Well There‘s Your Problem - BONUS Episode 51 PREVIEW: The Gateway Arch

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

big arch full episode on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/arch-144395122 listen to hell of a way to dad: https://whatahellofawaytodad.com/  

Okay, I got everything going. Alright, man. Do the sync point. A point of synchronization, yes. Do three, two, one, Mark. Three, two, one, Mark. Shouldn't have been Lewis? Nailed it. Lewis and Mark?

It's Adam and Eve, not Lewis and Clark. I don't know. Almost. You know, you know my favorite facts about the Lewis and Clark expedition? What's that? My favorite fact about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. about the Lewis and Clark expedition, is that at the time, they carried a lot of laxatives with them because they were eating shit food, and like, so they needed them.

And the laxative of the time was this solid ball of mercury. No, it wasn't. You swallowed. And then you just fished out and reused afterwards. It was called the perpetual pill. And so archaeologically, one of the most used. useful ways of tracking Lewis and Clark's campsites is, hey, is there a bunch of mercury leached into the soil here?

Which is a nice metaphor for like settler colonialism, you know, to be like, hey, we literally shit poison all over this country. That you let I hold out hope though, because you can't kill a human. Like, we'll do, we'll fucking eat balls of mercury to make a shit better. I don't think, I don't know, damn. Yeah. Put that on the, put that on the Voyager Park. Fuck a cockroach man, like don't let us come.

We will infest it and we will never be, it will never go. Don't let the mercury ball get hot though. That's not what you want to be swallowing. Oh, hot mercury ball, doesn't, isn't mercury a liquid at room temperature? We're only going to get to body temperature. Yeah, yeah. At least it's not a suppository. Oh.

Mmm, that's... Yeah, I actually boof my mercury. Do you guys not? Have I been doing this all wrong? Yeah, all right. this the all right mercury sounding rod all right i'm done folks this this is no no no no no no no i'm back here with mercury sounding rod hit me up francis yeah this is a bonus episode you can get so much worse than mercury for that like gallium this is a bonus episode of well there's your problem it's not

no this is going to be too silly to go on a main feed it's been too long um uh you you know who all of us are uh maybe you don't though we have a guest we have a guest yeah yeah you do I'm Francis. I am the St. Louison that you know. And is that really the term? Is that the time of St. Louisson? That's so unwholesome. I assumed it was St. Louisian for some reason. St. Louisian, no. We can't pronounce French that correctly. All of our French words have to be really dragged through the mud, beaten across Iraq. We really, like, I used to think,

I know that French, you know, Parisian French versus Montreal, Prince versus Creole French, all kinds of different Frenches, but they can at least understand each other. I feel like you come to St. Louis. I feel like you come to St. Louis. It's just, it's all over the place because we're hitting it phonetically, and you know all those vowels. So I've been

wanted to do this episode for a while but never quite came together. It still hasn't quite come together, but we're doing it anyway. It's going to be very vibes based. We're going to, we're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about a building. We're going to talk about a building. We're going to talk about a which I really enjoyed.

It was amazing to look at the first time I saw it. I was, you know, overawed. I was like, wow, I actually built that damn thing. We're going to talk about the gateway arch. Hell yeah. Now, Roz, I want to know what was your first live? Like, when you saw the arch for the first time, where were you? Because there's so many different vantage points to see the arch for the first time.

Was it like when you were flying in you saw it? Did you drive up? Like, you coming down 70? How did you see it for the first time? This was coming off of another whopping building experience. I will say that because I was coming in. This was when a bunch of us were on the private railroad car, the Swift Stream. So we came in on the train.

We saw it from the bridge. I saw it for the first time. Oh, beautiful. But this was beautiful way to see it. Also right after seeing the Union Tank Car Company, Geodesic Dome, that's right across the river. which I was, that was, well, I'm sensing, I terrified everyone in the car. An uneasy kinship between, because I was like, I just saw it and I was like,

sensing an uneasy kinship between St. Louis and London in the sense of being the city of the shapes. Yeah, what if we just made a shape and we made it fucking huge? That's the arch. I had no idea that the Union Tank Car Dome was on the route. And when I caught it out of the corner of my eye, this was right after doing serving breakfast for like, 12 people. I was like,

holy shit, it's real. Wow. Son of a bit. Those crazy sons of bitches, they did it. Yeah. They made the arch. Oh, this was the tank car dome. The arch, the arch, though. The arch was also very impressive, but I was expecting that one. I like that you were just, I like just the idea of you pressing your grubby little hands to the, to the glass.

Be like, look at that fucking shit. But yeah. Sort of terrible, hubristic monument to American excess, which one day in the near future a sort of second Napoleon, if you can imagine such a thing, is going to be sort of like using for artillery practice. Well, I would imagine it'll never go away. You can't, you can't, and I know this, we'll get into it, but my brother worked at the arch for a very long time.

He gave me the down low on it. Those legs go down that far too. They just keep going down. How do you have a job of shape, you know? 630 feet tall, 630 feet wide, 630 feet into the ground. That shit's not going anywhere. Not until Second Napoleon gets a hold of it. Surely.

Probably maybe November by the end of just putting a real marker down to be like, hey, not absolutely nothing will happen to the arch, you know, that might this statue of me, Ozzamandius, feeling pretty secure about the attachment of the trunk to the legs. What happens if... What happens if... The arch still existed in that sci-fi show that, what was that, like, one of those post-apocalyptic shows and it like took place in St. Louis and everybody was really excited. But the arch was still there, even after the apocalypse, it stands.

I think... The Last of Us or whatever, yeah. Yeah, so to be fair, that's because of the, like, fungus zombies. They're not gonna knock down an arch. I don't know how. I think second Napoleon might make St. Louis his or her cap, or their capital. Yeah. I mean, we're French already.

We got French shit all over the place. Like, if you're gonna go Napoleon, it's either us or Louisiana. Gotta be they, then, pronouns minimum. Gotta be, you gotta have like non-binary for Napoleon too. Crucially, Napoleon too, as distinct from Napoleon the second, different and worse dude. We're gonna have to replace the last O with an X. Make sure that we know it's non-gender Napoleon X community. Or a person of Napoleon X.

It's like Mark says, you know, all world historical personages appear, as it were, three times. First is tragedy, then as fast, third time get it right. Yes. Hey, do you guys know why they call it chicken Napoleon? Why is that? It's because they remove the bony part. Ha!

I don't get it. There you go. Oh, wait, no, I get it now. hold on yeah so in a real kind of like Scotland in autumn moment someone is also making my already bad internet connection worse by firing off a load of fireworks outside the window so it's all going beautifully here tonight wow so before we talk about the arch we have to ask a question which is what is St. Louis like yeah that's right there that's that's all of that

I mean, future capital of non-binary Napoleon. Yeah. It's in the middle of the country. You can only, you spread your fingers in every direction. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's conveniently situated right there on the Mississippi River. You know, so you have, you have river access everywhere. The Cardinals, which despite being a kind of bird, people don't like when you call them the birds.

No. That's us. Fuck off. Yeah, that's, yeah. Different city, different sport. You have a weird kind of cheese. We do. Our Frankensteinian Provel cheese, which I believe is a mix of like

mozzarella and something else. When you buy it, you can either buy it in a loaf or you can buy it where it looks like they ran it through a meat grinder. So it's like string kind of proval. Yeah, it's great. It tastes like melted plastic. We put it on everything. That sounds good.

Those fireworks are really gone there, aren't they? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's not great. I had one literally ricochet off the window at my old place. What? Just while I was minding my own business. It was, it was like getting hit with like a Nerf drone strike. It was crazy.

Is there a particular celebration happening or is this just for funzies? No, I mean, it's, it's around bonfire night, I think. Wait, no, it doesn't. It's past bonfire night, so I don't even know. It's easier the leftovers, gotcha. I know that. Wait, no, 5th of November, it's fine. Yeah, no, so it hasn't happened yet, so people are just, like, firing fireworks off.

You had to do the rhyme in your head. Oh, that's right. Fifth of November, Concrete Appreciation Day. I literally did have to do the rhyme in my head, yeah. There is fried ravioli. Oh, delicious. Yes. Fantastic deep fried ravioli.

Actually, yeah, I had one. It was really good. I was like, damn, I should have had this before I got to the airport. Um, oh, shitting that out of 30,000. No, thanks. I couldn't leave my seat for that whole flight. Too much turbulence. I've floated with you. It's the worst thing in the world. No, the fat. Eating, eating a lot of like mozzarella and additional substance cheese and then getting on a flight that's like a tumble dryer.

Oh, we have, I'll do you guys one better. We have a restaurant here called Twisted Ranch where you can order like 47 different versions of ranch dressing. What? Hang on, I'm looking this up right now. To the Joker, that's just a normal run. Normal ranch. Oh, you put buffalo sauce in your ranch, now it's twisted. What a twist. Right next to the World Chess Hall of Fame.

I kind of, I kind of want to not edit any of the fireworks out, so you just also get the experience of being under like the world's tiniest artillery bombardment for this episode. I don't know. Francis, you might have to take it away on this one. I don't know very much about St. Louis. I was only there once, and it was only for a day. a day. Oh, man. So, St. Louis, 250-something years old at this point. Home of the oldest farmers market, the side of the Mississippi. Sulard market still goes strong. We have, God, we have a very fucked up situation here where, like, we have a city and then we have a county.

So, like, when you say St. Louis City, the population of St. Louis City is like under 300,000 people, which, like, is not very much for a normal-sized city, but if you take the counties into consideration, then it's like two and a half million. And the thing is, is that all of these counties have their own municipalities, and all these municipalities have their own fucking cops. So, like, you have St. Louis police, and then imagine if you broke up Philadelphia and, like, every suburb got their own cops, and then just let them go fucking wild with it. That's kind of how St. Louis is set up.

That sounds like my idea of hell. Yeah. It's, it's... Must be a great place to look for mayors if someone on a podcast about Mayors. I am sure because there are, I mean, there's like 90 of these counties and they all have their own little fiefdoms. Actually our sheriff is in jail right now for witness intimidation. Oh, okay.

Sheriff's love to be in jail. It's kind of like living at work for them. them. Also, I noticed that the flag of St. Louis appears to be a kind of crypto-French Nazi South Africa. No, that is, we are at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri River. So it is the meeting of the two rivers. The Fleur de Lee, because we're a French town. And it's very, I like, it's a very basic flag. Yeah, I like it. But I also like the Missouri flag, which has like all kinds of like fucked up bears, high-fiving and like 20-something stars. Like,

fuck yeah so i i would say that this isn't like a like a scheduled display or anything if you can still hear this it's just some guy i love my city uh brackets european philadelphia i will say we do share this in common uh with you that we do love to shoot fireworks at each other um the favorite game on next door which is the local um social network for your neighborhood where uh all the racist people can be really racist as the game of gunshots or fireworks and it's fireworks come on no no a lot of times it's gunshots i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna pressure the city council into like investing millions in shot spots so that we can send cops after anyone who does this well we have them all over the place and the cops don't do shit so um yeah actually i heard i heard a

couple like the thing is is that what do you when you hear gun when you hear gunshot like there's there's a story being told in those gunshots right like sometimes it's just like one and you're like all right somebody's probably just testing off the new gun i got you sometimes it's three and that's kind of a hey fuck off kind of gunshot and sometimes there's a mag dump and you're like go to the range because there's no reason for you to be making this much noise