Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 149: Ghost Ship Fire

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

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I have a local recording going. Do you have a store space? Do you have a store space because somehow even in the six-hour drive, oh yeah, you did it? Oh, wow. I checked it already before we started. Oh, good. Oh, yeah, you did the thing you're supposed to do. Wow.

Yes. I did the thing I'm paid to do. Mm-hmm. Shitily. All right. I paid shitily. You paid quite well. I paid quite well to do it shitily.

This is the bulk of my income. This is discontinued. But Cardi 151. Jesus Christ. That's that's a crime. How would they discontinue? Cardi was like, how are you supposed to discontinue in 2016? I didn't know how I always used ever clear.

Yeah, it's about to say, you know, that that rum that rum was a great way to make a wide variety of terrible decisions when you're 19 or cause other people to make terrible decisions when you're 19. It's what kind of big government shit is this that Joe Biden is taking away your like 150 proof rum? Maybe they were Donald Trump took it away. Twenty sixteen. They shifted production back to Havana and then they reinstated the embargo. Now we're screwed. Yeah. Cuba Cuba, just like thriving with cigars and rum. Yes.

I mean, how am I supposed to play my favorite my favorite drinking game? Is this 151 or is this apple juice? Damn it. Hello and welcome to to Well, there's your problem. Nope, not yet. No. No. No, we do want to like procrastinate for a hello and welcome to Well, there's your problem. Fucker. I know we're back. It's 2024. It's been a do back to back to so I know it's been a hot minute.

Sorry. It's actually been cold because it's been winter. It's been a cold, but we're back to deliver another sad and angry episode. Yes, we don't run on a schedule because we're bad at organ or I'm bad at organizing things. Let me be clear. I'm trying to organize us by force this year. This is the mission. The irresistible force against the in moving object. I'm gonna get a bomb collar for you.

Like suicide. That's a good idea. We will record an episode of podcast tonight. Yes. Yeah. So this is this is one that Liam and I largely wrote in a kind of like furious hazard haphazard way. What's like the structure we're going to discuss here?

That's right. The Oakland Ghost ship warehouse fire We have to do the actual introduction first. Hello. Well, there's your problem podcast. I'm Justin Rosnick I'm the person who's talking right now. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. Okay. I did that out of order anyway pronouns pronouns Jesus I am Alice Gorda Kelly my pronouns? He and him. Fuck, Jesus. I am Alex Gordorkelly.

My pronouns are she and her. I am the person who is speaking now. Yay, Liam. Fuck, hi, yay, Liam. My pronouns are he and him. And for my co-workers, hello, I promise this is going to be very professional. I missed you guys.

I missed this. And we took some time off over winter. Liam got Marys, which congratulations. Thank you very much. And now we're back into the status point. Yeah, exactly. Everybody got something. You have the immune system of a toddler.

I guess so, yeah. You gotta stop like licking door handles like other people's masks. Yeah, but Rudy go bare, yeah. I don't know where I got it from. Genuinely. Because even the one time I could think of where I was in a situation where there'd be a lot of ambient coronavirus in the air would have been on M-Track.

And the M-Track train I took back home, since I could game the system, I took the Piedmont, which doesn't let anyone on after Washington Union Station. So not only did it cost 60 bucks because it was subsidized by the state of North Carolina. One good thing they've ever done. It was also completely empty the whole way. I had a whole card of myself and one other person. Yeah, I don't know. So I don't know where I got the coronavirus from.

Sometimes it just gets you. And I refer back to a tweet that I did that, like, when you get COVID, you should get, like, a call of duty kill cam where you should see the, like, the virus going down on it. Or the guy who got you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can't turn down. You should get, like, a sort of marker

in your sort of, like, objectives with the suit. You're in for it. Yeah, with the assassination coordinates of the guy who gave you COVID. Right. I'd probably, like Pat, someone on the street near Alexandria Union Station, who just super infected me out of nowhere. They still make overproof gozzlings.

Yes, they do. Thank God. But our long national nightmare of a lack of overproof rum has been alleviated. So this summer, I am I am doing the Roz torture gambit. And I'm gonna- Does this have to do with the bomb collar? It does, but it also has to do with making him drink teaky drinks until he feels bad. Oh, okay.

This is gonna dovetail well with my so far pretty good streak of keeping the alcohol Lizzie Mudder controlled this year. It's not until the summer, you got plenty of time to rest up. It's just pulled. It's non-alcoholic, teaky, drink, hellscape. What you see on the screen before you is a two-story warehouse in...

Yes, always is. Always is. It's a no-story warehouse. It's the shell of a two-story warehouse in Oakland, California, and it's not supposed to look like that. I should have a roof, at least. That's it shouldn't be so burned. Should look like that. But we're going to get into that.

Yeah. Yeah. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. I'm so proud of my captions for these ones nails nails nails nails yeah so Boeing once again have fucked it you know like yeah you're allowed to make fun of airbus anymore you're not allowed to do the die-by-wire thing because absolutely not. If it ain't bowing, I'm going. It's like pretty satisfied actually. That's what you get. I mean, that's, listen man, I've been crammed into enough American Airlines air buses to just like accept my fate at this point.

I flew it a 737 to and from my honeymoon. It was just about the worst thing I've ever experienced. I didn't get my door blown off half way through flight. That's some. It's it's Boeing DeGer, but it's McDonald Douglas defect, though. Yeah. So this is the chaos. Play. Boeing, Boeing trying to like roll out the Max brand again.

And this was a Max 9, which is the smallest. A new Max. An auspicious start. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they supplied it in a bunch of configurations, one of which had this door that you see before you. But like if you didn't need it, they would just like plug it closed and it would just be like straight fuselage, right?

And an Alaska Airlines plane on taking off, the door falls off, which is not supposed to do. You want the door to stay on the plane so that the plane stays pressurized. Ideally. And this depressurized the plane and they were lucky that this happened as they were climbing because they could descend very quickly and someone got their shirt sucked off like a couple of people got their phones sucked out. The phone landed intact still an airplane mode still at the baggage claim screen. You don't want to hand it to Apple, but you do kind of 16,000 feet.

That's pretty fucking impressive. That was all the Otterbacks. Let's get real. It's like that guy's Toyota that survived the California wildfires and Toyota was like, not to do any free advertising, but the the the the taco is an indestructible truck, assuming you get the right model. Yeah, no, no. I mean, also box, I switched between auto box, griffin survivor, and now I have a peak design case on there that I never used a little like magnet thing on. But I have no confidence in it, sort of like plain crash surviving abilities. I have, I have a lot. So when I was younger, I had to have it. This may not shock the listeners of throwing phones at walls Before I had psychiatric therapy. Yeah. Yeah, I just yeah

And now I have a lovely my outer box the clear cases don't hold up But I've clearly currently got a what I can only describe as a very vibrant. What would you call that lilac? Hmm, I would say the mood for me and I think I need to I had this period in my life where I'm like Because of how good the peak design camera straps are Everything in my life now needs to be integrated into the peak design system And then I found all the bits of the peak design stuff that don't work for me like the phone case And I think what I need to do now is to go back to the the Griffin case Which is like big and bulky it clips onto a belt clip like you're a dad and it makes you feel like a cop

And because if you want to feel like a cop, you cannot do better. That's my recommendation. And there you go. You should see Roz's phone because he's got the fucking screen protector. Just I wouldn't even say half on there still. It's like a stick.

Gradually slo-wowing off. Yeah, I haven't had a lot. And just like I tried to convince Roz to buy a new cell phone and it just went, you're the oldest 30 year old I've ever met. I don't need a new phone. It works fine. No, you just need to get better at answering phone calls and text messages.

Thank God. Right. There was no one sitting. Yeah. There was no one sitting in the seat next to the door that blew off. Otherwise they would have been like surely sucked off to a fatal end. Right. If they had their seatbelt on, they probably would have been fine. I mean, the seat still there. You got to say that. That's a tag. Maybe they should just build the whole plane out of the seats.

I mean, they had this thing where like with another Boeing, I think it was another Boeing Max actually where like a woman got partially sucked off and like died later of her being sucked off injuries. But she was sucked off through the window. Yeah, I guess so. So you get your injury going through the small space. Yeah, I guess. You just get a nice breeze. That's going to be your biggest issue. Samantha. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, NTSB after some searching found the door.

In the meantime, like all of the like Max nine's got grounded, which wasn't a lot like there aren't many in service. Like I think it's mostly like Alaska. One in nine. There's like I could be barely any. There's none in service. Like I think it's mostly like Alaska. And there's like I could be barely any. There's none in Europe. But it made the 737 Max Barcada. Exactly. Very funny.

And yeah, what they found in the course of inspecting them is that like a few others also have this problem. And the problem is just he didn't tighten the bolts. Well, the FAA announced a crackdown on Boeing. Or the excellent tweets of Jason Rabinowitz. Av Geek, if you're not I think he's Av Geek. I forget what he is. Yeah, that sounds right to me.

On Twitter, at airline flyer. I highly recommend the follow of him. He's he's really good. But yeah, the FAA rounded 171 Boeing 737-9 Max Planes, and they're going to increase oversight of production and manufacturing. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, right? Boeing is washed and fucked because, I mean,

this is like, they had to get Congress to waive the like, airworthiness rules for a couple of other Max's the first max thing which just had the plane like sort of fight the pilot to try and kill itself. That they you know, they got that that happened because they tried to lie about it not being a new airframe. And the whole thing has been sort of this background of them trying to outsource as much manufacturing as possible to like a union bust to put the manufacturing in places where there are fewer rights and worse pay and then their surprise will fall

off. Lots of financial tricks too, like where instead of having, you know, doing manufacturing of parts yourself, you spin off that part of the company into its own company, which has its own parts and everything. Yeah. And they make parts for their one customer Boeing. It's very, the structure of like the supply chain for these planes has been, you know, it's very strange. It's stranger even than

Airbus's and Airbus has to contend with the fact that they want to make parts in every single EU country and bullshit like that, including like Lichtenstein. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, I did see one post about this that sort of gave me pause, which is, um, it was like, if you are going to fly on a Boeing max don'ts, right? Like exercise your sort of visa power. I'm like, I think you've misunderstood what an airline passengers sort of position in an airport hierarchy is. You can't like look out the skybridge, jet bridge, whatever, and be like,

this is not my beloved airbus. I'm not going on this way. I only fly on triple sevens. That's an airframe. You would feel so smart, though, if you used a plane and then that plane crashed. But like, in general, you don't really have the option. You book a flight and you take your chances and maybe the airline just kills you. Like, yeah, maybe no rights, only possible death.

Which is one reason why I don't love flying. Are you gonna love flying? No, no, no. I mean, this is the reason why I don't, I haven't been to the live shows in the US is because I fear both the- Yeah, no, it's fine. We'll come to you.

Don't worry about it. Thank you. I fear both what a friend of mine referred to as the tranny scanning and also I don't I don't have wings to fall off in mid-flight. Why do they have to push a big like button that says, yeah, I reckon this one's got a dick like why is that maybe the dick could be a gun? I guess so. I guess I could have brought my like Semtex packer to the airport. I don't know.

Alice Paul Bokele, which was the IRA. Yeah, the Kelly part becomes predominant. But yeah, so we will see what happens with this. But in the meantime, if they try and put you on a Boeing exercise of like unlimited violence and self-defense, this will go fine for you. Stay away from the doors and places where doors may exist. Do the thing of like, you know, like a nervous parachute jumper. And just like as you're going in one hand on each side of the doorframe

and just hold, you know, they can't force you into the aircraft. Yeah. In other news on the opposite side of the terrain spectrum. Yeah. So again, a caption. Terrific caption. Thank you. Thank you. If you if you can't read the thing she listening on audio says, actually, I'm not telling you. Watch the video. Watch the video. Yeah. So we got to we got to to talk about the, the, uh, Hasidic tunnels. Yeah. We do have to talk about the Hubad tunnel. The year of the tunnel, you know, it begins now.

Big year for tunnels. There's the tunnel, the tic-tac tunnel lady. Fucking time with the God, with the goddamn little pictures. Every single fucking time there's something fucking weird. And it's just like why can't you people just be fucking normal? Why can't you just be fucking normal? We're all going to the same camps. Why do you got a fucking act like this? Well, this is this is even weird because like it's a kind of like just real quick to check

my pronunciation. It's a habit, right? Not shabbat. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. So just just to make sure I had it right. So so it's there's this into Nissan like warfare within Havad. Of Yeah, right. Right. Okay. How to explain how to explain the Luba Vitureva. They had a rabbi. Some of them, a minority, believe that he was the messiah. And those guys kind of maybe got kicked out of the house, sure, which is called 770 because the address was 770 Eastern Parkway. And what they tried to do is depending on who you believe, either tunnel into the shore from beneath so that they could be like praying within it, or they tried to illegally expand it so that they had more room because it's a cramped building. They didn't tell anyone they were

doing this, they just started digging. When the like non-messianist Havard guys found out, they called the cops, and the NYPD came to, with like a partner sanitation to fill in the tunnels with like concrete, they took down one of the walls in the women's prayer area and they just found a bunch of these guys just in there. Who being the guys that they are, immediately started to like throw shit around and fight the cops. I, I, I.

How long was the tunnel? I don't know. I mean, I don't know if there are diagrams. Yeah, this is mostly like Saddam Hussein. Right next to the office is. Yeah, I genuinely I haven't I haven't like had the mental capacity to process this whole event. And, you know, the first thing I do when I hear something like this is like, OK, where does the tunnel start and where does it end?

And I have no idea. It was maybe it was, it was one of the theories that was that it was coming from like, uh, um, like, uh, a mikveh down the street, like, like a block away. Um, and then one of the other ones was just that they had like gone from within the building and just sort of hollowed out this extra space to the side. But like you can't do that. I'm so fucking angry. This is the thing is probably that fucking bad, but this one's we're going

to do the bonus episode on Judaism and Rabbi Goldenberg is going to call me from Queens. I get real mad at me and I assume my mother will be upset. That's fine. Oh, and I hope you're enjoying your retirement. That's not the fucking issue here. These fucking people are insane. The there's a subway under Eastern Parkway. OK, what do you want me to fucking do about it, dude?

They must have dug underneath the subway. Yeah, I mean, like actually, they were videos. They were technically impressive. There were videos of like, like, Parley them like crawling out from sewer grates and like scarring all over the cops. With the hat and the hat. With the hat and everything.

And the thing is right, like, I want to live in a world where that can just be funny, because there was like a microsecond that that existed on the internet before it became the most anti-Semitic thing you've ever seen in your fucking life. And I want to live in that microsecond where we can just be like, that guy, that's funny. That I saw that video and here's the thing, I saw that video and like my eyes glazed over and I failed to register it for like several hours. Because you had covid. I guess so.

Yeah, I mean, because I was like, OK, this is clearly some weird anti-semitic gag. Yeah, you know, something like that. Doing it down here, dude. Just fucking us down here doing it, man. I mean, this is this is a thing about like a lot of ultra orthodox stuff is I it's it's probably not good to have a kind of like total disregard for any secular laws or like ordinances and to have like your own sort of like your own law enforcement and your own, I guess, building codes now that you're doing tunnels. But you do have to respect the the Hootspur of it, you know? Yes. I mean, this is the actual definition of Hootspur. Right. Yeah, truly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just so funny watching this wall

come down and a bunch of like baffled Italian American cops wondering why the Jews coming out of the walls to fight them. This is going to, this is going to. We're not doing anything for the fucking cabal conspiracy theories. This is the first ship. That's all I can keep fucking thinking is just, I just, every single fucking time I've said this before on the show, I basically do a, I don't know, like a thing where I just say, please don't be Jewish. Please don't be Jewish

And then the fucking love of it just pull stunts like this This is this is the fucking doing this shit. This is the first chip in the wall the previously un insurmountable under Indomitable monument that is the Jewish Italian pact in Hollywood. Yes. Nine arrests. Yeah. Oh my God. Nine.

Nine of them. So I believe this will... I just don't understand. This is also a potential solution to the the Israel Palestine conflict once what the masculine urge to dig the masculine urge to dig tunnels Yeah, I'm awesome Israel crossing pics. Yeah The mass Israel friendship tunnel, yes exactly good invisible hospital ship tunnel. Yes. Exactly. Invisible hospital. Speaking of which, in other news. Oh yeah, we're bombing Yemen now. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna do some more bombs. We're gonna bomb the Middle East a bit more. Guess who's escalating? I sort of like guess who's

coming to dinner. Guess who's escalating the war in the Middle East? Is it Joseph Robinette Biden? It is Joseph Robinette Biden. Wow. Crazy, right? Who could have seen that one coming? Yeah, so the Houthis, the sort of movement which controls like most of Yemen have been doing solidarity with Gaza by trying to blockade the Red Sea to Israeli shipping. And they haven't maybe been the most discriminating about what's been Israeli shipping, but that's

not really the point. You got some sick videos of them landing helicopters on ships out of it. I don't think they've they've actually killed anyone. I think it's only been like property damage. Right. They've like hijacked one ship. But I think that's it. And they've like launched drones at each other. But like, yeah, so obviously this, this aggression will not stand because we need our treats and the treats. And now instead of going through the Suez, going around the Cape. So you gotta protect the supply chain at all costs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is I need my Alibaba bullshit. This actually does have like serious economic like implications. But no one's kind of treating it that way, including the people who want to do it.

Because if you if you analyze it that way and you go, OK, well, the Houthis really do have a kind of like veto power over a lot of shipping in the Red Sea. Maybe you should like negotiate with them or like try to give them what they want. Because what they want at this juncture, at least, is to stop the genocide in Gaza, which is something you should also want, something you should also be doing. You just have to like yank on the leash. It's what Reagan did. Yeah, a surface to ship missile and just go down to the Delaware.

Well, I want to point out that the Saudis have been bombing these people for years with no no effect. They have no effect at all. Right? Yeah. And at our sort of like instigation without without helping funding bombs like the Saudis aren't making like they're dropping our bombs on the Houthis and it's just not fucking work. So what are we doing here? We know is what are we doing here? Honestly, I feel like this is some kind of weird, like misguided deterrent thing with like, OK, Israel's being Israel's being like tried at the Hague right now for doing genocide And the Houthis are claiming we're doing our

internationally required duty to economically inhibit Israel and I feel like this is a way to put pressure maybe not on the Houthis, but to put pressure on like the international court of justice in a way. I think at the same time, there's a thought that basically US military doctrine, especially at these of these, how Congress sees it is this sort of idea that surgical strikes with obvious quotes around them sort of don't count. Yeah. Yeah. And this is done under the bombing of 2001.

What's his name? Authorization for military force, the one that says that like the president can just do it for like anything that's like materially supporting terrorism, which is this is pushing it. I think that was the same. It's pushing it to do that. You can, I think, argue as well as you want that Iran is maybe a state sponsored terrorism. It is much as any any other state is a state sponsored terrorism.

But like this ain't it, chief. Yeah, this is the thing. Just I do. I do sort of like the idea of sending the USS Abraham Lincoln or whatever to protect your Ali Baba treats. It's basically, yeah, yeah. Gross disproportionate response is kind of darkly funny, but yeah. I feel like it increases the consequences if like, you know, the ICJ says, okay, yeah,

Israel is doing genocide. Now we also have to like say, well, the United States is directly aiding and abetting genocide by like, you know, attacking people who are trying to prevent genocide. I mean, at the same time, like, it's not like U.S. official doctors to invade the goddamn Hague, which we should do on some level because the Dutch don't have a right to exist as a people. That's the ICC or the ICC.

You're right. My bad. It's fine. It's fine. It's confusing. I mean, I think my main thing is that what this reflects is an absolute sort of lack of strategy or forethought. I was thinking more of a coincidence of military power.

Like just that too. But it's like what it is, is it's firefighting, right? Because had you any sort of grander plan, this would never have happened because you wouldn't have needed it to. Like because things wouldn't have escalated to this point. But because you can't control Israel. And because Biden seemingly has no interest in preventing this from escalating.

That was another thing I had thoughts about yesterday. It was like, it feels like no one's at the helm. Yeah, there's no one driving this thing. There's no there and there. It's one guy with a like inscrutable worldview. It's much like a block of Keri Gold butter, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And like, I hadn't, I had a couple of moments where I was kind of worried about escalation

in the sort of early stages where I thought that like, you know, like, Hasballah is actually going to do something. And then, you know, we've seen like a bunch of speeches from Hasballah that's like, ah, we're going to do it. Maybe we're going to do it. We're taking it really seriously. And then they don't fucking do anything. And the Israelis then sort of double down on this idea of escalating with Hasballah. But like, this is, this is a whole new thing where it's like, okay, well, it could just be us, and by us, I mean the US and the UK, just deciding to do this. Because- Weird sort of piecemeal war almost?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, it's so stupid and wasteful is the main thing about it. Like, at last I heard that these strikes killed like five people, right? Which is, depending on how you look at it, either extremely good targeting to avoid collateral damage, or the most expensive way of killing five people ever devised.

Yeah, and I mean now like the Houthis come up with a statement like like well, you know We're we were ashamed to not be in the same situation as the Palestinians where we were being bombed And this is like only strengthened our resolve now that we are part of the conflight. It's it's very it did you know That's sort of I don't know You know sort of warrior poet mindset. I think these guys, these are very resilient people that we've decided to, you know, piss off extra. This is gonna go, this is gonna go extremely poorly.

That's like the only thing I'm, you know, unless you like- You can just write a book that says, this is gonna go extremely poorly. US foreign policy since 1946. Yeah, I was about to say everything after World War Two has been just a disaster show. It's made them way more popular.

And yeah, the only thing that's going to actually change the fact that they can still put shipping in the Red Sea at risk is like invading Yemen and pushing them back from the coast, which I pray God no one has the idea to do because it would be even more catastrophic so for now it's just likecom. There are about a billion ships in the Red Sea. Yeah. So, you know, I do feel like these strikes that the Houthis have been doing have at least been a little bit targeted. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, it's mostly just stuff like the risks that MSC or MASC or whatever are willing to bear, you know.

Right. Yeah. Or, um, or what should I call it, Zim. Yeah, I don't think they, I don't think they'd like Zim. Zim's definitely got to go around a horn. Because that's, that's the Israeli shipping company. Um, no, there was one. Yes. Yeah, they got a, they got a bunch of ships.

They got a bunch of containers you'll see every once in a while. Yeah, just all the containers have bombs of genocide in them. That and hummus. Soda streams. Yeah. Soda streams. Billions of sodas. Waymo. Or is it ways? I forget which ways ways. Okay. Yeah. Waymo. Shipping container full of apps. Yes. Has been sent to the book. Intel chips and Intel chips. Yes. That's why you should go AMD. Please do. The fabrication please don't tell me there is more course.

Give me more course. What course. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. Nice. All right. So we see here the Wood Street encampment in Oakland. This used to be Northern California's largest homeless encampment. It was shut down by OPD and the city in May of last year. And I put this up to ask a couple of questions. Firstly, what is Oakland, California? It's, it's, it's like San Francisco, but on the other side of the bay. Yeah, it's San Francisco, brackets, Annex. And as such. Just as a little update, so far as I can tell,

assuming that Global Foundry's still manufacturers AMD's chips, I have good news. Despite the fact that it's owned by the it was privately owned by a sovereign wealth fund of the UAE until 9 p.m. on October 2021. They have operations in Singapore, the EU and the United States. And I think we're good. I think you can still buy AMD. All right. So, wait, but Israel is in Eurovision, which is the same as being in the EU, right? That's true. All right. That's it. Yeah, so that's that's a little that's a little using TSMC. God.

Oakland is on the other side of the bay from San Francisco. It used to be cheaper. It still is cheaper, but like, yeah, fine. Israel. What has happened is that find Israel. What has happened is that we're good. Okay, it's gone. So Oakland used to be poorer. It used to be blacker. It still is both of those things. Yes. But decreasingly so because the economy of the Bay Area has been really well. I mean, this is this is the thing like number go up line go up line go up line go up Jobs get created, you know people get paid more sometimes

And then the number that doesn't go up is housing, right? And so what Oakland has is sometimes called a housing crisis It's sometimes I think maybe more accurately called a displacement crisis, right? Yes, where The cost of the housing goes up to accumulate people who are working at like, you know, who are working in San Francisco and commuting in, or who are working at like startups or whatever in Oakland. And the people who are already in Oakland get priced out. And so as a consequence, like, I have some numbers here, right? So like in 2014, the Oakland rental market was the 21st most expensive in the US. And by 2015, it was the fourth. Um, they're like, the city has a minimum wage.

That minimum wage is, oh God, what actually is it $12.55 an hour for which you cannot find an apartment in Oakland. That there are no, if you, if you earned that, if you earn $12.55 an hour and you worked full time, you would have to spend 112% of your income on housing. Yes. I mean, it's at the point where now you have think tanks saying, well, hold on a second, not only can like just ordinary people who we don't give a shit about not afford housing, but like teachers can't afford housing, like

firefighters can't afford housing, cops even, like still, like if you, if you started as like an entry level teacher in Oakland public schools, your estimated salary is like $42,000 a year. Congratulations, you live in Sacramento now. Yeah, exactly. But you can't afford anywhere in. No, you can't. You can't. I mean, it's it's yeah.

Yeah. And so anybody it starts out obviously with the people who are like most precarious in housing, right? Like, you know low-age workers students the elderly Artists who will get to later and now it's sort of like balloon to the point where Yeah, yeah, and so people are being like gentrified out Homelessness is vastly, vastly increased. It's heavily, heavily racialized as well. So like, like 60% of the homeless population of Oakland are black and they're about like

20% of the city's population. And despite the fact that despite the fact that the mayor used to like have to live in her car, like as recently as 2018, the UN General Assembly, like the fucking UN went to Oakland and called their treatment of homeless people cruel and inhumane. It's in this situation where this is really one of the like front lines of, and I hate to put up the harrowing of hell here, but housing policy. of, and I hate to put up the harrowing of hell here, but housing policy. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, in the situation in, especially the Bay Area, but California in general, you know, it's, you have, you know, people like to frame this in terms of like the Yimbi and Nimbi

debate. I think even if you were, if you were in a situation where like, boom, we've upzoned every single parcel in California so you can build a 150-story building there, I think you need more radical measures just to move the housing market in the direction of providing housing. And that is, you need to really start to say we are going to build mass public housing on a huge scale. We're talking hundreds of thousands of units because I the current situation is very advantageous for owners of real estate. The market value keeps going up and up and up and up. And as long as you constrain supply, you are going to do better financially

than if supply is not constrained. I mean, this is one of the things about landlords is there's two ways for them to make a lot of money. One of which is to build a big building. And the other one is to ensure that no one is able to build a big building. And the second one is to ensure that no one is able to build a big building. The second one has a much higher return on investment. Yeah, you have to like reconceptualize this as housing is a human right and housing has to be extremely affordable or else. And we'll sort of, we'll get into some of the implications of this

later, but that's the sort of the scene set for for Oakland and like Northern California in general. If we go to the next slide, please. Yes, I put this one in. So we need to talk about the phenomena of the taxpayer building. This has sort of implications for both, you know, housing policy for architecture, but also especially for firefighting, right? And this is, I think, one of the most well-known examples here is, all right, so this was a building in Chicago. This was the Masonic Temple building, which is essentially part of it was the Masonic Temple and above that, to pay for the Masonic Temple's upkeep, they had a bunch of offices. This was the... We've told them a lot before. Yeah, this was for a brief period of time the tallest building in Chicago, 21 stories tall in 1895. But they tore it down in 1939, right?

Well before its useful life was over. It needed some building systems upgrades. It needed some foundation upgrades because they put the State Street subway right next to it in that year. You're just doing your weird Masonic rituals on the floor, like checkerboard floors, like shaking under you and you're just like, for fuck's sake. Yeah, that's a lot of downtown Masonic temples though. A lot of times, they're in older parts of town where the subway will be. At that point, they should just incorporate it into whatever 33 degree master Mason ritual you're doing, you know, obviously Scottish right. Anyway, so now why was this building? This building was torn down and replaced with a two-story building.

Wow, that looks like gas. Beautiful. Yeah. Well, no, actually, I use this as an example because there's no pictures of the building that this was replaced by. This is a similar building. This is where Abner's Cheese Stakes in Philly was. And the Shtrip Club was in

the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement.

Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the basement. Shtrip Club was in the here which used to serve people underage. Oh, yes, yes, Jesus. Anyway, this is a good example of a taxpayer building. But the idea of the taxpayer building is, what do you do?

You own land, right? Hmm. Do you want to develop it? No, you want to speculate on it. I want to speculate on it. Yeah, exactly. Number go up, Mr. Bond. Yeah.

Yeah. Developing stuff costs money. Speculation? Not so much. Great amount of happen. You have this annoying thing though called property taxes. And if you have a completely vacant lot, you're going to be taxed on like the square footage of the land, right? Sure.

And then you will also be taxed on any improvements you have on it, which is sort of like a building, a shed, pavement, whatever the assessed value of any man-made structures on it, you will furthermore be taxed on that. So if my pure idea here, if all I wanna do is speculate, it behooves me to build the most minimal building on the structure I can that pays the property taxes. Oh, the minimum viable commercial building. Yes. Yes. That is the taxpayer building. Huh. So that's why there's like a fucking like mattress warehouse or whatever. Yes.

Um, mattress warehouse, the American candy store, whatever. It doesn't have to sell. Well, it just has to sell enough to like make rough Exactly, yeah, and they can do their own little like money laundering or whatever the fuck in there I'm just because I want the like the tax revenue, right? Yeah, so in this case this very large and architecturally notable historically notable building was torn down for two-story building I think was a Walgreens until night at like 2008 torn down for two-story building, I think was a Walgreens until like 2008. It was, yeah. So you have... The Masonic Walgreens.

Yeah, you put the smallest viable building on there and these buildings have a lot of shared characteristics, right? They're usually one or two stories tall. They have a commercial use on the first floor. Sometimes it's residential on the first floor, sometimes as residential on the second floor, but sometimes it isn't because a lot of times these buildings cover a huge amount of the lot. They have very deep floor plates, which means there's going to be a lot of rooms inside the building with no access to the outside, with no daylight,

with no nothing. They have a lot of internal space, but since they're generally constructed in an old-fashioned manner, it's very easy to reconfigure rooms. It's very easy to do that without a permit because everything's happening away from windows. These buildings were very, very common until probably the 1950s, just because eventually people found out that you can make the same amount of money to cover property taxes with a surface parking lot, which is another great way to speculate on land. Different kinds of urban blight.

Yes. So... Disney hall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so eventually, you know the term taxpayer is sort of lost in Urban planning and architectural Context but one place it remains to this day is in firefighting Because these things are death traps

Cool. We'll see. Yeah You got lots of internal rooms with no access to natural light. So if you have no No power in the building, you can't see shit They're gonna be made of wood largely And not like, you know, not really heavy timbers This is sort of light stuff because a lot of this happened sort of in the later era of wooden construction this happen sort of in the later era of wooden construction. After we stopped using really big heavy timbers, which are more fire resistant, there's lots of opportunities for things like back draft, various sudden exacerbations of the configuration.

These buildings don't have plans on file because numerous random people have reconfigured the interior any way they want. A lot of times we'll have situations where there are rooms which are completely sealed off at some point, so you can have a fire growing in there and have no idea. Somebody getting a cask of a Montiado down there with that fire. Yeah, well that probably would have happened, you know, like dozen years prior. You know, no one's going in that completely sealed off room. People won't even know the room is there. That's sort of its own kind of urban nightmare along with the guy who

like fell in between two buildings with no access, except from like above in New York City and just like they found his skeleton like wedged in between two buildings. You know, yeah, that's. Folks, if you're designing a building, try to avoid opportunities for a room to be completely sealed off with everyone forgetting about it. And, you know, so these buildings are there. They're they're not good buildings. There's still a lot of them left. Um, you know, because the way that land speculation worked in American cities is a lot of them left, because the way that land speculation worked in American

cities is a lot of these got built in like the Great Depression. And then guess what? The fortunes of cities haven't recovered until very recently, at least in terms of being able to make money off of real estate. A lot of these buildings are over a century old with a century of modifications. They're very common everywhere, except like cities that are very new, like, I don't know, Anchorage. Well, Neon. Neon. There's no taxpayer buildings in Neon yet because there's no buildings. But, uh, yeah. So taxpayer buildings, this is, they're very bad for firefighting because they they're

buildings that want to kill their occupants. Yes. Yes. We go to the next slide. Yes, we now see 1305 31st Avenue in Oakland. And it's it's difficult to find a like maybe wondering why it looks like this. There's no pre fire street view shots of this. Right. Yeah. This is this is concrete and wood built 1930. So right sort of like pre depression. Yeah. Right at the depression. Yeah. And this is this is a two story warehouse originally designed for milk bottles.

So the idea is that you have milk bottles get washed on the upper floor, they go by conveyor belt down to the ground floor, get loaded onto trucks, drive out, and then you get your milk. And this immediately collapses because of the depression. And as far as anyone remembers, this was kind of like a hippie party space through the 60s onwards. Yeah. So that point, you're trying to get a rent from basically anyone you can so that you can continue to hold these buildings. Yeah. If you're even getting rent at all, it may be a squat. Like it's people remember doing drugs there and that's about it. And so this then in 1988 falls prey to to like a new landlord. I'm going to butcher the pronunciation.

Yeah, thank you for doing this. I don't have to. It's fine. I'm going to take a guess at us who bought this building in 1988. And she is the sort of owner of record for a shitload like $5 million worth of sort of low to medium value bullshit in Oakland. Yeah, taxpayer buildings like a Buddhist temple, like laund like, auto repair shops. It just kind of the kind of absentee landlord who like doesn't really like ever check in. You never see them except to collect rent. Yeah. You know, it's sort of a has a tenant. Sometimes that's the ideal landlord. Yeah. In some ways.

Right. I will say that just in case you're wondering how this ends for Ms. I apologize again for the name. They are bankrupt. Thank God. Yeah, finally, at long last, there were some some sort of consequences to this. But yeah, so I'm relying a lot here on the reporting of the the San Francisco Chronicle, which is an excellent job. Yeah, I want a Pulitzer for this as well. They might have done. Well, the East Bay Times or the Pulitzer. Excuse me. All right. No, it's okay. I'd rather be right about it. But yeah, so she doesn't really show up stuff. Communication like goes through her kids and like emails tend to like not go answered for a long time. And like a lot of landlords with this sort of portfolio,

she is racking up code violations and fines and stuff. Over the period of 2005, 2014, the vacant lot, like next door, the lot that this building abuts, she paid Oakland like $26 and a half thousand dollars in in like code Fee's right. Yeah, not a lot of regulations out there about vacant lot. You have to be Yeah, I assume just like dumping shit on it, but nobody knows And yeah, the sort of city of Oakland's building department gets a bunch of complaints for in the last couple of years about how unsafe this building is.

And the last time it was inspected was 30 years earlier because they send an inspector and the city inspector like knocks on the door, can't get in, does a like sort of eyeball based inspection and it's like, I will call back about this and then never does. Yeah, the inspection systems in a lot of cities are really based on sort of a mutual understanding between the city and the building owner that it's good to have a safe building. And so when you have someone who doesn't does not conform with that particular

system of trust, you have a problem. Right. And that's, I mean, as we'll learn, the fire station is what a block and a half. Yeah. I think you said. So yeah. And in terms of her other tenants, like some of them were like in the same position that you mentioned of like, yeah, she doesn't give a shit. This is fine with me. And some were in a position of like, yeah, my like electrical box kept sparking and I had to email her for two years and then she sent out like some guy who may be fixed it, which again is like very familiar landlord stuff. But so she has this building right and she wants to make some money off of it. So she lets this out to a master tenant, right? One guy, if we go to the next slide, this is not zoned as residential, this is zoned as like warehouse. And so this is a warehouse nominally, whose sole tenant is this guy on

the right, Derek Almena. That's his wife on the left. And we should be very delicate and say this dude should be punched in the face repeatedly. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing like you never want to sort of we're engaged in sort of like social history and engineering history and stuff here. We want to sort of we're engaged in sort of like social history and engineering history and stuff here. We want to sort of like identify a context to stuff without necessarily being like, it's this one motherfuckers fault, but it's this one motherfuckers fault. Yeah, this guy is not worth defending.

He is a true shithead. Oh yeah. So he like, what he does does he illegally sublet this by dividing it into a housing units and renting those out for like like $700 a month. And as we saw the rent in Oakland for a one bedroom is like 2,500. So you know, that's that's very attractive. And though it's not sort of your typical slum lord ship, what it is is like he kind of starts a cult. Yeah, I mean, it's initially called Satya Yuga

and it was then later named ghost ship. It's sort of like nominally, it's an art collective. There's a cron interview with like the next door neighbors who do a kind of like, we didn't see him do any art, just meth, which to be fair, sure. Who amongst us? Right. Right, exactly. And so this warehouse space, the top floor of it is this guy, Almenar and his family, his wife is three kids, which they kind of turn into this hoarder space. There's some photos of it later on. And then the bottom floor is like subdivided. And because it's intended to have milk trucks drive in, what they do is they just drive a bunch of RVs in.

Five of them. Probably not a good idea. Yeah. So it's like five RVs. There's like some stuff that's like, like, sort of built shanty divisions within it. Made of pianos in some cases. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And to get the city off their back, nominally, this is not housing. This is a 24 hour art art workshop right and that's what they have to tell people and this guy is the maybe the most irritating motherfucker on the face of the earth right in a Facebook post seeking tenants Alamina Road seeking all shamanic rattlesnakes sexy gun slingers looking for a space to house great gear. Use Studio develop next level Shaolin discipline after driving your taxi cab late at night. Build fusion earth, bomb, bumpers, splunkers, shelters and plant herbecious colonies in the sun and air.

Would you believe this guy used to run a weed farm and also did a lot of meth allegedly? I'm so mad you took that from me. Yeah, this is to give you to give your sense of the vibe This is the kind of place where they make you sign a contract where you commit to being unconditionally awesome. California this guy's got California brand. Yeah, this guy's got serious California brand. California landlord or at least like master tenant. Yeah, he's he's he's he's he's he's in a he's in a middle manager position where he is both tenant and landlord.

The contradictions are eating this guy. Yes, exactly. There's there's a there's a dialectic occurring, which I understand is when two things which are the opposite are happening. Yeah, Hegel's master slave dialectic makes this guy sort of act like a cult leader. He has little David Koresh moments. He does like weird long rambling Facebook posts about Hitler and stuff. If I live or negative?

Positive. Oh, OK. But by positive esoteric. If we go to the next slide. So he also has this Renfield. This is a guy called Max Harris. And Max Harris is seen here in jail. He gets a very sympathetic piece in New York Times magazine, of which I read the whole thing I'll

summarize for you. This is an extremely dumb and exploitable motherfucker, who is this like drifter from middle America who like ends up in Brooklyn and then sort of then Colorado and then Oakland, and is kind of like alternately groomed and psychologically terrorized by Derek Almeida into making all of the shit run, collecting rent, working the door at parties and all of this. He's like nominally creative director of this art collective. The thing you never want to be.

Sounds like he's been creatively directed. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So one of one of the tenants says that he has a that Harris has a servant's heart. And yeah, so or dumb motherfucker. Yeah, genuinely. But like he's he's the type of guy to be rescuing like bugs he finds in the prison yard. Um, because he's just a kind of like well-meaning hippie. Um, who is now at the whims of a kind of like would be David Koresh.

A lunatic, right. The dudes are, I mean, we, we really cannot stress enough that, uh, that, uh, Derek, Almeena is aa is a horrible person. Yeah, yeah. As we'll get to, absolutely garbage person. There's a detail here in that New York Times magazine profile where it says, occasionally people who lived such a yuga told me, Almena spoke to Harris in a sharp German accent pretending that Harris, whose mother was Jewish,

was his Jew, his slave. Harris insisted he meant this as a joke. That I'll mean a meant this as a joke. We should probably fuck. Sorry, Devin. Yeah, you got to watch out for artists who are put in a position of power because all of a sudden the eccentricities aren't so funny anymore. Yeah, that's how you get the fuck out of the house. I know. I don't know if this guy ever was an artist, meaningfully, I just thought of himself that way. Who's that guy I hate?

Who's that artist I hate? Oh, that now. Who's that guy I hate? Let me open a spreadsheet. There we go. 64 gigabytes. Yeah, is this the part where we say that Valerie Solanas's only problem is poor aim? Solanas's only problem is poor aim.

Yes. So so so this guy this guy Max Harris, he does all the like bullshit work. Me. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, I may know his family like living on the second floor. If we go to the next slide. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it it's $2 to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalogue of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want.

Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. This is the ground floor. Yeah, you may notice a trailer in here. It's going to get worse than this, folks. This is one of five, as you say. Actually, the notes say specifically the ground floor had five recreational vehicles, open parentheses, all caps, five question mark, not one but fucking five.

Another question mark, closed parentheses. Yes. No electricity or running water. No, I mean, this is the thing. They did later have electricity, obviously. We'll get into that. Sort of, yes. Yeah, it's like a lot of these places where it like sometimes it has electricity and water and heat most of the time it doesn't. And as you see, there's just all of this hoarder shit just like crammed into it. Like there's a lot of a lot of a lot of various pianos and speakers and there's some of these old fashioned, you know, wooden, you know, sort of barbacks.

There's like a whole bunch of I mean, okay, I would probably also decorate like this, but without having a trailer in there and also with fire suppression. The other thing is you would find it difficult to decorate like this as intensely were you like, you know, for benefit of not being on meth. Yeah, you need, you need, I mean, this is, this is like is like sort of I don't know this looks like a set for like psychedelic rock music video. I Would say it's Burning Man shit, but I made a did a Facebook post which I've read which I kind of agree with him about About how cucked and shitty and like dot-com Burning Man is now

like dot com burning man is now. So I mean, okay, he was cooking with that one. But yeah, so he like tells the cops no one lives here. This is like an artist collective, people come in and work when they feel like it gets people to lie about it. Meanwhile, the upstairs, he's like renting that out for concerts. And these sort of like nooks are being rented out to like tenants. And the whole time the side of the building, like a bus in that vacant lot is just getting filled with like dumped RVs and like scrap because like he kind of dealt in that and like at least one time stole a trailer off of somebody. And so like, that's such white trash behavior. Yeah. Yeah. And so like all of this stuff is just building up against

the side of the building. If we go to the next slide, we can see the upstairs, which listen, I, I don't hate it, right? It's eclectic. But at the same time, it's also like the Oregon console. That's nice. He's got all the the sort of fake reproduction Tiffany's gets what we're going to talk about in the bonus episode. He's got, you know, this is this is a case of and I live in a glass house on this one and someone with like a fairly decent hoarding thing going on. Yeah, and it's like all this stuff is cool and I like it.

But you know, I don't just need one. But no, I don't even one speaker. I need 20, which I feel like the wall of sound. Thanks to nothing. Once again, who's which was Phil Spector? There we go. A guy who should have had worse marksmanship. Yes. Better hair. So if we, if we, this is where you do your like concerts and stuff. Thus you can see the drum kit. This is where Almeina and his family live.

And this is a sort of a wooden floor above the ground floor full of RVs. So there is, there's a concrete staircase in back, I think, but if you go to the next slide. There are stairs, but they are hidden and don't lead directly to the exit. Yeah, it goes up to like a sort of a half landing. So what you need, obviously, is a staircase that's just gonna go from the ground floor

to the second floor. And so they build this, and they build this out of like wood that they find. It's like pallets mostly. Like the next door neighbors who are interviewed who are like, oh, they just mostly did math. They went over to visit and they find that like they're building this staircase. There's a massive hole in the concrete floor that like the kids are playing next to. And, you know, neither

of them seem at all worried about this. It's the most it's the rickety is looking shit in the world. It's covered in fairy lights. It's important to remember the kind of wood you use for pallets is not very good. It is not very strong because pallets are intended to be disposable unless they're blue or red in which you could probably use that, but the CHEP company would get really mad at you. The disposable staircase, yeah. Would you believe that Oakland Child Protective Services visited the Almeida's and took their kids away off the basis of like, this is not a safe environment? Right. visited the Almeida's and took their kids away off the basis of like, this is not a safe

environment. Right. This is not a situation where you're, you know, it's one thing if there's like complicated, like, familial and emotional and behavioral problems that, you know, the child protective services take your kids away. It's another they take your kids away because like like your kid is going to fall in a hole. Your house is so goddamn unsafe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. It's not you, it's the hole. It's the fact that you tolerate the

hole existing. Yeah. Please see our Caving Disasters episode for more. That's true. So Child Protective Services is after like Oakland Department of Buildings, the second agency now who have gone, this is unacceptable to us, and then also gone, we're not going to tell anyone about this. This is fine. No other action needs to happen. This is sort of a police department and a serial killer investigation sort of deal. Oh, we'll get to the police department. If we go to the next slide, if you're if you're

trying to get out of the building from the second floor down the staircase, this is your route, right? It is not intuitive and it's not marked in any way. This is from the New York Times. You come down the staircase made of balsa wood, you go around the quite nice chest to feel like wing back chairs. Yeah, I would like one of those one out of like a 50,000 pianos, take a left at a door and then go out onto the street. Yeah, I'm in a situation where like I I deserve to own all this stuff instead of this guy because I want it. And I would also be more responsible about it. Well, do you have a system? I would, be more responsible about it. Well, to be fair, the system.

I would, yes. To be fair, to be fair, to be fair. Our couch came out of dumpster. And I get bed bugs. We don't have it. We didn't have it. No, it's fine. That couch is that I stole a steel. It was in a dumpster.

It was in a dumpster. I just picked you up. Remember, you call me like nine times. Yeah, I was like, you were going to get so I was going to take it. This is this is Florence. No sofa. This is the thing. It's $10,000 on design within reach.

I can all three of us are going to discover. And this was something I had planned to introduce later on, but you're doing it now for me. We are these types of people, right? Like, if we're making fun of these people, this is not coming from a place of elitism. This is coming from a place of recognition. Yeah, this is,

if I had differences between me and this guy. This was what my house would look like. Yeah, differences between me and this guy. Not being a landlord landlord not having done meth Fewer neck tattoos, but like other than that we've got the hoarding in common. That's for sure. Yeah, I've never praised Hitler I've never praised Hitler. No, if we if we go to the next slide, I can talk about our beloved law enforcement the thin blue line So this is this is from an OPD body cam. That even says 24 hour artist studio. Yeah, 24 hour artist studio. This is when it was still under the sachet.

You gotta do some art. It's 3am. Come in, we're open. That's right. So you need paints. You need oil pastels. You need to do a fresco. It is time sensitive that I do this fresco. So yeah, it's a very thin fig leaf, right? Everybody knows it. But you know, per the next door neighbors, again, who are this the one source for like what it's like to live next to this place, the cops and the fire department get called out here constantly, like all the time. It's like a problem place for them. This is from an OPD body cam in 2015, where they they came out to reports of a stabbing. And what you have in this in

this body cam is two or three like Oakland city cops poking their heads around the door looking at like exposed wiring and all this wood and like sparks and the park trailers and saying to each other Oh, man, this shit's gonna burn down like they are on their own videos saying it's like a One spark and it will all be bad. I would be so worried about the electrical wires And again like going three for three on this, they don't report that to anybody. They don't tell anybody. And that never leaves the Oakland Police Department.

It's not a stabbing. It was 3 a.m. aggressive interpretive dance. It's artistic. It's what's the thing where people stick hooks in their skin? It's like that. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting art.

I mean, like. I was like, as far as the policing goes, like they could either do nothing, kick everybody else out onto the street or like at least tell someone. And what they chose was do nothing, right? Yeah. Which I guess maybe it's better than making everybody homeless. Maybe.

And the whole time throughout that you get like fights, you get parties, you get loud music, you get small fires, you get a lot of drug use, which fine, whatever. It's probably not great to live next to. I'll get to that in a bit. And the the city inspectors come back out because the neighbors complain because of all of this shit because of the quality of life stuff, the trash is piling up. People they, you know, know that people are living in there when legally they shouldn't be.

And the inspectors knock on the door, nobody answers, and they go, okay, well, bye. And they just leave it. That's also one of the things with this inspection and why it wasn't done. They didn't have access to it. I already said that. Yeah, literally like hiding inside with the lights off pretending nobody's home kind of stuff. of that. Yeah, literally like hiding inside with the lights off pretending nobody's home. Kind of. I get the feeling there was relatively little art going on in there just on account of a lot of a lot of a lot of artists do seem to have connections with people in the city,

you know, at least as I experienced. If we if we go to the next slide where I call your bourgeois compradour. Yeah, please. Yeah, because the thing is right, like I've been I've been like kicking the shit out of this place for 20 minutes. People got to live somewhere. Well, it's not only that, right? It's like on the one hand, this is probably extremely annoying to live next to. And I think it's it's perfectly reasonable to go like oh man these guys aren't artists They're just doing meths right doing math math

Doing math. Yeah doing methylated spirits But like if you ask the people who actually live there, right? Okay, they might have neck tattoos and shit and they might be doing like maybe the worst tattooing you've ever seen I've seen some bad shit. Yeah. But on the other hand, like, people live here. It where the hell else can you afford in Oakland is nowhere. And it's not like you don't know that it's scary. It's not like you don't know that there are people there who are doing like meth fuel posts about Hitler. And, you know, I can't judge these people because I have been in squats that I knew were scary. I have friends who live

in places like that. My landlord is kind of an absentee slumlord because like, despite the podcasting millions, thank you for subscribing to the Patreon. My rent is about the same as these peoples. And like people, I believe did make art here, maybe like they were part of a community there. And the fact that it was exploitative and dangerous and like very annoying doesn't make their lives not matter. Right. The one thing, the sole intervention here that benefits everyone is making housing affordable and abundant, right? Because otherwise, you just end up with these situations where if you want to live in Oakland and you want to make any kind of art that doesn't sort of like allow you to maintain connections with people who work for Google and who are gonna sort of patronize you in that sense then you have to live somewhere like this and you're sort of you're picking between this and maybe something that's worse.

Yeah, and the other thing that you know puts puts decorating such as they had done in the interior apart from you you know, doing that in a real apartment or public building is that, you know, the people who actually live there certainly knew how to get out of the building quickly if they had to. Right. We learned, I think, that one resident dies in this fire. Everyone else has no idea, obviously, where the exits are and so on and so forth. But I, yeah, I mean, you did it much more beautifully than I could, but.

I've got more. I've got a whole second, the second wind queued up. Okay. I'll just go fuck myself that. No, no, no, please. Do your thing and then I'll go again. People gotta live places and. People do.

People gotta live places. That's, yeah, obviously in my job, I work with people that need places to live and it's sort of like, oh, we're just gonna fucking toss them to the wind is unacceptable. And what we should do, I think is obvious to anyone who's been paying close enough attention to me, which is we will level San Francisco,

we will level San Jose, we will tear down Levi's stadium, brick by brick and build a million, a million person. remember that Tokyo giga skyscraper that was supposed to exist Yeah, we're gonna do that The big one the really big one Yeah, but no people people who lived there But no, people who lived there thought it was beautiful. And I think this like differing conceptions of beauty and of meaning and of like what safe housing and what home is come into play here. I think that was something that came out in the court case is, you know, prosecutors and defense attorneys trying to extract this stuff from people

who lived in a like a different generation and a different lifestyle. And there was this kind of like mutual incomprehensibility of what it meant for something to be home and for what it meant for something to be like, you know, to be a beautiful place. And I think a lot of people who lived there or who visited were like genuinely inspired and made genuine connections there. There's a quote from one resident who said, it was a beautiful but a terrifying place. And this is someone who says that like, you know, there

were constantly the electricity and the hot water were going out. The cops showed up because like people had guns, you know, she says I kept a fire extinguisher, a flashlight and a self defense weapon. It was a nightmare. But at the same time, there is something alluring and there is something time, there is something alluring, and there is something different, and there is something like inspirational about it. And that's not wholly attributable to one guy in sort of having Stockholm syndrome for him. It's also like having a place that is outside of a mainstream that is a horrible place to be an artist. And I mean, there's an LGBT issue here too as well, because like a lot of these people are queer and trans. And, you know, as far as we know, three of the victims of the fire were trans.

And after the fact, the authorities dead named and misgendered fucking all of them. And I just find it really, really bleak that you can get out of fucking like Indiana or whatever and you come to somewhere that you think is gonna be better and it kills you in its own distinct way of forcing you to the margins. Right, because you've been forced to the margins to say exactly that.

That you've been forced to the margins your entire life and now you're killed for it. Yeah, and it wants to sort of like have its cake and eat it, right? Like Oakland is one of these places where like it wants to paint itself as like inclusive and like having this kind of like counterculture. But it doesn't do anything that allows that counterculture to sustain itself. And when it does, it snuffs a life out of them. Exactly. Exactly.

If we if we go to the next slide, I'd want to so one of the victims was Cash ask you who did this she was she's in a band called them or us two and I listened to a lot of them researching this and Genuinely like really really talented It's just really bleak but yeah, so We've got some interior shots here and I I'm going to talk about Oakland Fire Department as the fourth agency, which knows that this place is fucked up and does nothing. I will say just that this is a nice looking space.

I like this. How this whole composition here, I also would say I have a little bit of formal education in the architecture of houses in this area. Other than the fact that it's a little bit bigger and the trusses are made of steel instead of wood, it's identical. You can see the sort of frame of this roof on the the exterior shots post fire. And this is not not even not even like that notably a fire trap in some ways. Yeah. So the nearest OFT firehouse was a block away. And they're on friendly terms because, you know, the the firefighters were out there constantly for like people setting couches on fire and shit You can't take that from West Virginia. That's a West Virginia thing

Defend West Virginians again We're not apologizing for that West Virginia University students are Infamous for their burning burning of couches. They're right and glorious to do so, all glory to the Mountaineers and your hideous-ass PRT. Yeah. But unlike the cops, the firefighters, they stop by and they like the place, right? There's reports of one of the firefighters stopping to play like piano number 43 or whatever. And they seem pretty chill about it. Like one of them tells Almena that like as long as you've got marked fire exits, it's fine. And you know, after

this like off duty firefighters come and hang out, they stay at parties, they stay at barbecues and stuff like they're on friendly terms. And it lends people this air of confidence that like, well, if the firefighters say it's okay then it must be okay. And I should say that at this point Oakland fire department it was funded it was fully funded but it was chronically understaffed possibly because you cannot live in Oakland on a firefighter salary. a firefighter salary. And so between 2011 and 2015, they had no fire marshal, no assistant fire marshal. So nobody who's supposed to like enforce fire codes or investigate breaches of them. Not to even make a joke, but they are running on fumes here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's there's there's that's the thing is you you you just have priced people out of existence. And now the fringes of society are left to just burn for it.

And it's yeah, it's it's awesome. You got the muscle, you don't got the brains. Well, this is the thing. It's the same thing I talked about with like the the sort of policy papers earlier, where it's like if you think of like a housing crisis or a displacement crisis and like tranches, right, Where the first tranches like people who are going to become immediately unhoused and who in this sort of like grand scheme of things, nobody except like charities gives a fucking out. Right. And then the sort of second tier of like people who are,

you know, artists or living like an alternative lifestyle who are then marginalized, but who the city still wants to like exploit in that sense. who are artists or living like an alternative lifestyle who are then marginalized, but who the city still wants to exploit in that sense. Nominally cares about, right? Yeah, exactly. And then the third tier of people who you need to run essential public services and who don't wanna commute for two hours to get to work,

like teachers and firefighters and even in this case, cops, right? Like it's still... A lot of these cities also have a residency requirement, which makes it even more difficult. It was gonna say the same thing. Yeah, it's a sort of thing where like if you want to be a firefighter, you have to be independently wealthy,

which is a fucking insane thing. You just have to like do it for fun. Yeah, so you're in this place where the city kind of like eats itself in that way. And it eats itself first in sort of like in human terms, then in cultural terms, and then in like functional terms. Anyway, if we go to the next slide, we have to talk about electricity. And I've shamelessly stole this graphic from Bay Area News Group. So in the year previous, there was another show and they had a power cut in the middle of it.

And Almena had to like go next door and fix the power. All four of these buildings are running off of one PG&E box. And it's like three different businesses and this warehouse. And the wiring is sort of like Daisy chained through them. And when it gets to the ghost ship, it is divided into, it's going to be like, power strip to power strip to power strip to power strip to appliance. The way you the way you classically blow out a power supply, right? Exactly. And also, you know, it's coming right off the power pole here into what was formally industrial buildings.

This is probably like 243 phase on the way in, I think it's 24. Might be 480 even. This is higher than normal voltage. I'm not that good with electricity. It's just one of those, I think. He's the fact that their contract, their electrical contractor, I don't have his first name, but his last name is Canon. Basically just lied about his credentials, took the fifth for his deposition, and just

like didn't do his moral ethical duty as a human being. Yeah, because the landlord tried to replace the transformer on the cheap. On the cheap, right, exactly. Quote, we are going to use it a little bit differently than standard close quote in regards to this transformer. Yeah, and their license as a contractor had expired five years earlier. And they were just still going. If there's two transformers in their wired and series, they're definitely doing a weird thing with stepping down the voltage here.

And yeah, so the tenants remember that like you couldn't use like two appliances at the same time kind of thing, or you would just take the power out. Oh, well, in fairness, that's the same with my kitchen. I was gonna say that I was gonna make that joke. But at least at least I know the breaker box works. Yeah. So so this electricity is going to like a little kitchen in the in the back. There's there's like two refrigerators in there. And I think like a microwave. If we if we go to the next slide,

it's about the actual the actual event itself because they were doing ticketed events. And and this was like going to be a concert. It was a secret location. It was a secret gig that was going to be announced on Facebook. And Almena wasn't in the building because of child neglect as it happened because CPS made it so that like if you want to see your kids, if you want to get your kids back, they can't be in the warehouse when you're doing a like a concert.

So he, his wife and the kids were at a hotel. And it's all delegated to Max Harris, who is like running the door. He's, I guess, technically the bouncer. He's also one of the first people to respond in his to the fire. You know, an attempt to get people out of there. I do want to say I have to I have to quote this. This is from the promoter of the show. They can limit our invites but not gonna let them lower limit our fun. We shall rise up overcome and dance on the ruin stay safe out there. Also, we should mention that

the cover, which was $15, which should be fucking illegal, basically paid, that is what Almeena spent as his living expenses. Basically, he made rent from the illegal tenants and then parties covered, like he was running a goddamn 2011 fraternity parties covered his expenses I I just there's something very evil to me about the idea of charging $15 to burn up like this yeah and I can't shake that just like you're talking camping stoves in the kitchen like really just like the fringes of society we talked about mm And just like these people having no idea, you know, you try to go to a party or a concert or something.

If we if we if we go to the next the next slide. So the party is happening second floor and people notice smoke coming up through the floorboards. About 1115 the night of December 2nd, we should say that. Yeah. And this happens very, very quickly. It's an extremely flammable building. Like as far as people remember it, like stuff was

the building was like filled with smoke within like five or ten seconds. Fuel sources are plenty. This thing is going up like a Christmas tree. And that kind of like, that kind of smoke, like a couple of breaths of it will kill you. Like you will lose consciousness and then you'll die. The firefighters make it all of goddamn 20 feet. Yeah.

Literally they make it 20 feet. I just, this is one of those where I just, I want to scream into the void. Yeah. Just classic the evils of of of all these things. Collider. I mean, you could not have had a faster response time. Had it been like, unless it was next door to the final. Like they get there three minutes after the first one call. Yeah. 100 percent.

And yeah, I mean, there's sort of there's descriptions which are sort of vivid and horrible. Make people want Saab, yeah. Yeah, people sort of go to this staircase and a lot of people don't want to go down it. A lot of people want to like stay up because it seems safer. There's a detail about a woman sitting on the first floor in a wicker chair screaming not to come down and chanting, this is the will of the spirits of the forest. All right, well, someone should be delated to death with a baseball bat.

But yeah, I think I think a key aspect of fire safety is you don't let somebody say that it's the will of the spirits of the forest. Generally mysticism does not improve in evacuation situation. No, you can do the mysticism afterwards. Yes. And that's that's that's the time for mysticism There's there's a time for action on there's a time to come in with the spirits Yeah, there's an absolute spirit will commune with you if they need to

Don't call us. We'll call you There's absolutely heartbreaking sense in here that I don't think I'm gonna get through without crying Just Michaela Gregory and Alex Vega embraced his body on top of hers to shield her from the flames. And just, I, what are you fucking saying to that, right? It's just like, these greedy motherfuckers pushed these people to their deaths because they just didn't fucking care. And systemic failures, the failures of capitalism, the failures of all of this just make you want to punch a wall. Yeah, all of these people deserve so much better. Yes.

And so, you know, so Max Harris is downstairs. He's like at least trying to like shout so people can follow his voice. He is doing his level best. Yeah. As far as we can tell. And mostly people just do not make it down because there's no time to. Neither stairway leads to one of the two exits. The pallet staircase, as you can imagine, is absolutely fucking gone by this point.

Yeah. And. I mean, so. Yeah, so the roof collapses at 11. Forty nine. No, please. I'm just reading from the notes. I you want to read this this this this this motherfucker's Facebook post. I'll I'll read the yeah. So take your time.

So so I mean, everybody's dead like like half 11. No, I mean, no, no shot. You have you if you if you if you were in there, your chances of getting out alive are are slim to none feels optimistic. And and about 1 30 in the morning, Almena posted on Facebook, do not post where he posts, everything I worked so hard for is gone. Blessed that my blessed that my children and my car at a hotel safe and sound. It's as if I've awoken from a dream filled with opulence and hope to be standing now

in poverty of self worth. And this is a brilliant brain. You will have to bleep this, but that dude should do us all a favor and put a sh. Well, this is the thing that like recurring thing is that this guy is sort of like monstrous egotism, where he cannot like make anybody do anything other than hate him. Like when he's on the stand at trial, this is going to be a recurring thing. When he hears the victim impact statements, he says that he's like willing to to tattoo the names of the victims on his body. Right. To apologize, like it does some weird shit that day,

maybe the day after the fire or at least in the interview, but I want to say Matt Lauer maybe. Where he's like clearly traumatized, but also like, do we get it the worst fucking way you could possibly do a thing? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I don't, I don't know what it is.

I'm sort of grasping for words, but it's sort of those. Yeah. I fucked is the word, I think. Yeah. Um, if we, if we go to the next slide, I'm interested in how he says, I would tattoo the names of the, the people who had died on me, you know, cause you know who else does that is serial killers. Senator John Federman.

Christ. Damn. Oh, man. That guy turned out pretty bad. Anyway. Yeah, we're sorry. Yeah, I hope I listen. I hope I never get brain damage, but I especially hope I never get the kind of brain damage that makes me a Zionist.

Um, so. If I start wearing an Israeli flag as a cape, I'm going to need you to like put me in inpatient care. Yeah, don't worry. Well, well, we'll take care of that. Thank you. Yeah. Um, so yeah,

our castle bravely sold your odd with milkshake. Yeah. Yes, that's right. Yeah. It's just like, keep paying me, but like getting understudy. Um, and yeah, so the aftermath for this is, you know, like, obviously, this devastates an entire community. Like, there's so many photos and so many descriptions of people like, you know, going to leaf flowers or whatever, and just breaking down in the street.

Like, I, you know, this happens occasionally where like, we'll talk about stuff and people have like, personal connection to about stuff and people have like personal connection to it. I guarantee it's going to happen in this one. You know, I think I know people who know people who lost people. So I'm at that level of like remove. And, you know, I really hope we're doing it justice. But yeah, it absolutely like tears tears the heart out of a community in Oakland. And, you know, you have like the Oakland Fire Department, you have like Cal FI, you've got like the ATF doing a lot of the like fire investigation. And ultimately, what they conclude is we don't know. For a while, they sort of pinned on the fridge, refrigerator.

For a while they sort of pinned on one of these refrigerator races. Yeah, but like it's too badly damaged to even be able to tell. And I mean, just in terms of the length of time where people are waiting to like find out whether they're loved ones or alive or dead, whether or not they're going to like get their remains back, which again is sort of doubly fraught when that person is trans. And so therefore, their ID might not match. It takes days and it's agonizing. And I think that's one of the sort of cruelties of a lot of sort of like fire investigation, right? It's not only are you sort of like not able to give a lot of sort of like fire investigation, right? Is, you know, not only are you sort of like not able to give a lot of definitive answers, but it takes you a long time to not be able to give a lot of definitive answers. Right.

I mean, and the Oakland fire chief, Teresa Delote Reed on the right. Resides. Yeah, just she just fucking pieces out. She just leaves. She goes on. She goes on leave like right after this happens, then she quits. Right. It's it's yeah, because which I. I just live forever.

I don't even know how to express how I feel about that, you know, you know, you got to use those vacation days or you're going to lose them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Enjoy. Enjoy the enjoy the hottest fires of hell. Maybe that's I I don't understand why every single agency involved in their shit. They're so complacent about it. Like, and I think it's maybe like most excuse inexcusable with the fine apartment, right? Because child protective services, they think about

children, right? The cops, I don't expect to do anything. But like, if you're a firefighter, I expect you to be able to recognize- Firefighting is sort of in your job. It's actually kind of your only job. Yeah, most of what your job is, or should be, is prevention. I expect you to be able to recognize when a building is dangerous. Instead of just thinking it's cool, right? And getting buffalosed by like one dipshit, you know? You got to wonder a couple things like, is this even the worst building they were at every day? I mean, are there other ghost ships out there? Oh, there are so many. There are hundreds. Right. Yeah. 100%.

Let me let me just put this down now as a marker because I was going to say this on the next slide, but I'll say it here. This will happen again. And it may start. If it is when? Yeah, 100%. And it you know, plausibly, it could happen in Oakland again. Because there are. There are. There are. Yeah, there are. So many plausibly it could happen in Oakland again. Because there are there are. Yes, there are like so many places like it could happen in London. Like so easily, I could give you the address of like three places that I've been to where this could happen. Yep.

Well, the the the auto body shop down the street in a very similar building burned down like what two years ago, I want to say. Three years ago, yeah. Yeah, that was in the middle of the night though. So the whatever Karate studio or whatever was upstairs was unoccupied, I think. Immersively, yes. Oh my god.

The sketchiest building I've ever been in was a squat, right, where the only door in or out was sort of like anti barricade reinforced in case the cops came in with like a bunch of tires on the back of it and metal grates on the front of it. And if you wanted to get in, if you want to get out, right, you had to like open the inner door, reach out through the grate, unlock a padlock and then sort of like unwind this whole chain, open the metal grate and get out. And I just seems. Yeah, as as I was in there, I was thinking about the fact that I do an engineering disasters podcast for a living. And I thought about how

ironic that was. And I thought about how this should not be a way in which people are forced to live, right? The you're your sort of sick sense of security for getting kicked out of your house should not depend on you having to like, chain yourself in behind this like rainbow six siege barricade shit. You should have like a door that locks normal style. And I just like I should be able to have a weird cool artist space that also is a death trap. Yeah, like that's that's yeah, 100%. So this there's this legal aftermath,

right, where they charge Almaner and Harris. And initially, the state offers this plea deal. And it's not a walk in the park actually. I think it's like some number of years. It's not as many as it should have been necessarily, but then Harris probably shouldn't have been on trial in the first place. And through all the victim impact statements and stuff, the victims' families do not want

this plea deal to happen. And so the judge refuses it and it goes to trial. And when it goes to trial, Harris is acquitted of all charges, which I think is difficult emotionally, but I think it's the right decision. And Almena gets, like on paper, it's 12 years. In practice, it's like 36 months of house arrest with a tag. Wow.

It's like 18 months of like nominally a 12 year sentence. And yeah, if we if we go to the next slide. That's the sort of sole criminal sanction as far as as far as that goes. The Ings eventually like file for bankruptcy. They for bankruptcy, they have to not be landlords anymore, they liquidate all of their shit. And most of it comes out of their insurance, they pay like, I think it's like $12 million, and the city of Oakland settles for like $32 million, which is going to compensate the victims and like one guy who was like very badly burned but didn't die. And yeah, this is absolutely something that will continue to happen. I think, I mean, Oakland's been doing like trying to build more housing and we get back into housing policy and the sort of harrowing of hell here about, you know, what quality is that housing, what extent is, you know, how

useful is that housing when you're sort of like demolishing homeless encampments. But I think my sort of summary of this, right, is the kind of evil fucking hypocrisy of saying Oakland is a place with like a culture and an art scene that we're proud of that makes it a sort of a vibrant and diverse place to live. And we are doing everything we can to make the conditions of working in that kill you. If you want your city to have culture and art that is not just like Jeff Koons shit, then it needs to house the people who make those things. And if you want to not murder those people, then it needs to house them people who make those things. And if you want to not murder those people, then it needs to house them affordably and safely. And no one is interested

in doing it as far as I can tell anywhere. And it's just, it's so fucking bleak. Yeah. No, it's just not, it's, it's not compatible with the modern financialization of real estate and buildings and stuff like that. It's just, we're in a culture devoid of art, and this is one of the reasons why. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So something fucking Verna Herzog said in his autobiography that one of the And and his autobiography that one of the sort of impetus is for making all of his like weird shit is that he thinks that humanity is like running out of images, right? That doesn't have new images anymore. And yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I. I think when you make it impossible for people to create new images,

you kind of like cut yourself off culturally. Oh, by that. Yeah, look at how much of the culture is focused around nostalgia these days. I mean, you know, I'm all goddamn thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been this has been the sad and angry presentation that Liam and I put together. What what what have we learned,

if anything? I don't know. I'm so fucking angry. I did the research for this and I'm still so fucking angry. I feel just beleaguered. Like BlackRock CEO on ****, I guess is where we'd start. What we need is old-fashioned Viennese public housing. I just saw an article about it. For artists. Yeah, and everyone. It should be for everyone, obviously.

But I want a kitchen. Please let me have a kitchen. Viennese public housing had kitchens, don't worry. I know, it does. This is sort of... This is... The root of everything comes down to, you know, I it should just be cheaper to live. Yeah, you should.

You shouldn't need to live with the fringes of the society and be punished for being there. Yeah. Yeah. That's some bullshit. You should not have to have a podcast in order to make a living wage. Right. This is this is undignified labor. You know, yeah, it's. Still like 600 bucks a month to live here. I paid less than that in the same year. Living Philly.

It's it's it is legitimately insane in California. Yeah. Yeah. It's not sustainable. No, it's not. And the fucking whole thing is gonna sink into the whole room Yeah, I I know I paid 695 a month to live in West Philly With my ex-girlfriend and so I paid like 350 in one bedroom. I I I pray God my landlord never remembers I exist right because he doesn't do anything for me, but he never puts the rent up either.

So it stayed below market rate for the last like 10 years. It's an absolute shithole. I hate it. I can't wait to move to London, but the problem is every time I look at moving to London, moving to London becomes 5,000% more expensive. Right. Man, you gotta advertise yourself.

Good tenant doesn't complain. House won't burn down. Yeah. Just like a selfie of you smiling advertise yourself. Good tenant doesn't complain. House won't burn down. Yeah, just like a like a selfie of you like smiling with. Comes with husband. Please help. That's right. Yeah. Well, you have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands for danger. I missed you, Safety Third. I missed you safety third. I missed you too, Alice. Oh, don't give it a voice. Wow, wow, it has the same voices. Look at how I look at him. It has the same voice. Steamboat Willie, now public domain.

Yes, Steamboat Willie third. We can do whatever we want. I didn't realize Mickey Mouse hated cats so much until I watched it finally. Yeah, it's weird how he was. I just said that makes sense on account of being a mouse. Cats have done horrible things to the mouse people. Yeah, I have met Kitty Reckonin. I remember that. Kitty Reckonin.

Milk Shake as well. Milk Shake has murdered several mice in the past few days. Not Toby. Toby just stares at them. This is a big fat ass at his old. milkshake as well milkshake has murdered several mice in the past few days not to be really he just stares at them big fat ass at his old Hope is just like ah, I cannot be bothered. I've got to go lick myself again Yes, hello, Roz Alice yay Liam and Schrodinger's guest no guest today Good enough by observing the lack of guests. we have we have collapsed that little quantum position. We actually murdered a guest and collapsed them into a non-guest waveform. I mean, sort of many, many worlds, we have

murdered infinite guests. Yeah, that's true. We'll do it again, papal. Yeah, yeah, you do the you do the danger five thing where you shoot someone over the phone. Why not? Yeah. I decided for this safety third, I would tell you guys about an incident I had in one of the few years I worked at a cargo airport. Oh boy. But before we continue, allow me to quickly load Chekhov's gun. I am strongly in the camp of planes should be feared and respected, but not because the act of flying is magic and goes against gravity. No, I fear and respect planes because planes

are efficient ambush predators. Let me explain. While working at this airport, if you walked up to any ground crew member and asked them for a piece of advice about working ground crew, they would tell you, planes sneak up on you. Oh, it's like trains, planes sneak up on you. Oh, it's like trains in a train yard. Yes. They become scenery. Yes.

I do not know how or why this happens, but my theory is that planes move kind of slowly when they're on the ground, and you can't hear the engines from so far away that by the time a plane gets within 100 feet of you, your brain has turned any noise the plane makes into white noise and tunes it out. Several times I amper sand hashed pound sign 39 semi-colon sitting around. Ah, I see milkshake has been at the controls again.

And get the feeling of being watched only to look up and see a plane barreling towards me So remember planes sneak up on you. All right, phone me in mind Yeah, now that Chekhov's gun is now low Chekhov's gun Not cologne gun is loaded and on the table. We can continue on to the incident. T.M. I hate the incident. T.M. Yeah. On that night, I was in charge of driving the belt around.

Seen here, I am. Seen here, the belt. If you have seen ground crew loading luggage into a plane, congratulations, you've seen the belt. If if not I include a picture of one what do you need to know about these belts in particular is that they sucked Some that would be the tube surely anyway Some were better than others but not by much one night I had a really terrible one the engine would die on me randomly and I have to spend a second turn the ignition a few times to get it back on. I told my supervisor this and he said, the night was almost over. Can you tough it out? And then he changed the subject. Then he changed the subject to tell me

we needed to go to a plane on the other side of the building we were working off of. If you've never driven on an airport ramp before, the planes have the right of way. And all other non-plane vehicles have to drive around the planes on a one-way road. They are pretty big. Non-plane vehicles might also have to cross the plane taxiway. I'll include a picture, so hopefully this makes more sense to the audio listeners like myself. You fucking asshole. to the audio listeners like myself. So I'm a little confused.

You know, the only reason I understand this is I grew up going to Washington Dulles International Airport where they had the big mobile lounges. So you got the full airplane service vehicle experience whenever you went anywhere. Just just I just I'm just letting it wash over me. Yeah, it's like, okay, back in the day before they did 9-11, you could just go to the airport and look at planes. Yeah, that was the good times. But in order to get to the terminals where you could see the planes better, you would

have to take the mobile lounge out there. So I got to go on the mobile lounge a whole lot and understand the process of not getting yourself killed by a plane. Anyway, that's a tangent. Well done, bud. Yeah. All was going well up until the moment I began to cross the taxiway. About halfway across my belt once again died causing me to stop dead in the middle of the

taxiway. That's the middle of the taxiway. That's the star on the map here. Oh no. Oh dear. Right in the middle of the junction. Yes, exactly. No problem, I thought. I had checked for planes before crossing and every time this had happened throughout the

night, one or two turns of the ignition turned the engine back on. But this time, I was wrong. No matter how many times I tried the ignition, the engine would not turn back on. Quickly, I went into panic mode, trying to wave someone down to help me while calling my supervisor repeatedly and constantly trying the ignition. Much to my dismay, no one noticed my frantic waving, and my supervisor was not answering my calls and the engine still wasn't turning back on. The anxiety nightmare.

Yeah, I sat there. I sat there on the taxiway trying this for about a minute before I remembered. I need to be checking for planes. I looked up into my horror. One had gotten off of the runway when I wasn't looking and was a few hundred feet for me on the main taxi way running parallel to the runway. Not taking my eyes off the plane out of fear of losing it I gave up on flagging someone down and calling my supervisor. I quickly pocketed my phone I unbuckled my seat belt got one hand on my backpack while the other hand was still relentlessly trying the ignition, and I decided that a plane turned towards me. I would ditch the belt and make a run for safety.

Much to my horror, the plane had begun its turn onto the taxiway I was stuck on. I made up my mind, I tried to try the ignition one last time before jumping ship. And this, for whatever reason, was the golden one because the engine roared back to life Not wasting a single second to process what had happened I slammed my foot onto the gas pedal and broke every airport traffic roll and speed limit Hauling it out of there and away from the plane Indiana Jones shit. This is why the top gear airport service vehicle grace Actually a public service. Yes.

I quickly made it to the dock I needed to go to only to see my supervisor sitting on his phone. I pulled the belt up and parked it so fast and so close to him that he probably thought I was about to run him over. I still had one hand in my bag and I wasn't buckled in. So I fell slash jumped off of the belt. Just the belt, the belt shows up at its maximum speed of 15 miles an hour. And this.

Yeah, it's like the size of dinner plates. I like the size of dinner plates. I like how this submitter capitalized capital T, the capital B belt. You gotta respect the belt. You gotta respect the belt or the belt won't respect you. My supervisor upon seeing me happily said, Hey, I saw you called me. What do you need? Fuck you, okay. You're the most man in the world, yeah.

Despite the whole event, probably lasting only two or three minutes, I had called that man at least 100 times. I began to scream and curse him out and told him I had just played chicken with a plane because that hunk had junk and I would not be stepping foot on it again. His solution was not to call maintenance, but to point out another person, Ampersand pound sign 39 semicolon S belt that had been left unattended nearby and simply to use that one instead. But GTA rules. Yeah.

No, I wasn't going to win the battle and maybe also coming down from the adrenaline high. I took a picture of my belt identification number. I walked over and took one else Ampersand Pound Sign 39 semicolon S belt. I spent the rest of the night with my ear to the ground listening for another person to end up in my situation. I never did. Using that picture I took, I never used that belt again, even if it was the only one available. Outstanding. I'm scared of planes in a whole new dimension now. Thank you for that.

He might run over the guy who drives the belt. Yeah, right? I don't want to harm the belt guy. I don't want to harm ground stuff. I'm only going to harm the catering truck. You have this like specific vendetta. What's the what's the most ring thing? The hierarchy of airport service vehicles. Oh, yeah, that that catering truck's been getting like way too up itself.

Like I was about to say I was about to say only respect the belt and the baggage trolley. You don't respect the air stairs. Air stairs. No, air stairs. Air stairs I don't respect. That's why I get around by being a hop on. Yeah, if you're in that situation, don't even bother. Just deploy the emergency slide. The only reason that I,

the only reason I respect the airplane fuel truck is because it will explode if I fuck with it. So yeah, I like this. I like I like having airport safety thirds. They're fun. Oh, this is very good. Yeah. Give us a couple.

If you've had a comical experience with an airport service truck, please send it in. 100%. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Yeah, I got to do for the sake of my autism and everyone listening, the end of the safety third segment. That was safety third. Oh, that was safety third. Yes. Now on next episode out of practice.

We're out of practice. That's right. Now, next episode, we the Chernobyl disaster. Yeah, our commercials, we have a shirt that you can you can buy to cover your nakedness. Yes. We have done it. We will put a link to it in the description, I hope. And yeah, check out all of our other podcasts. Thank you for your patience with us on this one. And we will fix the workflow or perish. Yeah, one of the two. I'm really hoping for fixing the work. I don't work.

We're fixing the work. I was on Trash Future, which is fun, but it's on their Patreon. So you have to give Alice more money to listen to it. Yes, give me more money, please. Please give me more money. I think that that's all the commercials. Yeah, that's all of them. So we have a Patreon where you can listen to our bonus episodes. We're going to record one right now, actually.

And it'll be up in a bit. It's on Art Nouveau. Yeah, so. Art Nouveau. Other than that, I think that was our guest. Oh, we buy a contribution. That is a podcast. Goodbye, everyone.

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