis with another quote from Dark Tide. So same guy that Jesse was just doing. He's a Boston guy. He's a Boston guy from Italy. You know these guys.

Yeah, I mean, yes, but also I'm terrible at doing voices, so. Yeah, it doesn't stop me. He had begun discussions with the Boston Elevated Railway Company, whose waterfront land, USIA, was leasing for the tank site in January when they, but they stalled in the spring and early summer, and were not concluded until late September. It then took one month for Hugh Norn Construction Company to build the concrete foundation upon which the massive steel tank would sit, fabricated steel plates for the tank. didn't arrive in Boston under the first week in December.

Even with the perfect of December, Jell had recognized that the construction schedule would be tight, and December was far from perfect. I love the way you say December. That was very good. December. December. So this is fucking nuts, right?

So we're in the beginning of December already. This needs to be done by the end of December. We are in the month. It needs to be perfect and it's going to be tight, right? The steel has just arrived. in the very first week one dude falls into the tank and dies which not only sucks right it's just you hate to see a guy die but it also saw the molasses it spooked everyone out of a day or two's work right so

they're now that's two days now that these guys are too afraid of falling to like work on the tank this is like before anything like safety measures were considered law these people were probably just like zero zip lines just on the top of a tall ass metal rickety structure and one misstep and you are just dead. 40 feet, you're dead. Yeah. And they're just like, well, part of the job. Sorry.

And then they get a new person. Everybody's just like, everybody's traumatized because they watch one of their friends die in front of them. Yeah, exactly. They get two days off. Yeah. And then the worst super storm in 12 years hits the next week because two weather systems collide, which like knocks down power lines, even knocks down a roller coaster with 50

mile per hour winds, delays everything for two more days. And then on the 26th of December, we're now five days out. A sleet storm, so bad, another roller coaster fucking blows down, stops work for another day. But still, somehow, for better or more accurately, for worse. They got that shit done. They actually fucking finished it. But at what cost? Here's Jesse with a quote about cutting corners from the book, Dark Tide.

The contract called for the 50-foot high tank to be tested for leaks upon its completion by filling it with water. Jell knew that the amount of water he would need to fill the tank would be so vast that he would have to tap into the municipal water supply. An expense, he refused to authorize. Jell also knew it would have taken many days, perhaps weeks, to fill the tank. It was time he did not have. Instead, Jell ordered crews to run only six inches of water into the tank,

enough to raise the water level above the first angled joint at the base of the structure. When no leaks occurred, Joe pronounced the tank sturdy, sound, and radio's. Oh, that's good old capitalism, baby. Yeah, exactly. The same thing by my head. I had him clapping his hands like, good enough. Let's roll. The treasurer, by the way.

Anyway, here is a picture of the tank as it looked when it was finished. You guys can describe it to the people here as a black and white photo. I don't know if the poor workmanship comes across. it definitely looks like shit aesthetically. I mean, you've 100% seen tanks like this in municipal areas. It's the huge round, wider than it is a metal drum. Yeah.

And it looks dangerously close to houses. Yeah. And I realize it's probably just the camera, but it doesn't even really look like it's standing straight up in the picture. It does. No, it looks like a little upside. It looks like a little leaning tower of Pisa in the vibe.

I don't know what's up with that. Anyway, we got this great big tank all built, ready for the molasses money making time in 1915. This boat that they were building this for came in on January 1st. They finished it literally just in time and immediately filled it with like 700,000 pounds of molasses or 700,000 gallons of molasses. Pass the water test. Yeah.

And as time goes on, tons of molasses comes in and out over the years, right? And at first, the constant leaking and recalking of the sides of the tank and all of the extremely loud groaning sounds that the tank would make that could be heard for miles were at first rather scary to everyone in the neighborhood as you can imagine

but the problem living closest thing and just hear all night all day as you can imagine the steel buckling the problem is when you're living in a fucking slum with no bathroom

and you got other problems to worry about as time goes on USIA famously just painted the tank over with brown paint so the leaks weren't so obvious anymore and eventually the janky busted-ass tank in the middle of everyone's zone just becomes a fact of life. You get used to the groaning like when you live next to a train, right? You live next to the train.

Eventually you get used to the train. True. Extremely true. Yeah. So it's that kind of problem because after a while, people just kind of settled down and relaxed. And to illustrate that, here's another quote from Dark Tide for Mathis, which is like a little vignette now. It's like a story about a railroad worker called Giuseppe Yantoska and his family who lived in the North End right near the tank. Giuseppe saw three large cans standing uncovered on the dingy countertop.

Dingy, dingy, countertop. He shuffled over and peered inside. All three were filled with thick brown molasses. They went over to the tank after school. Maria. Well, that was Maria. Sorry. They went over to the tank after school.

Maria Lantosca said. Pasqualino? That's an awesome fucking name. Pasquilino and Maria and Antonio. They bring the cans. The molasses leaks from that tank all day long, and they go there and scoop it up. We can use it. Otherwise, it goes to waste.

Can the kids get in trouble? Giuseppe asked. Can they get hurt? If the railroad men see them, they just chase the kids away, so there's no trouble, Maria said. I don't see how they can get hurt. No, I guess not, Giuseppe said. He dipped his finger in one of the cans, tasted the,

the molasses, turned to his wife and smiled. Street molasses, free street molasses, sounds pretty good. That's some shit right there, right? They're like, nothing could ever go wrong. And in the winter of 1918, as old chilled molasses at the bottom of the tank was being mixed with fresh new molasses on into January 1919, when World War I has now finally come to an end. And America was about to vote itself into the prohibition within like one week.

One last big ship from Puerto Rico had just come in, filling the tank to just under its 2.3 or 2.5 million gallon capacity just a few days earlier. At noon on January 15th, 1919, in the middle of a fall spring, where the weather goes up briefly by about 10 degrees for a few days before returning to its normal cold levels. On the one hand, the nice weather was encouraging the workers of USAIA to enjoy a nice coffee and sandwich. break in the middle of their shift. And indeed, everyone around was enjoying lunch at the time because the weather was particularly nice. And they were all sort of sitting around and chatting and enjoying themselves blissfully unaware of what was happening inside of the giant tank right next to them. If they could see inside, they would know that the strange temperature differential that I was talking about was causing the molasses to ferment in a way that it didn't normally ferment,

much more actively and in a way that produced lots and lots of excess fumes, right? Remember, this stuff can be distilled into alcohol, so there's lots of fumes. Now, even though it was probably sucky and inadequate and dented, the money people who made this tank happen did think to include a nice little vent in the top for just this ventuality, which probably would have vented some of this gas. But unfortunately, it was winter. So that kind of thing usually happened in the spring or summer. So right now the vent was just closed.

It was shut. And with such a huge load in the molasses tank, the pressure from all those fumes was building up because there wasn't that much space in there. Nearby the tank, since their fireboat quarters were just 80 feet from the walls, some firefighters were also sitting around chatting and having their lunch. They were probably talking about the crazy worldwide flu epidemic.

they were also currently right in the fucking middle of at that time, which by the way killed 20 million people. This is the last pandemic before COVID. I guess they used to call it Spanish flu, but I feel like that's not right anymore. What's it called? The influenza influenza. Yeah, it's crazy too.

Even back then how like people refused to wear masks. But back then they threw you in jail for seven days if you didn't or something like that. Spanish flu is like calling it the Chinese virus, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're trying to fix it. We're trying to rehabilitate it. How far we've come. Yeah. But that is a horror for another time since a little bit before 1230 now, there comes a huge muffled roar from the area of the tank as its shape begins to warp. As it popped up off its base and twisted itself apart, the thousands and thousands of rivets holding the metal plates together flew out of their holes at such a speed that it gave World War I veterans. machine gun war flashbacks. It's like a loony tunes cartoon, dude, of this thing bulging. And you see the rivets in the, yeah, exactly.

One happens. It's like, think, think, tink, dink, and it's flying off. And then suddenly, a fucking wall of molasses, 15 feet high, blasts down the street instantly in all directions at 35 fucking miles an hour. I would see that. And I just, part of my brain just wouldn't believe what I'm seeing. Exactly. You know that scene, I think it's deep impact?

That's like Taleyoni and I, I just stand there on the beach. That would be me being like, I just have to accept them, but to die to molasses. You shouldn't, you shouldn't have because, okay, all right. Here's a grisly account of it from a Smithsonian magazine article written in 1983. So this is 80s vibes, Jesse. This is an 80s character. Here you go. Spill a jar of kitchen molasses that imagine you estimated 14,000 tons of the thick, sticky fluid

running wild. It left the ruptured tank in a choking brown wave, 15 feet high, wiping out everything that stood in its way. One steel section of the tank was hurled across commercial street, neatly knocking out one of the upright supporting the L. An approaching train screeched to a stop just the track ahead, sagged into the onrushing molasses. When the molasses wave hit houses, they seemed to cringe up as though they were

made of pasteboard, wrote one reporter. The Clowardy home at the foot of Copse Hill collapsed under poor Bridget Clowardy, killing her instantly. And when pieces of the tank hit a structure, they had the effect of shell fire. One jagged chunk smashed the freight house where some of the lunchers had been working. The great brown wave caught and killed most of the nearby laborers. The fireboat company quarters was splintered. A lorry was blasted right through a wooden fence, and the wagon driver was found later dead and frozen in his last attitude, like a figure from the ashes of Pompeii.

God, I'm just being just like swallowed by molasses and preserved like a fucking mosquito in Jurassic Park. They didn't find one dude for four months. That's crazy. I think he was well preserved. He was just in there, like in a little candy shell. another thing about how many licks to get to the center of where that man was dead

it was a fucked up thing okay another thing about 12 30 p.m. this day is that sometimes kids come home from school between their morning and afternoon sessions one minute Anthony del distazio was watching walking home with his four sisters the next minute he's lifted up on a wave

of molasses goes under it kind of gets stuck against something on the ground and rolled over and over and over until he wakes up later under a sheet on the dead side of the floor in a hospital with people telling him it's a miracle he's alive and that one of his sisters died.

Damn. Yeah. Luckily, rescuers were on hand faster than they might have since a policeman just happened to already be on the phone with his station house, the exact moment of the tank exploded. So he was like, oh shit,

there's fucking molasses coming. Send help now before it got to him. Isn't that crazy? Lucky. Lucky as fuck. It was like going fast, but it was still like, he had enough, like, you could see it from that far away, just a wall of brown. Yeah, exactly. 35 miles an hour is like a very scary speed.

Yes. Pretty slow, but it's still too fast. You can hit by 35 mile per hour, anything you're dead. You couldn't run away from them. Anyway, this disaster was large scale and absolutely insane. And even at the time, the details of it shook people to their core. Here is Mathis again in his best 19. New York Times reporter voice,

reading the entirety of the national report they made on the tragedy. 12 killed when tank of molasses explodes. Huge. Huge? Is it been huge? I think it does. Huge sheets of steel. Hulled through the air. Destroy structures of Boston waterfront.

Boston, January 15th, probably a dozen persons were killed in 50, injured by the explosion of a huge tank of molasses on the waterfront off commercial street, near Kenny Square today. At a late hour tonight, the only bodies identified were those of a fireman, George Leah, Leah, Leah, Leah, Leah, Leah, Leah, Leah, maybe Lehigh, two residents of tenements in the vicinity, Mrs. Bridget Clowardy, and William A. Duffy, and James Lennon, a motorman of Lennox, and J.M. Cyberlick, Cyberlake, I'm sorry, I'm so good. Seberlick, a blacksmith, also of Lennox. The tank was owned by the Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of the United States Industrial Alcohol company with a plant in Cambridge. A dull muffled roar gave but an instant's warning before

the top of the tank was blown into the air. The circular wall broke into two great segments of sheet iron which were pulled in opposite directions. Two million gallons of molasses rushed over the streets and converted into a sticky mass the wreckage of several small buildings which had been smashed by the force of the explosion. The greatest mortality apparently occurred in one of the city buildings where a score of municipal employees were eating their lunch. The building was demolished and the wreckage was hurled 50 yards. The other city building, which had an office on the ground floor and a tenement above, was similarly torn from its foundations.

One of the sections of the tank wall fell on the firehouse known as engine, which was nearby. The building was crushed and three firemen were buried in the ruins. One George Leahy was killed and the other two injured. A fourth fireman was. thrown through the window into the water, but was picked up. Wagons, carts, and motor trucks were overturned. A number of horses were killed. The street was strewn with debris, intermixed with molasses, and all traffic was stopped. The first rescue party on the scene was a squad detailed from the state nautical school ship, Nantucket, which was anchored at the playground

pier. Under the direction of Lieutenant Commander H.J. Copeland, the enlisted men gave first stayed to the injured and searched the ruins for bodies and assisted in patrolling the district. Shortly afterward, the police reserves arrived together with a military company from an army station. Yeah. Also, the Red Cross nurses came in and had some great, like, tents set up to help people and helped. And the community came together and it was inspiring in a way.

But it was also like a surreal nightmare escape of people stuck in goo they couldn't get out of. There's even an account of an on-leave sailor seeing some dude's arm sticking out from under a truck and hearing him asking for help maybe from under the goo. But when he and another guy go and try and pull him out, they actually pull the guy's arm off instead. It's fucking crazy because he was stuck in molasses. And anyway, just to drive home the science of this a little more, here's Jesse with a quote from Scientific American about why molasses is such an awful thing to be trapped in. For this one, think like, know-it-all scientists, but not with the Jerry Lewis, Professor Frank Voice from The Simpsons.

All right. Got it. A wave of molasses does not behave like a wave of water. Velascus is a non-Newtonian fluid, which means that its viscosity depends on the forces applied to it, as measured by sheer rate. Considering non-Newtonian fluids such as toothpaste, ketchup, and whipped cream, in a stationary bottle, these fluids are thick and goopy and do not shift much. if you tilt the container this way or that. When you squeeze or smack the bottle, however, applying stress and increasing the sheer rate,

the fluid suddenly flow. Because of this physical property, a wave of molasses is even more devastating than a typical tsunami. In 1919, the dense wall of syrup, surging from its collapsing tank, initially moved fast enough to sweep people up and demolish buildings,

only to settle into more gelatinous state. that kept people trapped. And speaking of being trapped in molasses, here's Mathis with another quote from Scientific American in the same vein. Depending on the way it is made, molasses is between 5,000 to 10,000 times more viscous than water. The Reynolds number for an adult man in water is around 1 million.

The Reynolds number for the same man in molasses is about 130. To make matters worse, a man immersed in molasses will not get anywhere with the kind of symmetric swimming, strokes that would propel him in water. Each repetitive stroke would only undo what was done before. Pulling his arm towards himself would move molasses away from his head, but reaching up to repeat the stroke would push the molasses back where it was before. He would stay in place like a gnat trapped in tree sap.

Even burly men struggled to tread molasses in the wake of the Boston molasses disaster. Horses flailed and braid, straining to keep their heads aloft and snorting to clear their airways. Yeah. And really, it was like weird brown swamps filled with screaming, injured people who you couldn't even tell who they were or even what age they were or what gender they were. People trudging through the sludge to shoot horses who were too hurt and stuck to escape. Plus, there were huge chunks of metal debris everywhere because so many buildings were destroyed.

Like, it said that a train stopped and barely went like where the thing fell, like almost didn't. But the story I heard also was that a train crossed over it just before it fell also, which is crazy. I'm like weirdly grateful people trudged into the molasses to shoot the horses because the image of them in my head of being trapped is extremely depressing. But I think I have a theory that the reason that they decided to do that was probably because of the sound, which is fucked up. Yeah. So like I say, people helping these people were smeared with red and brown blood and molasses. Look, the whole point of me getting so graphic here is that I think when I hear people talk about this thing, that there was like this crazy

tidal wave of molasses in Boston 100 years ago and you can still smell it today. It kind of comes across as like weird and silly, right? But really, I just wanted to highlight how serious and horrific this was. And actually, Mathis read the New York's time thing that said 12 people died and 50 were hurt. Actually, it was 20 people who died and another 100. who were varying degrees of injured. One guy, another 21st guy died months later from being depressed from being in this fucking flood. Honestly, the whole thing was just super fucked up.

You know, as serious as it is, maybe that's why people say you can still smell it, right? Because you don't necessarily want to relive the horror of it, but you do want to remember it, right? And I have a quote here from North End native Frank Fravata, who was a kid at the time of the disaster, but who remained a respected North End character for many years after. So, Jesse, when you read this thing, sweet old wistful Italian-American man. It was just the way that the paper says it. And that smell of molasses lingered on for months and a months and a months.

It took years before it, really, really? Because molasses, you know, no matter if it rains or whatever weather, It stays for a long while. Eventually, even we evaporate. What the shit. This man had a moment. Oh, yeah. He just got the last thing.

He just had like an existential realization. Melasces evaporate just like a peepot. And yeah, dude, that's amazing. Tears in the rain. Tears in the rain. But I don't know. I don't want to touch too much on the thing. Does it still smell like molasses?

even though this happened 107 years ago. Mathis, you're from Boston, kind of. Like, have you ever been in the North End and smelled sweet, sweet molasses on the hot summer day? If I did, it never stuck with me. Yeah, I've been in the north end of Boston. I've never smelled sweet, sweet molasses on a hot summer's day. No. My instinct tells me that the molasses should be long gone by now.

But looking into it and watching some videos on it, it said that certain, elements like vanilla and like other sugary stuff in the smell are pretty stable so they might hang around for a good long time if like a pocket of it was never scoured away by saltwater or put in the sea maybe like some state in the ground or something like that i like i like many people say they can still smell it today i feel like in the 60s you could probably smell it right yeah i would i would believe that i for sure and i mean i don't know if i doubt now that might be parts of like north end maybe somewhere the pockets of like on a hot summer's day it drudges up the smell of molasses strangely in the soil or in the street somehow like in a hole in the ground

what was the clean at the cleanup process i can only imagine dude like how i can't cleaning up a honey spill is a pain in the ass everybody got a spoon and said they get to work they tried they tried lots of different ways to clean it up they tried like water and certain chemicals and all this stuff but In the end, the thing that worked the best was highly pressurized salt water scouring, like getting it that way. But eventually, there was just so much of it, like I said, it's 22 million gallons. Eventually, once it hardened, they had to upgrade from water to like chisels and saws and brooms and just like get shovels and like take it out like coal.

you know what I mean? But eventually by the end it took 87,000 man hours to get the area back basically to how it was. The water in Boston Harbor ran brown for like weeks or some shit like that, which is crazy. But as you might have already guessed, the initial outcome in terms of anybody getting in trouble for this was not super encouraging on a macro level. This next quote here is from Stephen Palo again. This is him on GBAH news. not from the book. So this one's a little bit more casual.

So this one's for Mathis. This tragedy happened when there were almost no regulations whatsoever. The court case goes for three years. It's an enormous court case, thousand witnesses, 1,500 exhibits. There's a grand jury that sits and does not return any indictments, largely because there were no laws broken at the time because there were no laws on the books. Keep in mind that this tank didn't even require this. This, keep in mind, this tank didn't even require a building permit because it was considered a receptacle, not a building.

So a whole host of things that we take for granted today in the areas of building construction standards, almost all of that comes from the great Austin molasses flood of 1919. And that's actually true. Like, luckily, after that went down, there was an investigation into who was at fault by the Boston Municipal Court. And they found that the tank was way insufficient for the loads they built it to carry. and then the USAA was eventually found guilty of manslaughter for that, and over 100 lawsuits from victims became one giant class action lawsuits against purity distilling, the largest ever to date at that time in Massachusetts. And though they initially tried to blame everything on sabotage from Italian anti-capitalist anarchists,

which I guess happened a few times in World War I that they threatened certain things. The auditor on the case was like the hardest bastard in the world and only cared about the rules, even against the easy out of casual everyday racism. And eventually that guy concluded that it was actually the tank's poor construction and lack of safety standards, which caused it to fail. And USAA was actually ordered to pay the victim's families and the city and stuff like that, about $300,000 in damages at the time in 1925 or something like that, which in today money is closer to like $6 million.

and actually did represent the end of that era of unchecked, unsafe, rich people hubris fueled construction projects because people suddenly realize that when rich people experience consequences, suddenly things change. What? It's so fucking, I know, it has to affect them before they understand anything called empathy. Yeah. So what did we learn, right? In conclusion, the message is, read about the problems that you face in your life for real.

not just through ways that make you feel comfortable, but actual stuff by people who you know and are not threatened by the fact that they are smarter than you and who have spent their entire lives learning about what they know, trust those people, get that knowledge, and then with that knowledge, you must then hold the people who are factually responsible for your problems accountable,

rather than the people that they would prefer you to blame. And bang, just like that, hey, the future is bright again. And I guess, you know, shoutouts to everyone who has to drown in molasses on the way to getting us there. The end. It's crazy.

One of my friends works in, he's like in the safety field of like, he's like a safety inspector for warehouses and plants and stuff. And one of the like the quote that he was taught really early is that the rules of safety are written in blood. Like these rules don't exist

until something horrifying happens that forces the, the rules to exist, which is just such a shit, like, unfortunate way of that way things go. Because the heart of this, too, is, like you said, like, this thing wasn't built to hold the amount of weight it had. They knew that. Like, there was a lot of things that were just caught corners for the sake of getting it done on time and for as cheaply as possible.

Right. And it's just crazy sitting here, writing this script and thinking about the fact that, like, maybe the lives of like hundreds of thousands of people would be like exposed to cancerous chemicals because of the exact same thing happening a hundred years later. It's just crazy. Different corners cut or ignored altogether at this point. Because the other part now is like penalties are not,

they're not substantial enough to negate the profit that they would make off of them cutting corners anyway. Right. It's fucking crazy. And in this case, everybody got wiped out by a big wall. of molasses. It's so interesting because now we're starting to see,

I wish I could give credit to it. I read it early this week. It was probably on Reddit, but it was a news article about how there's a weird rise in, like dementia cases and other things of people who live near golf courses. I assume because of pesticides on golf courses. Pesticides. Yeah, that would be my immediate thought.

Yeah, there's also, like there's a bunch of different, now they're worried about all. all the different weird things that can happen from the AI like centers. The yeah. It's fucking water. I'm like weird black fluid that's in the water table that like they're not like they didn't tell anybody about. Yeah.

I like we're going to get a whole new wave of this of weird like, ah, yes, some guy with a billion dollars did not care about you when you tried to make another billion. And there were no laws regarding this kind of thing. So they just did whatever they wanted when you like let me ask you this. general person who's not here to answer my questions. Like, when you are watching like a cartoon or something like that with like an environmental message and it's boring, right? It's boring because the message is already so obvious that we all get it, right?

We all understand the thing that Captain Planet is trying to tell us about saving the earth or whatever the Navi are trying to encourage us to do, right? It's an inane message because it's so core obvious in the same way that's saying, don't be racist is obvious, right? So what is it that's stopping us? Just think about that. That's a question for you who can't answer questions right now. Just think about that. And on that question, we're off to go to a minisote over at patreon.com slash shluminati pot. We'll be back next week with the brand new episode. We appreciate you. We love you. Goodbye. Bye stuff. Buy stuff from us. Buy all of our stuff. Go to yedda.com slash illuminati. Anyway, me and my wife were sitting

outside indulging on our porch one night enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside, and after a few moments, I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dashed back outside, and she's looking up the sky at the hall. I look up to you, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. You know,