The Josh Innes Show - St. Louis Tornado

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

A rather large Tornado rolled through St. Louis on Friday. Some of the videos are wild. Speaking of videos, some folks are so desperate for clout that they sit around and film these things. St. Louis is known for its own style of Chinese food. It seems odd, but it's true. Anywho, many of the post tornado videos I've seen have been from folks who were devastated to see Chinese places getting taken out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 26th to 30th, Canadians will rise as one and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today

at SunriseChallenge.ca. That's SunriseChallenge.ca. Boy, on Friday we had a tornado in St. Louis through the city. Doesn't happen all that often. It's happened before in St. Louis, but this is something. This will be one of the few times a tornado has actually blown through here. Bad Boy was an F3, came through St. Louis. And it happened Friday. People didn't really see or hear anything about it nationally, really, until Saturday, right? So I start getting phone calls and texts from people asking if

I'm all right. They're like, are you okay? I saw that there was a tornado. Are you okay? Like, yeah, I'm fine and nothing happened to me. But here's the thing, man. So this tornado blows through on Friday afternoon. We're expecting really bad weather where I live. I live in Kirkwood, Missouri,

which is kind of a city-ish suburb of St. Louis. It's in St. Louis County. It's not in St. Louis City. It's in St. Louis County. So it's off of I-40. Like I live off of Interstate 40, whatever. We're supposed to get bad weather here, like golf ball size hail. We're all kind of concerned. The sky's got really dark around here. And then about two o'clock it rained. I'm talking sprinkled. I wouldn't even call it rain.

It sprinkled for about 30 seconds and got a little bit windy and a couple of branches fell off some trees. Then it stopped and the sun came back out. We're watching the news, they're talking about, there could be tornadoes touching down. I'm like, right, what the fuck ever. I go to the chiropractor, right?

I get home, start watching the news again and we find out that a legit tornado ripped through Clayton, which is right around, is Clayton technically in the county or the city? I think Clayton's at St. Louis City. I'm not sure. It might be the county. But it rips through Clayton, which is this nice little downtown area, right? And then it rips through City Park, not City Park, Forest Park. And Forest Park is this gorgeous

park. It's one of the best city parks in the country. Gorgeous. The World's Fair of 1904 happened there. It is a gorgeous, awesome, amazing, sprawling park. Killer place. I go walk with Ross there all the time. Me and Luther used to walk there all the time. It is awesome and apparently this thing blew through there and then blew through some neighborhoods in North St. Louis, took out some buildings, took out some houses, took out some trees at this park. I had no clue how big this storm was because as I noted, it was sunny that afternoon and I'm not that far away.

I take Ross to Forest Park every day, I mean seemingly every day, every week, two or three times a week. Depending on how you drive there and how the traffic is, you can get there in 10, 12 minutes. You can get to Forest Park. I don't know what the mileage distance is. It ain't that far. So it's wild when something like that happens where not that far from you people's houses are getting knocked over. You got trees being uprooted. It's wild. And here I am just dicking around at my house in the sun like, hey, I'm about to go to the chiropractor. Nothing came of this storm. So people are messaging me like, are you okay? Are you alive? Did you guys make it? I'm like, literally

nothing happened. I didn't lose power here. I didn't lose power. I got two drops of rain. Sun came back out and it was hot again. It's wild how that kind of shit can happen. Like a mile wide tornado can just like blow through a city or whatever the hell it is And you're 10 minutes away from that and experience None of it now. Let me play a few commercials and we'll continue The hot honey McCrispy is so back at McDonald's with juicy 100% Canadian raised seasoned chicken shredded lettuce Crispy jalapenos and that completely craveable hot honey sauce. It's a sweet heat repeat you don't want to miss. Get your hot honey McCrispy today. Available for

a limited time only at McDonald's. Yeah, I've never really been in any terrible weather. The worst thing I've experienced I think must have been when Hurricane Gustav blew through Baton Rouge and we took that one hard and we were out of power for days. I remember we had generators for that one, but like Katrina in New Orleans wasn't, or in Baton Rouge rather, wasn't a big deal for us there. But Hurricane Gustav in 2008, I think is when that was, was a mess for us. But

outside of that, I've never really dealt with horrible weather. I've never seen a tornado. But the thing I'm tickled by is, first off, I'll say this. I've seen some people post ring cam videos like doorbell camera videos, and some of these videos are nuts. Like there's one of a dude, and maybe you've seen it on Instagram, dude's out by his pool. I think he realizes the storm's blowing in, so he's trying to get out of the pool and move some shit. Maybe he

had just mowed the grass because he was shirtless and he had a leaf blower out. He's going over to his outdoor kitchen to grab the leaf blower and go inside and a tree basically falls on him and almost fucking kills him. It's like inches from killing him and he runs inside. Some of these fucking ring doorbell camera videos are bonkers. But then you get some other people. And the people who need to be ridiculed are the people who are in the middle of what becomes an F3 storm, a

gigantic tornado that knocks out city blocks, takes out buildings, takes out houses, closes down businesses. A lady was killed in a church. Like this lady was just volunteering at the church serving lunch as boom, roof collapses, dead. But then there are people who stand on their portrait in their yard with their camera phones filming this shit. And then they post the video and the video's like, Oh my God, I've never been more scared than I've ever been in my entire life. Well then bitch bitch why the fuck weren't you in your basement or in like the center most point of your house or sitting in the fucking?

Tub in the bathroom trying to avoid the storm. Why is your dumbass out there with your camera? Oh, I know cuz you're fucking clout chasing That's all these like people are so obsessed like imagine that that's the first thought you have like you're in the middle of a tornado Your life is in jeopardy. You may die. You have no idea what this storm is gonna do. This storm could go fucking bat shit crazy. And then you're donezo.

But your first thought is hold tight. Let me get my phone out so everyone can see this because assuming I survive, this is going to be killer for views on the gram. This is the most scary. I'll tell you the exact caption on it because I took a screenshot and sent it to Jim earlier because I find people to just be ridiculous. But the- let's see, where's old Jim

Mudd? Here he is. Jim Mudd. Here was the post. The tree came through the living room. Scariest day of my life. Tornado hit St. Louis. Us when the tornado hit st. Louis us when the tornado was real yes when the tornado was real you were literally standing on your porch with a camera filming the tornado like this is twister like your jonas jonas went out and got corporate sponsors there was another one i saw and this was a little different because it was certainly a really unique situation, but there were some guys doing construction work and a guy was out in one of his little machines. I don't know

what you would call the damn thing. I don't know all the names of all the different machines you use on construction sites, but the dude gets out of the machine, he and his buddy and they go sit in this guy's truck because this tornado is coming through and they have nowhere to fucking go. So they're just sitting in the truck and the guy starts filming and you watch as a tree falls on this this digging apparatus machine that they were whatever you fucking call bulldozer. I don't know what the hell it was and it falls on it and it just crushes

it and the guy goes, bro, I think your truck got crushed. I think your machine got crushed, bro. And I don't know what happened to those dudes, but like in that scenario, like you don't have another option. So in a way, it's kind of like, hey, film it. So just in case anybody finds this phone, they can confirm how I fucking died. Then you get real stupid people. If you think the people that stand on their porch to film the tornado, if you think those are stupid people, there's a different batch of people who are even fucking dumber and those are the people that were on the interstate who decided to stop their cars in driving lanes to stop their car while the storm

was blowing through and they stopped under the overpass and blocked traffic. So I want you to imagine you're someone trying to rush and get to safety and some jagoffs in front of you all kind of just decided, you know what, we're going to park our cars under the overpass, not on the shoulder, but right in the middle of the road, thus protecting ourselves and like eight other cars, leaving the rest of you as sitting ducks where you may just die. Now, I don't know a ton about tornadoes and how to avoid these tornadoes, but from everything I've heard, and nobody's going to do

this, but from what I've heard is if you think you're going to be in the middle of a tornado and you're in a situation like that, you get out of the car and you lay in a ditch. Now, I have no clue if that's true or not. I have no clue if that's something that actually happens or not. I don't know. But everything I've read is that when you get into a tornado and you're in that scenario, go lay in a ditch. Now, maybe there isn't a ditch delay and I don't know and it seems kind of absurd to do that. But it also seems kind of absurd to just stop your car under an overpass and leave thousands of other people in harm's way because they cannot get anywhere because this storm is blowing through.

Like is that a crime? Like I would think that that's gotta in some way be a crime. time. Like imagine just the assholedness that takes. Now again, it's a scary situation to be in. Like you don't know really what to do. You're like, shit, am I going to die here? What do I do? But by you stopping under that overpass, you have essentially made everybody else a sitting duck, and if that thing blows through there, you might survive, and then essentially you're responsible for killing hundreds of other people if they all get blown

away by the storm. Now they didn't, but what if they would have? And if they would have gotten blown away by this storm, that blood is on your hands. Like it's kind of a dickish thing to do, right? Like that's not kind of, it is a super dickish thing to do. You have to be a real special breed of asshole to be like, nope, I'm stopping under the silver pass because a storm's coming and there was literally hundreds of cars just stopped on Interstate on 64, a major American street in this

in St. Louis, dead stopped. Another thing that came of this and this was the saddest thing I think is that a lot of the the inner city people, the people in the kind of shadier parts of town. Let me set the story up this way. So in Missouri St. Louis particular there is a brand of Chinese food that people love okay it's called it's called chop suey and if you play if you drive through St. Louis and you see a. through St. Louis and you see an Asian restaurant in a shitty part of town that says chop suey, I can almost guarantee you that the food is phenomenal, that you will never have better Chinese food. St. Louis, we may have talked about this before, it's pretty remarkable. St. Louis has the most incredible form of Chinese food, particularly fried rice. The people in St.

Louis are fried rice fiends and the way they prepare the fried rice. The people in St. Louis are fried rice fiends and the way they prepare the fried rice at these chop suey restaurants is remarkable. If you've never experienced it, you must. They've got like hot braised chicken, they've got the chicken on a stick, they've got the fried rice, which is phenomenal, the lo mein is phenomenal. These chop suey restaurants, as they call them, are remarkable. But in certain parts of town in the more inner city parts of town folks refer to these people as the Chinaman and it is just accepted vernacular in St. Louis. Like somehow in St. Louis it is not something that is considered

racist or offensive. They call Chinese restaurants Chinaman, not the people working them, just the restaurant they're referred to as Chinaman. So like if you like if you look at the comments, right, like I saw a video that was posted and one of these chop suey restaurants got taken out, right? And all of the comments are, oh God, no, not the Chinaman. That's my favorite Chinaman. Oh God, my Chinaman got taken out. Good Lord, the Chinaman is gone. What do I do now? They had the best Mugu Gaipan. So yeah, the comments are bonkers. And it's wild because nowhere else in the world could you go and just refer to something

or someone as the Chinaman. But that's what they call them, right? And what's wild because nowhere else in the world could you go and just refer to something or someone as the Chinaman. And that's what they call them, right? And what's weird is I don't think they're doing it to be racist, right? It's just bizarre. It's like I was watching Hangover 3 and it was on Comedy Central the other day. And there's a scene where John Goodman is looking for Chow

and he refers to him as the Chinaman. And they bleep that on Comedy Central the Chinaman is bleeped yet you come to St. Louis and it is just accepted vernacular and accepted in circles like in the like certain parts of town that Chinese restaurants are just called the Chinaman. Why I don't know I think there's a backstory and I think I've read the backstory but it's like basically a lot of these folks like Chinatown I think apparently from what I've read Chinatown in St. Louis used to be where they built old Bush Stadium and they just knocked all these people out so they could build Bush Stadium and then basically

all of these Chinese restaurants moved into like black parts of town and then they form the sort of bond and that's why black folks in town love Chinese food or some shit and then they call them the Chinaman shops. In what universe that happens other than here it does not. It happens nowhere else but like you'll go look at the comments the comment sections are fucking bonkers when you see videos of one of these places getting taken out by a tornado it's just that's my favorite Chinaman. Oh no. And then like people were doing check-ins to see how their favorite

Chinaman was. Like like Harold's Chop Suey is in a video and gets knocked over and then someone will pop in and they'll be like well what about Mr. Steve's Chop Suey? That's my favorite Chinaman. Is he all right? But they ain't lying about this shit there. This Chinese food is stupid good. Most of the food in St. Louis is not good. The barbecue is mid. The pizza is not good. There's a lot of shit that's bad in St. Louis food wise. I mean the barbecue might be the most overrated thing on the planet like Kansas City barbecue is fine. I'm a Texas barbecue guy as you know but I'm okay. Like certain Tennessee barbecues are okay. Like St. Louis barbecue ain't shit

and the pizza is gross but the Chinese food from the Chinaman as they call them is elite. Elite I say. Anyway more to come.