Doomed to Fail - Ep 249: An Almost Disaster - The Citigroup Center

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Let's talk about the almost-disaster of The Citigroup Center - 601 Lexington Ave in NYC. This building was built on a lot that wasn't empty when they got there, and they made an objectively weird deal with a church on the corner: they would build their building over the church's footprint.   This caused the building to be built on stilts - everything SEEMED ok until some people did some math & the right people were finally alerted. A huge (secret) retrofit was undertaken before the building destroyed the neighborhood.    Taylor continues to not be able to believe she worked on the 38th floor of a NYC building for years.   Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In the matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortenthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow American, what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your... Ben and Taylor, we are back. And ask you how you're doing, but I think you're still bleeding. I'm okay. I put interritorial gel on it, and it's not bleeding. There you.

I feel like that's, like, disinfecting it and then, like, all as well. Yeah. Worst case scenario, you can put super glue on a wound, and that will close it. Oh, that's good. Oh, actually, I couldn't find the super glue earlier, but that's good to know. No, I have this, like, tool that, like, shaves it off the edge of a 3D print, and I cut my love with it, but I'll as well. I clean the print, and there's no blood on that.

Yeah, good. What else do we have to catch a while? What is the banter that the people want to see today? I don't know. I feel like I don't know I'm just coming out of the sickness my daughter did

so much stuff this week she did the talent show and she did an orchestra concert she was in like six acts in the talent show she did all these TikTok dances I was like I can't believe you know all those TikTok dances

it was just like really fun and cute and yesterday she just did this like orchestra concert and she can play so many songs and when she's home she plays one song over and over again and she's like whatever but she's like just great at it That was really hard. Great question for you, because you have a child, you have young children.

What are they, what is like, what are schools doing on AI exposure? Like, are they like, are your kids like starting out like AI proficient? Like, what does it look like? I don't really know because, well, they're on the computer for a bunch of stuff. Like they have like a laptop at school they use and they like use that. And like so we give them like they, I think that they like do have access. to like a school chat GPT to like ask it questions and to like start doing stuff. But I definitely am like thinking of it in the way that like people were afraid of Wikipedia in the beginning.

And like you can't use Wikipedia for school, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. When I'm like right now I use it all the time, but I use it and then like if I like really want to go like deeper, I'll look at the sources and like go a little bit further with that, you know? So I'm like, I'm a little bit like if you want to use it like the way that I use it for, this show is like I use it to start and then I look at all the sources, you know. So I try to like make them do that and want to like, you know, read entire books, not just like Google them. I don't know. But. Yeah.

Yeah. So what happens? I don't know. Mostly just curious, like, what is life you don't look like when you're a child coming up in the age of AI? It's like. Yeah. I mean, like right now, they still do a lot of like writing with their hands at school. Like they're at like a report at school and they don't type it.

They like are able to still like write it and stuff, which I think is great. It's great. Because that's like the most, like, that, then at least, obviously they're not, like, just, like, copying, pasting, from something. But when I paste, when I, like, get, like, a, like, I ask chat GPT, I'll ask it, like, you know, to give me, like, some sources and a thing. And I'll paste that into Google Docs. And then I'll, like, use that as, like, expand it as I'm reading. But as soon as I paste it, Google Doc says, this is written by AI. Does that?

Wait, does it really? Mm-hmm. Yeah. As soon as I do that, it, like, it, like, I get, like, like, I get, like, like, a big black pop-up next to the thing that says this sentence looks like it was written by AI and it'll tell me all those things and I'm like it was like that's what I and then I pull it apart and add a lot more to it and you know read all those first ones and do all the things but when I started it does tell me that it is um so yeah I didn't know we did that that's incredible

yeah yeah I don't know I don't know I don't know the answer we'll see I mean I just don't I just don't have any idea what school's going to look like in a year you know or or five like Florence is in ending fifth grade this week. So she still had a long way to go before the end of high school. And there's, I mean, the world's going to be so different. I don't know. I have a theory that, well, it's very centered around my own life experience. Which is probably why I'm thinking about the way I'm thinking about it.

But I'm like, what is the point? What is going to be the point of law schools in like 10 years? Yeah. Like, what do you need a lawyer for? Like, all the case along the world is excessive. and somebody like AI can be prompted to write a brief and do patent searches and why do you even need to go to school for that it's kind of crazy totally i don't i don't know my my nail lady was like i'm worried they were going to run out of doctors and i was like that's fair because you're right

i don't you know you know i don't know anyone who's like going to medical school and yeah i don't know i don't have an answer do you know it'll never be replaced podcasters. Yeah, I'm going to say podcasters who are literally being replaced by AI. But those AI bots can't generate the rich content banter that you and I can't. No, they can't. They can't be this friendship. You can't recreate this in a lab. I can't. I can't tell an AI to make sure that talks to the other AI, like they're friends for 20 years.

Whatever. We'll get through it. We'll power through. Whatever. I'll introduce us. Yeah, please. Welcome to doomed to fail. You bring you historical disasters and failures. And I am real person, Taylor, joined by real person, Fars. We are real, legit people, like not fake even a little bit.

So I'll be covering an engineering failure today, but one that succeeded and nobody suffered a result of it. So it's actually a happy story. That's good. Yeah. I'll be covering a New York state. skyscraper that was on the brink of collapse and the covert mission that was undertook to save it without anybody really knowing. I'm scared.

I'm like nervous. Go ahead. You might actually know this building. It's because it's very distinct. It's very unique looking. So the building in question is the city group center building located in Midtown East in Manhattan. Are you familiar with this building?

Okay. I'm looking it up. You know what building this is? This is a Mugatu building from Zoolander. Oh my God, you're right. It's the one in Zoolander, it's a giant M at the top of it. Because it's a Gatou Building, even though in real life it's like a triangle. But yes, I totally miss that.

Yeah. Have you seen this building in person? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I've seen every building. Can you describe it real quick? They get weird about it. It's exceptionally tall for the neighborhood that it's in, I think.

And then also the top is not flat. It has like a really. like I said it was a triangle, but it's basically like a 90-degree triangle on the side of the top. I think that really stands out, and it's very, very, very far east. I don't know if that matters in your thing. Do you notice anything about its base that's unusual? I don't. Maybe I don't know what the base looks like.

The top is very distinct. Tell me what about the base. We're going to talk about the base, because the base is the problem here. So. Oh, I see it. I hate it. Okay. Okay.

Do you want to describe what you're seeing? Yes, it looks like a giant building on some little tiny-ass legs. There you go. That is a problem. So part of the problem, the part of the problem is that it's on stilts. The bigger problem are where the stilts are located. So that's what's going to cause all this kerfuffle. And you can just look at it and you can tell this is wrong.

This is a crime against nature, basically. Oh, word. So a little bit of backstory. The 1960s, the city block that you're looking at there was, mostly just brownstones and a single church. In 1968, two real estate brokers names irrelevant started buying up parcels of land on this block and the assumption that one large parcel would be a lot more valuable than individual parcels here. Makes sense. It's New York. It's the 1970s. It's like coming up. So that tracks. The church on this block had been a holdout on selling

its land. But as part of their negotiations with these brokers and later the company that we now know a city group, they agreed to sell on the condition that a new church be built for them.

There's several stipulations here. That new church had to occupy the location of the current church. The new church can't be physically connected in any way whatsoever to the skyscraper. And that's a base on requirement.

You have to be asking, if you're going to have to build the church anyways, who gives a shit about getting access to the space there, New York has a, people can get air rights. Like air rights to what's above. You find it as really, well, I assume. Basically, you're like, I can buy the air rights at the building next door to mine so that they cannot build their building higher than mine and ruin my view.

Exactly. It was that. So that was part of this thing was, well, let you build your thing here and give you the air rights to build your thing, but you have to rebuild my church, and you have to do it in the exact same location it currently is. So with all that, the parcel was acquired and design work was underway for a new skyscraper for City Group.

They're basically their HQ. The firm that was hired to design this was Hugh Stubbins and Associates. Their first and most obvious challenge was how do you design a building when you can't use the entire footprint of the block that you're supposed to be building on? What a weird deal. Like, I don't know. We couldn't just, like, give them an extra million dollars and not done that? They actually pay them quite a bit.

It was, it was, it was, it was like in 19, I guess, 68 money, it would, or yeah, in their money back then, it was about $9 million. So it's out of, that's probably, I don't know, 20 million now or something. I also found out later on that the last holdout parcel, the very, very last one was a record setting price for a parcel land. in New York, which was $40 million. Hmm. So it was, yeah. Yeah, and money back then. So who knows what that is, like $60 million probably.

It's a billion dollars. It's a billion dollars for all we know. In 1973, this design firm, Hughes Stubbins and Associates, they revealed their design, which included the peculiar design element of the building, which you described as sitting on stilts. But that's not weird enough. The stilts are midline, midpoint on the building. They're not on the corners of the building. Right.

And it's really hard to describe it. I'm not saying they're deeper within the central architecture of the building. What I'm saying is like they're on the outsides, they're on the facades, but they're on the middle point, the center of the building. So like the corners are like hanging over nothing. The corners are hanging over nothing, exactly. Yes. the building was opened but again they had to do that because they had to make space for the church they couldn't inhibit the building sideways so they were like this the only way we can do it is we've got to

build it on these weird stilts that was the entire point it's to do this one church the building was opened in 1977 with nearly 100% occupancy it was really considered a success for the time like how quickly also it sounded like city group was really on the come up in new york and was really established himself as a financial like powerhouse there. And so they had a really good easy time kind of going through the process of getting this thing occupied. The church that had been promised to be built after the previous one was destroyed for development of the area, that was also opened the same year as the city group center in 1977. So it's going to get a little bit in the weeds. Actually put a pen and pad next to me so I can't draw things, but now I can't turn on

video. So it's fine. Here was the design challenge. In a typical high rise, wind's hitting the face of a building, apply force that can be absorbed and distributed at the base. So it's not like this. When wind hits one face of the building, that force can then be distributed towards the back of the building. And you're fine. Like, nothing's going to happen. There's going to be some swang we'll address later on. But that's basically it.

To manage the wind loads, given this design, since there are, there's nothing on the corners. So there is no distribution there. And also I said that it was very east, but I think even today, I don't know how like the age of the buildings around it, it stands out as like one of the tallest buildings really close to the river, which I imagine has more wind. Oh, yeah, of course. You know. So one other person who's really going to be the protagonist of the story here is this guy named William Le Miser, who I assume is French. he is the structural engineer that was retained to do the structural engineering components of this beyond just the design elements that Stubbins and Associates was doing.

What he, the design he went with was to install these massive Chevron trusses all up and down the facade on all sides of the building. So if you look at like the exoskeleton of the building, what it would look like is that center point where the stilts are, once the building actually starts and the stilts stop, you have a chevron that's pointing down and it spans eight floors and there's seven of them in total to these huge trusses. And the whole point of that was that because of the center mass of the building was on these stilts, you now have these trusses where the support structure and the loads that each floor would have to bear get directed down from one floor to the next to these trusses.

That was the entire point. Make sense? Yes. So key element here, and we've talked about this before, we talked about this in the higher agency where designs change and nobody actually knows, nobody of consequence knows that the design really changed. The way that this was designed by the structural engineer was it required, well-ded joint to create the Chevron trusses.

But trust are huge. It's not one piece of metal. It's like multiple pieces of metal. And the whole point of it was you're supposed to weld them together. The other thing worth noting here is that at this time in New York, part of the city regulations was that structural integrity for buildings like this was only supposed to factor in perpendicular winds, winds that are hitting the face of the building head on, right? Which makes sense because in any other situation, like that wind is always going to be stronger

than a wind that gets deflected across the corners of the quartering winds or the ones that would hit the side of that building, that all gets deflected. And so the bigger risk is always one that's going to hit you face on. In the case of this building, given that it was on stilts, that wasn't true. When winds hit the building at an angle, it's called, like I said, quartering winds. Instead of one side absorbing the load and the other three sides flexing to disperse the load, two sides take the load and the combined force isn't able to then be distributed across the remaining trusses.

Makes sense? Yes. So does it go down to the trusses on its side, but it doesn't like distribute the whole thing? It wouldn't, the new load bearing capacity of the trusses wouldn't be sufficient for a high strength wind hitting it in an angle because two trusses would have to bear the load. And there would be no, the trust on the other two side wouldn't have the corresponding strength to then offset the load that they have to bear. Again, in a regular building, we wouldn't even be talking about this because it's just the base. It's just the foundation, right? If it's strong enough to hold head on, it's strong enough to hold it any which way, that was going to be the case here because of the trust system they put it together.

And this was even before anybody even knew that they'd struck, they built these trusts as wrong, which I'm going to describe here. foreshadowed that with a weld thing. But there's more issues that come into play here. Yeah, I'm nervous. I know exactly what you're saying. You're like, people started making decisions and then didn't tell everybody. You're like, you need to tell people where decisions aren't. Yeah. Well, during the building phase, apparently doing welds like this in field is like really challenging. First of all, it's really costly because someone who has the skills to do welding, it's like a union job. It's very labor intensive. You have to do it on site, which means that you're subject to the weather, and you don't want to be doing this when it is when it's super cold out. You don't want to be doing

this when it's wet out. And so a cheaper solution that the builders put together was, let's just do bolts, which again was exactly what happened with the higher agency was let's just do bolts. And this is going to mitigate costs and time and increase efficiencies. And who cares is just the bolt instead of a world. I definitely, my friend, our friend Paul from New York, he is a foreman and he's worked on like, like, when they rebuilt Yankee Stadium 20 years ago, he was like one of the guys that was like in charge of that working that project. One time, like, I asked no question that like he looked to me like I was an idiot, but I was like, what happens when it rains? And he was like, we keep building, like, whatever. But I'm like, ours in the wood like inside of that building

get wet. And he was like, well, yeah, but then just dries. And I was like, huh. Like, obviously, you know, like stop construction on things when it rains in New York City because you wouldn't be building, half the year, but a lot of it you just do in that bad weather, you know? Yeah, yeah. And there's got to be like concessions meet and stuff, I imagine. There was also a way to do this, which we're going to learn here in a second. Even if the weather was bad, it would have changed the way that they would go through the building process, but it was still sort of doable because that's actually what they

ended up doing on a retrofit, which I'm going to discuss here later. So key element here, when I said nobody knows, what I'm I met was the structural engineer in charge of the project, didn't know. His firm knew because the builder called the structural engineer firm and said, hey, we want to use bolts instead of welds for this. Is that okay? And again, somebody there looked at the New York City requirements and was like, well, if you use bolts and it's a perpendicular win, this will hold up. That's fine. Run with it. Nobody told the lead structural engineer himself. So the building, the building, elders did check.

Here's why all this is relevant. So when joints are welded, they become actually, they become at minimum as strong as the parent steel, the individual pieces of steel. And in some cases, they become even stronger than that parent steel. Loads can be supported evenly along the entire trust, which obviously is going to have less metal fatigue,

less points of failure. Bolts can't do that. Bolts are a single point of failure in any situation. They are very strong, but there's several things you can go wrong with them. One being there's additional structural rigidity problems because bolts have to deal with friction and vibrations differently than a weld would instead of being a single piece of metal. And so that's a reason why this guy had originally architected this without bolts and with welds. One other factor worth discussing is tune dampeners. You know what this is, right?

Because you worked in a tall high rise. Is that just the thing that makes it move? Yeah. Well, it's the thing that mitigates its movement. So in very tall buildings, skyscrapers, very tall, narrow buildings near the very top of the building is a heavy centered mass that moves in an opposite direction from the building when the building is swaying in the wind. The point of it being, it's actually not for safety I learned.

It's more for comfort. So the idea was, like, when the wind hits and it's shaking and, like, if you're the top floor, you're like, what is going on? Like it's going to be scary, I assume, you know? And I think I think I probably said this before. But like I lived in a high-rise building for a while and in New York. And some of the apartments had like odd jut out on the wall that like it was like a like a sheep of like you can tell there was like a girder or whatever underneath it. Because when it was an office building, it was okay.

But once they were into apartments and people started to sleep in it, they were like, this building moves too much. And like you said, it wasn't like necessarily the building was going to fall down, but it was like you perceive it differently when you were laying in your bed than you do when you were working in an office and they have to add more to it to people would freak out. Yeah, yeah. They were saying that with this one, when they were designing this tune damper, they were like, we could have added more structural rigidity to the building. This was a much more cost-effective way and like, I don't know, a more elegant way to solve the problem. And city group was like, yeah, like, we're not going to be able to rent this thing. The top floors out if this thing is shaking too much. So let's just solve it.

So, and I actually also learned this. The city core building was the first one from inception that actually had a tuned dampener ever installed in it. There's one that happened a year earlier, but that was a retrofit. So it's considered a first building with a tuned dampener, apparently. In the case of this building, the dampener was a 400-ton concrete block that sat on top of pressurized oil. And I don't really know what pressurized oil is, but basically it means that it just floats on top. Like, it's literally just like floating and can sway from one direction to the next. That's kind of the idea behind it.

The pressurization of oil is run by electrical systems. So without the electrical system, it's just regular oil, and it's not going to be buoyant enough. and slippery enough for this four-tun concrete mass to move around. So you can see the problem, right? If you're dealing with, like, incredibly high winds, you're probably also dealing with power arches. So you've got like a convergence to several factors that are coming together here. About a year or so after the building was commemorated,

this part is very contested because there's multiple people in whatever. Everybody wants to be the first one to take credit. So, like, there's one story from one person, another story from another person. I don't actually know it's true, but the general premise is that about a year off the building was commemorated. There's this Princeton student named Diane Hartley, who was writing her thesis statement on the design of this building. And as part of her research, she determined that the quartering winds the building was likely to face for higher than the stress loads those Chevron trusses should be able to handle. She had several back and forth with a design firm. She was mostly blown off because it's like you're like some big shot design firm.

like some 20-year-old kid writing you, you know, like, it's like, yeah, yeah, it didn't really go anywhere, a girl, exactly, which was, it's funny, if you read the articles about this, it actually comes up quite a bit. She submitted her thesis, and that was kind of the end of it. For the most part, history is determined that she's the first one that actually identified this as an issue, but she wasn't in a position to solve it, basically. Later, the lead structural engineer was doing a Q&A via phone with some architectural students and was posed a similar question, but like, what are you going to do about the quartering wins? Is it able to handle it? And this led him to question himself and his calculations. So he went back and started doing

some research on his own math and designs of the building. And in that process, he learned firsthand that they used bolts instead of wells in the trusses construction. And how long has it been open by this point? A little over a year. He re-ran the math and determined that a one in 55-year storm could topple the skyscraper. That was if the tune dampeners worked. If the power was shut off and the pressurization system to the oil was shut off as a result of that, and the dampeners stopped working, then a one in 16-year storm would be sufficient to take the building down. what's worse about this is this is like hurricane season in New York and there were reports

I forgot the name of the hurricane was when there was one off the coast of South Carolina that looked like it was heading towards New York and so this guy the structural engineer was having a really hard time he he legit apparently considered suicide like he was like I'd kill myself it's going to be how I solved this ultimately he's not he's not He decided to go to the head of city court. He went to the design firm, uh, Stevens and associates.

He went to the insurance providers for himself and the design firm. And he went to New York City mayor, Ed Koch and told them, here's what's going on. And like, let's put our head stand on. I forgot what to do with this. This is a huge problem because if you make this public and you tell people what's

going on, everyone's going to panic. It's going to be absolute mayhem in pandemonium. Yeah, sure. She didn't go to work. You sure, sure. You wouldn't go to work. None of the people in the buildings around you would go to work.

We would walk around that area. All commerce would totally grind to a halt. What ended up happening was they put together these contingency plans, which were, here is how we're going to do a forced evacuation of X number of city blocks from where this building is. Here's the timelines. And here's the relief shelters we're going to put in place to handle people who have to be rushed in an emergency situation who are hurt.

So they actually put a lot of thought into like how to do this. But the one thing they agreed on was we cannot tell people, we can't let on that this is going on. Then we're going to, maybe we have this problem, basically. So next day, start working on the fix. And the fix is really simple. It was what I mentioned earlier. It was like just weld, what was bolted. Right.

And then also install generators so that if the electric goes out, the tune dampener still works. Right. So that was basically the decision. And it's funny because we didn't actually know at all about any of what happened here until about 20 years later. It was 1995 when this actually came out, what happened in 1978. But what ended up happening was they brought these construction crews in and nobody would enter the building or do any work until every last person was out of the building. So every employee's gone. then one crew would come in and start removing drywall because the trusses were buried behind the drywall

then another crew would come in start doing the welding move on to the next truss and the next weld while another crew came in and then we did the walls right there I kept picturing like if you're like just some cubicle office worker and you walk to like do you smell that new paint like it's got to be a little like people had to know something was going on like that plant looks a little bit weird located there. It wasn't there yesterday, you know? Right. I think that one's been, like, sitting on my desk. Exactly. Exactly. And it's drywall. So it gets everywhere, right? So, like, you probably have, like, dusts all

of the place, but I'm sure they kind of account it with that with, like, janitorial services and whatnot. Yeah. Also, really good fortune struck for all the parties involved here, which was, there was, like, this three-week period when this was going on, where every New York publication was on a union strike. So, Even if someone was trying to, you know, leak information or whatever about this. There was nowhere for it to go. Yeah, there was nowhere for it to go. Nobody would write it.

Nobody would print it. So, so no harm and no foul. Amazing. In the end, after the retrofit was completed, it was theorized that now that building can sustain a one in 700-year storm before it is brought down. I love that stat. Like, okay, I don't care. It could be tomorrow. It could be in 699 years.

I mean, okay, so I know. I was looking at that too, and I was like, well, how do I disrun what that actually means? It's based on actuary tables. Like, that's actually why I think, like, Fukushima happened is because you look at certain situation, like, this is such an anomaly. It shouldn't happen in this many years, therefore the safe life cycle for this thing should be over by then. But then it happens.

And you're like, well, shit. Like, we had a plan for that. What's interesting is that the original design, part of this calculation was if they hadn't done the retrofit, a 70 mile per hour order wind would bring the building down. So, do you think about an average hurricane, that's like baseline 70 miles. Like 70 miles, like, I think that's like Cat 1 or something. And they were literally looking down the face of a hurricane coming down the South Carolina coast. And it turned away at the last minute, but that was also part of why all these

contingencies were put into place. Like, we might have a situation where a fucking giant skyscraper could be rubble in the city. in 1978, which like we saw how that turned down in 2001, but like, imagine how much worse would be in this situation, 20 years earlier. Yeah, and I think it's also in, I mean, no offense to the Twin Towers, but they went down very efficiently. You know? And like, it sounds like this one would just tip over. Yeah. And that's like, that's a different amount.

Like, if they, if the Twin Towers had fallen, like, horizontally, they would have, it would have been so much worse. So much worse. Yeah, because this is on stilts. And so if a trust goes, that side goes before the next trust fails after failing to hold the load and then the next trust. So even worse case, it wouldn't be falling over to one side. It's falling on four sides. Yeah. So, so yeah, they did the retrofit.

It's up. It's running. It's still, it's still in use today. And much credit to this structural engineer who, like, literally was going to kill himself over this. Like he really had a hard time dealing with this. And it turns out that like his career actually catapulted as a result of this. Because they were like, hey, like doing the right thing makes you better at your job, not trying to hide it.

And it sounds like you don't know. As soon as he found out, it sounds like he said something, which is that we're supposed to do. Yeah. And then there's a whole side quest here too, which was really fun around, around who actually brought this up first. Because originally, the structural architect, the structural engineer said it was some male student that brought this up to him in that Q&A I mentioned earlier. And then later on, I forgot her name Nicole Hadley, I think it was, Hadley something. She came out saying, I brought this up because of my thesis paper before that conversation happened. But the theory is either because of sexism most likely, but also possibly because of the fact that she never.

talk to the structural engineer directly. She only talks to, like, staff at his office. Whereas the other student, he actually did talk to directly, and he got firsthand feedback on what he thought about the courtroom wins. So there's a whole debate on, like, who actually broke this? Who got this guy's wheels turning to figure this out? So a little fun little psych quest. That guy needs another way to talk to him.

Like, if someone tells me something, catastrophic, I'm not, it's not gonna not get to my boss, you know, like, but people have to talk to this guy directly. Like, that's just like, it's just funny that like all these things happen. And the one, the one person who's gatekeeping this information is the person who doesn't know. So here's, here's the other reason why his disclosure was really incredible. Nothing would have happened to him if he hadn't done it. If the building had collapsed till thousands of people, nothing would have happened because he built it to, because he built it to code.

Right. Like, the code was only looking at perpendicular wins, and he was like, everything I built to spec is for that. And again, when the builders called his office, they were like, yeah, it's built to spec. Like, you can change the bolts from wealth or wells to bolts, and it's going to be the spec. So he didn't have to say anything.

He wouldn't have been liable for anything if the building had fallen and killed a bunch people. And that's also part of what you're bringing up here, which is like, why does anybody, you have to talk with this guy? I was like, well, yeah, because. everybody else was looking at the sheet and look at the math and being like, this works. So why?

What's there to discuss? You know? Scary. But it was a good outcome. Good outcome. Really, really scary situation. It's a terrifying looking building. I think I'd have a hard time going inside of it

because just like everything in your lizard brain is telling you that there's something wrong with this building, just where the stilts are located. And the fact that they are stilts at all makes you think. I mean, looking at it from like one of the sides. when you look at it, it looks like it's just like balancing on one. Yeah. You know?

Yeah, no, I don't want to be underneath it. I don't want to be in it. I don't want to be near it. Yeah. It's a big no thank you from me. Yeah, 100%. I'm on the same page with you on that. So that is my story.

Maybe next time I'll bring a failure that actually is a failure. But this is a happy one. Yeah, it's a good one. I like it. I'm glad that everything turned out okay. It is definitely. really scary yeah yeah so anyway that's the story um thank you for listening uh do we have anything to sign off with taylor um no does anyone thank you for your suggestions um find us at doomed

to fell pod on all social media email us doom to fell pod at gmail dot com with your ideas um we would love to hear from you let us know what you think tell me more love to hear from you we listen and read every bit of feedback, so please do right to us and tell us what you're saying. Yes. Sweet. Well, go ahead and cut off there, Taylor. Thank you.

Cool.