Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 164: The Sultana Disaster

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

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So it's 1048 Novus time. I regret to inform listeners this is the last episode of Well There's Your Problem There Will Ever Be. We are all still friends. ALICE We're all alive because we're about to turn on each other like dogs. LIAM Yeah, we might. ALICE There'll be some people turning on each other

later in this episode. LIAM Oh good, I love a good in-fighting episode. ALICE Oh yeah, yeah. Well both in forms of intrigue and also in forms of panic. ALICE I just have to stress that this is not the last episode, please do not cancel your Patreons, I need that money to live. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Nah, nah, we're gonna keep doing it.

ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, listen to the lady. JUSTIN Exactly. I mean, it was nearly the last episode, because you almost died. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN I... I had a bit of a spill on the South Street bridge, yeah, that mixing zone is not good. You gotta, you gotta... I mean, listen... Buy a gun and strap it to the side.

Yeah, what you need is a kind of a claymore mine on every kind of directional surface of the bicycle. That accident was at least partially due to my own stupidity. Uh oh. Y'know, and I didn't hit anything or get hit by anything, I just lost my balance, because I was trying to grab onto my hat that was about to fly off. ALICE This is why you gotta wear a helmet, you know,

because it straps on. ROZ Why don't you wear a helmet? JUSTIN Well, you know, that would have been, that would have probably prevented this. ROZ Why don't you wear a helmet, Roz? I need you to make friends, Roz. I have to keep podcasting. Also, you're my best friend, Roz. I need you to make friends, Roz. I have to keep podcasting. Also, you're my best friend, Roz." RILEY There's a philosophical thing here. ALICE Is it the vehicular cycling thing, where you

don't wear a helmet to ride a car? RILEY No, vehicular cycling, you have to wear a helmet. ALICE Ah, okay. RILEY One of the things about urban cycling is, you're supposed to be safe enough that helmets are optional. Now whether that's actually the case is debatable, the thing is, I was doing bike share, which does not come with the helmet.

That's true. It really, really should do, you know, they should fuckin' have a magnetically attached helmet or some shit like that. There's some places where they do that, and the result is no one uses it. Also, the helmets get lost constantly. ALICE I mean, I get it, right, like, obviously I've had European woman dysphoria from, and I'll send Devon the picture of this to add to the episode, the beautiful Dutch woman in heels wearing, not a helmet, but normal outfit,

just peddling the step through bicycle around. And I think, oh, that's really cool, I wish I lived in a city where that was possible and I could do that and not bash my entire brains in. So I get the impulse, right? JUSTIN I guess it's a combination of factors involving, okay, someone went around me in the mixing zone, also my hat was about to fly off, also the brakes didn't work very well on the bike, what else. Also, y'know, I mean, again, this is a situation where, had any one of those things not been the case, this would not have happened, but no, just, suddenly there was, y'know, the

workload was too much, and over you go. ALICE Well, don't die, I'm fond of you being alive. JUSTIN All I got was road rash. Which, y'know, sure, whatever. ALICE Sucks. JUSTIN Yeah. Nah, it's painful, but it's not like any deep wounds or anything. Banner week for cycling in Philly, I gotta say.

So anyway. Welcome to Well There'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. I was not murdered by the streets of Philadelphia. My pronouns are he and him. I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her.

As yet, I've yet to be murdered by anyone or anything, and I'm hoping to keep that streak going for a long time. Yay Liam. Yay Liam. I am regrettably coming to you from beyond the grave. I have been murdered several times, and that's, y'know, I had a good run, I think. My pronouns were he, him. Your pronouns are was and were.

Yeah. To know what pronouns are. I think I would know, but... If you got murdered pretty hard, but not hard enough, so you were like clinically dead but came back, could you then tell people, fun fact, I got murdered? Yeah, of course. In the same way as the thing I said about being like a plane crash survivor if one wheel goes off the end of the runway, I would be like...

Oh, that's a good point, yeah. Any person I talk to, I'd be like, hi, I'm November, I was murdered. I'm a murder survivor. Yeah. I was a plane crash survivor, I... what was it? Ah, runway excursion. Ah, they do that constantly now. I'm a step away from saying that you should be able to say that you're a plane crash survivor if the plane was, like, delayed. You know? I'm a plane inconvenience survivor. JUSTIN We had a delayed takeoff.

Delayed landing. ALICE Give me, where's my ribbon? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE Covid survivor? I mean, all of us did that, you know? We should get a medal for that. JUSTIN I heard the air traffic controller speak, or I heard the pilot speak to the air traffic controller in an urgent tone.

ALICE And that fits on a t-shirt, you know? Not so well, but we'll try. ALICE I survived, like, a United Airlines pilot using the frowny voice with air traffic control, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. JUSTIN Oh, you know that's bad, because United is where you fly the friendly skies. ALICE Yeah. Not the frowny skies.

JUSTIN Not the frowny skies. If the frowny skies, something serious is going on. ALICE I could double up on getting us legal threats by making us a come fly the frowny skies t-shirt. JUSTIN Oh, come on, I'm on the frequent flyer program, I don't need that. Even though I don't fly frequently. Do it to upset him. Do it to upset him.

Do it to upset him. I'd be on the no flyer program. Anyway, what you see on the screen in front of you is a steamboat. Now what you may notice here, and we'll talk more about this photo later, there's a lot of people on this. Oh, sure, that's true. That's not what I noticed first, what I noticed first was that it's named the Sultana after either like a sort of a female equivalent or companion to a sultan, or also a kind of

raisin. And that it's only smoking out of one of the smokestacks, which means it's like, effective, probably. JUSTIN We'll talk about that too, later. But uh, yeah, this is not supposed to be like this. We are going to talk about the Sultana disaster. ALICE Yay. JUSTIN The worst maritime disaster in American history.

ALICE The Sultana disaster when you get on a trail mix and it's like's mostly raisins. Yes. This is standard, raisins are by far the best part of Trail Mix. Oh, that is a bold... that's just M&M with obstacles. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, who do you have in Trail Mix over the humble raisins? M&M's, they're just a... M&M's are like, that's a deviationist addition to trail mix.

I'm not so enthused about really anything in trail mix, I'm gonna be honest with you. The raisins are nice, y'know? I do like peanuts, but my wife would be sad. I don't go out of my way for pretty much any component of trail mix is the thing. You know, it's like, all of it's like, fine. I like raisins in like, a cinnamon raisin bagel, but that's basically the only context I have them in. ALICE I'm not a huge raisin head, I like, yeah, like a fan of raisins.

I'm not like, a sort of raisin stan. particularly, I think we can all agree, the like like, deceitful raven... raven? The deceitful raisin, the raisin masquerading as a chocolate chip, that's... Oh, pure evil. Satanic. Yeah. But like, in general, like in the aggregate, I like a raisin. I like grapes when they're turned into wine, not when they're squished.

I just thought of the most fucked up thing, I think, imaginable. Oh yeah? Oh, okay. You know how people on the west coast get scooped bagels? No, what the fuck is that? That's where you scoop out the interior of a bag. Hold on, I'm googling scooped bagel right now, and if it displeases me in any way- what the fuck is this?

Yeah. Yeah. This is... I am willing to get up there like the Israeli ambassador to the UN, this is the greatest insult to the Jewish people. I was just thinking that, yeah, if some of these sick freaks ordered like, a scooped cinnamon raisin bagel, and then there's just no raisins in it. Uh, I would like a cinnamon only bagel, though. I... Just don't want like a big-only bagel, though. I...

JUSTIN You don't get it, you get barely enough. ALICE You get a bagel shade. A crystal of cinnamon. You just have the shell of a bagel. ALICE Yeah, I don't like bread that much. I mean, I like bread, but I don't know. I've been on a big sourdough kick. Welcome back to Food Chat.

JUSTIN Oh, that's a real, like, kind of lockdown bread, you know? Like a real 2020 bread, to get into. ALICE Oh yeah. Everyone got their sourdough starter. SEAN No free advertising, but I will say, La Colombe in Fishtown donates bread to Lutheran Settlement House daily, which is kind and good of them. And sometimes the seniors and people I work with don't take all the bread, and I go in there like a raccoon, and I take a bread, and I come back to my house and my wife says, why are there six breads, and I say I don't know, I don't know what happened here.

ALICE Yeah, man can't live on bread alone, but you can try. SEAN But I'm gonna sure try. I can sure try, yeah. No free advertising, but I will give them a pass, because they donate bread to people who need it. ALICE So anyway, before we talk about the sultana... SEAN Yeah, let's talk give them a pass, because they donate bread to people to keep it. ALICE So anyway, before we talk about the Sultana...

SEAN Yeah, let's talk about bread some more, I'm hungry. ALICE Or continue this, um... SEAN I can talk about my friend's GoFundMe. My friend Blake, she's doing a GoFundMe for surgery. I'm gonna put a link in the description, cause she's great, and she deserves it, and she's already raised like half the money she needs. So...

ALICE Someone's gonna have to put down a note so I remember to put it in the description. Yeah. I'll tell you what, I'll do another like, yelling at you message in the group chat. Okay, that sounds good. Before we talk about this continued tangent, we have to do the goddamn news. Well done, Nova. Good save. I was typing done, Nova, good save. JUSTIN Yeah.

I was typing on my phone. ALICE Silly. JUSTIN Big things happening in Israel. ALICE Oh boy, yeah, this is pretty gruesome. JUSTIN It's not great, is it? JUSTIN Yeah. A big protest erupted outside... I don't know how to pronounce this.

ALICE Don't give them dignity. JUSTIN Yeah. One of the horrible prison camps they have in Israel where they detain Palestinians. ALICE Kind of THE preeminent horrifying, their attempt to do Israeli Guantanamo. ALICE Israeli Gitmo. ALICE Yeah, exactly. Because I think two soldiers were prosecuted for, um, ****ing Palestinian prisoners.

Gotta have to believe that, but, yes. 27 prisoners from Gaza have died, at least. Oh yeah, there are like incontroversible reports of absolutely routine torture of the worst kind. Primes against humanity, yeah. Oh yeah, and this is all stuff that, y'know, if you, like, pay attention, you're like, you knew about this months ago. ALICE Yeah, so it's nothing that Israel hasn't been

doing, or the US, or even the UK hasn't been doing for decades, right, but like, it's something that's happening with, like, kind of unusual, like... what's the word, like, not even bothering to... flagrancy. Right. Yep. But in this case there was then inorganic, and large protests which developed outside the prison, of folks coming in and saying, actually, they should have the right to sodomize prisoners. Yeah.

I disagree with that! Actually, that's good. Yeah, and, to bear in mind, this wasn't because the Israeli justice system, and I put that in air quotes, was actually that concerned with the wellbeing of Palestinian prisoners, right, it's a fig leaf, right, to say that one of the reasons why the ICC or the ICJ can't investigate us is because we have a functioning legal system that investigates and prosecutes abusers, right? So the military police show up, they arrest like half a dozen people, who are gonna get charges dropped, or at worst, a slap on the wrist, and this is a bridge to...

I believe they already got the charges dropped. Yeah. And obviously this is a step too far for Ben Gver, and his compatriots on the far right, and I think what they ended up doing was pulling battalions out of Gaza. Like, full-time, regular forces, because they didn't trust the reservist ones. Because a lot of these protesters were reservists. So yeah, it really seems like, if you think about October 6th as Hamas's master plan to just psychologically destabilize Israeli society until the whole thing collapses in on itself,

it seems like it's going quite well. JUSTIN It seems like it's going pretty well, because then shortly after this they have at time of recording bombed Lebanon and Iran. ALICE Yep, yep, yep. Something I genuinely didn't expect to happen is they killed Ismail Henia, the political head of Hamas, in Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president when the last one got, like, helicopter-accidented. And he's like, the guy doing the ceasefire negotiations, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Haneeyah was kind of out of influence with Hamas in Gaza, on the military side of it, for a while there was this kind of divide between the commanders under Daif in Gaza, who planned and executed the October 6th attacks, versus the political leadership in Qatar, who were not told about this and then had to make up ground about it. And he was on that side, the Qatari side, and was then killed in Iran. Which is another insane thing, not that Israel hasn't been operating inside Iran and killing Iranian

scientists etc. in Iran for years, but this is a sort of unhinged escalation and whatever the kind of retribution is gonna be. I mean, this itself is a retribution for Hezbollah, most probably. Like accidentally killing about a dozen kids, like Druze kids, in the Golan Heights, by like, misfiring a missile aimed at, like, Mount Hermon or something? All in all, like, you have to look at where the escalation is coming from here, and time and time again it's Israel. Right?

Um. Yeah. I mean, they wanna drop everyone into this horrible regional war. You know, they're gonna... SEAN I mean, there is no plan. I don't... Yeah. It's just like, annihilation, I guess, is the plan?

ALICE Listen, I don't... yeah. It's just like, annihilation, I guess, is the plan? ALICE Listen, I don't... you don't want to hand it to Hezbollah, not least because it would be illegal for me to hand it to Hezbollah as a prescribed organization in the United Kingdom, but I do think that if Israel do what they want to do, which is open up a second front in the north and invade Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah, they will suffer badly on all sorts of levels and quite possibly lose, at least without the support of the US. And so the US gets dragged into another proxy conflict with Iran, which is cool.

And I have to- JUSTIN Or even not a proxy conflict. ALICE Well, yeah, exactly. And then you open up the floodgates into all sorts of terrible things. And again, the alternative to doing this was literally just to credibly, even credibly threaten to withhold weapons or military support from Israel at any time, and Biden hasn't done it, so this is where we are. SEAN Everyone under 26 who listens to this podcast,

start your draft dodging plan now. It's better to have a plan in place and not need it, than need it and not have it. ALICE You're not wrong, is the thing. I did not anticipate things getting to this point. ALICE That is just... gruesome. ALICE Yeah, yeah, I mean, the thing is that, y'know, the genocide in Gaza remains, uh, like going apace. And the kind of, like, universal sentiment amongst Israeli politicians and the Israeli

military, if not the Israeli people, that is, that, like, not only is this good, but we want more of it. JUSTIN That's always the fun part, when it's like, people are like, alright, it's just Netanyahu's regime. Like, if they replace alright, it's just Netanyahu's regime. It's like, if they replace him it'll be with someone who's worse. LIAM Turbo Hitler, yeah. ALICE Yeah. And I mean, they presumably will not have as easy of a time doing the same things in

Lebanon because Hezbollah is considerably better supplied, and more experienced in all of this. It's just been, I come back to Qasem Soleimani, right, and I mentioned this on Twitter, right, that being the kind of Iranian operator who is trying to calibrate very precise, very measured, very proportionate things, that mostly go off without a hitch. You know, Hezbollah has been kind of poking at Israel, and this kind of thing of killing some Druze kids is the one real misstep they've had in months of doing it. To do that takes some expertise and some consideration, right?

Your opposition in this is a guy who keeps escalating for no reason, right? The thing that I said on Twitter about it is, it must be like playing chess against a guy who keeps eating the pieces, you know? And Karsem Soleimani was like the sort of guy who did that, like, sort of, par excellence, right, and he got killed by Donald Trump, which is an incredibly insulting thing. You know? ALICE So yeah, I don't incredibly insulting thing. You know? ALICE Yes. ALICE So yeah, I don't know where this goes, what happens with this. SEAN Nothing good, continued genocide of...

ALICE Yeah, basically, like, the only way this ends is if the US is credibly able to restrain Israel, which has shown absolutely no indication of what to do. Capable of doing it, so. Yeah. I mean, you know, the good news is, for the listener, this will be coming out probably two weeks after we record this. So you'll already know how it turned out.

ALICE Yeah, you will know whatever kind of response, like precisely calibrated response Iran and Hezbollah, and possibly the Houthis, have kind of implemented, and you will know that in response to this Israel has like, y'know, fucking bombed the presidential palace into Iran or whatever. If you might already be on a plane to basic training. What time are you here, this? Yeah. Uh, great. ALICE. What time are you here this? JUSTIN.

Yeah. Great. Great times. Great times everywhere. Israel's doing so great in this war. ALICE. I fucking hate this place. I just, I fucking hate, obviously, I've said it, we'll keep saying it, big fan of not doing

atrocities, especially atrocities committed in my name, please stop doing that, you fucking psychopaths. JUSTIN I mean, it's gotta be, even if you are, like, pro-Israel, you have to be looking at this and saying, these fucking morons. What's wrong with them? ALICE You would think, right, that's the, like, Israeli, like, technocracy. SEAN Okay, let me stop you there, sir. ALICE Cause, like, Gadi Eisencourt, or like, Yav Golan, are the kind of guys in Israeli politics

who are supposed to do that, right? But the problem is that the baseline of Israeli strategic thinking is already so fucking insane, the kind of, like, our career military technocratic, bureaucratic axis of like, we're gonna do the smart thing. They think that the smart thing is fundamentally still war with Iran. It's just that they don't like that Netanyahu is more personally corrupt and dumber about it. LIAM Yeah, there is no Overton window, it's just... low whistle, please.

JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, you know, a deeply sick society, ultimately. ALICE No, aren't we all, you know. JUSTIN Yeah, well, this is true. This is true. ALICE Israel's just, I mean, like, this is the thing about exceptionalism, I think Israel's just like a lot of our societies with the volume dialed up, you know? JUSTIN This is true, yeah.

I mean, it's kinda like, yeah, they're like, uh, we can do anything we want. And uh, mmm. Yes. So far. So far they've been proven right. They're gonna hit a wall at some point. It's gonna be ugly for everyone. I'm glad you think that.

They definitely hit a wall, it just might take the rest of us out as well. Oh yeah, we're gonna get unconstrained nuclear war. Yeah, they do whatever, the Samson option or whatever. ALICE Oh yeah. Just glass Tehran and maybe like a bunch of Europe into the bargain. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, they just hurl a nuke at London for no reason.

ALICE I hope not, I'm trying to move there, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah. The round'll be really cheap after the nuke. ALICE You say that, I'm not sure move there, you know? The rent'll be really cheap after the nuke. You say that, I'm not sure that's even true. It's like, zone two, moderate radiation exposure, uh, £2,500 a month for a studio, no bills included. It will literally be Fallout London.

God. Which I believe I saw a post from you saying it wasn't that good. ALICE Yeah, I did not enjoy it. Um, it just... There's a... Tonally, it's a bit of a mismatch. JUSTIN Well, we'll have to see how it compares with the reality in a few months. ALICE Just, like, giving, like, irradiated London

a bad review. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Two thumbs way down. Like, giving, like, irradiated London a bad review. Yeah. Two thumbs way down. In other news... I gotta, before we talk about this I do have to say I got a Tumblr ask, which is not something I normally respond to from someone, I presume of, and as well, begging us not to have takes on this.

I don't have a take on it. I don't know exactly what's this. ALICE I don't have a take on it. I am- SEAN I don't know exactly what's going on here. ALICE I don't have a take on it. SEAN It seems like there's a very close election between two not very good candidates. ALICE Imagine that. Imagine such a thing. Yeah, so this is the Venezuelan election. ALICE Oh, K-Hive is gonna sneak into your home.

SEAN You're getting a take, whether you like it or not. SEAN K-Hive or old K-Hive is gonna sneak into your home. You're getting a take, whether you like it or not. K-Hive or old K-Hive. Oh, old K-Hive. Oh, OG K-Hive, yeah, you're going, you are... They're gonna do stuff to you that they wouldn't do to you in Gitmo. Speaking of Gitmo once again, right, so talking about flagrant human rights violations. So the allegedly socialist, allegedly president of Venezuela, Nicolau Maduro, has won the most recent election, right, and the opposition have accused the government of widespread electoral fraud, and this would be nothing new, right? And depending on how sort of campest your views are, because the Venezuelan opposition

does include a lot of awful, like, vampiric freaks, who want nothing more than to, like, institute some kind of, like, US amenable far-right quasi-theocracy or whatever the fuck. JUSTIN Yeah, it seems like the main, y'know, one of the main things is, okay, at least from a foreign policy perspective, Maduro wants to keep the oil company state-owned, and Gonzales wants to privatize it, y'know? ALICE Yeah. On the other hand, the Maduro government is insanely corrupt, personally, genuinely very repressive, and you just end up with this thing of, like, you never wanna hand it to

a guy with the secret police torture senses just because he's inconvenient for the Americans, right? Or just because he calls himself a socialist. But on the other hand, you can look at a lot of the opposition and say, man, these guys are some fuckin' creeps as well, right? I don't know that there's a take arising from this. LIAM Hey, hey, you want Stalin or you want Pinochet? Come on, pick one.

ALICE Yeah, great. LIAM Fuck me. Correct that. ALICE It's like a less competent Stalin, you know? LIAM Yeah, less competent Stalin. LIAM Oh. It's like a less competent Stalin, you know? Less competent Stalin. Oh, don't wanna hear less competent Stalin. Yeah, I mean, this is a kind of situation where the Venezuelan economy is turbo-fucked,

that isn't something that's inherent to it being a kind of pseudo-left-wing government, right, because the Argentinian economy is turbo-fucked, and they have an insane libertarian freak show in there. Yeah, they have Elon's Boy, whatever his name is. SEAN Yeah, no, Elon's Boy is in El Salvador, but Javier Millet. ALICE I thought Elon liked Millet.

SEAN It probably does. But it's like, obviously it's partially a situation like Cuba where you have devastating sanctions, right, but it's also a lot of personal corruption and mismanagement involved. And like, things are getting pretty unsustainable. And the kind of one tool left in the toolbox to Maduro, who is the kind of shitty inheritor of Hugo Chavez after the CIA shot him with a cancer gun, is more repression, more prisons, more secret police, right? Which, yeah, is predictable. And I think what's interesting this time is that the kind of socialist Latin American

leaders, most notably Lula, have not quite gone along with this. Like, Lula's thing previously was always like, you know, this is like an internal Venezuelan problem, he's been very slow to criticize Maduro for lots of good reasons in terms of geopolitics in South America, right? This time he's kind of with the US on the like, expressing serious concerns about irregularities, etc. etc. etc. So maybe things are heading to another inflection point, who knows, maybe you get Juan Guaido back in. You know?

I was about to say, I mean, there's been a bunch of weird stuff going on, I mean, this is all about, like, what, they haven't released the actual ballots, I believe. Yeah. It's like an insanely insecure election system, the way it works is it's an electronic voting system. election system, the way it works is it's an electronic voting system, you press the button and the machine sends the thing to the central, like, voting authority, and then it prints out a paper ballot which are then counted, and the opposition are like, can we observe that paper ballot counts?

And the government is like, no. Which is not a good sign, Phil. Yeah, it's probably not a good sign, yeah. ALICE And the thing is, previously they had allowed international observers, and those international observers had said things like, oh, the elections seem pretty unfair to us, now there's no international observers. You know? JUSTIN Oh, okay.

JUSTIN The other thing is, even the official results don't seem too commanding for Maduro, you know? ALICE It's like, what's the maximum you can kind of plausibly tip the scales, you know? Before you're going into Saddam Hussein bath party stuff, where it's like... SEAN Yeah, like, uh... ALICE 106% of the vote, yeah. SEAN 106%, yeah. ALICE It's not plausible if you're saying that you

won with a 99% majority, and then you're having to water cannon like 100,000 people off the street, you know? So yeah, I guess, it's really grim, and not to sort of do my usual thing, but you can lay a lot of this at the door of the US, a lot of this is the fault of, like, sanctions. I think there was a time when it was possible to engage with Hugo Chavez in ways that weren't shooting him with a cancer gun. There were probably ways where it was possible to engage with Maduro, right? SEAN Hey, we used to have a whole refinery here

in Philadelphia that was built for Venezuelan crude. ALICE Yeah like, it's not as if the US cares particularly about human rights violations for fuck's sake, especially when it's getting its oil. It's just that they don't like the human rights violations left inflected, and so... JUSTIN Exactly, exactly. We don't want to interact with a state oil company. You exempted Sonia Ramco. You can do all that shit and stamp the word Chevron on it, or Exxon Mobil, it's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you have to let, like, all of the richest people in your country with the most German surnames, have to still be in, as opposed to forcibly expatriated to Miami or wherever. ALICE Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Goebbels von Hitler, but... ALICE Yeah. Well, good luck to you if you're in Venezuela. ALICE Yeah, yeah, I mean, Maduro is... he's a land of contrast, because he is, like, unarguably a dictator, and has done a lot of terrible

things, but on the other hand, he did, during the State of the Union a few years back, get caught on camera eating an empanada he had stored in his desk drawer, and if that's not related at all... ALICE Good for him. Yeah, I get it. I'm a fat boy, you know? ALICE That's as far as my, like, critical support extends is that, like, storing, like, sort of empanada in your desk drawer, like, empanada in the resolute desk, functionally, is, that's the work of a kind of genius, you know?

SEAN Yeah, no, that would be pretty good, you put out, like, a, you know, you have an elevator that comes out of the floor and goes into the desk to get you a fresh empanada. It'd be like how Trump had the button for the... ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. And empanada? I would abuse the fuck out of an empanada. ALICE They would have to lift me out of that office

with a crane. I... LIAM I will not go quietly! Gonna beat William Howard Taft. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. Okay, before we talk about the Sultana, we must ask a question. What is a steamboat? ALICE A guy, a thing invented by a guy from Lancaster County, you're welcome.

ALICE Is that true? ALICE Yes. Robert Fulton was from Little Britain, there's a township in southeastern Lancaster County. ALICE Didn't like his work with Matt Lucas very much. JUSTIN I was waiting for that. Robert Fulton, engineer, inventor, and polyamorous. Still a common overlap in the Venn diagram to this day. Yeah. He built the first practical steamboat in 1807, the Claremont.

This is a replica of it. Why, why, why are the paddle wheels so small? Because it was the first one. Oh, okay. You see the John Bull, those wheels are tiny. Looks like a couple of steering wheels. It made it from New York City to Albany in just thirty-two hours, regardless of the current. I mean, pretty cool to triumph over wind power and like that, to be like, I don't even need

to care about weather. Because it was possible to get from New York City to Albany with a wind-powered boat, but you had to go with the tides, because it's a tidal river all the way up to Albany. But the Claremont could just say, fuck you, I'm going. At the cost of pumping out a shitload of fossil fuels, y'know. JUSTIN Oh yeah, yeah, it ran on, well, it ran on wood, I believe. That's biomass, that's eco-friendly. ALICE Okay, sure. If we were it done today you'd be painting a big, like, green leaf on the side.

JUSTIN Exactly. Now Fulton soon went on to bigger and better things, conquering the mighty Mississippi River, with a steamboat called New Orleans. And where previously trade on the Mississippi River only could practically run one way with these single-use rafts, now the steamboat allowed the river to be a bi-directional highway of commerce. ALICE You can import stuff through New Orleans and send it up the Mississippi. Like, I like delicious food, what else does New Orleans have? SEAN D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE,

D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D'ACQUERIE, D ever met and the people who have gotten me the drunkest in my entire life. Sounds about right. A bunch of guys complimenting your shoes. Yeah, and then saying, you got them on your feet. Now give me a dollar, yes I do.

Greatest city in the world, baby! So yeah, I mean, again, before when you wanted to ship cargo down the Mississippi River, you built a raft, you filled it with cargo, you rode it down a river, you get to New Orleans, you dock there, and you disassemble and sell the raft, and then you gotta walk back. ALICE Sounds like it sucks. For a number of reasons. SEAN It sucks, yeah, it was really bad. But now you have the steamboat, so you can go back up the river.

Now it has paddle wheels, right? Why did they use paddle wheels? There were several reasons. You couldn't, like, forge a big screw propeller yet. They're very difficult to manufacture. Early paddle wheels could just be made of wood. So you could just make it in your backyard. Yeah, basically. It's just a water wheel, but backwards, you know? Screw propellers needed high pressure steamboils, which weren't perfected yet, and they required a bunch of draft, which the Mississippi River did not have. Right?

It's like really shallow and really silty, right? Like relatively silty. Very, very much both of those, yeah. So you just like, essentially just have a big shovel that's like digging you through the water on each side. Pretty much. Neat. You know, this is side wheel steamboat, there were also stern wheel steamboats.

Oh, like in the Human Blood Money level. Yeah, just a little bit later design. Wait, actually I think that steamboat had both. Eh, not important. Yeah, sometimes you get a both. You have belt and suspenders. But yeah, the Mississippi River, though, was also pretty treacherous to navigate, even with, y'know, these mechanical accessories, right?

We'll talk about the Mississippi River in 1865. ALICE Yeah, this is a screenshot from Red Dead Redemption 2. ALICE It's full of dead confederates. ALICE Because, like, I had to find images for a bunch of these slides ten minutes before we recorded, so what are you up to? SEAN I think we should've just left it and pretended it wasn't, it's just like, no, it's always looked like this.

ALICE Yeah, this is a contemporaneous photo of the Mississippi River in 1865. LIAM Not done on one of those tin plates or whatever. Yeah, this is a tin type of the Mississippi River. It looks great, full color and everything! Oh yeah. Yeah. Colorized it with AI. Don't know why there's a bunch of cops holding a bible, but, you know.

Shrimp Jesus emerges from the Mississippi. JUSTIN. Shrimp. Um. So, the modern Mississippi River is significantly tamer than the river in 1865, right? It's been fully charted, it's been controlled with levees, it has locks and dams instead of falls, there are bridges over the river instead of ferries you have to dodge, they dredge it pretty frequently, you know, it still has problems with like flooding, the fact that

the whole thing could divert into the, what's it, the Chachafoya River? If you say so. Yes, at any point... excuse me, Chachafoya? I looked up how to pronounce this and then I forgot. Yeah, at any time if there's a problem with the old river control structure it could just explode the economy at any point. ALICE Oh yeah, that's the one Army Corps of Engineers project that diverts, that's functionally trying to keep it to the old channel, it switches over to the one that it's supposed to hydrologically go to.

ALICE Yeah, the Chachafala has a steeper grade, so naturally the river should want to go that way, and there's a big control structure that keeps it going through New Orleans, and through all the oil refineries and stuff down there that depend on shipping, and the chemical plants and the... That delta is really weird, just the amount of, like, heavy industry that's built on the most delicate land imaginable. ALICE. Makes you feel proud to be American, maybe. ALICE.

It truly does not, but... JUSTIN. For the purpose of waterborne commerce, though, the Mississippi River has largely been bent to man's will. But in 1865, the situation is different, right? The river floods every year. When it floods, it often shifts channels, so you get a new river each year. If you're piloting a boat, you have essentially no navigational aids other than the stars

and a compass. It was very difficult or impossible to navigate at night, there's no locks or dams, these steamboats would actually have to climb up the various falls in the river. I still have no idea how that works. ALICE Just a notch, I... Just run it. JUSTIN Yeah, just run it, just go. Yeah, the paddle wheel just pushes you up, I guess, I have no idea.

Accidents are common, boats explode sometimes, you have problems with the boilers... This is why Mark Twain, after a few years of doing this, was like, fuck this, I'm gonna get into the equivalent of podcasting of his day, which is being a humorist. Yeah, he became a humorist. He moved to Virginia City. Mark Twain would like, do the fuck out of a podcast. Oh he definitely, he was definitely like, Mark Twain was basically a Bernie bro. This is like a dangerous business, but it was still better than walking. Right? ALICE It is crazy how much of human progress in

civilization is based on, walking sucks and I don't wanna do it. JUSTIN It's like me taking the trolley up to the Wawa this morning, and I thought they'd already stopped serving breakfast. Still got a coffee, though. ALICE This is the impulse that drove us out of the trees and into agriculture, right? Fuck walking. JUSTIN I didn't want to walk a mile to find out they stopped serving breakfast.

I took the trolley. ALICE You sure did. You fool. JUSTIN Yeah. Well, the breakfast options in my immediate area are irritating. ALICE I also, wah-wah breakfast is not very good. JUSTIN See, cause the place with a good sandwich doesn't serve coffee, and the place with the coffee doesn't serve a good sandwich.

Why don't you go to Goldstar or something. How do you get the, like, the wolf, the lamb and the beans across the river or whatever the fuck? Exactly. Can't do it. Can't do it. It's the podcast of the breakfast sandwich and the coffee. Exactly, exactly.

I gotta replace my coffee maker, I haven't done it yet. What? Subscribe to the Patreon. No, I plan- well, no, subscribe to the Patreon. I'm poor, yeah. I'm definitely extremely poor. Can't afford a coffee machine, yeah. Yeah, he can.

I think- I think- I do this for you, people. Yeah, I mean, listen, given that you got yelled at by your landlord this week, on top of also dying, I think you're allowed to be like, subscribed to the Patreon. You know? JUSTIN That's a good point, yeah. ALICE When you don't have a landlord anymore, that's

when you have to be a bit quieter about the Patreon, you know? JUSTIN That's a good point, that's a good point. Anyway, so, we have to talk about a steamboat. Here. ALICE Before the explosion. Yeah, well, that's spoilers. Sorry, sorry. This is, well it's written there on the slide, this is Sultana.

And a lot of this information, but not all of it is from a book called Disaster on the Mississippi, by Gene Eric Saliker, published in 1996, it's on the Internet Archive, you can check it out for one hour at a time for free. This guy's a lifesaver, genuinely. Yeah, that's why they're trying to make it go away. Yeah, I know. Uh, I do note here that there's a structural problem, which is that the steamboat is trying to support, as superstructure, the weight of the entire state of Texas.

Um. Texas roof? Yeah. Oh, state of Texas. JUSTIN Texas roof, yeah. Oh, and just Texas. ALICE And just Texas, yeah. Texas is like, on the top deck. Which I think is probably very dangerous and destabilizing, because Texas weighs a lot. JUSTIN I believe that's, Texas is very heavy. Lots of oil. ALICE Sloshing around.

Free surface effect. JUSTIN Yeah. Hurricane deck. I forget why it's called that. ALICE In case youoshing around free surface effect. JUSTIN Yeah, Hurricane Deck. I forget why it's called that. ALICE In case you want to see a hurricane? LIAM That's where they give you the hurricanes?

JUSTIN Oh, where the wind passes through it. I think that might actually be the reason. LIAM Oh my goodness sake, this is the fifth Sultan on the Mississippi River. ALICE I mean, there's only so many names you can give a boat, right? LIAM I don't like scrapped, wrecked, burned, burned, uh, and... ooh, cursed, cursed. Burned down and sank, yes.

Cursed. Cursed boat name. Yeah. Burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, yes. The front fell off. Yeah, so this is the fifth Sultana. It was 260 feet long, 42 feet in beam, 7 foot draft, but it could be trimmed to operate in only 34 inches of water.

ALICE Jesus. JUSTIN It was built in 1863 by John Litherby's Boatyard in Cincinnati, Ohio, and had two 30 foot diameter side paddle wheels. ALICE At a time when Ohio was like a sort of center of shipbuilding, which is insane. JUSTIN Oh yeah. Yeah, that took a while to go away, even. It was designed to go as far upriver as Pittsburgh, and all the way down to New Orleans, but the smokestacks were too tall, and it crashed into the bridge at Wheeling.

So they never went that far upriver again. Yeah, I mean, makes sense. Yes. So according to the Cincinnati Daily Commercial on February 4th, 1863, it was one of the largest and best business steamers ever constructed. It was built largely to carry cotton up from New Orleans and distributed north, right? Here's some of its features. As a grand and luxuriously appointed saloon with a full bar, uninterrupted by columns

or other perturbations, lit with chandeliers... ALICE Just imagining like 1860s us doing the cruise ships bit and be like, why do you need a robot bartender? JUSTIN Steam powered robot bartender. ALICE Yeah, I played Fallout. ALICE I'm just thinking about the riverboat gambling you could do on this. 31 staterooms with two berth each, individual wash basins with running water and chamber pots.

Good, I love to shit in a bucket. Fine furniture and woodwork of the highest quality material provided only by the best firms in Cincinnati. And it had two side paddle wheels, 34 feet in diameter, driven by four high pressure, high pressure for the time, tubular boilers. ALICE Totally tubular, dude. SEAN Yes. We'll talk about that in the next slide, and crucially, though not initially, it eventually

came to pass, it featured one seven and a half foot alligator, which will become important later. ALICE Uh, what? ALICE As furniture, as crew, as like, what... RILEY Oh, the crew kept it as a pet. ALICE Oh, so as crew then. Great, perfect. RILEY Yes. They kept it in a crate most of the time.

ALICE Live seven and a half foot alligator. RILEY Yes. ALICE America's so cool. ALICE Sometimes. RILEY Why would you not have an alligator? ALICE Yeah, I mean, you. Why would you not have an alligator? Yeah, I mean, you're not wrong. I love an alligator, I love a crocodile.

Everyone loves alligators. Yeah. Until they encounter one in the wild. Yep. And then they get ate. Yep. Don't stick your hands out of the boat. No!

On the Bayou tour. Don't do that. Unless you wanna get a cool story, and like, a cool nickname, and one fewer arm. On the Bayou Tour. Don't do that. ALICE No. No. No. ALICE Unless you wanna get a cool story and like a cool nickname and one fewer arm. JUSTIN Yeah, one fewer, at least a finger. ALICE Yeah, you wanna take your life and your own hands on the Bayou Tour, that's between you and God.

JUSTIN I would avoid that. Let's talk about the tubular boilers. ALICE Yeah, please. ALICE Mike Oldfield's tubular boilers. JUSTIN Yeah. Traditionally, and I'm talking about traditionally in 1865, Mississippi steamboats were built with a very simple but very inefficient boiler. Right?

So you have the boiler, you have a firebox somewhere, it's making fire, the hot gases go through these two huge flues. Right? Mm, like a pair of nostrils. Exactly. The flues heat up the water in the boiler, they turn it to steam, the steam drives the engines, right? Because these flues are gigantic, a lot of that heat is wasted. Since not a lot of it is actually in contact with the water, with the tubing, which then

transfers the heat to the water. You need more surface area. Yeah, exactly. You need more surface area in order to transfer the heat to the water. ALICE You need more surface area. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. You need more surface area in order to transfer the heat. ALICE Learning completely the wrong lesson, being like you need a very wiggly flu. JUSTIN Oh. No, they tried that. ALICE Oh, no.

JUSTIN Yeah, they would do like return flus, where the thing actually curled back on itself. ALICE I mean, you get more surface area. JUSTIN Yeah, just a little bit, yeah. So a newish concept became popular in 1848, right? Other than overthrowing governments in Europe. ALICE I'd love to do it. JUSTIN Yeah. And though this design had been fitted to steam locomotives 19 years previously, they decided

to adopt on the river the fire tube boiler, shown here. ALICE Many small tubes. JUSTIN Many small tubes, yes. ALICE Correct me if I'm wrong, this is where you get the cool photos of steam locomotives where the boilers exploded and it looks like spaghetti has poured out of the front. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Cause that's the, like, those are the flues, which are just shot out of the thing.

Yes, exactly. That's due to water hammer during the boiler explosion, mostly. Water hammer 40k! Yes. Yeah, so your fire tube boiler has many small flues, the hot gas is passed through these flues, and the flues provide quite a lot more surface area, they heat the water much more quickly than the two huge flues. Thusly, you can boil the water more efficiently and at much higher pressures, resulting in

more power, while simultaneously having less fuel consumption. These had been standard on steam locomotives since Stevenson's rocket in 1829, but they'd been rare on steamboats. Now there's a reason for this. ALICE Can I guess? Can I guess? Is it because it's really difficult to make these at marine engine or marine boiler scale? JUSTIN Not so much. It has to do with the water quality. It's because of muddy waters. ALICE & SEAN LAUGHING. ALICE & SEAN Okay. SEAN Yeah.

So we're talking, the boiler just gets real gritty real fast. ALICE It gets real grody really fast, yeah. SEAN Okay. ALICE Yeah, the Mississippi River has a lot of silt. The water from the river was pumped directly into the boiler. The water would boil, but the silt would stay there. This caused problems." ALICE Oh, so you're not fucking around filtering that water? JUSTIN Absolutely not. No filtering, you just dumped it right in there. Yeah. So, problem number one was these boilers required frequent

cleaning to stay efficient. This cleaning was very laborious because there's not very much space between the tubes. ALICE You just have to get in there with a bunch of pipe cleaners and shit. JUSTIN Yeah, is that, or you send a small child in or something like that, exactly. You can see here on a steam locomotive, these flues are spaced more closely than they would've been on an early steamboat boiler, but there's not a lot of space in there to clean. ALICE Oh, sure, and like, river silt's like a pain

in the dick to get out, especially when it's been warm, like it's been boiled. LIAM Warm, thick, warm. Hot silt, yeah! It's like a pain in the dick to get out, especially when it's been warm, like it's been boiled. Hot silt, yeah! Ohhhh. Now in order to... It was very difficult to clean, and in order to clean it, you had to cool the boiler down, you had to shut, you know, you had to... Whatchamacallit.

You had to douse the fire, you had to wait for the boiler to cool down, you had to drain it, then you could finally clean it. You know, send in a small child with a pipe cleaner, so on and so forth. This reduced the working life of the boiler. When you have a boiler, it's best to keep them at a constant temperature as much as possible. To avoid... Thermal cycling.

Yeah, to avoid fatigue from thermal expansion and contraction. Right. So, you know, a steam locomotive, a relatively newer one, would be generally, if it was in heavy use, they'd keep it in steam for ten days or so on, or something like that. And then, you know, they would do a cursory cleaning. And a lot of times they didn't even, you know, wait for it to cool down because you could do a lot just by messing with the steam. Because you have much purer water in a steam locomotive than you do in a steamboat.

In the case of the Sultana, they couldn't stay in steam for that long because the boilers would get clogged with silt. So they're cleaning the boilers every five days or so, and they gotta drop the fire, wait for it to cool down, so on and so forth. Puts more thermal stress- And how long does this process take? I am not sure. It's gotta be out, this one. I would think-

Absolutely. That's what I was saying. I was just curious if it compounded. It's gotta be at least hours. That fucking sounds like it sucks! JUSTIN Yeah, nah, it sucked. Um, y'know, and this puts more thermal stress on the boiler than, y'know, on something that's continuously operating. ALICE Yeah, remind me how good, like, metallurgy in the 1860s is.

JUSTIN So, at this point, the Bessemer steel process has only recently been invented. A lot of these boilers are not made out of steel, they are made out of some high grade of wrought iron. ALICE The kind of raw iron that's very prone to, like, fracturing? We've talked about before. JUSTIN It's less prone than cast iron. Wrought iron is generally, you know, you're working out all the brittleness by just hitting it with a hammer over and over and over again.

But yes, it is still much more brittle than, say, steel. The other problem you get here is hot spots, right? Cause silt does not boil at the same temperature as water. That makes sense. Okay, that makes sense. That's the reason chemistry has got different stuff in it. Exactly. So if silt builds up on the flues, right, like if you're...

I don't know. If the ship takes on some water, and like, I don't know, let's say a fish is like right here that got sucked in, and he immediately dies, but then a whole bunch of silt builds up on top of it, right, because it can't sink down to the bottom. ALICE I'll dig that fish a shallow grave. SEAN Right. Then, you wind up with a hotspot there, because the water is not able to carry away the heat. ALICE Am I crazy, or does this not happen in nuclear

reactors sometimes? SEAN I think, I mean, that's, whatchamacallit, that's gotta be like, hmm. I don't know. ALICE It's just, I vaguely that's, whatchamacallit, that's gotta be like, hmm. I don't know. It's just, I vaguely remember this coming up before. I also vaguely remember this, but I can't tell. Yeah, no.

I think that's gotta be, are we talking about the reactor itself, or are we talking about the steam generator? The, I don't know. It is, um, 1144pm. That makes sense. I think, you know, you probably have something that, you know, blocks something with the control rods, like, what is it, neutron poisoning or whatever it's called. I don't remember offhand.

I'm completely derailing the thing, you gotta just ignore me. Anyway. You're doing great. It's also a pressure vessel. So if silt builds up, and the flues can't transfer the heat to the water, they heat up much hotter than they would normally. This weakens them, right? Eventually they could fail. That would cause water to leak into the flue. Oh, that's bad. Now you want to keep in mind that the water in the boiler is under significant pressure,

so the liquid water is at a significantly higher temperature than its normal boiling point. If the water leaks into the fluid, a slow rate, it's not such a big deal. You have this sort of drop in pressure and the efficiency of the boiler will be reduced and you're going to have to reduce the heat. You're going to have to reduce the pressure. You're going to have to sort of limp into the next sport to get it fixed. If the leak is large enough, there'll be this rapid drop in pressure, which is accompanied by a lot of the hot water in the boiler will

immediately flash to steam, this subsequently causes a massive increase in pressure, that will widen the leak, which would encourage more water to flash to steam, and the boiler blows up catastrophically. ALICE Oh. Okay. Not great. JUSTIN This is usually not caused by a leak in a flue, however. But hotspots can have other problems if there is, for instance, a very low water level in a boiler, and you suddenly add more water in.

Which we'll get to in a bit. Okay, so, the Sultanas, pre-war and wartime career. So here is Captain J. Casp Mason. Looking terrified. Yeah, that man is looking very alarmed. He's never seen a camera before. Understandable. He was actually the second captain of the Sultana, the previous owner was a Captain

Lodwick, I didn't see his first name. He only owned it for about a year. Again, it was designed to carry cotton, as well as passengers, but it was almost immediately Captain Laudwick, I didn't see his first name. He only owned it for about a year. Again, it was designed to carry cotton, as well as passengers, but it was almost immediately forced into wartime duty. Captain Mason was known for one thing, which was speed, right? His boats were among the fastest. He set many a speed record on the Mississippi. Now, Sultana was an ideal boat for the job, of going fast, with its newfangled fire tube

boilers, but Captain Mason's style took a toll on them, right? They needed major repairs after only two years in service. ALICE When we say wartime service, which side? JUSTIN Uh, the Union. ALICE Okay, good. JUSTIN Woo! JUSTIN Yeah. Most people we're gonna talk about are in the Union. ALICE Okay, good. LIAM Woo! JUSTIN Yeah. Most people we're gonna talk about are in the Union.

So anyway, they needed major repairs after only two years in service, but after those repairs on April 3rd, 1864, he made a trip from New Orleans to Cairo in only four days and seven hours, which is a trip of 500 miles as the crow flies, and much more as the river winds. ALICE Well, as the river winds. Jesus. That's bad. It's fuckin' like, drifting this thing around like, meanders and shit. Absolutely. Incredible.

Um, but Mason ran into financial troubles with the boat, and he was eventually forced to sell his shares in the boat to investors, which eventually formed the Merchants and People's Steamboat line, right? But he remained captain of the boat. But his financial position continued to worsen as the war wound down, so there was less traffic, and he desperately needed cash fast. ALICE Sort of a routine thing in, like, Civil War period American history, where all the guys who had the most, kind of like, personal, like, dash were also the worst with money.

Yes. Yes. It's like fucking Ulysses S. Grant, the man who can't run a general store. Oh, absolutely not. No, there's a lot of, uh, we'll get into the shenanigans in a minute. For some reason, you know, people are like, wow, what war are you talking about? We're talking about the Civil War, of course. ALICE The American one. JUSTIN The American Civil War, yes.

The war between the states. ALICE 824 was Marvel's American Civil War. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. The War of Northern Aggression. ALICE Oh, buddy. He's from south of the Mason-Dixon, get his ass. JUSTIN Yeah, okay, well, you know, okay, what was the Civil War? What was it about?

Slavery. Slavery. And capital. I learned from Dinosaur Kingdom 2 in Rockbridge County, Virginia. Oh boy. Um, that, uh, the Union, um, accidentally genetically engineered, uh, a race of warrior dinosaurs that turned against them. ALICE What would've been cool if we did.

JUSTIN Yeah, actually, it would've been pretty cool, except they're Confederate dinosaurs. ALICE Let's go, nevermind. ALICE I consider all Confederates dinosaurs. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah, what was the Civil War? ALICE I'm the meteor. JUSTIN It was when we got, it was how we got rid of slavery, we had to go put a bunch of Southerners in their place.

You know, I don't know what else to say about that, it took a long time. There's a lot of, you know, people did a lot of fighting, it was nasty. There was like Gettysburg and Cold Harbor and like Appomattox and a bunch of other stuff. Dixburg, yes. ALICE If it's not eating the lunch of a certain military history podcast that we have a slight overlap with, Civil War would be an interesting bonus episode, it would also be seventeen hours long, and entirely comprised of me talking. LIAM Absolutely.

I'd listen to that. I'd listen to that. I'd listen to Nobet and Uncle Robert just yelling at each other for seventeen hours. ALICE Yeah, but so, I mean, obviously, a huge part of the American national psyche and mythology and stuff, and much much revisionist history from a country of the kind of a Shelby foot fetish, but, y'know, as the right side won and then fumbled the bag in terms of reconstruction. Which was what I was gonna say.

We should have never stopped doing reconstruction. You know, someone shouldn't have shot Lincoln. Secret Service fucked up on that one. Secret Service were busy thinking about counterfeiting at that point. That's a good point, yeah. Still have to write the Secret Service bonus episode. That'll be next month. So, now, one of the things in the Civil War was no one really wanted to take prisoners,

it was annoying. So we'll talk here a bit about the parole system in the Dix Hill Cartel. Parole for prisoners predates the Civil War by far, typically for like, officers, right? The idea is that you give your word, your parole, your word in French, as like an officer and a gentleman, that like, if you get released, you're not gonna take part in any sort of hostile activities for the duration of the conflict. So like, we caught you, we're gonna send you home, but you like, super ultra pinky promise not to do the war.

Can't fight anymore. Yeah, and like, they genuinely took this 100% seriously as well, like, this is a kind of matter of personal honor, with some exceptions. Yeah, I gotta imagine there's also a few people who are like, eh, I don't really feel like getting killed, you know? Mmhm. Yeah, basically, you got captured, you're out of the war, now you get an enforced vacation. It's like being a cop, right, like, you're fucked up, you're on paid suspension, you're out of the war, now you get an enforced vacation. It's like being a cop, right? Like you're fucked up, you're on paid suspension, you're on administrative leave.

You know? Yeah. So, in the Civil War they expanded this to enlisted men. Because no one wanted to take on a huge number of prisoners, because keeping prisoners was expensive. Expensive, yeah. And also you have a bigger number of enlisted men kicking around than you had in any previous conflict.

JUSTIN Yeah, and there was an extent to which, y'know, folks didn't really want to just shoot people, right? So the two sides came to an agreement known as the Dix-Hill Cartel, named for Union General John A. Dix, Confederate Traitor General Daniel Harvey Hill. ALICE This name's like a Fort Dix in New Jersey, and name's like a... fuck all, because Fort Hill was Fort AP Hill, until they renamed it. JUSTIN And it sorta worked like this, y'know, if

you're captured, you go to a prison camp, from there they'd record that you existed and you'd been captured, then you were paroled and sent back to your own lines. ALICE Probably made fun of you a bit, y'know. Yeah, exactly. So this guy's bad at war, idiot. And they're like, okay, you can't rejoin the fighting in any capacity until you're exchanged for other prisoners. In the north, they actually held these folks in huge parole camps, which tended to be dirty

and nasty and unpleasant, and in the south they're like, eh, just go home. But they expect you to turn up again if you were exchanged. Which I don't think I would do that. I think I'd try and hide out. I don't wanna deal with this. ALICE Like jury, do you say? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. I'm let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month.

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

Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. DRAGON. Problems arose with the system when Confederates captured Black Union soldiers. ALICE. Are those guys racist or something?

MMM. Getting a kinda bad vibe off the Confederate states of America, yeah. Ah, you don't like our boys in grey? I'm past even, like, critical support, I don't even have that much, you know. The Confederates refused to exchange black prisoners because they assumed all of them were escaped slaves. Oh my god. They also refused to parole them. Of course.

So the Dix Hill cartel just broke in 1863, and then prisoners just started accumulating on both sides of the conflict. General Grant did not try to resume negotiations to bring back the parole system because he realized it was working in his advantage. The South had this massive manpower shortage, it needed its prisoners back far more than he needed his. ALICE So this is the thing, right, how can you sit down and calculate that in your head, successfully and coldly, and do it as part of a stranglehold on an entire political and military entity, but also not be able to do it to understand how

many cans of beans you need to order in a general store in Ohio. ALICE Yeah, the churn out biography of Grant really made me a cynic on him. JUSTIN Grant, you know, he's better at the macro stuff. ALICE Yeah, no kidding! This is the thing, like, you know, you hear about people getting promoted above their competence, I think Grant spent a lot of his life below his competence, he needed to be put in charge of armies to be good at stuff. JUSTIN Now, this meant that your prisoner of war camps quickly became overcrowded and unhygienic, and especially in the South they were chronically under-supplied.

ALICE Yeah, we had to invent all new types of war crimes for this. JUSTIN Exactly. ALICE We never had to do this on this scale before. JUSTIN There were infamously bad prisons on both sides, y'know, there's like Camp Douglas in Chicago and a camp in Elmira, New York, but in the north this was mostly punitive under supply, whereas in the south it's also punitive but with genuine supply problems. But no prisoner of war camp in the Civil War was so infamous as the one in Andersonville, Georgia. ALICE They hanged the Commandant after the war.

JUSTIN One of the very few people who got hanged. ALICE Seriously. JUSTIN Certainly not the only one who deserved it, though. ALICE Yeah, and he was, Wirtz was like, a captain, I think. So like, pretty low down this Osenpol had just been left in charge of this bullshit, and was just like, I don't give a fuck if they get dysentery, and like, they hanged him for it, which they were right to do, but... Just getting dysentery.

So, Andersonville Prison was very nasty. Essentially they put you in an area with a fence surrounding it. They would hate to be put in an area with a fence surrounding it. Right. I hate to be put in an area. Right. Short of that fence was the deadline. Which is essentially, if you cross this line we shoot you immediately. Right. It's Arkham City. I've been playing a lot of Arkham City lately.

There was a creek that ran through the camp. This was the water supply. It was also the latrine. Oh boy. Essentially, they just shove people in there and they're like, ah, you're on your own now. They gave you some rations of cornmeal... ALICE Slight Woodstock 99.

JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN Except it goes on for years. Jesus. Yeah. They gave you some rations of cornmeal, they gave you some timber for heating, not you personally, but like, they shoved it at the entrance and, y'know, they sort of distributed it yourselves.

Y'know, and it's not enough for the whole population. Everyone's emaciated, everyone's got scurvy, no one had clothes, social order completely broke down. ALICE Lots of stories about taking the boots off of corpses and stuff, y'know. JUSTIN Yes, yeah, exactly. ALICE Real, real prison shit, yeah. JUSTIN They're like gangs of prisoners robbing other

prisoners. ALICE Oh god. JUSTIN The mortality rate was something like 28%. By the end they had crammed 30,000 people inside the walls. This was not a great place to be. ALICE Oh no? JUSTIN No. I would avoid being sent to Andersonville prison. That is my official recommendation, should you fight the Civil War.

ALICE Stick with the run the jewels advice, don't get captured. JUSTIN Don't get captured, yeah. So, in early 1865, just as the war was wrapping up, the parole system sort of started back up. That meant there was this arduous task of getting people out of the prison and back to the north, or at least to Union held parole camps. On March 20th, a large group of prisoners dragged themselves out of the camp and onto a waiting train, which took them to Montgomery, Alabama. There they transferred to a steamer, which steamed down the Alabama River to Selma, where

they were then loaded into cattle cars onto the train as far as the Tom Bigby River, which they then crossed on a ferry, then took a train as far as Meridian, Mississippi, then another train to Jackson, where someone said, alright, you gotta go to the Union controlled parole camp at Vicksburg, it's down this road forty miles, good luck. So they walked. ALICE Oh, fuck that. Yeah. JUSTIN Now when they got there, of course, they were

in a parole camp, as opposed to Andersonville Prison, and the parole camp was run by the Confederates, but those Confederates were under control of Union troops. ALICE What's weird, sort of like, nested, like, Machioshka-do. SEAN Yeah, it was like, well, I guess you people know how to run this place, we're just gonna point guns at you to make sure that you run it right. ALICE So it's a very funny idea to be in prison and

the prison guard has a second prison guard holding him at gunpoint. Make sure he doesn't try any funny business, you know? This was an unpleasant place to be, but the rations were better, it was not Andersonville. You know, you got new clothes, you got like, not a decent living, but you weren't like, you weren't a skeleton anymore. But soon enough, Richmond was captured on April 6th, Lee surrendered to Grant on April 13th. ALICE Once again, anyone who tells me shit about Lee's Generalship scoreboard.

JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Real prisoner exchanges started again, it's time to try and move these folks back north. ALICE Mmhm. Unfortunately. JUSTIN And the thing happens. ALICE Yeah. You may have heard of this. This play about to be lit, et cetera, et cetera.

JUSTIN We'll start slightly before that happens. On Tuesday, April 11th, 1865, Captain Mason, Chief Mate William Roeberry, pilots George Caton and Henry Ingraham, Chief Engineer Nathan Wintringer, and Assistant Engineer Samuel Clemens- ALICE Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Two things here. First of all, Nathan Wintringer fully took me out. Second of all, Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain Samuel Clemens? SEAN No, it was a completely different Samuel Clemens who happened to be on the Mississippi at the

same time. Some of them gotta pick different fuckin' names. Yeah. This is getting outrageous. What else is gonna have to change? Yeah. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

They set out from St. Louis towards New Orleans with the intention of securing some of those lucrative parolee consignments, right? And they found out they had to wait a day for a boiler inspection, so they set out Wednesday. And on April 15th the Sultana was pulling up to the wharf in Cairo, Illinois. ALICE Yeah, and they're like, what a beautiful April 15th, 1865. A day which is chiefly gonna be noticeable for us making a lot of money. Exactly.

Now, the K. Rowe is at the confluence- It's like that salad oil JFK incident, yeah. Presidential assassinations really have a way of fucking with people's business, I think. Yeah, I'm gonna find one for like, Garfield next. Yeah, McKinley, you know. McKinley, yeah. Now, Vaquero is at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It was notable at this stage of the war for being the end of reliable telegraph services

to the north, and to the east. And that's where the sultana, or the crew of the sultana got the bad news. President Lincoln had been shot. Oh no. Yeah, uh, I mean... we do the whole Mad Men Kennedy episode about this, and then get back to work, you know? Yeah, well, uh, again, this is the end of reliable telegraph service. Oh wait, there's an angle! There's an angle! There's an angle.

Captain Mason knows what they have to do at this point. The Sultana took on a shitload of copies of the Cairo Democrat, and it's just, they go down the river and distribute the newspaper everywhere, and let everyone know the bad news, or the good news, depending on what town you're in. Just like, having a very, like, 50-50 set of customer service responses depending on what town you're in, you know? It's like, great news, Lincoln shot. Terrible news, Lincoln shot.

Yeah. They get down to Vicksburg, which is right near Camp Fisk, where all the parolees were, you know, they sent out the newspapers, and Camp Fisk nearly devolves into a mutiny and a riot. Everyone's clamoring for the blood of Confederates. ALICE I mean, this is the worst thing to clamor for, you know? JUSTIN This is true, this is true. It's a sort of delicate situation.

So right at this time, Captain Frederick Speed was drawing up orders to send as many troops back north to St. Louis as quickly as possible. Um, which I assume they put him in charge of because of his name. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Captain Speed, cool name. JUSTIN Captain Speed. LIAM Captain West Coast Trucker Turnarounds! ALICE Just sometimes the surname and rank really kind of...

LIAM Really blend together nicely. ALICE Yeah. Like Sergeant Max Fightmaster. Yes. Who was the Native American woman who was man killer? Oh god, that's a cool name. That's a cool name, yeah. Coolest Native American name is still American Horse for my money.

Not sure why, it just really appeals to me. That's pretty good. So... Literally, it's like, Steal's White Guy's Horse. Go ahead, pretty good. Mm. So... Literally, it's like, Steele's white guy's horse. Go ahead, fuck him. Yeah. Transportation was to be furnished by the quartermaster department, run by one Colonel Reuben Hatch.

Uh, Colonel Hatch's not as good, you know? Now, Colonel Hatch had spoken with Captain Mason when the Sultana reached Vicksburg, and this is where it's gonna get annoying because we're gonna have military ranks interspersed with civilian captains of boats. ALICE Oh, sure. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah. So just remember, Captain Mason, Steamboat Captain, everyone else, military captain.

Okay. I believe they're all in the army. Because there's no Air Force. ALICE Or Space Force. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE I mean, the Union Navy had some interesting, like, riverine stuff going on, but... JUSTIN So, anyway. Hatch had spoken with Captain Mason when the Sultana reached Vicksburg.

He may or may not have known that Mason was in financial trouble. Mason may or may not have known that, uh, Hatch was not above a little honest graft. ALICE He's a quartermaster. A quartermaster at this point who's not above a little honest graft is like missing some part of his brain. JUSTIN This is true, yeah. But at any rate, an agreement was reached, the Sultana would take on a nice healthy load

of fourteen hundred or so parolees at two dollars seventy2.75 a head at Vicksburg on the way back up from New Orleans, and Hatch would get, you know, a nice healthy kickback, right? Of course. Theoretically, the Sultana should have had preferential treatment anyway, since it had a government contract for moving men and materials, but you know, you can't be too careful. Sometimes you know, you gotta get that kickback, you gotta give that kickback, gotta grease the paddle wheels a bit. Yeah, exactly.

The remaining trip from Vicksburg to New Orleans and back was done as quickly as possible. They arrived at April 19th, delivered the bad news to New Orleans, which by this point... ALICE. Tosses a pallet of newspapers off the side, just like, Lincoln's dead, bye. See ya. JUSTIN Bye. Gotta go back. Yeah.

Yeah, they unloaded and loaded as quickly as possible, they took on some cargo and some passengers, then began steaming back up to Mississippi. Just after midnight the morning of April 23rd, they had a problem. ALICE Which I've cheerfully illustrated here. JUSTIN Yes. There was a minor leak that had developed in the middle, Larbord boiler. Larbord is the old fashioned way to say port. Left. Yeah, exactly. This was not serious enough to cause a disaster, but a big enough problem that the boiler could not be run at full pressure.

Yeah, it's kind of the small leak you talked about earlier, right? Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like, eh, it's a little bit of a problem, we just reduced the pressure, there's gonna be a bunch of steam shooting at, you'll be fine, right? Since the boilers were all interconnected, all the boilers ran at low pressure. The Sultana limped into Vicksburg around 6pm that day, the search for a mechanic was on. A certain R.G. Taylor was found at 8.45pm and convinced to take... ALICE And so therefore presumably extremely drunk. JUSTIN Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, you're a boiler mechanic and like, 8.45pm, I'm like... LIAM Yeah, you're seeing that one. ALICE Why do you think they called a Boilermaker? JUSTIN I'm not on call. I'm not on call right now. LIAM I sure hope not. ALICE They hadn't invented the pager yet, anyway. Yeah, it wasn't even bad to be drunk at work yet.

You know they don't even give doctors pages anymore so much? Like, as... I know, it's like real... Like, just why would you, but at the same time kind of a bummer. Yeah, I think you lose something, you know, you spend all those years in medical school or whatever and now you don't even get a little beeper, it's just your bullshit regular phone that you get tweets on, y'know? Sucks. JUSTIN Taylor looked at the leak and he was in disbelief,

and he was like, why didn't you repair that in New Orleans? And the chief engineer, Winchinger, uh, replied, there hadn't been a problem in New Orleans. ALICE Yeah, not only were they stopped to check, cause they were busy throwing bundles of newspapers at people. JUSTIN Yeah, they just threw everything off and then like had a catapult, y'know, to put the cargo on the passengers on. ALICE Catobarra one of these things!

JUSTIN Yeah. It is a very, like, mechanic thing, to be like, why didn't you fix this before it was a problem? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Um, well, keep in mind, when they left the K-row, they had just done an inspection. So, anyway. Taylor was like, I can't do this job in time, I don't want anything to deal with this, right, but the engineer caught up with him, persuaded

him to come back and give it a go. ALICE This is like, stuffing money into his hands. JUSTIN Yeah. Taylor worked all night on the repair, he cut out an 11 by 20 inch section of the boiler, and the big bulge on the boiler from the failure he tried to just beat back into shape with the hammer, right? ALICE Hit it with a hammer. JUSTIN Hit it with a hammer until it looks better. And Wintreger stopped him, and he said, that repair's gonna take too long, just make a temporary repair, rivet some sheet metal on there, we'll take care of it properly in

St. Louis. ALICE Yeah, hit it with flex tape. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. And Taylor was like, fine, whatever. He still worked for twenty continuous hours on the repair. ALICE Oh. JUSTIN Yeah. He also noticed while he was working that it looked like the boilers had been run with

some pretty low water levels. Which can cause damage to it. We'll get to that later. ALICE You asked me to find an image for a slide about corruption. JUSTIN Yeah. LIAM This is that, yeah. ALICE This is, this is, you're gonna get whatever images we have in stock.

JUSTIN In the meantime, Colonel Hatch is using his position- LIAM No image warehouse. ALICE That's right, yeah. JUSTIN Colonel Hatch is using his position as Quartermaster to get as many kickbacks from as many steamboat captains as possible, right? Captain Kearns, whose first name I couldn't find, because that's the irritating thing about books, is like, at some point they just start referring to people as their last name,

you're like, I have to go find somewhere in the book what his actual name is. Anyway. It's the benefits of having a very distinctive first name. SEAN This is true. Captain Kearns was in charge of river transportation. He expected to know exactly when any steamboat arrived in Vicksburg, so that prisoners could be sent north in an orderly fashion on any boat available. Um, owing to the sheer quantity of men to be transported using non-contract ships was

permissible. ALICE This is the guy with an actual logistics job whose boss is mostly a kickback's guy. He's a guy with a migraine, like, every day. You know. JUSTIN A steamboat called the Arthur, which was owned by the Atlantic and Mississippi Steamboat Line, which did not have a contract with the military, arrived first. Lieutenant William Tillinghast did the wheeling and dealing, securing kickbacks for himself

and Colonel Hatch. Unfortunately- Being in the military used to be so cool. These days you have to be in, like, the Special Forces or the SEALs or the CIA to do this shit, but like, back in the day you could just be a regular ass army officer and you would still have to die. Yeah, and just have to negotiate your boss's cut on the deal of military movement, y'know? Yeah, you could probably be a sergeant and still get a kickback back then.

Yeah. It's a better time, in a lot of ways. Also a much worse one in a lot more ways. Now, Kearns wouldn't budge on this, he knew there was a contract boat coming soon. So, Tillinghast and Hatch devised a stunt to get men on the next Atlantic and Mississippi boat. The A&M's Arthur left Vicksburg, but the next boat, the Olive Branch, was not far behind. Hatch was to inform Captain Speed of the arrival of any steamboat,

but after detaining the steamboat overnight, the Olive Branch, he simply didn't inform Captain Speed. Oh, good. Okay. Captain Speed went down to the waterfront, he saw the Olive Branch, and he was irritated. He went to see Colonel Hatch, who said he didn't know anything about the boat, he didn't detain the boat,

and suggested maybe Captain Kearns had taken a bribe from the contract line Colonel Hatch, who said he didn't know anything about the boat, he didn't detain the boat, and suggested maybe Captain Kearns had taken a bribe from the contract line to prevent non-contract boats from transporting freed prisoners. ALICE This is like dueling corruption networks. JUSTIN Captain Speed was infuriated, ordered every man who was ready to depart onto the olive branch, and then had Captain Kearns arrested. ALICE This is... how the fuck did these guys win the war? JUSTIN Now, Captain Kearns said he didn't know anything

about detaining the olive branch, and while this particular kerfuffle was unfolding- ALICE Just, in handcuffs, just like, for what? Do you tell me for what? JUSTIN Kearns is the only guy actually trying to do his job. ALICE Yeah. But, Kearns is the only guy actually trying to do his job. While this particular kerfuffle was unfolding, the Sultana pulled up. Oh boy. You're gonna fuck everything up.

Yeah. Captain Mason of the Sultana learned about the Olive Branch and he was pissed off. He went to Colonel Hatch to make sure he made good on his promises. The Sultana would take on as many prisoners as it could carry. The big reason for the delay in sending prisoners north was entirely due to bookkeeping, right? They had to figure out who everyone was and account for all of them. Captain Mason went to go see Captain Speed, Speed said at most 300... ALICE There's too many goddamn captains around here.

JUSTIN Everyone's a captain, yeah. ALICE Everyone's a captain, It's like the IDF. Yeah. I do feel like the sentiment, there's too many goddamn captains around here, is a kind of like, classic of military history going back to the fucking Iliad. Captain Speed said that at most 300-400 men might be accounted for and ready to board the Sultana. Just getting them from Vicksburg, uh, to Vicksburg from Camp Fisk was an ordeal, there weren't enough trains. Um, Captain Mason threatened to make a formal complaint that the man in charge of the camp itself, Captain George Augustus Williams, he was going to

make a complaint about Captain Speed to a higher echelon here, when the man- ALICE Yeah, they're finally gonna find the one major left in the Union Army. I think there was a general somewhere in town. JUSTIN Oh, yeah? ALICE Yeah. But he was like, there's a massive gap in ranks. There's one colonel and everyone else is a captain. ALICE There's a weird thing with the Union Army, and

I guess a lot of the militaries at this time, where they had like a system of Brevet ranks, where you would get like a kind of, you'd be like an acting major or whatever for like the duration of hostilities and then get busted down to captain or whatever, so like everybody's like a, you know, a Brevet captain or a Brevet major or whatever the fuck, so it's a huge mess as well. JUSTIN Gotta imagine there were, you know, a good amount of field promotions as well. JUSTIN Got to imagine there were, y'know, a good amount of field promotions as well. ALICE Mmm.

Yeah. JUSTIN So, the man in charge of the camp itself, Captain George Augustus Williams, had an idea. Why don't we just take the Confederate books, check off the men from there, then finish our books afterwards. ALICE Oh, no. Okay. What if we just kick the can down the road? JUSTIN Thusly, the men could be transported before the formal rolls had been completed.

They still had a problem though, which was physically moving the men from Camp Fisk to Vicksburg itself to put on the boat. ALICE Yeah, all of these guys who have been subsisting on like one fistful of cornmeal a week for like three years or whatever, and not walking to the thing. DUSTLY Turned out to be an advantage. Colonel Hatch was like, I got it, I'll supply the trains. Colonel Hatch supplied the trains, and they were a goddamn mess.

Over two thousand parolees had to be transported in a somewhat orderly fashion from Camp Fisk. The first train that showed up had three passenger cars and a flat car. LIAM Oh boy. SEAN This seems like it's going to go poorly. Over about two hours they crammed about 800 men in there. At least give me a seat on the flat car, you know? I think I'd prefer the flat car, yeah. Yeah.

At least you got some athlon. Like what are those Montreal Open Air cars rise like so much? A second train left a little bit later, was not expected to show up, but it showed up, and the engineer was like, hey, we're running low on fuel, we gotta move now. We're fucked! Help! Yeah. They crammed another 450 men on that one, in three passenger cars and a baggage car.

Oh my god. No one knew this train was running. Then the first train came back and picked up more people. They took the remaining prisoners. Boarding the Sultana started as soon as the first train pulled into Vicksburg. Now the Sultana was rated for 376 passengers and crew, was now expected to take on around 1,400 paroled prisoners. ALICE 1400 times 2.75 is $3,850 they're making off of this, which in, like, off the top of my head, in 1865 dollars is worth about, like, 11 trillion dollars now.

LIAM Yeah, I think that's right. JUSTIN Yes. No one had accounted for the unexpected other train, the final number wound up being around 2000 parolees. ALICE Jesus. JUSTIN Captain Kearns has already been concerned about overcrowding the Sultana when another boat, the Pauline Carroll, pulled into port. This was another non-contract boat, and it was also bigger than the Sultana.

And Kearns was like, we should put the overflow on there, we should put them on that boat, right? ALICE It's like, $75,000. It's like, $75,000. That's, like, mm, okay. JUSTIN So he went to the waterfront and he tried to convince Captain Speed, and Captain Speed said the rolls had already been made up, it was too late to change them now, everyone's going on the Sultana. ALICE Oh no.

JUSTIN But Captain Speed still went to go check with Captain Williams, who said he'd been aboard the Sultana, there's plenty of room, it's fine. He had not been on the Sultana. No, no, no. Lieutenant Tillinghast was also concerned with sending so many men on the Sultana because he had arranged another kickback scheme with the captain of the Pauline Carol. This guy is just everywhere. He went to Captain Speed and Captain Speed said there was plenty of room. Then Captain Kearns was like, okay, I'm gonna go directly to Captain Williams. He said, there's no room on the Sultana.

This is overcrowded, this is a problem. But Kearns was still under suspicion of taking bribes from the various steamboat captains arriving in Vicksburg, and Williams was like, no, they all go on the Sultana, and you're gonna hear about this later. ALICE Jesus. The one guy who is maybe not corrupt here. JUSTIN I'm not taking bribes, you're taking bribes. ALICE Fuck you.

ALICE Why are you so obsessed with bribes all of a sudden, is it because you're taking bribes? JUSTIN Are you taking bribes? You think you're taking bribes? His men will be fine on that boat, don't worry. No one involved here actually went to observe the loading process, or how crowded the Sultana actually was, except I think Captain Kearns. Now very late at night, as the column of men from the third train was marching into the Sultana, there was a revolt.

These men who had seen the horrors of Andersonville prison were anxious to get home to better conditions, could not bear the crowding on the sultana, they refused to be crammed in like hogs. They wanted to get on the Pauline Carol. So some unknown officer told them the Pauline Carol is quarantined due to a smallpox outbreak. Fucking assholes. So reluctantly they boarded the Sultana. And the scene on board was ugly. Not as ugly as Andersonville, but pretty bad.

Men had no room to sit or lie down. They were packed on every available surface, including roofs. They had to install temporary posts between the decks to bear the weight of the men, but there were still like sagging floors. Men were standing on crates, they were in the livestock stalls, there was one person who even took up a berth on top of a coffin that was being shipped. ALICE Yeah, two for one! JUSTIN Yeah, exactly.

There were some regular passengers on board, they were essentially confined to their staterooms, because the men were too thick to navigate through. Mmm, I've been there. Yeah. No, I haven't, what am I talking about? It's worse than Friday night. Um, a little after 9pm on April 24th 1865, the Sultana left Vicksburg, dangerously overloaded, and it was miserable.

Jesus. Now, they had provided rations for the men, but the men couldn't get to them. There was one stove available between the 1900 odd parolees. They could also get hot water from the boilers, which was used for coffee and boiling the meat in their rations. Delicious. Most people couldn't even reach the stove or the boiler so they resorted to eating only hard tack and drinking directly from the river.

Since there was a whole extra trainload of men who had not been accounted for, of course insufficient rations had been supplied. A lot of men went without eating at all. This was, however, a journey of only a few days, frankly it's still better than Andersonville. ALICE Yeah, and you're on your way home. Yeah. There was very little to do on the Sultana. It was a slow journey, the only real entertainment was, y'know, you pass a town or a settlement

or a village or something, or you see another boat. As a result, y'know, the proles would crowd to the side of the boat whenever another steamboat passed, and of course that made it list significantly. Right? Yep. Yeah. Sultana carried a significant load of sugar below deck, but was still extremely top-heavy, because humans are big bags of water and meat that's a bit heavier.

Right? Um, this was somewhat lessened at night when everyone was asleep, but still occurred whenever the boat turned. What's more, navigation was more difficult than usual, because the Mississippi was experiencing a massive spring flood. ALICE All the stuff we talked about, about how it's a new river every time it floods, and it's extremely dangerous, and unmarked and uncharted. JUSTIN At some points the river was as much as three

miles wide, bank to bank. Jesus. Yeah. Captain Mason was actually terrified of the heavy load which he had not expected or wanted. He was like, I'm gonna take a regular number of prisoners on me. Whatever this is. He's been inveigled into some quartermaster bullshit. Exactly.

Scheme hatchery is afoot. To ease his anxiety he turned to drinking. Yeah, I went to. Yeah. Oh god. He's in charge of the boat, but he's not driving the boat. That's the pilot's job, right? The pilot is in charge of, you know, driving the boat on the Mississippi.

The captain is just operating, right? But you know, he spent probably more time than Pruden at the ship's bar. Apparently somehow he never appeared intoxicated. ALICE Just like wedged in by dudes on every side, just knocking back whiskey. JUSTIN So I think during the day they managed to clear out the saloon, and then at night they brought out cots for the officers. ALICE Still, you gotta maintain that, like, privilege

as a rank, right? JUSTIN This is true, yeah. But there's a bunch of eyewitness accounts of people saying, man, Captain Mason was drinking a lot. ALICE Just grimly... SEAN But he never got drunk. ALICE Yeah, like, grimly remaining completely sober externally, as you're like, on your fifth bottle of whiskey, they're rolling around your feet, and you're just staring at a fixed point

on the wall opposite, just like, consumed with absolute terror. Yeah, that's like me on the airplane. Um. He was like, too scared to get drunk. That's Roz, baby. JUSTIN The morning of April 26th they reached Helena, Arkansas, where this photo was taken. ALICE Looks bad. I'm just thinking about all the adrenaline just punching the alcohol right back out of

your blood. JUSTIN A man on board spotted the camera, and this being a novelty at the time, told everyone hey, we're getting our picture taken! And everyone crowded on the side of the boat to get in the shot, and nearly capsized the thing. That's why there's only smoke coming out of one funnel. ALICE Kids these days on the damn daguerreotypes, you know. JUSTIN Yeah.

Captain Mason had to issue orders to the officers on board, hey, get out there and get your men to redistribute themselves. This is not good. Balance, balance you dumb idiots! We gotta, we're gonna trim this thing if it kills us. Yeah. It's like, the gram, the Instagram is less important here, please. Um, okay, so we have to talk a bit about steam engine operational theory in 1865. Thermodynamics is still in its infancy. Concepts like enthalpy are not well understood. Enthalpy

is sort of the embodied energy in a substance at different temperatures and pressures. It was definitely not understood by people who had to actually operate boilers. It was thought at the time a boiler was operating most efficiently when it was dry, right. Because they thought the energy was contained in the steam and not in the water. When in fact the reverse is true. We didn't figure that out for a few decades. ALICE No, you want your steam boiler to be extremely wet, right?

JUSTIN I wanted it to be wet, it's gotta be wet. They were only operating at moist. So, if you were in a situation where you wanted to get to port quickly, fighting a strong current, with an overloaded boat, you'd want to run the boilers as dry as possible to get there fast." ALICE This is like saying, essentially, it's like received wisdom at the time, totally understood that, I'm trying to get here faster so I need to drive with a handbrake on. JUSTIN Yeah.

LIAM Sure. JUSTIN This is all complete horseshit that people believed at the time. ALICE You can tell it's working, cause the car's much noisier now. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah. LIAM But we're pressing the ga's much noisier now. Yeah. Yeah. But we're pressing the gorse for the handbrake turns.

It's like, well I need more energy density for my two stroke engine so I'm gonna put less oil in the mix. Oh, 1940's sob. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, a relatively full boiler has a lot more energy stored and is going to run exactly as if not more efficiently than a dry boiler. Generally it's better to have more water than less.

So Sultana was being run fairly dry. Her boilers were configured four across, okay? I'm gonna draw a diagram here. Here's the boiler, here's the boiler, here's the boiler, here's the boiler. Underneath there's a pipe, right? The pipe is supplying water. I don right? And the pipe is supplying water. I don't know if the pipe is supplying water. I think it just might be connected that way.

Since there's pressure, there's probably some kind of Venturi device that's the injector. I don't know how they did it in 1865. They might not have had those yet. Anyway, there's a pipe that connects each boiler together, right? And then on top of that, there's another set of pipes, right? Okay. Like that, the steam goes out and that goes to the piston engines. Right. So these are configured across the boat. Right. So, you know, if we look at the hull, it's like this, um, we're looking

straight on towards the bow. Um, so essentially whenever the boat lists, because the boilers are all interconnected, the water level in each one lists with it. ALICE Oh boy. Free surface effect again. JUSTIN Yeah, you have exposed tubes on one side, and they're all submerged on the other side. Then it lists the other way. You got exposed tubes on one side, submerged tubes on the other side. Then it lists the other way.

You got exposed tubes on one side, submerged tubes on the other side. You are rapidly thermally cycling these boilers. You also have buildup of silt and so on and so forth, right? So each time all the men ran over the side of the boat to look at a bird, this thermal cycle was occurring. And every time it sloshed back into an empty boiler, some amount of that water flashed

directly into steam, it caused, y'know, this pressure buildup, just over and over again. This was not enough- ALICE One of these boilers has, essentially, a sheet of metal riveted over a big leak in it, right? Yes. One of them as a patch. There's a lot of dispute as to whether the patch actually contributed, though. But we'll get to that in a bit.

It certainly seems like it might have. It would be very funny if the whole goddamn thing explodes and they just find the piece of effectively ducked tape still completely fine, like, uncompromised. ALICE Yeah, so this is certainly enough to severely fatigue the boilers. There's another set of issues here. Back in the day, I mean, there were some inspections on steamboats, but not enough that like, are the steam pressure gauges properly calibrated, do the safety valves work as they should at the pressures they're supposed to? So on and so forth.

I mean, the fact that the captain was ordering the boat to go so fast up a strong current strongly implies that these boilers are being run over their rated pressure, which I believe was 135 psi. So the Sultana got to Memphis, Tennessee at 7pm, April 26, and offloaded some men and cargo, including all the sugar that had been acting as ballast, then set off again about 1 o'clock in the morning. Now, it's relatively calm at this point, everyone's asleep, the boat is just humming along as usual when... boom.

ALICE Oh. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE There's a... I found in the course of looking for images of these in illustration, which has dudes being blown up out of the boat in a little cartoon form. ALICE Ah, alright. JUSTIN Yes. At, uh, 2am in the morning, April 27th, 1865.

ALICE Just say 2am, you motherfucker. JUSTIN We don't know what order the boilers blew up. One of them blew up first, two other boilers blew up with it. The fourth boiler was fine. Yeah. It's a margin of safety, you know? The explosion instantly destroys the pilot house, right, where the pilot was sitting, and there any way you could control the boat

kills most of the crew instantly because it destroys the entire Texas deck where the crew compartments were. Yeah, where Texas was. Yeah. What isn't immediately destroyed in the explosion there's then a cloud of superheated steam that skulls everyone to death in the immediate vicinity. Oh no thanks. Yowch. And then there's a massive conflagration on this wooden boat. Oh. Uh. The decks that weren't immediately destroyed started sagging directly into the middle of the inferno, so a bunch of people just slid into the fire.

One of the smokestacks fell backward, which crushed the remnants of the pilot house, and the other one fell forward, which crushed the hurricane deck and caused it to collapse onto the deck below. ALICE There's like six different horrible ways you could die here instantly, or almost instantly. JUSTIN If you read the book, there's a full three chapters with like, a hundred survivor's accounts. Each one more horrific than the last one, I only picked a couple.

So yeah, the boat's in a pretty bad way at this point, very rapidly. No one's in charge. Captain Mason is still, like, alive, but it's very difficult to get control of anything, right? ALICE Well, he's still in the bar, remaining resolutely sober. Even more so now. JUSTIN I think he was in his cabin, I believe he's actually hung over at this point.

Yeah. There's no crew, no propulsion, no nothing, just a burning hulk, full of whatever is left of about 2100 people. Yeah, Captain Mason is like, trying to figure out what happened, he's not able to maintain order. Lots of soldiers, though, lots of the parolees were so tired they slept through the initial explosion, but were quickly woken up by those who had heard. Everything was on fire, and the flooded Mississippi spread out for miles on every side. ALICE Yeah, how do you feel about swimming a mile and a half through, like,

silty water, on no notice, and also you've been half-starved for several years. JUSTIN Yes. That is the situation people find themselves in, and then the passengers are also not in a great way, cause, y'know, women's clothing at this time does not do well with water. ALICE No. ALICE Or fire. JUSTIN Yes.

Yeah, you got a dual problem here. Take your poison. Yeah, so, exactly what you do in this situation is a difficult question. Mississippi was cold as hell, everyone was weak from being in Andersonville, the boat was on fire, there were not very many life preservers, and certainly no lifeboats. The current was very strong, it's 1865, so no one can swim, everyone was panicking, the whole boat was one huge human stampede. Now the river's very busy, and rescue was close at hand, but not close enough. ALICE I mean, this is a kind of 9-11 level of, like,

helplessness, right? Yes. Yeah, you're fucked. If you're in this situation, it's not good. You're going down. Some men managed to hold onto debris from the boat, some men clung to the rudder, many found themselves kicking off other drowning men trying to steal their piece of flotsam or jetsam.

Many of these men were severely injured or ill before the explosion, many others became severely injured in the process of the explosion. There's a lot of accounts here- ALICE Injury not service related, write it off. JUSTIN Yeah, write it off, yeah. There's a lot of accounts in the book, as I said, most of them are pretty grim. Some people managed to survive by clinging to the treetops in the flooded river. A lot of people started ripping up the boat for pieces of the boat they could float on.

Because, hey, one advantage of a wooden boat is wood floats. Now Captain Mason comes out on deck, he tries to calm the men on the bow, he said the sultana would soon ground itself on a sandbank, they'd be able to jump into the shallower waters, that was a lie and no one believed him. ALICE I mean, pretty impressive to even come up with a lie under the circumstances. JUSTIN I was about to say. Nevertheless, he did his best to make it right.

He spent the rest of his life hurling various pieces of debris, furniture, crates, anything that floated overboard for the passengers and parolees to cling to. No one's entirely sure how or when he died. Now in the water there's this sort of usual general panic that accompanies these kinds of maritime disasters, but also a new one. Where's that alligator? ALICE & LIAM Oh, fuck. How the fuck.

Shackles alligator? ALICE The pet turns on them in their moment of need. JUSTIN So a lot of people who could swim to safety, or could at least attempt to, they didn't for fear of attracting the alligator's attention. I mean, it's a target rich environment, man, and they mostly like stuff that's already dead. You just gotta... This is true, yeah.

I think you're fine, I think this is one of the only times you could out swim an alligator with any degree of confidence. At least one group of men clinging to a log were terrified when a horse that had fallen off the boat poked its head above water, all of them let go of the log, which the horse then leant its head on and floated away. ALICE Okay. ALICE Just mistaken identity. JUSTIN Yeah.

They needn't have worried about the alligator, though. Private William Lugganbeal of Company F, 135th Ohio Infantry, saw an opportunity to save himself at the expense of one seven and a half foot alligator. Who had also survived the explosion. He found a crate, bayonetted the alligator, then... ALICE Hold on a fucking minute. There's a level this guy is operating on that extends far beyond the bayonet as a weapon designed to kill the enemy, right?

That... This is the thing about the Civil War, maybe like all human conflict, right, is that it contains such things as like corn-fed German name Ohio and bayoneting a fucking alligator. Yeah. Then he threw the crate in the water and jumped in after it. How cool are you gonna feel in the second after you've bayoneted an alligator? Like, if you get out of this, like, you're never buying your own drinks again, surely. JUSTIN He missed.

ALICE Ohhhh. ALICE Probably thrown off by the whole bayonet-ing an alligator thing. JUSTIN Well, he eventually caught up to the crate and survived and floated away down to Memphis, but he had to do it by kicking off several other men, who then drowned. ALICE Oh, well, yeah. it by kicking off several other men who then drowned. Steamboat Bostona 2 showed up around 3 o'clock in the morning, saw the conflagration, slowed to a crawl, dumped bales of hay into the water and sent out ropes for those strong enough

to take hold. They also dispatched their small boat to go pick up survivors. But that was the first rescue and the later rescues took longer, cause word didn't reach Memphis for at least an hour, when some men clinging to debris finally floated on by. ALICE Yeah, he was just on the docks, and a guy floats past, and he's like, I bayoneted a fucking alligator. Yeah, I bayoneted an alligator, I'll see, you should probably go help those people. Yeah, please. They sent out the iron-clad USS Essex upriver, trying to rescue as many survivors as possible as they went. There was also a gunboat called the Tyler that was closer, but it had been disabled somehow, right?

They sent out some small boats to try and rescue men as they floated by, but darkness and fog were hampering operations. The entire town of Memphis came out to the docks to distribute supplies, make fires, and send out small boats to search for men in the river. Several steamboats were dispatched to the location of the wreck, but, you know, essentially by the time they got there, anyone was dead or floating downriver at that point. And the burning hulk of the Sultana drifted about six miles and then sank on what was normally dry land. ALICE This is a grim one, I mean, all the boat ones

have been. We've never had- ALICE These are happy boat ones. JUSTIN No, I mean. ALICE A cheerful boat one. JUSTIN Nothing good happens on boats. ALICE Well, sometimes you reach your destination. ALICE Not on this show, you don't. JUSTIN No, that's true, that's true.

Never gonna do a boat... Here's an episode about a routine boat voyage, there, nothing bad happened. Nope. Not on this show, god damn it. So this is very bad. There's not much else to say about it. What ultimately comes out of this? Well, the death toll is unknown, it's always gonna be imprecise.

ALICE Especially with like, the bookkeeping on the fucking Vicksburg Inn. You know? JUSTIN Right. Yes. Likely about 1,587 of the more than 2,100 passengers and parolees died. No definite cause was ever determined. It was likely a combination of factors overloading, fast-running, bad repairs, bad maintenance, poor materials, though they were again using one of the best

materials at the time which was charcoal hammered number one, which again I assume it's a kind of wrought iron. Very soon after two more boiler explosions, the FireTube boiler design was retired on the Mississippi. They went back to the old boilers for a while, and then I assume they went to newer marine boiler designs. Because I guess FireTube is just not suited for this application, but a lot of times since you got more space you can use more advanced designs than that. Captain Frederick Speed was court-martialed, found guilty, then the verdict was overturned,

since he never actually saw how overcrowded the Sultana was. Colonel Hatch left the service before he could be court-martialed. God, it's like being a cop. Yeah. Colonel Hatch left the service before he could be court-martialed. ALICE. God, it is like being a cop. JUSTIN. Yeah. Captain Mason was dead. There were a lot of conspiracies afterwards about Confederate sabotage, at least a few people who claimed to have done it, y'know, by putting some kind of bomb disguised as

a piece of coal in there, or a log disguised as a piece of coal with a bomb in it, I don't know. ALICE You're fully in, like, Confederate spy paranoia because they did just assassinate the president. JUSTIN This is true, yeah. ALICE And I imagine it probably overshadows it quite a lot in terms of the press, that the president was assassinated the day before. JUSTIN Yeah, this was not well reported on at the time. Because yeah, the President was just assassinated.

Um, November, you put this memorial in Knoxville up, there's actually like half a dozen of these. Yeah, I have a look. Various there. Yeah. Little kind of, I think this is the most architecturally interesting one, so I like the little obelisk on top of it. All the others are just kinda like, regular stones, y'know.

The remnants of the Sultana were found in 1982 under a soybean field, two miles east of the current channel of the Mississippi. Hydrology is so fucking weird. Yeah. Doing the like, where do Skyrim's rivers come from video, but about like... JUSTIN Where does the Mississippi come from? ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN Fuck you.

LIAM More of that. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. Ask Lewis and Clark. Oh wait, they're dead. So no one knows anymore. LIAM Oh. Well, we'll get it dealt.

ALICE Google, source of the Mississippi, probably. JUSTIN Yeah, probably. ALICE Lake Etosca. In northern Minnesota. SEAN Yes. So, that was the story of the Sultana. ALICE Relentlessly depressing start to finish. SEAN So grim. Why is every boat what we do the grimmest episode we've ever done?

SEAN I thought there was some good graft. I thought that was funny good graft, I thought that was funny. Everyone's griffed in Except Current. SEAN I do love that, I liked our corruption heavy episodes. ALICE Oh yeah, always. And of course I always appreciate an alligator being bayoneted to death.

SEAN Poor guy, he didn't do anything wrong. ALICE No, he didn't. SEAN Womp. ALICE A single desperate womp for that alligator, you know? JUSTIN He lived in a crib for like a year, and then he got bayonetted. LIAM Yeah, that's not fair. ALICE There you go. I can also do the word womp in the TikTok text to speech voice.

ALICE Don't. JUSTIN Womp? ALICE Wow. Wow. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Wokenomics. Fuck. Shake hands with nature.

Dear Justin November, Ye Liam and Guest, if applicable. No. Wrong. This Safety Third comes from a country which some say does not exist and is a conspiracy. Australia. Mmm. Yeah. Wow, these are some fascinating photos. JUSTIN Yeah, right?

SEAN I used to work for General Bullmouse and his car factory, which made cars with lion badges on them, in Elizabeth, South Australia. My job was as an electrical engineer, which mostly involved programming robots so they could make various parts and pieces that went into cars. After the treasurer of my country yelled at the automakers in 2013, all three big automakers announced they would be shutting down their plants within three years. ALICE This to me is Dank Pod's garbage time lore. At the end of 2016, and after we had made our last VF Commodore, we were then tasked

with the jov... The jov. ALICE The jov.odore, we were then tasked with the jov- the jov- ALICE, the jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov.

The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov.

The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. The jov. to dismantle a stamping press, which is used to stamp things like frame parts and panels. ALICE As we see here, all these beautiful, beautiful holding ute panels. JUSTIN You can make a ute, and then you can rack.

ALICE Damn, I can't make utes anymore. JUSTIN These are utes on a rack. When you take them off the rack, you're racking off me fucking you. The way a stamping press works is that the plates of steel go in, the stamping head pushes down with many fuck-to-Pascals of pressure, so the steel is curved and shaped... ALICE I wanna hear this in the original accent, desperately. JUSTIN I'm not good at Australian accents. ALICE Nah. JUSTIN And then can be sent off to be trimmed further and welded into unibodies and so on.

Hydraulic rounds, which push down with so many fucktow pascals of pressure, very much want to release that pressure in a swift hurry. I wrote my procedure, before disconnecting the control circuits and the power, and then I was sent off elsewhere, to decommission another part of the plant. ALICE Mmm, sad job. JUSTIN Yeah. On this particular day, when I was close by in a welding shop which housed many robots, I heard what could be best described as being similar to a single shot from an Abrams M1 battle tank.

So I left what I was doing and ran into the adjacent building. What I saw was one of the hydraulic rams buried in the passenger door of an Isuzu 550 truck, after it had already gone clean through a brand new Commodore with all the doors closed. There was also a second hole in a concrete wall, roughly nine meters from ground level. ALICE Australia the first country to make a practical rail gun and all it took was closing a car factory. LIAM And one poor sacrificial asuzu. JUSTIN Yeah.

And a Commodore. ALICE And a Commodore. JUSTIN Apparently the people dismantling the- ALICE Commodore died in battle. It's kind of Valhalla. JUSTIN Yes. Apparently the people dismantling the stamping press had thought it unnecessary to follow the procedure which I had written, and had failed to depressurize the hydraulic rams

before knocking out the shims that held them in place. Jesus. Jesus Christ on a sail. The moral to this story is that when someone writes a procedure manual, then you would do well to at least read the procedure manual. If that manual contains the word FuctoPascals, or other obscene made-up units of measurement, such as a metric Fucton, then it is because someone who does not know you would prefer it if you did not turn into chunky marinara. Thank you from EE7529.

ALICE Thank you for bringing the first railgun to market. SEAN Congratulations, a lot of success. ALICE You outpaced DARPA, you know. SEAN PS, the Chevy SS was the best car ever sold in America because it was built by people who live in a place where everything is trying to kill you, and not just the animals and plants but the dirt too. Remember Whittenoom.

Oh yeah, that's the town that was like all asbestos mine, right? Oh, right, yeah, that one, that one, yeah. There's a similar one, Times Beach, in the United States. Although that was benzene. ALICE Oh. Old friend of the show, benzene. JUSTIN Oh, yeah. ALICE Least favorite chemical of the show.

JUSTIN We should do both of those episodes sometime soon. ALICE Oh, that's a good idea. JUSTIN Yeah. Alright, well, remember to take the pressure off a hydraulic ram before you decommission it. ALICE Lot of pressure pressure related accidents this week. SEAN Delta P. You know, when it gets ya, it gets ya. Well that was Safety Third.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? ALICE No, because by the time this comes out we will have already done the Kill James Bond live shows, you have missed your chance to come and see us. Unfortunate. It's a great shame, you just have to, y'know, remain vigilant for the next ones. Well, you have to go back in time, and fight the Civil War? That would be too early, yeah, then asking that's gonna work. You gotta recalibrate your time machine.

Yeah. You donate to my friends, go fund me. Um. Donate to other good your time machine. Yeah. You donate to my friend's GoFundMe. Um. Donate to other good things, also. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, I mean, if you go back in time to fight the Civil War, remember to be on the good side. Right. Yeah.

That's key. You're supposed to be fighting against slavery, not for it. Yeah. The good guys wear blue? Yeah. Well. Bye everybody. it. Yeah. The good guys wear blue? Yeah. Well. Alright, bye everybody. Bye.

Don't get sent to Andersonville. No, don't do that.