Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 160: The 1963 Salad Oil Scandal

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

can't believe we destroyed both masculinity and the economy with seed oils DONATE TO HELP THOSE TRAPPED IN GAZA: https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.map.org.uk/ https://donate.unrwa.org/-landing-page/en_EN https://pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/general WE HAVE A MERCH STORE NOW: https://www.bonfire.com/store/well-theres-your-problem-podcast/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Can you, can you, Roz, you have to hit record on the thing. I know, I'm starting three recordings at once, come on. This is, this is not necessarily, there's a whole pre-flight series of checks we have to do. Yeah, yeah. In order to do this. No, don't show them, don't show them that we just did this with PowerPoint. The wings fall off, you know, part way through.

Roz's pilot is just like, oh, that's bad, huh? Uh, is your captain speaking? Uh-uh. Hey, so, uh, put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye, am I right? Just as you're going down making frantic mayday calls, so you guys ever see an airplane? Look, I have now flown on a Boeing 737 Max-8, and I survived. No, I survived. ALICE I just, on the way down, you're getting like,

hey, if you want your relatives to be sharply attired at your funeral, you can buy your Boeing to Die t-shirt from... Well, there's your problem. Link in the description. LIAM Like a bio. So yesterday I started, I got started, but I'm in group therapy, and I've been going for a number of months, almost a year now, and much to my chagrin, therapy works on me now.

But I started my weekly check-in with What's Up YouTube, and I got laughs, and I also got a look from our group leader who was just like, what the fuck, and I was like, come on, man, that hit, what that hit. ALICE You're not supposed to do bits in there, but you are also a professional comedian, is the problem? LIAM Yeah, it is the issue. JARED No, don't say those words to me! I had to put down comedian on my text for, oh, I'm so horrified.

ALICE Just like, I am a clown, a jester, a professional oaf. People laugh at me for money. ZACH I am a professional oaf, I'll tell you that. I do social work and I have a professional oaf. And my favorite thing is when people at work are like, so what's your podcast about? I'm like, do we have to talk about this? ALICE I think the thing is, there's a valuable gap

in social work for an oaf. You need an oaf. Because, like- I agree! We had a problem where someone rushed us the other day, and I had to be the, I was like, I'll be the first line of defense, please leave my senior center, why are you screaming at the seniors, please don't do that. Did they leave?

They did. Damn. There you go. Yeah. Being o leave? They did. Damn. There you go. Yeah. Being oaf-pilled, being oaf-maxed, it works. I am oaf-pilled, mostly because I don't have a choice. Liam has replaced John Federman as Pennsylvania's greatest oaf.

Thank you! Thank you. You get like a sort of state oaf representation, you know? Exactly. Oh, but I'm not gonna go, I'm gonna go wild on Israel, and just be like, alright, no, we're doing mandatory BDS now. And if you don't get in line, we're also gonna beat you to death with a caliphate. It's like inverse Germany, in order to get citizenship you have to sign a thing that

says that Israel doesn't have a right to exist. Yeah, we... No state has a right to exist, I keep saying it and people keep yelling at me on Twitter. Yeah. No state has a right to exist, I keep saying it and people keep yelling at me on Twitter. ALICE We re-root, we hack into ways to re-root everyone using it into brick walls with tunnels painted on them. ALICE Aww. ALICE This is the first thing that Hezbollah's gonna do if it kicks off, right? That's day one, hour one, you're trying to get like a cap and television.

SEAN Just wily coyote a bunch of fuckin' people. Yeah, which, whatever man. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but y'all motherfuckers are gonna learn to Just wily coyote a bunch of fuckin' people, yeah. Which, whatever, man. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but y'all motherfuckers are gonna learn today. Okay. Welcome to, Will Err's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go. I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. ALICE I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam! LIAM Yay Liam! Oh fuck it, it's good to hear your voice, Nova. ALICE I missed you too, buddy. LIAM My name is Liam McAnderson, my pronouns are he and him, and I've just been staring

at this picture of vegetable oil. Tell me what the hell that's about, or do we have to do goddamn- ALICE It's beautiful, it's about, or do we have to do goddamn research? ALICE This is a picture of vegetable oil. You'll note ingredients, soybean oil and canola oil. There's nothing particularly wrong about this picture. JUSTIN It's gonna sound real stupid. Are soybeans not vegetable? LIAM Yeah.

ALICE Well, they're a leju-m, right? Like, they're a bean. JUSTIN Yeah, that was my question. ALICE They're a bean, yeah. So I guess technically. Vegetable oil can have a lot of... This is the thing, because you're Oathpilled, you're not like, soy, by definition, so you don't know about soybeans.

No, I don't know, I force-femming myself by chugging the vegetable oil out of the wise market. I mean, it worked for me, y'know? No, so, an archaic term for vegetable oil is salad oil. Yeah. And salad oil was responsible for, in addition to another event, one of the worst Wall Street stock market crashes of the 20th century. SEAN I am baffled and ready to learn more.

JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Do you guys have salad cream, by the way? What the goddamn shit is salad cream? Alright, Devon, I'm gonna need you to edit in a spinning in newspaper in an old movie picture of Heinz's salad cream. Salad cream is like, it's like white ketchup, it's like if mayonnaise was a little bit more ketchup-like. Okay, so we have, okay, this is gonna be a fun culture exchange. Right? Ketchup? It's like if mayonnaise was a little bit more ketchup-like. Mm.

ALICE Okay, so we have, okay, this is gonna be a fun culture exchange. You guys have ranch, right? ALICE Uh, yes. But only recently, like, when I was growing up we didn't really. It's like, definitely a recent-ish American input. ALICE Yeah, American Edge really wins again! ALICE Yeah, apparently. JUSTIN Yeah, I can imagine, they're pretty similar, y'know, all these, like, sort of mayo-based, or cream-based

dressings and condiments are very similar. Yeah, well, salad cream is like, if you had ranch but you didn't have any of the spices, because those are obviously too intense for us in Britain. Okay, okay, I'm picking up what you're putting down. I don't think we have that, I mean, I'm sure, so, I, y'know, I'm a fat boy, I like mayonnaise. And I haven't seen salad cream, but I'm sure in the whatever UK section of the Wegmans I go to sometimes they have it. Mm.

Do they like, do you dip fries, which you call chips, into it? You absolutely can do it, I preferred it to ketchup growing up. I think it's, if I moved out of this country, it's one of the first things I'd miss. JUSTIN Yeah, y'know, I mean, I'm definitely actually pro-mayo-based condiments for fries. ALICE Me too. Yeah. The Belgians were cooking with that one.

Literally. JUSTIN Right down the street there's a Mexican restaurant that actually does this really nice habanero mayo, which I like a lot. They only give it to you if you order the chicken sandwich, though. Which is annoying. ALICE Is the chicken sandwich any better than it used to be? JUSTIN Good question.

I haven't had one in a bit. ALICE Speaking of... JUSTIN It depends on what time of day you get it, I've found that, you know, later in the day, they start giving you the scraps of the chicken thighs, rather than the big ones that you get earlier in the day, and the thing is, later in the day is usually, you know, when I've forgotten to make dinner, that's when I'm going over to Loco Pez to get dinner at the very last second. ALICE Let me suggest a sandwich to you, have you

guys, since we're talking about Belgians, have you guys ever had a Maitriette? JUSTIN No, but I wanna learn more. It's French for sub-machine gun. I guess by analogy with like, a sub-sandwich. Yeah, so what it is, it's a baguette filled with fries, like french fries, like a sauce, some meat, and usually like, cheese as well. It's like, you get it off a stand or whatever. Really, really fuckin' good, actually.

I mean, of course it's good, it's like carbs on carbs, but like... ALICE This feels like a poutine sandwich. ALICE Yeah, nice! SEAN Yeah, nice! SEAN Never has without the gravy. Uh, Roz, next cooking day, will you make one for me? ROZ Uh, could you repeat what I'm making? That sandwich.

That's, okay, this entire sandwich we were discussing. Yes, please. Yeah, I can give it a shot. Thanks dude. Um, assuming the fridge doesn't crap out again. Yeah, I barge into Roz's house and I eat his food. And I pet his cat, and then I leave. Yeah, exactly.

I enjoy making food. You're good at it. It's a wonderful thing to do. I leave. Yeah, exactly. I enjoy making food. It's a wonderful thing to do. Speaking of food, one of the things you need to make food is oil. One of those oils is salad oil. Today we're gonna be talking about the salad oil scandal of 1963. That's right, that's right, for all of you mad at us because we don't do engineering disasters anymore, this one's just for you.

That is. Sorry. That's called a segue. So sorry. So sorry. But before we do that, we have to do the goddamn news. There's been like fifty different disasters, like actual natural disasters we haven't covered. Oh yeah, there's a...

We know about the dam collapse, we know about the semiconductor stuff, we know about flooding in the global south, we're really trying, I'm sorry. JUSTIN There was a lithium battery factory explosion, Israel's about to go to war with Lebanon, all sorts of fun stuff that's gonna happen. ALICE Fuck's sake. You wanna just catch up on it by just doing another all news? JUSTIN Oh my god, we might have to. ALICE When we get a backlog.

JUSTIN Yeah, but what I've decided to cover instead of all this is a boat boutique issue that only I care about. ALICE I also care about this. ALICE Because you are an absolute dictator over the news section, and you decide what goes in, and you know what, I'm forced to support you on this, so tell me about this boat." JUSTIN So, we briefly talked in the last episode, or at least showed a picture of the SS United States, which is the crown jewel of the US merchant marine fleet.

It is moored in Philadelphia, it's been sort of decaying for fifty, sixty, well, seventy years now. ALICE She's not looking great, to be honest. JUSTIN Still the world's fastest liner. Although it's largely been gutted on the interior, cause they did as best as abatement a long Looking great, to be honest. Still the world's fastest liner. You know, although it's largely been gutted on the interior, because they did as best as abatement a long time ago. And it's owned by the SS United States Conservancy.

You know, with the idea that eventually we preserve this, we turn it into a museum ship or a hotel or something like that. Because it is an intact liner. That part of South Philly? Okay. It's not South Philly? Okay. It's not supposed to stay there permanently. Which, good news and bad news on that one, because the Steve Adoring company that owns that pier a couple months ago, more than a couple months ago, decided to double their

rent, which the Conservancy couldn't afford. Oh, it's just getting kicked out like a restaurant? Uh, yeah, so essentially the- Like an independent bookstore? Yes. Well, they sort of, you know, they doubled the rent, the Conservancy took them to court saying that wasn't provision in the lease we have, the verdict was issued like, a week ago I think, a little more than a week ago, and the judge said, no, they can't raise the rent but yes, they can kick you out, and so they're kicking them out judge said, no, they can't raise the rent, but yes, they can kick you out, and so they're kicking them out in September, and no one knows where to put this thing.

ALICE Incredible. I love the legal system. I love housing law as it applies to boats, question mark. SEAN Yeah, can we just throw up, uh, Devon, if you're taking notes, can you just throw up that painting of the harrowing of hell we always use? ALICE Bo boat housing twists. LIAM Boat housing twists. JUSTIN Here's the thing, the Steve Adoring company that

owns this pier, right, I don't know exactly what they expect to do with an ocean liner sized berth for break bulk in the year of our lord, 2024. ALICE Free real estate, turned into luxury apartments. JUSTIN So, that is sort of one of the understandings. I think the other thing is, one of their big complaints against the SS United States is that, okay, it's pulling against the seawall down here, and the bollards are being damaged and so on and so forth, but- ALICE Oh shit. Bollards. JUSTIN Yeah, if you look at Porta Philadelphia's renderings, the bollards are being damaged and so on and so forth, but if you look at

Port of Philadelphia's renderings, the only thing they wanna do with this berth is just fill it in, and then use it as like a modern lumber products import terminal. SEAN I thought we were just gonna extend the South Philly Walmart. I think it would be objectively funnier. ALICE Just turn the SS United States into a Walmart. SEAN Turn it into the Walmart! Shit that Walmart can't get any worse, let's do it!

That's a good point, yeah. But, uh, this is, again, it's the crown jewel of the US merchant marine fleet, it's still the world's fastest ocean liner, and they're just gonna kick it out, and we don't know exactly what happens to it at that point. They have to wander the seas. Yeah, they have to find either another berth, probably on the east coast, or, you know, scrap it. They're 100% gonna scrap it, and that's the saddest thing. Yeah, I mean, if they wind up towing it to a lang or something like that...

Can the Chinese guys who bought the Ukrainian aircraft carrier off of the Ukrainians after independence not, like, buy this one as well? Just turn it into a... you could probably turn this into an aircraft carrier, maybe, and it would be funny. JUSTIN Yeah, you could probably, well, you could use it as a hotel, definitely, you could use it as a... you can't really use it as a ship anymore because the, I guess the aluminum hull is having a lot of problems with age. ALICE Just as an extra fuck you to be launching fighters against the US fleet in the Pacific

from the SS Taiwan as a province of China, formerly the SS United States, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah. I mean, the other thing is, there was an attempt to do something very similar with another ship, the SS America, I wanna say, it was bought by Norwegian Cruise Lines, and they fucked it. Oh my god, they screwed the pooch on that one. That could be an episode. Should be.

Yeah. But, yeah, this is not a good sign for the SS United States. This is one of those things where I can't even say, like, uh, well, donate to the Conservancy, because this is a situation where- A bullshit show? Yeah, you need a lot of money for this. This is not gonna be funded with small donors. This is- They've had similar situations before, yeah. Bill Clinton usually swoops in and contributes a couple million dollars, but that might not

be enough. Can someone tell Peter Thiel or Elon Musk that the, like, birth owners are woke, and that the ship is racist? Oh yeah, that's a good idea. Right around the block, yeah. I mean, again, South Philly, so... Yeah, it's these woke longshoremen. You know, they wanna kick out the boat, um. ALICE Yeah, it's these woke longshoremen. You know, they wanna kick out the boat, yeah.

Well, in fairness, on the west coast... ALICE Just for like, telling the truth about pronouns, or whatever. ALICE On the west coast, they are woke. ILWU, very left-wing union. But yeah, so this is an unfortunate piece of, you know, just, uh, I don't know, just wantonness to kick this thing out. I mean, you know, especially since, I know they've been close to a hotel deal a couple times before, but they are again close to a hotel deal now.

This is just forcing everyone's hands when it's not advantageous to be. So yeah, that's... Anyway, good luck with the Steve Adoring Company on trying to attract break bulk to this pier in 2024. ALICE It's gonna be fine, y'know? JUSTIN I hope it was worth it. ALICE Mm, fuckers. JUSTIN Yeah.

In other news... ALICE They did a Just Up Oil who destroyed a priceless Neolithic thing. It's gone now. It's amazing it lasted so long, but then a little bit of cornstarch with orange dye, gone. What you see here is a bunch of UDMH floating over the horizon. Fuck, we should've done the Chinese space program dropping a rocket stage onto a dude's

house. Yeah. Oh, that was pretty funny. And it looks a lot like this. So yeah, just off oil, you may be aware, protest group want no new gas and oil contracts in the UK, which is a good thing, have, in order to draw attention to the fact that everything is going to be fucked if we don't do that, sprayed harmless orange dye, or paint, whatever, onto the Henge at Stonehenge.

And this kicked off the, like, mother of a- JUSTIN Is that an apartment complex? The Henge at Stonehenge? ALICE Yeah, the villages at the Henge at Stonehenge. And then, what happened was, curiously, a bunch of people on the right, whether they know themselves to be on the right of politics or not, discovered overnight a new interest in conservation, and in, like, Neolithic ritual sites. These are also all the same people who have been calling English heritage woke and soy

for the last, like, five years. But now they were very very concerned that this orange paint was gonna permanently damage the structure and kill a bunch of rare lichens and stuff, which I think that one thing that might kill a bunch more rare lichens is climate change, but I'm not an expert on lichens. SEAN It might do that. ALICE And then everything was fine, it's already clean again, it's been washed off, with no lasting harm to the thing, but- LIAM Someone took a garden hose and fixed it.

ALICE Yeah, I mean, pretty much, right? But, the sort of, Stonehenge is about to get put on the World Heritage Danger list because there's this plan to just drive a road tunnel straight under it. Oh yeah, the Stupid Tunnel Project, yeah. That's one of the dumber ideas out there. They're trying to expand a highway through this sort of Stonehenge area, what is it, Salisbury Plain. This is like one of the most expensive projects in Britain because HS2 was cancelled.

I think HS2 being cancelled was one of the things that was said to be funding this incredibly stupid project. You know, I know Gareth Dennis can rant about this for quite a while, but one of the things that always gets me about the reactions to Just Stop Oil protests is they always do some kind of relatively harmless and easily reversible vandalism, and it's like everyone comes out of the woodwork like, oh my god, they destroyed the Trevi Fountain by like, I don't know, putting black dye on there. Yeah, and it's like, okay, well they gotta change out the water.

They do that pretty regularly anyway, because otherwise you get mosquitoes. I mean, this is not, this is not like, these are not like, huge, huge like... It's not like, they aren't like, you know, burning down buildings or like, slashing famous artworks, they're doing mostly harmless stuff. I don't know. But they get such a reaction. They're doing propaganda of the deed without doing the deed. ALICE I mean, it's impressive in that way, I suppose.

I mean, part of the reason why the protest landscape and the direct action landscape in the UK looks like this is actually as a response to policing. A lot of the discourse about this in mainstream respectable publications was how we need to crack down, things need to be even harsher on protesters. But it's barely possible to crack down on this, this is the result of the previous crackdown. They used to be a pretty lively set of actions going on at oil refineries and oil infrastructure and gas infrastructure, and everyone involved was put under insanely restrictive conditions, the sites themselves have these blanket orders over them, so you get arrested for looking at them funny.

And so if you want to protest something about the fact that the entire planet has been set to broil, and part of that is happening at a facility down the road from you, then your option is, I guess, to throw some soup on a painting, or turn some lichens orange, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah, go sit in traffic. Y'know, that sort of thing. ALICE Yeah, because it's either that, or do the Andreas Malm stuff, and that's scary. LIAM Propaganda, the deed, yes.

With the deed attached. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you're gonna do that, you're embarking on a very different and much more illegal course. LIAM Thought that we would ever encourage you to do that, blah blah blah. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, definitely. I don't know, you go read How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and it's like, oh, I'm gonna blow up a pipeline, and they fix it in two days.

And you go to prison forever. ALICE Also true, along with this very serious risk that you will kill someone. Whereas this, you're not even gonna kill any moss, really, it turns out. JUSTIN Yeah, it turns out. This is just... You make a lot of stupid people very angry. ALICE Yes.

And I look forward to- LIAM Which is always a wed, I do wear this. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of the kind of, what you might call most attention grabbing bit of British environmental protests, whether that's Just Up Oil or Extinction Rebellion, not to conflate the two, but like, they're very effective at raising awareness, but part of the problem I worry is that people are very aware of climate change, they just don't want to believe it, y'know? It's just like...

ALICE Oh, I think that's a hundred percent true. JUSTIN It's like breast cancer awareness. I'm aware of it, I'm not doing anything to stop it, I don't think I can. ALICE Yeah, except if you had a 100 or 99.9% chance to get breast cancer unless you like, did something to change your entire life urgently. You know? JUSTIN Yeah, and everyone else also had to do that thing.

ALICE Yeah, that's the other- I mean, I read an interesting Guardian article, fucking liberal moment for me to say that, I read an interesting Guardian article with a guy, a psychoanalyst, and I had a lot of time for psychoanalysis as a discipline. But talking about the kind of psychology of denial, and different kinds of denial, of which, you know, hopelessness is a kind of denial, because you don't think there's anything anyone can do, but also the people who think that, like, oh, well, you know, there's... it's just gonna be fine.

I think that's the situation that you have of have to throw yourself into at least some of the time to not go insane, right, unless you're very very comfortable with thinking about the possibility. To get up and go to work in the morning, some of the time you have to be able to be like, that's probably gonna be fine, I'm not gonna think about it today. SEAN Yeah, it'll probably work it out. Not my problem. ALICE Yeah.

It's just the rest of the time. Like, yeah, I dunno, I have a lot of thoughts about climate, and I'm not gonna derail the thing. JUSTIN I'm just gonna keep blasting that AC. Which actually I am doing right now, cause it's 94 degrees out. ALICE How's the heat dome tracing you? JUSTIN It was fine other than the fridge not working, but I don't know if that was related. Mm.

Dying. It might just be because of the humidity. I'm hearing a diversity of opinions about this. He's tougher than I am, he grumps himself. Fifty percent of Philadelphians have been killed by the heat dome. I have a wilted flower. I don't know, I was outside for a bit during the heat dome, it was annoying, but it was like, eh, I didn't die.

ALICE I'm right there with you, Liam. This is the thing that scares me, apart from all of the other things, is that, like, I am a pussy, right? My threshold for discomfort, in terms of heat, is really low. ALICE Me too. ALICE I grew up in a cold country, and whenever it gets the slightest bit warm, I'm like, this is almost unbearable to me. LIAM Yep.

JUSTIN I was out on a porch, I put the umbrella up, I thought it was nice for about 20 minutes, and I was like, eh, it's a little bit too hot, I'm gonna go back inside. ALICE Mmm. Yeah, okay, so we're all pussies, that's good to know, but yeah, I show you sentiments on climate. JUSTIN You're not gonna expose myself to 97 degrees. 90 degrees, that's a little bit easier. You go out for a nice bike ride, you get a breeze the whole time, it's fine. ALICE I mean, I will say this, as far as Stonehenge

itself, it's pretty far inland, I think, Salisbury Plain's pretty high above sea level, and like, it's gonna be fine, all the grass around it's gonna be dead, all the people are gonna be dead, but the rocks are gonna be bleached and everything, but that'll be fine. JUSTIN The North Atlantic current, or whatever it is, shuts down and then it gets whacked by a glacier, that's the problem. ALICE I would hate to get whacked by a glacier. SEAN I would also hate to get whacked by a glacier. SEAN I would also hate to get whacked by a glacier. JUSTIN Oh yeah, you're just watching it approach, like that guy in Austin Powers, like, when

the steel mill is coming. ALICE Yeah, yeah. We need to do the fossil fuels episode at some point so I can properly get into it about climate change. But someone called me a doomer about this the other day, and I'm like, I'm not trying to be, I'm really not, but like, I- SEAN Yeah, everyone else is the doomer. I'm the only smart person. ALICE Yeah, that's right, we're all the only smart

person. SEAN You're the people doing the doom. I'm just talking about it, you're doing it. LIAM I'm just here, man. I'm just clocking in for my shift at the podcasting factory, but it's hard not to be a doomer about it. It's hard not to be a doomer about it. It's hard not to be a doomer about it. But if I adopt the stance some days more than others, I'm just like, if I think too hard

about this I'll c- So, sorry, please back. ALICE Yeah, it's fine. But yeah, shout out to these guys who are doing something about it, even if that something is like, blasting orange cornflour. You know? Cause it's more what I'm doing. JUSTIN But, speaking of oil, that was... If you show me Drake's Well one more goddamn time!

Phew. We made it. No Drake's Well. Yes. Yeah, exactly. It's a different type of oil. Oh! So, I want to acknowledge before we start, a really big source I used for this, and one

of the only sources, in fact, was uh, because it's very hard to find sources on this, was The Great Salad Oil Swindle by Norman C. Miller, who was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. This is a book that is long out of print and actually now somewhat of a rare book, it's like $400 on Amazon. Did you spend that? No, it's on the Internet Archive for free. Until Chuck Wendig kills it. Yeah, exactly. We have the credit card, which I don't get to use enough.

I don't think there are any in stock on Amazon either, so. Oh, okay. Well, I thought we'd start about edible oils, or as we probably know, cooking oils, right? Sure. Uh, okay. Yeah, I remember being able to afford these. Yeah, exactly. Uh, let's look at some.

Here's olive oil. It's made of olives. Yeah, don't buy Italian olive oil, cause the mob waters it down. Sounds insane, isn't it? LIAM Sounds fake is true. JUSTIN Sounds fake is true, yeah. But, olive oil, you know, that's- ALICE Don't buy Canadian maple syrup, the Quebecois mob

waters it down. If you wanna- LIAM I just go to the Plains of Abraham, and shout scoreboard over and over. If you want something that sounds healthy but isn't, you get avocado oil, right? Very high smoke points, very nice for that. I use it sometimes. There's peanut oil, which you can use, with similar properties, if you're not allergic to peanuts, otherwise it might kill you.

Although, it depends. Pienaato smells really good. Yeah, it depends. I mean, Corinne can't have it, but, yeah, probably will kill her. I just don't wanna find out, y'know what I mean? ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN Oh, Kevick Quah fact about peanut oil. SEAN Oh my god.

JUSTIN On the Montreal Metro, they use wooden brake shoes. And the way they keep them from catching fire is soaking them in peanut oil. ALICE I mean, makes sense. But, man, I bet it smells fantastic down there. LIAM Yeah, you top it at. JUSTIN Yeah. We have canola oil. I think I've ever heard of a canola plant.

ALICE I know what you're doing here. I have played multiple years of farming simulator, I know what canola is. Canola is an attempt to rebrand, like, Canadian oil. What it is? It is R.E.P. Seed. It is R.E.P. Seed.

No one likes that word. No. For obvious reasons. It's worse in British English because we don't even say seed. Like, in British English it is R.E.P. The yellow fields that you see out of the train, that is a field of R.E.P. Uh, which... Oh my god.

You can't be calling it that. No, we're gonna have to... We're honestly probably gonna have to censor that for the algorithm, aren't we? Uh, now, uh, f*** seed oil as it was, um, originally, uh, you know, the plant was originally constituted, it was not very edible. It was like good for like other uses for oil, like, you know, varnish or like a lubricant or something.

Um, and the Canadians, uh, came up with a way to reduce some of the acids in that particular oil, so that's why Canola is an acronym for Canadian Oil Low Acidity. Yes. ALICE I didn't know the acronym part. I only knew that it was Canadian. JUSTIN Yeah, it's Canadian Oil Low Acid, just like Canadarm and the CanDo nuclear reactor. They use Canadians for everything.

Yeah, they love that abbreviation. Don't buy canola oil from Canada, the Canadian, the Ontarian mob waters it down. And of course we have salad oil, or vegetable oil, which often is just soybean oil, right? They could be made from a lot of stuff, like vegetable oil is like, you know, it just has vegetables in it. But a lot of times it's just soybeans, right? ALICE We didn't even talk about palm oil! The, like, one of the best containers for a homemade IED in Iraq, the yellow palm oil container.

I'm really grateful. I don't know, isn't that also something that, like, the extractive industry there is constantly killing people? Oh yeah, it's insanely evil. Like, pound to pound I think it's the most evil oil, short of petroleum oil. Like, uh, yeah, palm oil. Real bad. Yeah.

So, how do you produce these industrially, right? Long story short, you have your feedstock, y'know, maybe it's olives, maybe it's avocados, maybe it's peanuts, maybe it's soybeans, maybe it's... so and so forth. You crush it, you extract the liquid, y'know, the resulting crude vegetable oil is strained off. ALICE Cruze vegetable oil is a hell of a phrase. Yeah. And then they refine it, right?

They remove the impurities and so on and so forth. The good stuff that comes out of the refinery, this is shipped close to its destination in bulk and they bottle it and they put it on grocery store shelves, and the other residue, the nasty stuff, has a lot of uses, including like feedstock for soap production, right? Which we will talk about briefly later. So that's your basic process. Anyway, now we have to talk about a guy. This is Anthony Tino DeAngelis. ALICE Oh, this is an incredible guy already. JUSTIN Yeah.

ALICE Look at that face. Look at the guy behind him who looks miserable, look at that tie clip. Oh, they don't drip like they used to. ALICE Let me just put a marker down now, don't buy American vegetable oil, it's watered down by the mob. JUSTIN Yeah. No, no, no, he does more than water this stuff down. Yeah.

So, he's born in 1915 to Italian immigrant parents in the Bronx, he's a very ambitious child, he quit school when he was 16 to in the Bronx, he's a very ambitious child, he quit school when he was 16 to get into business, he borrowed $500 from his parents, which is like a whole... ALICE Just doing the Goodfellas thing of being like, ever since I was a kid I wanted to be like them. LIAM I always dreamed of ripping off the government or whoever.

ALICE I always dreamed of being a vegetable oil guy. JUSTIN Yeah. I'll put a pin in, born 1915, for when we get to the end of the presentation. Um. Mm, okay. What? He borrowed five hundred dollars from his parents to get into the candy store business,

which immediately went bust because of the Great Depression. It took the family's savings with it. But undeterred, he got a job in a Bronx meat and fish market and quickly progressed to being a manager of 200 employees in only three years. Right. But when he was this manager, he got into an argument with a superior and he quit. And the manager did in fact come crawling back for Tino, who was essential to the business, but Tino's pride wouldn't let him go back to the market.

Um, so he became a foreman at the City Provision Company, and he said he was a legend there at how efficiently he could dismember a hog. That's not a fun thing to be a legend of. Yeah, that, don't like that. No, very efficient. He was, uh, he could partition that hog faster than anyone else. This guy was the big boss of, like, the Venom Snake of hog butchery.

LIAM Love to be, yeah, love to be the, uh, I don't know, the fucking Babe Ruth of just killing pigs? JUSTIN Yeah, he was boss hog. Uh, no, the, uh, the hogs were already dead. He was just chopping them into pieces. ALICE Sure, yeah. Huge consolation for the hogs, I'm sure. JUSTIN In 1938 he opened his own hog processing company, where he claims to have pioneered the concept of having hogs slaughtered in the west, and brought frozen for processing

in the east. Because shipping livestock is difficult and expensive. Especially, y'know, at that point you're shipping them on trains, which, you know, they get delayed and when they get delayed too long, then you have to feed and water the hogs on the train. Which is annoying. And then sometimes they just die. Sometimes you have a really bad delay. You know, it's shipping livestock. Sometimes you lose the entire potato harvest because you left it somewhere and you forgot about it. Yeah. Stuff happens. Yeah, exactly.

So anyway, he's processing frozen hogs from Chicago, as opposed to shipping them in fresh, and this saves a lot of money. He's very successful. He's so successful that with his company he managed to avoid the draft because his company was an important supplier to the army, right? And he claims during this period of his life he worked constantly, like, 16 hour days and only took breaks to go to his bicycle club. ALRIGHT, MICRO.

Fucking nerd. Yeah. This does not look like a guy who has ever bicycled. I bicycle a lot, and I also don't look like someone who ever bicycled. The problem with bicycles is they're not that difficult. I cannot ride one. So... JUSTIN I mean, difficult in the sense that they don't burn a lot of calories.

SEAN Did you ever learn how to ride a bike, Nova? ALICE No! Like, my parents never taught me, and I've tried a couple of times to learn, but like, I dunno, it's just, I'm, yeah. No, I can't ride a bike. SEAN Come to the States! ALICE Gotta get two propane tanks on each side. Uh, the old Nate Mathais, right?

Yeah. So, with the money he makes from this hog processing company, he buys a controlling stake in the Adolf Goebel Company of North Bergen, New Jersey. It was a name you could have back then, y'know, it was normal. Yeah, it was this before, it was normal back then, yeah, that company's from like 1905, I believe. I think it started in... You're gonna start like, why should I change, he's the one who sucks moment, if you want

to be an Adolf. Exactly, yeah. He bought the Adolf Goebel Company of North Bergen, New Jersey in 1949, it was a big meat packing firm. This is for his first scheme, right, because Tino's a patriot, and there's nothing more patriotic than ripping off the federal government. ALICE That's the damn truth! ALICE Yeah.

SEAN It's saluting. JUSTIN Yeah. The new National School Lunch Act meant the government would be buying massive quantities of food for school cafeterias across the country. ALICE President Eisenhower decides to end malnutrition, and as a result a million guys like this go, I can put, like, circus animals into old mattresses, and I can sell it to the federal government. So, he needed the Adolf Goebel Company for the capacity to meet these orders, right? And he delivers 18.9 million pounds of smoked meats and sausages to the government, and

was promptly sued for overcharging $31,000 for underweight deliveries. Now, Tino claimed this is because the Department of Agriculture specified too short of a smoking time and that would lead to undercooked meats that he didn't want to deliver to the children. That's why the weights were off, because they'd been smoked a bit longer. ALICE I mean, to cheat the feds for like, $31,000 is a lot of money, but like, he could've gone bigger. JUSTIN Yeah, he probably could've gone bigger. But the thing is, the concerns about children's health that he had were somewhat mitigated

by the fact that two million pounds of the meat that he delivered were never inspected. ALICE Oh. Alright, yeah. Mmm, that's bad. ALICE What's in this? Don't worry about it. Snitches, mostly. There were some- ALICE You could really taste the fucking...

Oh jeez. JUSTIN The guy this used to be. ALICE Yeah, you could really taste the hoffer. JUSTIN Now, that and some accounting irregularities later, and in 1953 Goebel was bankrupt. But Tino's ambition knew no bounds, though. He set his sights on a new government program. ALICE Oh, come on.

Milk, milk, milk. JUSTIN Food for peace. ALICE Oh boy. Uninspected meat, a gift from the American people. Just dumping a sack of uninspected meat out of the back of an aircraft. JUSTIN Oh, he did that to the Yugoslavs, actually. ALICE Jesus Christ. You know what, like, they were doing a genocide, but maybe they had the right to shoot down

the fucking F117, you know? LIAM Oh, but the F117 was never packed with uninspected chicken. ALICE Yeah, actually, the SAM site only detected it when it opened the Bombay doors to drop uninspected chicken on certain positions. JUSTIN I think he sent a barge full of meat to Yugoslavia. ALICE Just a barge.

I don't like the phrase barge full of meat. I like that. JUSTIN And it turned out it all went off, either in transit or beforehand. ALICE Oh, god. ALICE Can you imagine opening those doors? I don't want to. Oh god. This is fucking asshole.

I have a barge full of meat. Yeah, the meat deck. Yeah, the meat deck. It doesn't have a poop deck, it has a meat deck. It's meat decks all the way down. ALICE I work on the meat deck crew on the barge full of meat. JUSTIN So, food for peace, right? It sounds like a charitable program.

This was, uh... ALICE This feels like a great way to rip off my government. JUSTIN This was pushed by Hubert Humphrey, right, Public Law 480, the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, signed into law by Eisenhower in 1954, this provides food aid to impoverished countries. But it's not direct aid, because we have to do some fuckery. ALICE Oh, there always is. What did Thomas Sankara say, food aid is when you give us tractors and fertilizer and shit? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I thought we said it more eloquently than that, but... Um, but, well, fertilizer and shit is redundant. Yeah. What a barge full of shit. Oh my god. The shit that fertilizes it. No, it's not full of shit, it's full of uninspected beat, weren't you listening?

So, the main purpose of Food for Peace, y'know, it's a diplomatic thing, right, but it's also we're stabilizing food prices in the United States by dumping our agricultural surplus abroad. ALICE Yeah, I mean, it's a classic of foreign policy, the EU has done it, the Soviet Union did it, and of course you guys did it. LIAM Yeah, yeah. Actually, me and Ross, personally, and that's why we podcast, because they shut down our uninspected replay.

JUSTIN Well, this is actually a surplus podcast that goes out around the world. ALICE Yeah, we're like Voice of America, but way shitty. We're like Voice of America and the world's CIA agents. JUSTIN Yeah, we're doing Radio Free Europe here. So, uh, now these impoverished countries' currencies were nearly worthless, so big commercial shipments of grains, soybeans, or salad oil, again that archaic term for vegetable oil, these weren't possible without somehow greasing the wheels, right? Now, the obvious thing would be for the government to buy the food, and then give it to the countries,

but that's too obvious. That's just what they're expecting. Right? ALICE. Gotta keep the commies guessing. JUSTIN. Yeah, so, essentially, the- well, you also, a lot of agricultural subsidies are very unpopular in cities at

this point in time. So essentially, the country seeking food aid would pay the United States government in their local currency, the US government would then bid out the shipment to private companies. The lowest bidder wins, they ship the bulk agricultural product to the impoverished country, then the government pays them in dollars for the shipment, while retaining the foreign currency, which then usually wound up being spent on USAID projects in said foreign country. Thus the illusion of free enterprise was maintained, while also allowing shippers to make healthy profits.

ALICE In an insane like three card monte, with, like, six different middlemen. JUSTIN Yes, exactly. ALICE I'm also, like, thinking, since you mentioned agricultural subsidies being unpopular in cities, that this being the 50s, you are doing the plot of American Graffiti or West Side Story, right? Guys are pulling switchblades on you on every corner, and, incidentally, all of the money that could be used to fund a library or something is going to a six-way backhanded deal to deliver a shitload of salad oil to an impoverished country in a way that mostly enriches one

fat bicyclist. JUSTIN Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's a mad dash to participate in this program because big charity means big profits. So naturally, Tino DeAngelis wants in. ALICE & LIAM Tino.

JUSTIN Oh, big T. Big T, yeah. JUSTIN Tino, yeah. So, now, let's talk about the business secrets of Anthony DeAngelis. ALICE Everything they don't teach you in all the business school. JUSTIN Everything is bribery. You must have a plan to bribe every single person you see. I don't actually see an issue with this, really. I've been discussing with my parents as I gear up to have children, like how my dad did it, he goes, a lot of bribes. A lot of bribes.

Once you had figured that out, it was kind of over for us. Listen, this is the thing. These were the salad days, so to speak. Once you had figured that out it was kinda over for us. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Listen, this is the thing, these were the salad days, so to speak. Before 1977, no Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. So long as you're not bribing an American in America, it's not even a crime that the US government cares about. JUSTIN He's bribing a lot of Americans in America.

ALICE It's still not a crime the US government has ever done. We've used this exact stock image before, haven't we? ALICE Yeah. Tino De Angelis had advanced bribery technology of the kind of latest run of 50 euro notes. LIAM Big Tony D got shooters. Big Tony D got shooters. ALICE Mmm, I believe that. JUSTIN No Mafia links were ever proven.

ALICE Okay. JUSTIN Except for one of his subsidiaries. ALICE They didn't need to! They didn't need to! No Mafia links were ever proven. Okay. Except for one of the subsidiaries. They didn't need to! He did have a Chicago subsidiary of the company we'll get to that had a lot of mob guys in it, but the New York one was clean. Supposedly. We don't know.

Uh huh. Okay. Now, Tino was very well liked in his community, not just because of his big personality, but because he was very liberal with his checkbook. He was constantly helping people out with medical bills, debts, contributing to charities, slipping everyone a ten dollar bill constantly, y'know. The florists- Yeah, the Clay Davis shit.

Y'know. Yeah. The florists, the mailman, the truck drivers, bank tellers, some random kid on the street, this man was just leaking cash like a sieve everywhere he went. In fairness, I do this too, and as far as I know I'm not affiliated with the mob, so... who's to say. ALICE Yeah, I want to be Tony DeAngelis real bad.

I wanna... Yeah. Like, if you... ALICE You can just start giving your money away, feels good as hell. ALICE I do. ALICE Links in the description, probably. Yeah. Yeah.

Give Luther and Sullivan a house, your money. Because we need it. Because Benefit State of Trust just went under, and we're fucked, folks! So people like Tino, because he's giving away money all the time. I think it would be a fun bit if we just switched from Tino to Tony and- Tony D'Angelo's. Better than Tony D'Angelo, you fuckin' homophobic dick. And this is, this is, uh, you know, he's somewhat of a braggart.

I would be too! Yeah, you're willing to tolerate that if, you know, he's constantly bettering your financial position, right? Anyway. Tino starts the allied crude vegetable oil company of Bayonne, New Jersey. Oh, Bayonne. Oh, Josh Munson, if you're listening, sorry. It is somewhere in this tank farm.

I am not sure of the precise location. I fucking love North Jersey, dude. What a shit show. It's beautiful. It all looks like this. I'm feeling the, like, Springsteen a shit show. It's beautiful. It all looks like this. I'm feeling the Springsteen in my ears as I'm looking at this. Real down and out at the Longhorns Steakhouse in Bayo.

So Tino had some legitimate ideas for getting into the salad oil business, right? More bribery. Yeah. Namely, he was gonna make it really really big, and he was going to use a disadvantageous location to his advantage. Right. At this point, most salad oil processing happened in the Midwest. It was crushed.

It was refined. It was canned and shipped to customers or down the Mississippi river by barge for export. Right. Make sense. But Tino has a worse idea. Right. Try the unrefined oil in the Midwest, ship it on trains to Bayonne, then refine and can

it there, and then put the refined oil directly on merchant ships for export. Sounds like it's gonna be way more expensive. Yes. I mean, that's the kind of innovation that drives, invest in this motherfucker immediately. Well, he has financial connections just across the Hudson River. Yeah, all those guys is bribing. Exactly. This is a very expensive and impractical proposition, but he managed to convince the financiers,

allied as soon very well capitalized, they set up the refinery, the tanks that they bought were originally for petroleum, and it took them about a year to clean them, I'm doing air quotes, clean them. Can you do th- like, food grade stuff, I mean, if nothing else, like, a single molecule of benzene remaining in the thing kind of fucks everybody, right? Bad. Bad. We'll talk about this more later.

Oh boy. What's the worst part about this whole night? He puked in a perfectly food safe bucket. Yeah. You know, got to work wheeling and dealing, right? So the spectrum from food grade to biohazard, very often takes a sharp detour, you know? Yeah. Well, it adds spice, right?

You know, you get that in your nose. Did you know, when you grew up, did you have the, like, vomit bowl? The like, stoneware bowl that lived under the sink that was only ever used for when a kid was sick and was throwing up? Good. Good. I did not have one of those.

JUSTIN What did you throw up, Roz? ROZ The toilet. ALICE But what if you're too sick to get out of bed? You're like six years old, you have hyper gastritis, or flu, or whatever, and you're throwing up a lot, but you can't get off the sofa or out of bed. Good question. Huh. Did this just never happen to you?

I might've just not gotten that sick. Huh. I will say, my favorite is when people reveal themselves as having a dual purpose vomit and popcorn bowl. That's... You've met multiple people who've done that? I don't ever like using a word like degenerate. I think it always lends credence to the far right, but in this case I'm not sure what

else I can say, like... Disappointment to humanity, I think it's... Use two bowls, folks! Buy a second bowl, have the readily distinguishable... The popcorn bowl should be like a big glass Pyrex bowl, and I strongly believe that a vomit bowl should be earthenware, like stoneware. White glaze on the inside, kind of like buff brown on the outside, ugly as hell. Yeah, that's my vomit bowl. SEAN We are begging you to use two bowls.

Two bowls, please. Yeah, you heard of two chains, now get ready for two bowls. Of course, the real struggle thing is when you're eating too much cereal out of the popcorn bowl. That's when you have depression. How much cereal do you... Okay, yeah, fair enough, I've had some pretty weird depression meals. Big, big, I think it's a joke in forgetting Sarah Marshall, a movie which has not aged well,

but yeah, you can fully have too much cereal out of a popcorn bowl. SEAN You know what movie has not aged well? I could hear Roz's annoyance, psychically. Animal House has not aged well. ALICE Oh no. JUSTIN Yeah, I agree with you on that one. That one did not age well. SEAN Did not aged well. Oh no. Yeah. No, I agree with you on that one. That one did not age. Did not age well. I was, I was, I, Corinne had never seen it and I put it on and I was

just like, I was like, I have to caution you. This is like a racist Disney cartoon from 1940. Like this has not aged terrifically. And she's like, how bad can it be? We get like 12 minutes in and she's like, this is actually kind of offensive, but I'm just like... ALICE It's, um, there's a real kind of like, um, what do you call that point in a submarine environment, where there's a change in the density of the water or whatever. It doesn't matter, anyway, the dividing line for that for me is about 2000, because any comedy made in the 80s or 90s invariably has a trans joke. Like, okay, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, usually combine the two, y'know?

Like fucking Crocodile Dundee, or like, feel up a woman's cock or whatever, and be like, oh, I thought he was a bloody Sheila, or whatever. Y'know, it sucks. Which it sucks, you can't watch old movies. JUSTIN I think Trading Places held up pretty well, which is gonna be relevant later. ALICE Trading Places was great. I love Trading Places held up pretty well, which is going to be relevant later. ALICE Trading Places was great. I love Trading Places.

JUSTIN It's such a good movie, yeah. ALICE The two fuckin' Statler and Waldorf guys? Great. JUSTIN Oh yeah. So, Tino paid a quarter cent premium per pound of crude vegetable oil. He sold the refined oil at undermarket rates. No one knew how he made money, but the customers kept coming back." This is kind of a recurring thing, whether like then or now, we haven't gotten any better

at this, that even professional auditors, like big name auditors, seem to be able to avoid asking the question, how does your company make money? Mmhm. Pretty soon he had a near monopoly on salad oil exports out of the USA, all on the taxpayers' dime. He had only 22 employees, and they were all paid exorbitant wages, they were all provided Cadillacs on the company's dime. It's a job creations program, that's what's great about America, what's the fucking problem

here? And you're telling me that this is not in any way mob affiliated, these 22 guys driving their Cadillacs around Bayonne, New Jersey. JUSTIN Look, I'm just saying what the book said, and most of the articles I read. ALICE The fucking waste disposal business. JUSTIN Yeah. It's not to say there weren't problems from the get-go, just after Allied settled a civil fraud case about shipments of oil to Spain, Tino landed a huge government

contract under his shortening Corporation of America subsidiary to export 70 million dollars of salad oil to India and Brazil, and when the oil got there, all the cans, which were proudly stamped, donated by the people of the United States of America, all the cans burst open. ALICE Well, if that isn't a metaphor, you just have rancid salad oil all over yourself, you're gonna go botulism. Uh, thanks. JUSTIN There's rancid salad oil filling warehouses

from Calcutta to Curitiba. You know, the Catholic Relief Agency in India had serious doubts about whether the product was edible at all from the get-go, which we'll get to later. But this does inspire Tino into a genuine efficiency that he came up with. No longer would the salad oil be shipped canned, instead tanker shifts would be cleaned and then filled with the product in bulk, and it'd be canned at the destination. That's smart, that's thinking with the brain head there.

ALICE I once again, for the second time on this slide, I'm uncomfortable with the word cleaned. SEAN Yeah, that's doing a lot of work. JUSTIN I got in there with the power washer for a few days. It'll be fine. ALICE It's like when you let a dish, you leave a dish overnight to soak, if you know what I mean. You're not doing that fucking dish.

You and I both know it. ALICE You have kind of the cast iron with the layers of seasoning, except it's been seasoned with bauxite, or whatever was lost in the fucking carrier. JUSTIN Probably crude oil. Probably just straight benzene. ALICE Probably tastes pretty good. Crude oil's usually sweet.

So... ALICE Texas crude, baby. ALICE Mmm tastes pretty good, like, crude oil's usually sweet, so... LIAM Tax the crude, baby. ALICE Mmm, delicious. JUSTIN Okay, so we gotta talk about a financial instrument. LIAM Oh boy. ALICE Alright, alright, it's called for the back to me now, let's go! ALICE We tried to get Riley on for this. JUSTIN Well, I tried a little bit, I shoulda DM'd them earlier.

That's on me. ALICE Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. So, the warehouse receipt loan, and field warehousing. Right? So, before everything was an app, and everything that can't be an app was switched to just-in-time delivery, businesses used to have a thing called inventory. I remember that from video games.

Yeah, and that inventory was stored in warehouses. ALICE I remember those. They're all luxury apartments now. JUSTIN Exactly. Except this one, which is a U-Haul. ALICE This is my house. The gigantic U-Haul. It's a lesbian joke, fuck.

JUSTIN It used to be a Pennsylvania Railroad warehouse. JUSTIN This was a Pennsylvania Railroad cold storage warehouse. ALICE That's why they used to keep all the guns in case there was a communist uprising. The cold guns, yes. I feel nice with your hands. Why do they call it uprising when you cold eat the open, the cold gun? The hot food. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, just like that. The guy who owns U-Haul is actually like a big architecture buff and that's why they go for these big old-fashioned warehouses and they restore them really nice. Oh shit. Yeah. This one, they actually redid the keystone up here. This is in South Philly. Anyway, so, ah crap.

Okay. So, inventory doesn't do a lot if it's sitting around and waiting to be sold, right? Sometimes you're a company, you say, money me, money now, me a money needing a lot now. ALICE I'm saying that constantly. SEAN I also am saying that constantly. I do like that that's written into the notes. ALICE It's like, every month of my life I get a new thing to become obsessed with. Is it ever anything inexpensive?

No it is not. SEAN Oh, I hear you. I had the, hey, so, I'm thinking of upgrading my PC chat with my wife yesterday. ALICE Ooh, that's a rough conversation to have with anyone. LIAM It's right there with the, I need a Dodge Viper chat. ALICE Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, just on a lower level, right, like, I need a new pair of jeans, right? Like, I actually do need them at this point.

I wear shorts. ALICE I might enter into a shorts era due to climate change. LIAM I found out I could wear shorts at work a couple weeks ago and I have been just... STABBIC. ALICE That was dangerous to tell you that. I've been thinking about entering into a crop top era, but it's about hating my body less, y'know. Five New Child, we promoted on this podcast, folks.

Joe Biden's economy has forced me to consider nudism for economic reasons. I... I... Yeah, I can only afford a crop top, I can't afford the rest of it, can I? I gotta be honest with you right now, I am shirtless. I record shirtless by and large. Yeah, yeah, reasonable. Absolutely reasonable. So, as a result of the invention of a new financial instrument, the warehouse receded, and by new I mean it started in the 15th century in Italy.

Right? Fucking Borgias. Everything old is new again. My parents had a cat named Lucrecia Borgia. Sick name for a cat. It was. She was a mean cat, I loved her. ALICE All Borgias are cats, but all Medici's are dogs.

SEAN I'll buy that. JUSTIN So, the merchants would store their goods in public warehouses which were regularly inspected to prove the inventory was there, and then those merchants could take out loans using the merchandise as collateral. ALICE Is this what a bonded warehouse is, by the way? JUSTIN I think so? ALICE Cause I've heard the term before, and I always understood it to mean a warehouse that is in some way regulated like that, but I actually know.

JUSTIN I'm not a hundred percent certain. I think a- is a bonded warehouse government owned? It was government, government, like inspected and shit. Oh, yeah, it is. It is in terms of bonded whiskey. It is a government warehouse. It's a, it's a, it's a customs bond. So the government runs it or like a

company like pays a bond to the customs. Industries. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So later these dedicated warehousing companies emerge and they operate large public warehouses

for the storage of all kinds of inventory, merchandise, so on and so forth. With the expectation the owners would use said inventory as collateral for loans, but this is inefficient, right? You have to actually physically haul the inventory to the public warehouse, and when it's sold you have to haul it back, it's redundant storage, so on and so forth. So we get this concept of- ALICE FULKER Full cliffs haven't been invented yet. JUSTIN Yeah.

So we get this concept of the field warehouse, right? And here's what the field warehousing company does. They come to your factory, they put their name on your warehouse, or your tanks, or your bunkers if it's some kind of bulk product, they hire some of your staff to do periodic inspections of the merchandise. Now the inventory is easily on hand, and it can also function as collateral, and there are definitely- ALICE It's so fucking corrupt!

There it is. JUSTIN There's definitely no conflicts of interest in the structure whatsoever. So hypothetically, right, I have six tanks full of vegetable oil and a little bit of benzene for spice, right? I want to financialize these. I go to a field warehousing company, they come out, they paint their name on all the tanks, they hire my employees to watch the tanks, reporting to them, and then I say to my employees, do you want a second Cadillac, if so, pump all of the vegetable oil out of

these and continue selling it as normal, and tell them that they're still full, and then I can, like, I can financialize a fraudulent asset that I'm still, like, extracting. You're way ahead of us, No Dumb. I'm not a financial genius, I don't have a lot of corporate instincts like that, I came up with that off the dome, instinctively, on hearing the concept. You can go further. We're gonna go further than that. Because I'm thinking, like, Tino De Angelis is smarter than me. At least on things like this.

And like, if I'm minute one hearing about this, like, I could steal from these motherfuckers so easily, then I guarantee you this guy heard them coming from down the block. JUSTIN There's a lot of trust in this relationship. ALICE Mmm. Or bribery, I imagine. JUSTIN Let's talk about American Express. ALICE It's the credit card that is sometimes accepted. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly.

American Express was a bigger going concern in the 50s. American Express of course emerged from one of the several express companies that was, originally a lot of it was forwarding freight on, like, baggage cars on passenger trains. But eventually American Express mostly does financial services. At this point, you know, American Express, they did credit cards, they did traveler checks... I was about to mention traveler checks, just a joke. I was about to mention traveler checks, just a joke. System banking, which they spun out into Lehman Brothers, I think.

Oh hey, I remember those guys. What a wonder what they're up to. Yeah. Go to Money Order, stuff like that. Yeah, American Express did a lot of it, they were a big respected business at the time. It's not like now where it's just like, yeah, the credit card doesn't get accepted anywhere. So Tino needs more money, so he can cause more problems, so he signs a contract- Yeah, hard save!

For me every day of my fucking life. Yeah. Tino signs a contract with American Express Field Warehousing. And Field Warehousing was not American Express' main line of business, it was very much a side line of business, they'd never made money off of it, I think they'd just started the division in like the 30s, it just never took off. Side hustle, y'know. Sometimes, it's like podcasts, y'know, you start five and maybe one's successful and you stick with that one, y'know. It just never took off. Right? ALICE. Side hustle. You know.

Sometimes. It's like podcasts, you know, you start five and maybe one's successful and you stick with that one, you know? JUSTIN. Yeah. Tino was gonna change all of that, he would have the most extensive and enthusiastic use of warehouse receipts of any account the company had. ALICE.

Another sort of warning sign for the auditor there, typically. JUSTIN. Yeah. ALICE. If you were making money in this field and no one else is, what's, how, why? Now, the problem was, Tino can't get a loan, even with the warehouse receipts he gets from American Express, to prove that the salad oil is there, since his meatpacking company was still in bankruptcy for defrauding the government. ALICE & LIAM laugh.

ALICE This is a great American businessman. JUSTIN Matter of fact, his company couldn't actually get an account with any of the big Manhattan banks, he had to bank with a very small bank called the, I think, First National Bank of North Bergen, New Jersey. ALICE Oh, Jesus, man. ALICE Sounds like some way you get shot robbing. ALICE Yeah. Yeah, but...

SEAN It's like, you know that scene from The Dark Knight, where they're all just, yeah. JUSTIN The mob bank? SEAN Yeah. Except that they're successful. And you are, you know, you are left in a pile of red mist. JUSTIN Hmm. A pile of red mist. Mm. Um, however. Oh boy. He couldn't bank with the big Manhattan banks, and he couldn't get loans from them for his

warehouse receipts, what he could do, and what he did, was to pass those warehouse receipts along to the shipping lines, the exporters, who would then go to the Manhattan banks and take out the loan, and then send him the cash. ALICE This is smart, but also there's like six layers of bribery there. LIAM I'm very confused. Sounds like, uh, keep going, it's fine, I'll figure it out. JUSTIN Yeah. So, by 1957, about two million dollars in loans against the stored salad oil had been

secured, but Tino wasn't satisfied. You know, he's gotta expand the business rapidly, right? He needs more. ALICE Because otherwise there's just a bunch of tanks full of, allegedly, salad oil with an Amex logo on the outside. LIAM Right. ALICE Exactly. LIAM Allegedly salad oil.

ALICE It's full of something. JUSTIN I believe a photo of the tank farm. I only started finding photos, like, about ten minutes before we started. ALICE Mmm, delicious. That looks like where I want my salad oil to come from, hell yeah. JUSTIN Let's talk about the tanks. These were all existing tanks that Tino bought, and they were storing petroleum products. Tino spent about a year preparing them for edible oils.

What kind of preparations did he do? ALICE Well, you gotta get in there, take the, like, whatever lining is on the inside out, power wash the whole thing. ALICE Really good. take the, like, whatever lining is on the inside out, power wash the whole thing, put in a new liner, and then clean the whole thing down really thoroughly again, right? If I'm guessing. JUSTIN Maybe, he may have done that. I don't think he did that.

ALICE Probably is a lot of work. JUSTIN Yeah, he did take advantage of a few things. Now, in a big tank full of any kind of oil, it's normal to have some water in there, and the oil floats on top of the water. Floats. Yeah, this is from condensation and things like that, right? Now one thing you gotta think about here is, well, let's say a tank was full of 80% seawater, and 20% full of salad oil. Would anyone really notice or care, so long as the contracts are fulfilled?

ALICE The tank's 100% full, you can tell, you can bang on the side or whatever. JUSTIN Yeah, well, there's a couple- we'll get to the sampling devices and how they fooled them in a second. Oh, sweet Jesus. Is this gonna be like, Alpha doing the like, oh yeah, the cars are just over there, we have to drive them all over, please don't notice us doing this in order to meet our homologation requirements?

Accuracy International hiring a factory for the day? Yes, they do do that, actually, yeah. Jesus. Um, American Express field warehousing never really took a hard look at the tanks, usually Tino's men would do the sampling and measuring at the top of the tank, call it down to the field warehouse guy, who may or may not have also been on the payroll of Allied, or at least receiving kickbacks from them, right? Sometimes the tanks straight up weren't full, they had to use some sleight of hand to fake

the splash from the sampling device dropping the tank. Everyone was making money so no one paid too much attention, right? ALICE You just drop it into an empty tank, you hear it thunk off the bottom and everybody just goes, yep, it's good, cool, good. LIAM It's good, it's good, let's go home, you guys want subs for lunch? Let's go home, you guys want subs for lunch? Let's do this. If someone really did want to look into it more closely, Tino would take them to Tank

6006. And kneel them over the edge. Tank 6006 was unique. Now most storage tanks of this kind have something called a floating roof, right? That is, the roof of the tank rises and falls with the quantity of liquid inside, it essentially just floats on top, and this means that the concentration of... If you have a volatile flammable product like gasoline, this minimizes the air exposure, which means you can't have a situation where, you know, you have an air-fuel mixture that

causes it to spontaneously explode, right? Now, Tank 6006, though, was always full, or at least appeared to be, right? Because Tank 6006 had a hatch, had several hatches, only one of them worked, that was designed for inspecting the product. Oh for god's sakes. When they inspect the product, essentially they put a long tube down here, right? And that long tube, you then draw it out, and that sort of preserves the liquid in such a way that you can then send it over to the chemists and they can determine what each

layer of liquid is here. Which would presumably be water and salad oil, right? This tank was entirely full of seawater, as it turned out, but there was a cylinder around that hatch, attached to the roof, that was entirely full of salad oil. Oh my god, this guy's a fucking genius. Genius. I love crime! I love- this is- what the fuck? But yeah, so, you know, this is pure salad oil of the highest quality, that's what the

field warehouse guys wanted to see, right? Furthermore, all of these tanks were interconnected by a series of pipes. The inspection was a slow process. Tino's men held the keys to all of the tanks, including the ones that weren't technically theirs. They were owned by the field warehouse and company. So inspectors could take a look at a few tanks,

and then Tino took them to lunch. And while they were at lunch, Tino's men pumped the salad oil into the next tanks that were gonna be looked at. And Tino was him to lunch, and while they were at lunch, Tino's men pumped the salad oil into the next tanks that were gonna be looked at. And Tino was very careful about this, his men kept two sets of inventories, one for the inspectors, and one that was real, so they could actually fill the huge orders of vegetable oil we were still getting. ALICE LAUGHS. This is amazing, I'm so happy! This is amazing, I'm so happy! Why do I feel patriotic for America?

Yeah, we, listen, Rod's is right, there's nothing more patriotic you can do than ripping off your government. Lipping off your government? I don't know what that is. Lick off your government. Come here Abe, I'm gonna give you that old Nancy Reagan! Now, one of the issues with this is it requires keeping around, y'know, actual tanks full of product, or at least partially full of product.

This leads Tino to a new innovation. We'll bring in another company and just tell them they own tanks that they don't own. ALICE He's looking at this very ruthlessly, like, what is an externality, and it's like, having any vegetable oil. Having any, like, non-paper asset. JUSTIN He goes to H. Lawrence Kaufman of the Harbor Tank Company, which owned and operated several tanks in northern New Jersey, with a proposition. You're gonna lease and operate some of our tanks in Bayonne, you're gonna hire my guy

Joe Lemuscio to supervise, though of course he is. And you're gonna kick back a third of the storage fees to Lemouchio. Right? ALICE Again, not mob affiliated. JUSTIN Yeah. This is the kind of corrupt deal that's fine in the late 50s. ALICE It's basically legal. JUSTIN Kaufman agreed, and Tino took him on a tour of the tank farm, to show him which

tanks he'd be leasing. He's like, ah, that one, and that one, and that one, and that one, and that one. Kaufman was apparently not paying too close attention, because all those tanks belonged to other companies. ALICE They've just got the like, Amex logo on the outside. ALICE Just taped over and says ours. JUSTIN Not even Amex, it was like, y'know, a tank that belonged to, like, um, I don't know, the petroleum refinery next door.

So the deal still went through, Lemouchio provided extensive false inventories to Harbor Tank, who then proceeded to issue their own warehouse receipts, which Tino proceeded to convert into massive loans. Eventually, Tino went so far as to lease Harbor Harbert tank, Kaufman's company, tanks that didn't actually exist. ALICE. Hell yeah. JUSTIN.

Full of phantom salad oil, all of which was counted towards the company's huge line of credit. ALICE. Uh huh. He just has as many salad oil tanks as he needs to. JUSTIN. Yes. Through these methods, Allied Refining did $166 million of business in 1961, with the largest salad oil storage depot in the world, by several orders of magnitude.

Yikes. And that's so much money as well, in like, $1961. $166 million? It's like a billion or so. It contained, according to the warehouse receipts, twice as much salad oil as existed in the entire country, if the census figures were to be believed. A thing someone could have checked at any time. Yes. Hi, it's Justin.

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Okay, we gotta talk about commodities trading. Oh yeah, this is the real money. Cause like, just defrauding a bank? Easy. Baby shit. You can do this any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Now we're doing inside of trading, baby! Now we're into the real shit, which is stonks, as you say.

So certain kinds of things are commodities, right? Think, you know, crude oil, coal, lumber, soybeans, barley, maybe salad oil, right? Yeah, hogbellies, uh, like, oranges... Actually, this is weirdly intense laws about some of these, for exactly this reason now. Not onions. Definitely not onions. At least they- It's some of the stuff like, it's like a sort of huge federal crime to release details of

the annual Orange Harvest Report ahead of time, for instance, because of this. Yeah, imagine if that was a plot point in a movie. Yeah, right. It could be called changing situations. JUSTIN So these things are, commodities are fungible, right? So a 50 pound sack of two row barley is, broadly speaking, interchangeable with any other 50 pound sack of two row barley, 100 tons of anthracite stove coal is interchangeable with any other 100 tons of anthracite Stove Coal, right?

ALICE Introducing, like, non-fungible coal, where the coal just has a shitty drawing of an ape carved into it? JUSTIN Oh, that would be like the Anthracite football in Potsville. ALICE What? JUSTIN There was a foot- I forget if it was Pots-town or Potsville, they had an NFL franchise briefly. ALICE For non-fungible league. JUSTIN Yeah, and then someone carved them, like, a football out of...

ALICE It was Potsville. Potsville Marines. JUSTIN Yeah. And that's like the only remnant of the team, is the anthracite football statue. ALICE And the NFL killed them on purpose. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE The NFL is a profoundly evil organization. JUSTIN Still bitter about it.

ALICE Any number of ways. Including this. So, now you can trade these commodities and make a bunch of money in the commodities market. This is not simply just buying a shitload of coal and waiting for the price to go up and selling it, that's a very slow way to make money. What you wanna do is trade futures. Yeah, I love futures markets. This is, again, one of the easiest ways to get stupid rich with a huge amount of crime, and very little effort.

JUSTIN You can also get stupid poor. ALICE Yeah. ALICE I've already been stupid poor, I'd like to try stupid rich. JUSTIN Oh, nah, this is... You can get stupid... You can have a negative net worth of several hundred million dollars, no problem.

ALICE Yeah, although, to be fair, once that happens, you're in the zone of like, you know, if I owe the bank a million dollars then I have a problem, if I owe the bank a hundred million dollars, the bank has a problem. JUSTIN Yep, this is true. So a future contract where I agree to purchase some amount of a commodity... I'm not very good with this, by the way, I had to call up some people who were explaining this to me. No, the explanation is very very very good.

You can also read Terry Pranchett's book Feet of Clay, for like a hypothetical explanation of futures markets. So I buy 500 tons of soybeans for a certain price at a certain time in the future, right? Now I've made a bet with the seller, and the bet is this. If the market price of soybeans is up, then I get 500 tons of soybeans at a steep discount. The market price goes down, then the seller has just sold 500 tons of soybeans to some sucker for well above market price, right?

ALICE Yeah. Old timey country hustle, despite the fact that this all happens on a trading floor, between two people who are never gonna ever see a soybean in their life. JUSTIN Exactly, yeah. I don't have room in my apartment to store 500 tonnes of soybeans, so what I've really done is make sort of a deal with the seller to pay the difference in the price, in lieu of actual physical delivery, and I can do this with any commodity I want, which is why futures trading is great if you have some kind of inside information on any

industry. Except for onions and movie tickets, which makes you go to jail. ALICE and LIAM laugh. ALICE Yeah. I mean, the sort of, like, dirty secret of all this is that most trading is insider trading on some level. It's just about how you've been forced out. LIAM We're just taking the veneer off here. ALICE Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And, like, this is a quite abstracted financial instrument that bears very little relation to, like, your actual soybeans or hogbellies or orange juice or whatever the fuck. JUSTIN It's always those old wives tales about a commodities trader forgetting that, y'know, this futures contract actually stipulates delivery and then they wind up with a barge of coal they don't know what to do with. ALICE There's a really interesting article by a financial reporter who tried to buy, like, one barrel of oil on, like, the oil market, and found that it was basically impossible to do, because those things aren't connected to production. You can roll up to a refinery with your own barrel, and fill a barrel of oil, but like...

Yeah, exactly. But you can't buy it through an oil market, even though the nominal purpose of that is buying and selling oil, because that's not what it's for. RIght, exactly, it's like, you know, you can have a coal mine, and all that coal goes on a train to the power plant, and it changes hands 4700 times on the way to the power plant, it doesn't change anything, it still goes to the power plant. Yes. Yeah. It doesn't change anything, it still goes to the power plant.

And anyway, past performance does not guarantee future returns. ALICE Any investment can lose money. Do not try and day trade on this. Leave this kind of dark art to its practitioners, right? So, when honest and dishonest graft aren't enough, you get into soybean futures. Yeah, it's like the three kinds of states of truth. Truth lies in futures markets. Which is like, lying too. So most of his salad oil was made of soybeans, so naturally Tino went long on soybean futures.

Lots and lots of soybean futures. As for like a good chunk of his ill-gotten money went, you know, bets that the price of soybeans would go up. Furthermore, he thought he could manipulate the market, he does own twice as much salad oil as existed. ALICE So we call it monopoly. JUSTIN So Tino sets up several accounts with several commodity brokerage firms to make it look like a lot of people were bidding up the price

of soybeans, right? ALICE It's a monopsody? LIAM That's a bad guess. ALICE Yeah, I think it is a monopsody, yeah. It might be a monopsody monopoly, because he is both buyer and seller. JUSTIN Yeah, he's buying all- he's a monopsony, but he's serving another monopsony, which is the government. Yeah.

Yes. Christ, Hanzel. He's just a middleman. Fucking Atlas-shrugged ass sentence. This is like thirty pages deep into John Gault's speech in front of the UN, or whatever. He was sure that new big orders would come through the Food for Peace program soon, since there were, you know, starving children in Africa who needed salad oil, right? Of course.

Yeah. So, Tino and his friend Sam Engel, who was one of the Tank Watchers, set up accounts in the name of over 200 people, as well as more than a few dummy corporations, right? And they approach, among other firms, the brokerage firm EraHopt & Company, right? EraHopt is not in the futures business, they didn't know very much about the futures business, it was mostly full of young go-getters, and the company was in the midst of a massive expansion so these young go-getters were like, yeah, let's get a new client who's gonna- yeah, fuck it, let's go. The senior partners did not want to do business with Tino, they were like, this guy's, what

are you guys thinking of, we shouldn't do that. But Tino drove a hard bargain, he said the banks loved him, they were like, we've been in business for a long time, come on, be our futures broker, come on, you wanna do it, you wanna do it, right? ALICE & TINNO Yeah, you wanna do it. JUSTIN The banks even came around to convince the firm, and Tino now had a broker for his massive futures position, and he paid for the margin, the collateral, I'm not entirely certain how this part works.

ALICE Mmm, brokerage. JUSTIN The brokerage, he paid for the brokerage in warehouse receipts. ALICE Oh, okay. ALICE Just, like, leveraged to the hilt on entirely fictitious assets, and being like, hey, in order to financialize these fictitious assets, I'm gonna pay you in. Check this shit out. Fictitious assets! ALICE & LIAM Exactly. Yes. But that's a self-pun. JUSTIN In 1962, Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining took in 320 million dollars, and

managed to spend 319 million dollars of that. ALICE Don't back down. Double down. Triple down. Quintuple down. JUSTIN Keep spending. Keep spending. Keep spending. This is, my man is like...

We cannot let the money recede off. Seven antis deep on a Bellatro run where the numbers are getting up into, like, inexpressible other than through, like, standard form. And just being like, yeah, fuck it, keep going. More, more, more of this. More of this. Yeah, gimme, gimme, gimme. My ship's gonna come in.

So the money was rushing in and out, rushing in and then rushing out just as quickly, straight into futures contracts. And Tino was losing money on all of them. But he was sure that one day, Food For Peace would secure a massive export deal. But until then he was holding his precarious position, but he still needed more money. ALICE Oh, you gotta invent more tanks at that point. You're up to like, three times the amount of salad oil that exists. JUSTIN He turns to industrial scale check-kiting.

ALICE God. This guy! This guy, he's like... It's like virtuoso stuff, because he goes onto a whole new scam that I didn't even, like, conceive of, y'know? He doesn't, like, just stick with the one, he's got like a lot of strings to his bones. LIAM Diversify, yes. ALICE Yeah, yeah. JUSTIN So, despite the swindle Allied ref, did actually refine and export salad oil. One of the biggest accounts was Bunge & Bourne, which is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

ALICE Yeah, this is before the Nazis, so all the Anglos in Argentina just like, disaffected English people who just named Bunge or whatever, who were just like, yeah, I fuckin' own a salad oil business or whatever. JUSTIN I think Bunge is or whatever, who were just like, yeah, I fuckin' own a salad oil business, or whatever. JUSTIN I think Bunge is still around, actually. ALICE Oh, it survived us. JUSTIN They were one of these exporters that were taking Tino's warehouse receipts, and then loaning them money, right?

They had this friendly business type arrangement, cause Allied was frequently behind on loan payments, but Bunge was fine with that and would delay Cashing Allied's checks, but they charged interest for this. Furthermore, they also sold Tino their own warehouse receipts. Oh, for God's sake, man, come on! The exchanges took as collateral for futures contracts. Tino needed an inside man and he found one in the form of James Catarina, a clerk in the financial department.

Now, Bungie isn't a stupid company, right? They demanded payment in cashier's checks from the manufacturer's Hanover Trust Company, because they were concerned about the small size of Allied's bank, the first national bank of North Bergen. ALICE Yeah, the vibe I get from Bung is sort of like smart mark, you know? JUSTIN Yeah. Normally the transaction would go as follows.

If Allied were paying Bung, the North Bergen Bank would call up Manufacturer's Hanover, Manufacturer's Hanover would issue a cashier's check, and would simultaneously bill First National Bank of North Bergen, it would deduct the amount from Allied's account. Thus, you couldn't write a check and have someone sit on it, it's a cashier's check, right? The transaction is instant, or nearly instant. ALICE Oh.

Oh, fuck. Just, I'm detecting a slight latency into which Tino DeAngelis is gonna insert his entire dick and balls. I... Mm. Okay. LASERTY The fatal flaw in this arrangement was that the cashier's check was delivered by an allied refining courier, and the manufacturer's Hanover

bank was across the street from the Bung offices in Manhattan. Here's how you check kite on an industrial scale. Yeah, let's hear it. You just told me. The Allied courier picked up a $1 million cashier's check from manufacturer's Hanover, ran across the street, gave it to the Bung vegetable oil office. This check would quickly make its way to Katarina for a swift deposit, right? Katarina would then excuse himself to the men's room, where the Allied courier was waiting.

ALICE Are you fucking joking? JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE They exchanged the one million dollar cashier's check for a one million dollar Allied check. Katarina then went back to his desk and put the Allied check in the drawer. The courier would race across the street back to manufacturer's Hanover bank and tell him the deal was off, the cashier's check had not been used, all before the North Bergen bank had been contacted. Then Catarina would wait for the signal to deposit the check months later, if at all. ALICE How long, oh Catarina, must thou test our patience." ALICE. Uh, Katarina compensated for the missing funds by juggling the company's funds around in

several bank accounts, and Katarina never held back more than three checks at a time, so the kiting was hard to notice in a company as large as Bungie. Right? ALICE. It's not hard, it's not hard if you're a, like, manufacturer of Hanover, because you have a guy come sprinting in every time from the same company, being like, you gotta cancel this shit right now. LIAM Yeah.

Yeah. They sometimes did this twice in one day. ALICE Jesus fucking Christ. ALICE I'll say this, the courier's getting a lot of cardio in. Like, he's doing fucking wind speed, he's doing the bleep test between the two buildings. So, uh, but the futures market, despite how much the Tino has invested in it, is still looking pretty bleak, but he has one hope. The Soviet Union.

Oh, it's just like a hockey bridge. Hope for all of us, hope for humanity. Do you want the massively annoying and loud Soviet Union drop? Obviously. Of course. Yeah, these guys. So, yeah, the thing about having a massive futures position like Tino's is that at the price drops you get screwed.

Tino couldn't afford this in 1963. He needed those massive Food for Peace contracts now. But harvests were bountiful and the world was satiated. ALICE LAUGHS. Everything is already, like, oiled up sufficiently. Yeah, exactly, y'know, it's like, oh shit, we invented GMOs, now everyone can eat. Damn. So Tino starts a rumor.

The Soviet Union had been somewhat excluded from Food for Peace because of communism, y'know? But they were in active talks to buy American wheat. This is the Khrushchev-Thor stuff, right? Yeah. And, y'know, so perhaps maybe they also need salad oil. ALICE Yeah, who doesn't? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly.

ALICE Just like, y'know, as the banner says in the middle, they're forward to the victory of communism, but it's like, y'know, but that has to be lubricated, the road to, like, communism has to be lubricated with western salad oil. Okay. JUSTIN Exactly. Exactly. Uh, Tino's precarious position became more credible in the eyes of traders, even if he himself knew it was all built on rumors.

In fact, he knew that the USSR had just exported a shitload of sunflower oil to Spain, which had, by the way, denied him a Spanish salad oil contract, which he blamed the Opus Dei for. He thought Opus Dei had a personal grudge against him. Why the hell not? Inscrutable beef. Yeah, Opus Dei very in with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Yeah.

But, okay, salad oil, soybean oil, the futures prices were up at this point, right, he could have started backing out of his position at this point, but Tino DeAngelis decided that no, that's the coward's way out. ALICE Well also, if you try and back out of it, people might start asking questions, like, you have to go forward with some of this. LIAM Yeah, you have to go forward, yep. ALICE I have to corner the market. I have to go forward with some of this.

I have to corner the market. So, Ira Hopton Company is still being paid in warehouse receipts for an increasingly elaborate tank farm, which existed entirely in Tino De Angelis's mind palace, right? ALICE & TROY M. LENKLAND Mind full of salad oil. JUSTIN Yeah. These were in turn presented to the banks as collateral for Allied refining's increasingly precarious futures position in October of 1963. He drove the price of soybean oil contracts from $5,520 to $6,180. On paper, his contracts were worth $160 million.

Uh-huh. Good for him. He stepped up the check-kiting. He started taking personal loans. The problem was with this level of exposure, just a one-cent drop in the price of soybean oil would put Allied on the hook for $13,500,000 in margin within 24 hours. That's bad. Don't do that. Yeah, and of course, again, all of Allied's money was fake, and all that fake money had already been spent, and no one wanted to buy salad oil at such exorbitant prices, except maybe the Russians in Tino's

head. He was born a dumb asshole. A partner for Ira Hopton Company who had been skeptical of Tino from the start, named Fred Barton, he returned from a European vacation on November 11th. He took one look at the books and said, we gotta shut this thing down, guys, this is really bad. So they froze Tino's ability to buy, and his other brokers became nervous. By November 15th they couldn't buy any futures at all.

It's over. It's fucking over. It's so over, it's over. Oh, but it gets so over so quickly. Hold on one second. I'm just thinking about how badly you're, like, fucked at this point. You owe infinity amounts of money as a company that owns and makes very little, on a commodity on whose futures you are extremely leveraged, on the back of a bunch of checks that are gonna come due at any point now.

Beautiful. It's beautiful. JUSTIN So, what followed were some desperate attempts on Friday, November 15th to prop up the price of soybean oil involving the various dummy accounts. It failed miserably. Allied owned owed a massive amount of money, $5.1 million to Aera Hopton Company alone. Furthermore, the Commodity Exchange Authority had just started poking around as an attempt

to corner the market. Now the big problem here is attempting to corner the market is legal. It's not illegal until you actually do it. ALICE Oh, what is? They don't give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry, do they? JUSTIN Exactly, exactly. Now, Allied's man at Bung, uh... ALICE Casarena.

JUSTIN Casarena, yeah, had quit his job that same day. ALICE Smart guy! JUSTIN Yeah. And on that day he deposited three million dollars in kited checks. Never mind. I called my shot a little too early, huh? With the price of soybean oil falling, Tino's warehouse receipts were rapidly losing value. He could see no way out except maybe to flee the country, so on that Sunday-

You probably should've done that a long time ago. You know, you gotta go to the Soviet Union. Yeah, exactly. Defect! You could still defect, you know? On that Sunday, he didn't drop the bankruptcy petition himself, he had one of his men do it. Now, bankruptcy petitions require a financial statement listing the company's assets and

liabilities. And Allied's main asset was... ALICE Oh, they gotta find out about all the stuff you did. JUSTIN Exactly. Allied's main asset was Mind Palace salad oil tanks. And this caused a lot of consternation in the offices of Allied Refining. In the meantime, the brokers needed their cash, Tino's cronies who had done the dummy trading also needed to be paid off.

This was achieved with warehouse receipts and bad checks, respectively. ALICE Sounds like a Warren's Even song. Big fan. JUSTIN Yes. Um, Tino's bankruptcy petition, which failed to mention any of the company's assets at all, was so bad it was rejected by the courts. ALICE Just written in crayons, says I'm bankrupt, please. ALICE I have no money, frowny face.

JUSTIN Word got down to the commodity trading floors, though, that Allied was declaring bankruptcy all hell broke loose. The price of soybean oil cratered, and then Bung found out that three million dollars of checks that they thought had been deposited months ago had bounced. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. JUSTIN Chaos also reigned at Ira Hopton Company, the brokerage firm, they were now owed, uh, fourteen million dollars by Allied Refining, that they would in turn pay directly to the exchanges. They managed to get a day loan from a bank to pay the exchanges, which is not strictly

legal, and then they had to get an overnight loan to pay for the day loan, pledging the customer's stocks as collateral, which is more illegal. ALICE & LIAM Oh no, don't do that. These guys just decided to have their own little sideline into financial crimes. JUSTIN This was done surreptitiously without the managing partner, Morten Kamerman, knowing anything about it. Cause he would've put a stop to that instantly, you can't do that. Right? Tino still tried to convince Hopton Company that he would solve it, and promised and delivered

more warehouse receipts. The difference was that unlike the previous American Express warehouse receipts, which were for fake oil but guaranteed by Amex, this one was just a forgery. ALICE Just again, crayon. I have all the salad oil. RILEY Bunge was suspicious about the bounce checks, finally had someone had the temerity to actually go check the damn tanks themselves. A vice president check with Amex warehousing was confused when the company

told them that the VP himself had ordered the transfer of oil out of the tanks several weeks ago. In the meantime, Bunges inspectors arrived on property and checked the Ford tanks with their product, and they were empty, empty, half empty, and one was full of... something. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. ALICE & LIAM It's the seawater? Piss. Yeah, it's piss. JUSTIN American Express arrived on the scene and tried to find the damn oil.

Tino was nowhere to be found. ALICE I hope in the course of some of this he invested in a pair of good running shoes. LIAM I don't think it's gonna help him. JUSTIN It was only Tuesday, right, late that afternoon Allied successfully petitioned for bankruptcy. The second time's the charm. ALICE Because you actually list the assets at that point which are, uh, oil tank full of piss.

Yeah, air. Yeah. Air. Air are Hopton companies in a bleak situation. Another brokerage firm, Williston and Bean, uh... They all have these dumbass names, I don't know the answer to that. They were another broker for Allied and the dummy companies. They were also threatened with insolvency when Tino's bad check bounced.

Both Hopton Company and Williston and Bean were suspended from trading. Both assured their customers they were solvent, or almost solvent. After all, they got all these warehouse receipts that very nearly cover their liabilities, right? It was beginning to become a major scandal though, they were sending panic through theabilities, right? It was beginning to become a major scandal, though, that was sending panic through the markets, right? Two major brokerage firms were almost taken out by a vegetable oil guy, come on. ALICE So what happens when you don't do your due

diligence, you know? JUSTIN Then on Thursday, November 21st, 1963, Bung came out publicly and said there was, fact no vegetable oil, they filed a lawsuit against American Express. ALICE Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Read me that date again? JUSTIN Thursday, November 21st, 1963.

Put a pin in that. ALICE You know what my favorite Stephen King book is? SEAN Yeah, we're gonna get there, I think. JUSTIN Yeah. So, the media, you know, they're starting to pick up on this, they're trying to go down to the tank farm, they're trying to get pictures over the fence, you know, so no one will let them in. This is gonna be the biggest story of the week, though.

This insane Saladoi thing. Yeah, absolutely is, it's all anyone's gonna be talking about. Story of the year, 1963. Aero Hoppton Company, their customers were trying to close their accounts, but they can't, cause trading is suspended. There's 20,700 people's life savings hanging in the balance here. ALICE You know, just like there's only one thing I can think to do to get the heat off me, I gotta call my friend in Texas.

RILEY There was hope, however, that Friday would bring better news, and cooler heads would prevail, and that somehow, despite Hop's now thirty-seven million dollars in liabilities, their customers could be made whole. ALICE Speaking of made whole. JUSTIN Yeah. Made whole. So, November 22nd, 1963... ALICE For viewers listening without the benefit of the slideshow, we are looking at a picture

of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. ALICE What if I say moments before disaster. ALICE Moments before his head just did that. JUSTIN Yeah. Before he was killed by the Russian-Cuban CIA mafia teamsters. ALICE Go listen to the bonus episode on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Listen to the Warren Commission, the official narrative is 100% believable.

Yeah, this is the original Kennedy, before the reverse Kennedy. And you have to imagine, few is the number of people who are still thinking about salad oil as they watch the president's head explode. Yes. In fact, this actually closed trading on the... Force majeure, you know? So, in the meantime, everyone gets the news, okay, Kennedy's dead, the markets plunge, right?

In the meantime, American Express was inspecting the tanks, which they should have done before. Just like, I gotta go to work on the fuckin' salad oil tank farm in Bayonne, New Jersey. JUSTIN The creditors had already hired E.W.'s Sableton Company, and they did an independent inspection, which was much better than the American Express inspection. And what they found in the tanks was disgusting. ALICE Yeah, it was piss, dude.

JUSTIN It's late- no, it's worse than that. Oh god, it's piss and benzene. Yeah, it's- in late November, most of the oil in the tanks had congealed and frozen. The tank heaters didn't work. Eventually they resorted to just cracking open the frozen mass and found that just below the surface was liquid. Sea water. Straight from Kilvancull, which is a little passage that links the Hudson River to, what

should we call it, Newark Bay. Below the water was something only described as sludge. ALICE. Pissed sludge, yes. JUSTIN. Yeah. Surveyor's also found tanks that were supposed to be full of salad oil instead full of gasoline, or acidulated soap stock, straight up seawater, and of course more sludge.

They could not find the Harbor Tank Company's tanks. Nor could they find anyone who worked there. ALICE All of those guys just took those Cadillacs and drove to Mexico, and god bless them. SEAN Yeah. They were right to do them. ALICE Yeah. They were right to do it. JUSTIN Another brokerage firm that Allied had paid in warehouse receipts, DR Comenzo, was suspended from trading, and Ira Hopton Company was liquidated.

ALICE Number of brokerage firms taken out, up to three at this point? JUSTIN Three, yes. ALICE Also, JFK Skull, don't forget about that. Yeah. It's weird how Oswald took three brokerage firms to kill him, even though he was a trained brokerage arbitrator. It's not anything, that's nothing. It took another week to figure out how much oil there was, how much oil there wasn't, and how much oil there was supposed to be.

And what the hell that sludge was. Yeah. Allied's remaining stocks in the tank, stock of oil obviously, it was impounded by the FBI. Various steamers that were coming to pick up oil were turned away. Ships en route to Allied refining with cargo were left steaming in circles until a new buyer could be found. The Census Bureau ceased publishing statistics about salad oil entirely.

ALICE That was the kind of death of American innocence, y'know, it was never the same country after that. Something just broke. LIAM I remember that protest piece, I watched it on YouTube, yeah. ALICE Yeah, everybody remembered where they were when the Census Bureau said that they were gonna stop publishing the salad oil stats. We can't publish those. This month's salad oil stats we're just not gonna publish.

Atino finally appeared in bankruptcy court on Wednesday November 27th, having hired council only an hour before. And just pled the fifth to everything. So it was a solid strategy, you know? Shut the fuck up Friday. Shut the fuck up Wednesday, in this guy's case. Allied refining was completely out of money, and couldn't even cover day to day expenses. Creditors started revving up to go after American Express.

This is why you can't use their credit cards. On December 2nd, the Wall Street Journal finally reported the reality of the salad oil situation. Fully 1.8 billion pounds of salad oil never existed. Wow. Miraculous. This man invented more salad oil than you could ever even conceive about. Also, my god, he's greasy. Like, that's his job. Yeah, he's an oily man!

Like, I don't... So, to make a very long story short, if I hadn't been fighting with my two refrigerators yesterday I'd put more detail here, but I was distracted. Anyway, so, Tino's frog was- One of the beer fridge to answer the listener questions. Yeah. Well, the beer fridge started working before the main fridge did. Thank god. Yeah. Anyway, so, Tino's fraud was uncovered, he winds up in this lengthy criminal trial, has a bunch of twists and turns involving a Swiss bank account, Allied's petty cash expenses, Tino's mistress, the real question of just how the hell he spent all of that money anyway.

No one could figure out what happened to all the money. Cause even considering all the futures contracts, and the fact that the business was running a loss, it's still really hard to spend all that money. ALICE It's just in his mattress or something, you know. It's in Krugerrand. JUSTIN It's sent to, like, his other companies, which sent it to his friends' companies, so on and so forth.

Oh, he did get his meatpacking company back at some point before this. Yeah. Because the creditors are like, well look, he's such a good businessman, maybe we should put him back in charge, even though he's going to have to anchor up from defrauding the government. I love capitalism. Yeah. defrauding the government. ALICE I mean, it's both, it's a lot and it's not a lot, you know? Is it a crime to destroy three brokerage firms, or is it praxis?

JUSTIN I don't think anyone's particularly sympathetic here, everyone involved is a crook. The author, who, keep in mind, works for Wall Street Journal, or worked for Wall Street Journal is like, no, no one's sympathetic here, they're all idiots. So the creditors try to go after American Express, and American Express tries to cover its ass. It was true that American Express had sold off the field warehousing division shortly before the scandal, that didn't matter, most of the swindle was done under Mx's lack of watch, right.

But since big finances- But they all got Cadillacs, man. Yeah. Big finances, a big club, this sort of proceeded slowly, it proceeded out of court, it was... Especially the big creditors were like, kinda amicable about it, they're like, well, you know, you pay us when you pay us. It's just, uh, generates- We don't want to rock the boat too bad, yeah. Generates a lot're like, well, you know, you pay us when you pay us. We don't wanna rock the boat too bad. ALICE It just generates a lot of lawyers' fees, you know.

JUSTIN Yes, exactly. Some of the small creditors had been swindled by De Angeles Grumbled, and eventually Amex agreed to pay sixty million dollars out of the between eighty-five million and a hundred and thirty-nine million dollars of warehouse receipts owed. That was nice of them. Because, uh, no one was sure which ones were real and which ones were fraudulent. I mean, it was all fraudulent, but some was more fraudulent than other ones. Eventually, those angry creditors went on to successfully sue Lawrence Warehousing Company,

which had bought the Amex Warehousing subsidiary, except for the tank farm. Smart. They sued it for nine million dollars and put it out of business, despite the fact they had nothing to do with this whatsoever. Fuck em. Fuck em. American Express stock drops upon settlement of the case, Warren Buffett swoops in and buys 5%, and that's one of the ways he makes his fortune.

Tino ultimately got away with swindling the banks out of $180 million, which is about $1.8 billion today. He got out of prison in 1972 on parole and started a cattle ponzi scheme. ALICE Well, like a ponzi scheme that like, defrauds cattle. JUSTIN Well, he was, I'm not entirely certain how that one worked. There were like two cattle ranching companies that he pitted against each other, I'm not

sure. ALICE Dudes rock! JUSTIN I guess. JUSTIN He died in 2009. ALICE Born in 1915. Jesus. LIAM Yeah. Hell of a rot, man.

ALICE Died at the age of what, 94? No, that can't be right. I'm so bad at math. JUSTIN And that's the story of the salad oil scandal. LIAM Which we managed to stretch out to two hours. JUSTIN It's a good story. ALICE It's a good story, it's fun, yeah. This has been a beautiful moment in American capitalism, you know?

JUSTIN I believe this is one of the greatest stories ever told. When a man can rise from nothing to defraud the banks out of 1.8 billion dollars. ALICE And listen, capitalism might ruin the lives and crush the dreams of untold billions of people, but it does produce stories like this. So. Communism is not as funny. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

They would've sent him through a gulag or done some kind of commissar bullshit, you know? Here it's like, ah of commissar bullshit, you know? Uh, curiously. Ah, seven years? Alright, you're out. You can do a Ponzi scheme, that's not even illegal yet. ALICE AND LIAM LAUGH. ALICE I'm never gonna look at salad oil the same

way. JUSTIN Exactly. Well, what did we learn? ALICE We should do fraud. ALICE Yeah, we should get rich, get stupid rich, by defrauding the federal government. SEAN Yeah, lying to American Express, and the federal government, and just a whole bunch of other people. JUSTIN Today you have to do it with apps and shit, I don't wanna do that, I would rather

do salad oil. SEAN Do you ever see those spam emails we get, that are just like, have you thought about developing an app for your podcast? I'm just like, what would that even look like? What are you talking about? JUSTIN What would a podcast app look like, yeah. We would be decent frauds. Harvest and sells all of your data.

All of it, give it to us! Well, it's just, uh, you can do various drops from the podcast. That's kinda worth it, yeah, I think we might pay for that. And obviously then we get all of that data. You need to give us all your information. Yeah, yeah, well there's your problem podcast wants to make and receive phone calls. Exactly. I have to use your phone number to call up my broker about a soybean oil future.

This is the thing that I'm always curious about, and I say this without any kind of self interest or criminal motive, probably. You hear about these things, and they're always like, tremendously successful for the guy, and then they go to prison or whatever, and you think, is that a loophole that they've closed now, or could you get Stupid Rich doing the same thing again? Like file the serial numbers off, do the exact same scam. Would that work, do you reckon? I need that pair of jeans. ALICE We have to figure out warehouse receipts for podcasts.

ALICE One way to find out, uh, don't worry. ALICE I need that pair of jeans, so like, I might get into maybe the canola industry or something, y'know? RILEY We have a lot of podcasts in storage. We could probably get warehouse receipts. ALICE This one's recorded, it's fine, it's fine, don't worry about it. We just shift the same, like, WAV files around, in between different folders.

JUSTIN Oh my god, yeah. Start using the WAV files that we record locally as, like, extra stock, y'know? ALICE Oh, you don't want those, there's a lot of bags of boops in here. Devon is doing the Lord's work. ALICE Oh, I mean, impeccable stuff. This is true. Alright, so, I guess with that, everyone should remember, defrauding the government is fun

and easy profit. Anyway. This is not construed legal advice. Please don't do that, yeah. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. ALICE What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. JUSTIN Yes.

Yay Liam, and hello Devin, November, Justin, and possible guests. ALICE Nope! Stupid! ALICE It's a pretty good effort, but you found out the last hurdle, you know. JUSTIN I'm an engineer at a nuclear power plant. Sweet Jesus, live! Strong opening.

This is the story of the time we had to buy all the underwear at our local Walmart. Oh god, oh no, I'm fuckin' invested, let's hear it! We fucked up so bad, all of us shit and pissed ourselves. I did not include any slides, so please feel free to insert any generic nuclear power photos and cartoons that you find suitable to go along with this story. As I see you have done. Yes. Power Plant was recently shut down for a routine refueling outage.

Approximately one third of the uranium rod assemblies in the reactor core had to be removed and new assemblies added, so we could continue another 18 month long run. To perform this work, the head of the reactor vessel had to be unbolted and set aside a refueling crane, then shuffles fuel assemblies around. This is all performed under about 10 feet of water so that the workers above do not become irradiated. That's important.

Additionally, there were many other maintenance jobs being performed by several dozen workers in the reactor building. One of those workers included me, measuring something for some future project that never ended up being installed. ALICE You're in the background of like Dr. No's lab, you're like working on the fuckin' death ray. You're just like, never really have a real job there.

JUSTIN You're not working on the death ray, you're working on like a ladder that's going to make maintenance on the death ray, you're working on like a ladder that's going to make maintenance on the death ray a little easier. ALICE Yeah, super fill in paperwork, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, you're like, well, you know, it would be easier to calibrate this machine if we could get a man over here. One of the byproducts of uranium fission is iodine-131. This is a radioactive gas with a half-life of about eight days.

This half-life is in the sweet spot to be short enough to adversely affect your health if exposed, but long enough that the gas will persist for a few weeks before decaying completely. When the reactor head is lifted, some of this gas is released into the building. ALICE Wait, what you have is a kind of radioactive ghost. The building is haunted for a week or so. JUSTIN To reduce iodine gas in the building, several air filter fan units are mounted around the perimeter of the reactor. These must be set up and wired in at the beginning of the refueling outage before the other work

starts. This is an undesirable job because the reactor building is still very hot, very humid, and has an elevated background radiation rate. Naturally, the job to install the filters usually goes to the electrician with the least seniority and experience. ALICE & ALICE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE DIGGLE D You know? On this particular day, I was in the reactor building, and observed that the reactor head

was about to be lifted from the reactor vessel. Being aware that the dose rates in the building were about to go up, I decided this would be a good time to exit, and check on a project in a different building. Mmhm. Yeah. Funny that they didn't tell you about this, you just look over and see them cracking open the reactor, and like, I'm gonna go... Nah, nah.

I don't wanna deal with this. Yeah, now I am going on break. Yeah. Bye. Upon exiting the reactor building I had to remove and discard my outer anti-contamination jumpsuit, gloves, hard hat cover, and boot covers. Then I had to pass through a series of radiation detectors. These detectors are to ensure that you do not inadvertently carry radioactive particles

out of the building with you. These detectors are very sensitive. Many workers have been known to lose shirts and shoes that must be confiscated and appropriately destroyed if contaminated." ALICE Oh, my Adidas. They're just shredding them. JUSTIN Yeah. I think they got- I don't think they shred them, I think you have to put them in a barrel

full of concrete. ALICE Oh, fuck yeah, you're right, that's like, hot waste, yeah. This is just a pair of perfectly fresh Nikes, just being welded into a barrel. JUSTIN Yeah, fucking fucking dump a barrel full of Air Jordans. ALICE Dumps, I'll get ready for dumps. ALICE Yeah, what is here is dangerous and repulsive to us, and it's just a little graphic of an Air Jordan.

And then it's just a little graphic of an Air Jordan. Fortunately, I passed through the radiation detectors without issue. You always wanna do that. Key tip. Unfortunately, shortly after I exited, one worker after another started setting the detectors off. When this occurs, a radiation control technician waves a Geiger counter wand around you to try and find the

location of the radiation particles on your clothes and body. More unfortunately, the Geiger counter was detecting low levels of radiation emitting from every body part of the workers. This was a telltale sign of iodine-131 gas contamination. These contaminated workers were not allowed to leave the plant. This is for the safety of the workers and the general public." ALICE This is the great thing about nuclear power, right, is that sometimes the safety stuff is like, oh, this is genuinely, like, existentially

terrifying, and the other is like, oh, you gotta stay at work, indefinitely. RILEY This is for the safety of the workers and the general public, and this is to prevent radioactive material from getting outside the plant. The typical process is for contaminated workers to change into new clothing, usually new underwear and hospital scrubs, and then sit in front of a fan until all the gas blows off. With more and more workers setting off the detectors, the radiation control area was rapidly becoming quite crowded, and the radiation control techs were starting to panic while the magnitude of the situation was unfolding. ALICE That last bit is a sentence I never wanna hear.

RILEY An investigation was quickly convened, as it was discovered that the air filter fans were all wired backwards. ALICE Just hotboxing the fucking reactor room. This is why you should get the guy with the most experience to do it. JUSTIN So the fans were in fact blowing particles on the filters back into the reactor building. ALICE Uh huh, yep. Mmhm. JUSTIN The air filters were quickly shut down, but the damage had been done.

Approximately fifty workers were contaminated with iodine gas. They were all moved to the lunchroom, where they were told they could not go home until they were no longer radioactive. ALICE & KEN You just have like an after-school detention until you stop being radioactive. ALICE You'll have to stay here. JUSTIN They also told that all of their clothing would be confiscated and destroyed.

On the scale of radiation exposures, right, where one end is you turn into the melty popsicle from Chernobyl, and the other end is like, nothing. This is pitched at the low end, but fuck if it's not irritating. It's like, yeah, we have to weld your clothes into a barrel. I'm sorry, you're radioactive, I have to remove and destroy all your clothing. That pick-up line never works. No, it doesn't work. In the club with a Geiger counter.

Oh, listen here, man. At least stay in the containment room. This was a problem because the plant's storeroom quickly ran out of scrubs and underwear. Oh boy. All this news was generally not well received. No. Most of the workers were out of state contractors and wanted nothing more than to leave and never come back again.

I was recruited to pass out water bottles and to switch on the TVs to a movie channel in an attempt to prevent mutiny. This did not ease the mood. The plant manager sent his secretary to the nearest Walmart with instructions to purchase their full inventory of underwear and undershirts. I can only imagine what the Walmart workers must have thought." ALICE Just, you just, like, take the, like, nuclear power plants card, just go buy everything, come back with a U-Haul.

Just full of underwear, yeah. Well, you know, you never know. ALICE Just a bunch of, like, lightly radioactive guys sitting in a lunchroom wearing, like, animal kigurumis, and just ff-fuming. LORENZO Meanwhile in the quarantined lunchroom the situation was tense, most were visibly upset, a few set quietly in the back occasionally glaring at plant management. Others were more vocal and would colorfully shout out their displeasure until red in the

face. Yeah, while you're radioactive, there's nothing you can do. You have to stay in the containment room. You have to stay in the shame cube. Go in the shame cube! Go in your hole! Radiation control tech cycled workers through the radiation detectors. Some were allowed to leave after an hour or two.

Others had to stay all night into the early morning. Eventually everyone off-gassed and were allowed to leave in their new underwear to their homes and hotel rooms. No one received a radiation dose greater than what the government permits. Oh, well, what about the air filter underwear? The air filter fans were rewired and turned back on. The reactor was refueled, and life went on. This is a radiation safety success story. This is the shit that you have to do every day to prevent, like, atrocity, is sometimes

you have to hold a couple of dozen guys hostage in a lunch room while someone goes to buy them. Just a bunch of nude men in a lunch room. Oh yeah. Oh, I got a sausage delivery for ya. ALICE Naked radioactive men. In your area. RILEY Low level Dr. Manhattan. ALICE Just all of the Doctor Manhattan re-cohering himself bits, but it's like, I saw fifty to sixty naked men in the cafeteria.

RILEY Angry naked men. Angry naked men. ZACH Asks me about my Saturdays. This, this, this one was beautiful. Thank you so much for sending it in. Yeah. Keep up the good work. Love the show from Ryan Redacted. PE. Thanks Ryan Redacted. Thank you Ryan Redacted. Well, that was Safety Third. Our next episode will be about the nude angry man at Chernobyl.

ALICE Yeah, if there's some real nude angry... And the problem with Chernobyl, they didn't have a nearby Walmart, that's the main problem. JUSTIN Exactly, exactly. If the Soviet Union had focused more on consumer goods, this would not have been a problem. ALICE You didn't see a bunch of nude angry men in the break room because they weren't there! SEAN It's haunted by ghosts of nude angry men! JUSTIN Does anyone have any commercials before we

go? ALICE No, I'm good. Listen to all the other podcasts, please. JUSTIN Yeah. Listen to podcasts is good for you. You develop social relationships, cause you don't have any friends in real life. Um, give me money, I need it. Give her money.

Me money now. Me needing a lot of money now. Me needing a lot of money now. Alright, bye everybody. Bye. Bye everyone. Oh, that was really good, guys. That was fun.

That genuinely might be an Alzheimer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feel very positively about it. I was fun. That was fun. That genuinely might be an Alzheimer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel very positively about it. How do I stop this thing? Oh, fuck my ass.