Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 170: Indiana State Fair Coliseum Explosion

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

emergency management is important check out our TOUR (new dates added!): April 29: New York City https://sonyhall.com/events/well-theres-your-problem/?id=18162 April 30: Somerville Mass (SOLD OUT ALREADY SORRY!) https://artsatthearmory.org/events/bill-blumenreich-presents-well-theres-your-problem-podcast-2/ May 1: Somerville Mass  (SOLD OUT!) https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/wtyp/ May 2: New York City (SOLD OUT!) https://www.ticketweb.com/event/well-theres-your-problem-sony-hall-tickets/13918973 May 3: Washington DC https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/well-theres-your-problem-podcast/ May 4: Philadelphia, PA https://concerts.livenation.com/well-theres-your-problem-podcast-philadelphia-pennsylvania-05-04-2025/event/0200615211C27E44 see gareth on RAILNATTER: https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I will simply buy a new audio interface. Okay. Sure. This is the- that's- I don't know if that's the most efficient way of doing that, but it doesn't matter. I will buy a new house, and you'll be a new computer nit. Just completely replace every aspect of your life around Zencast. I've bought a new audio interface every week, the podcast is not- it's not even breaking

even at this point. ALICE Yeah, my tech setup is how I would... how would you describe it? Ship of Theseus. LIAM I'm about to have to take the Ship of Theseus out of the harbor, because I'm gonna have to move this computer. ALLY, your loose hard drives are gonna be rolling around in there. This computer is gonna have to get out of this corner, out of the apartment, into a Nissan Juke, and then across town...

Like a juke. I dunno, that's what the car rental place had. And then into the new apartment, down a really narrow flight of stairs... RILEY Oh, like Glasgow Tenement Stair-typed situation. Oh, yes. ALICE Into the new flats. And yeah, so, I have the travel rig as a backup, I have a laptop and a microphone for that, so if I suddenly sound worse for a while,

it is because something else has gone wrong in the move. Oh my god. SEAN Oh, moving is the most exciting thing. My favorite thing, and my favorite thing especially, is to move with Roz, who is the worst mover in the world. You are. You are. You are.

You are. You are. I don't like moving. I know you don't like it. I discovered I don't like doing is having to give your landlord or the letting agency an ultimatum, like a full on, like, the full on this is unacceptable letter, before you've even moved in. LIAM Oh, you are a tough pickle. ALICE I'm in a situation, I'm in a situation, because I rented a furnished flat, and they decided the day before giving me the keys to take half the furniture out of it, and then go, is that okay?

And I have to now go, no it isn't. No it is not. Give me my shit back, give me your shit back. Yeah, give me your shit back in the apartment, or like, give me a reduction on the rent, you know? Your shit back in the apartment, or like, give me a reduction on the rent, y'know? I hate landlords, I hate lessing agencies, I... We should sync, we should do the sync point. We should probably do the sync.

Yeah. Three, two, one, mark. Okey dokey. I like that Devon put in the notes, or put in when they flashed something up, I left this in so you can see how good they'reed something up, I left this in so you could see how good they're getting at it, I'm so proud of them. Thanks Devin. That did make my day.

That did make my day. Beautiful. Thanks Devin. It's positive reinforcement, you know, so it's very important. Positive reinforcement works on me, negative reinforcement doesn't, cause I'll just ignore you. I also love that we destroyed it later in that episode. That was also beautiful, beautiful symmetry. Something went wrong later in the episode and we just undid all that good work and you

know what? That's why they keep coming back. They love it. Not Devon. Devon would rather we were more professional. I mean the hogs keep coming back. They love the chaos. Yeah, enjoy your slop.

Alright. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to... Hi Ross. Yeah, enjoy your slop. Alright. Let's do this. Hello, and welcome to... Hi, Ross. 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, my pronouns are he and him, okay

go. I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are she and her, yay Liam. Yay Liam, hi, I'm Liam McAnderson, I'm about to avenge Nova's apartment calamity. Please, please. You have my sword. My pronouns are he and him, and with us we have, not a guest, not a guest. No, my name's Gareth Dennis, hello, I'm also a co-host, temporarily, don't worry everyone,

you'll get rid of me soon. That sounds like I know my own demise is inbound. My pronouns are he and him of course, but- ALICE We put you on like a performance improvement plan after like two episodes. It's like we're really trying to line shit up. We've got you move to a basement office and you're just getting the sense that the walls are closing in a bit. Yeah. MULLER I did wonder about the damp. LIAM You even took Gareth's stapler. Yeah, you withdrew my toilet privileges as well.

I did wonder about that. Let's do an episode. Oh no, but first we have to advertise something that's, I mean, I'm amazed that we have any spaces left given how well it's been selling. The goddamn tour. Oh, the announcements are on the second slide. Oh, fuck. I keep doing this.

I keep jumping ahead. I'm now on performance review. Yeah, you are actually gonna be guillotined there, bud. Sorry, I know you have a family, but it's time to go. That's a demerit right there, yeah. God damn it. That's the cause in Fired for Cause. Okay, what's going on?

Tell us what's happening, Rose. What you see in the screen in front of you is the interior of the Indiana State Fair Coliseum. Oh, shitty view. You may... This is untigget most of you,, like partially obstructed. I like the guy standing here, bottom right, in the, I mean it's a greyscale photo, but like, clearly with his arms crossed just surveying the dams like, ah, that's not gonna buff out

is it? That's the official pose of, well there's your problem, that's uh, you hit one of these, you know? Yeah, that guy is saying, well there's your problem. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. Also, is that a pinata dog? That's also just on some remaining concrete?

ALICE Possibly, yeah. So, you may notice there are some seats missing, and a wall has fallen over. LIAM Whoops. JUSTIN Today we're gonna talk about the 1963 Indiana State Fair Coliseum explosion. Ooh, okay. Yes. Now, there's a quote from the Reverend Fred Rogers that's often dragged out when there's a tragedy or a disaster or something.

Or Trump wins somehow. Yeah, exactly. That sounds unlikely. We'll get to that, motherfucker. Can you believe that Kamala Harris is gonna be president? Fred Rogers said, when I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.

To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing there are still so many helpers. So many caring people in this world. ALICE Sure, it's beautiful. LIAM Yeah, that's for kids, that's not for you. JUSTIN Today we're gonna learn what happens when there are a lot of helpers. Maybe too many of them.

ALICE Oh god. Well. ALICE Crush my childhood sense of security. JUSTIN Exactly. But, first we have to do announcements. Fake me out, I don't have a drop for this. No, exactly, there's no announcements drop. You just gotta- I was gonna say it straight and forth.

Announcements, announcements, annouuuuuncements. There we go, let's say, announcements. There we go, let's say, announcements. There we go, right, announcements. No, no, no. The New York City and Boston shows that we advertised earlier have sold out. We have added an extra New York City show and an extra Boston show. Links to tickets for that will be in the description. They're on the 29th and 30th of April, respectively, I believe.

ALICE I can't wait until we keep adding shows as they sell out, and we end up booking me into what is functionally a six month East Coast residency. LIAM That's gonna be a lot of episodes to put together. SEAN Yeah, we're under the gun. We're gonna do an episode on cocaine as we're on cocaine. I've never done coke in my life, but I think if ever there was a time to do it, it would be like two minutes before going on stage for the cocaine live show. That would be pretty good.

On the other hand, if I say that to customs and immigration, I will never be allowed to enter the United States again, so let's not do a cocaine show. ALICE We're not doing a cocaine show, we already did an LSD show. JUSTIN Don't do drugs. Yeah, as for the other shows, in Washington DC we still have about a third of the tickets left as of recording time.

In Philadelphia, at the Fillmore, we need to fill more seats. ALICE Yeah, please. ALICE That's what they call it then. Exactly. So buy those tickets there, there's still about half of them left. Sorry if the tickets are kind of expensive, we don't control the prices. You know, that's a Live Nation ticket master thing, you know, it's outside of our control. Awesome.

Yeah, well, the Sony Hall where we're playing, because we're playing Times Square, a real sentence I have to say now. Yeah, you did just say that. They, they, they sent me an email after I signed, I was testing something for the pod, and they were like, coming to, like, Sony Hall, it's, well, there's your problem, like, yeah, I fucking know, man, I booked that show. Well, the booking agent booked that show, but I know about it. Exactly.

Do we want to talk about the toy drive, or do you have anything more to say? Yeah, talk about the toy drive. Yeah, talk about the toy drive, yeah. Yeah, great. So, last year, Hogs, you r- so, I was talking to my- oh, I'm gonna get her title wrong, Erica, if you're listening, I'm sorry. She's like our development director, so head of like fundraising and stuff like that. The Hogs have donated between when we started donating last year.

So like November of 2023 to about now, the Hogs have raised $27,683 thereabouts, which is a tremendous amount of money for the place I work, which is called Lutheran Settlement House. We do social work, we do domestic violence, counseling, prevention, housing. We have a senior center. We have a food pantry. Kind of everything to everyone, especially with Mayor Parker putting her incompetent thumb up her equally incompetent ass. You might have to bleep that,

Devin. But yeah, so the hogs have been glorious, but I am appealing to the hogs today because I, once again, we are doing the toy drive for kids at our shelter. That's called Jane Adams Place and kids in our domestic violence program. I will fully rise into linking. We have an Amazon wish list. That's the easiest way for us to do this. We're not doing the PO box like last time, because I got sick of going to the PO box every day, and having the post office employees be like, there that motherfucker is again. ALICE You were literally bringing toys to at-risk youth, and the post office were like, this motherfucker!

To see his face again! SEAN Once I told them what I was doing they became very sympathetic instantaneously, which was pretty funny. ALICE Yeah, I bet. Like, you have a massive guilt card to play on anyone who fucks with you, which I think is really, like, you know, it's not a very well rewarded task, but that's one of the few perks that there are, you know? ZACH Yeah, absolutely. They were like, oh, come in the back, get a cart, and they would, like, hook me up with the loading dock, which was

pretty funny. ALICE It's like, your rewards are the laughter of children and making a postal worker feel just horrible about themselves. SEAN Aw, I hope not. ALICE So I rolled my eyes at the guy who is basically Santa. SEAN Yeah, also, Jewish Santa. I'm Hanukkah Harry, really. But yeah, if you wanna donate toys, I would appreciate it, I'll also have the donation link to Lutheran Settlement House if you hate toys, and want your dollars to not go to children

at all, but exclusively to hungry people, and our seniors. ALICE If you're on some kind of anti-natalist beef, but you're still charitable, so you're like, fuck these kids, but also like, you know, I wanna do a good deed, I guess you could do that. All I'm gonna say is, another year has gone past, and, you know, these children, they need the scale model Hawker Hunters. You know? SEAN They do.

And they're D'Havrin Comets. I... METE I've already seen the Comets popping up, I was very pleased about that. ALICE I will say, to those of you, there are some people who have donated... I don't have the names in front of me, I don't want to dox anyone essentially, but I do want to say there are several of our listeners who have donated in the thousands of dollars. RILEY That is so generous. I do want to say there are several of our listeners who have donated in the thousands of dollars.

That is so generous. And that is extremely generous. And if there's now a flag in our flag in our donation software database, so that if you donate and it gets flagged, yay Liam, and I have time in between whatever it is I do at work, I will be writing you a note on a post-it within reason because they're censoring me. I've already been told numerous times that I will be censored. Alright, that is my plug.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for giving us money. Thank you for enabling us to help survivors of domestic violence, old people, and the hungry. We are deeply appreciative of it. Absolutely. Yes. Alright.

Why am I saying that like I did something? I didn't do shit. Well, no, you're on the podcast and therefore getting the message out. You know? I guess so. I guess so. Yeah, exactly. This is a group effort here.

It's just that Liam's doing most of it. As Enver Hozier said, between the Albanians and the Chinese, we comprise over a quarter of the Earth's population. Yeah. I mean, this is, maybe not group effort, the word I would use there is group project. Yeah, one person does most of the work. Okay, I need to be very clear. There are people who are doing the work with, like, working at Jane Addams and working with survivors

of domestic violence much more intimately than I do. And I just wanna say, they deserve... None of their credit. I deserve all of it. ALL LAUGH I have Liam the Great and Powerful now, to me. Go hit your fucking kids. Just put that on like a sort of rainbow animated text, you know? Unicorn across the screen, don't hit your kids. The more you know.

Yeah, let's get into the meat and potatoes. I was about to say, that was- Wasted fifty minutes of time. That was nice and uplifting, so it's time to do the goddamn news. Must we. Yeah, we blew it. We live in hell. The once and future president has returned. You see here, before you on the screen, the text that I sent to my extremely worried group chat the night of the election

When I was going to bed and I was like, I'm not gonna stay up for this I'm not gonna torture myself because it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine It's gonna be like I'm gonna get a shitty liberal and things are gonna continue basically the same why stay up why why feel anything about this and same, why stay up, why feel anything about this. And unfortunately, as a sufferer of OCD, what I realize now is that in that moment I failed to observe my rituals, and my compulsive behaviors, and I jinxed it and caused Donald Trump to become president again. So I'm very sorry.

If you're looking at, like, net good and evil this podcast has put out into the world, Liam is helping the kids, I got Donald Trump re-elected. LIAM No, I- well, yeah, cause I did all of my rituals. And it still didn't work. ALICE No, cause I didn't do mine, right? This is the thing, we're all looking for the one OCD person who didn't do the thing, and that's me. It's my fault this happened. SEAN I will say, whatever, he's a shitty pro-life

Democrat, but Bob Casey refusing to wave the flag like, two weeks in, or whatever, oh my god, we're eight days out from the election. ALICE Oh my god, noooo. LIAM It's only been a week, yeah. Bloody hell. SEAN Gates is gonna be Attorney General, folks. ALICE Elon Musk is gonna be the... The doge guy. gonna be Attorney General, folks. ALICE Elon Musk is gonna be the... The...

The... The... The... The... The... The... The... The...

The... The... The... The... The... The... The... The...

The... The... The... The... The... The... The... The... with go away. Like, I... Mandatory Neuralink for every US citizen, that's what we're seeing in two years time. I know a lot of people out there are struggling, and like, even from an ocean away I kind of am too, because the whole planet's a little bit fucked off of this. I worry a lot for Americans, I worry a lot for my American friends. And I mean, I didn't, I gotta be honest, I felt the vibes that things weren't going

Kamala's way, and I ignored them. I was like, I'm gonna listen to the polls, I'm gonna listen to J. Anne Seltzer or whatever, and I was wrong to do that. What I should have been doing is turning my light switches on and off an equal number, an even number of times, that's a multiple of four but not of six, until it feels right. And I didn't do that, and now this is happening. JUSTIN I had a conversation with my dad about politics, which is something I can very rarely do right after Kamala got the nomination when Biden

dropped out. I was like, do you think she's got the juice? And Dad was like, no. And I was like, nah, I don't think so either. And then I had to suppress that feeling for the rest of the election, and I was like, yeah, I don't think she's gonna do it, fucks. But it didn't seem worth discussing. ALICE How many people, including me, on the left, or even on the center left, like, sort of left liberals or whatever, that whole sphere, managed

to convince ourselves that she was gonna pull it off because she was brats? JUSTIN Yeah, a really really really serious groupthink here I think. ALICE Yeah, for real! JUSTIN The other weird thing is, y'know, just how, I would say this election has been very parasocial in a lot of ways. I don't know if it's the first one, but, uh, this applies to both sides, because a lot of people who voted for Trump were like, uh, they interviewed afterwards, and were like,

I don't think he's gonna do all the bad stuff. I think he's just saying that for laughs. ALICE There were people who voted for Trump and then think he's gonna do all the bad stuff. I think he's just saying that, y'know, for laughs. ALICE There were people who voted for Trump and then voted Democrat down ticket in order to put a break on Trump somehow. JUSTIN Yeah. But then there was also a similar thing with, like, Kamala. One of the things is, I don't know if you remember any of the big group calls that were

organized, like, the week after... ALICE Oh, the white guys for Harris and shit? Yeah, one of them was like, I'm sorry to do this, because I know some of the people who organized it are probably listening, there was one that was like, train lovers for Harris. I looked at that and I was like, what are you talking about, she's not gonna do any of that. And now she definitely won't. They already did infrastructure, they're not gonna touch that again.

Everyone was projecting everything they liked onto both of the candidates, and it kinda, I don't know, it went nowhere. I looked at her policy page, which is still up yesterday, and I looked at it and I was like, there ain't shit there. People were talking about, how do you say, Democrats should have campaigned on this or that, they should have been less woke, they should have been so on and so forth. I think they should have had a policy. I think that would have helped.

There's just one single policy. Yeah, just one single policy I think would have been a nice thing to say, hey, vote for us and we will deliver this to you. That's the trouble, the Labour Party got involved, didn't they? Yes. The Labour Party are allergic to having any policies other than occasionally ones that are extremely harmful to vulnerable people such as trans people. So yeah, I know, Nia Novart, you're getting involved again.

I have a question. I have a question. So, um, dark Brandon, right? I'm track Joe. Everyone made a huge deal about his, his rail credentials, right? And so, you know, made this huge fuss about this big infrastructure investment. Um, how much of any of that actually has progressed at all? And is that, is all of it just going to get canceled? I assume that none of it even got to the point that it will need to be cancelled by the Republicans. Because I don't know of any actual rail projects that were actually being progressed other than just big talk. So what's actually, where are we actually at with any of that, Ross?

I would say the sum total of progress which has been made. The New Orleans demobil train is probably going to go through, they're too far in on that. There is now one extra train from Chicago to Minneapolis. Can we get the funding approved for more Pennsylvanians? Yes, that's also going through. There's going to be one extra train from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh at the cost of several hundred million dollars.

Make no sense. Be useful. That's mostly improvements for Norfolk Southern. What else is... ALICE What a legacy. What a legacy to end with. To maybe be, like, the worst American president. And that's, like...

JUSTIN There is a lot of Northeast Corridor improvements which are going through at this point. They're mostly bridge replacements, they're replacing the BNP tunnel in Baltimore, they are probably going to manage to force through the Gateway Tunnel in New York City this time around. Portal bridge is well underway. But that's all, you know, Northeast corridor improvements. You know, projects like expanding the long distance M-Trac network, or like, you know, replacing the long distance fleet. That's all up in the air still. I mean,

So the, so the, so the Democrats did the classic thing and they do this with women's rights. They did this with all this stuff where they say they, they basically don't do it and don't do it so that they can hang it over everyone for the next election. And they've been doing that for 40 years where they say, Oh, you have to vote us in so that we can codify Wade V. Rowe. You know, you have to just wait till the next one, then we'll do it. This is the most important election of our lifetimes because it's another opportunity. We had a story about John Kerry in 2004, man. Yeah, yeah.

I do think if they had maybe made this election about codifying Roe vs. Wade they might have had a better outcome. I disagree, because they relied on abortion too much in the final weeks, and nobody gave a shit. ALICE I kind of feel like none of us know, is the thing. I made the mistake of thinking I knew what was going on, or I knew what I was talking about.

I know I have no qualifications to do so. I made the mistake of, like, thinking things could ever be good, which I know I shouldn't, and I didn't touch light switches enough, I touched grass instead of light switch. You didn't flip the light switch three times, yeah. No no no no no no no, like, three times would've been wrong, like, four times, unless it feels wrong, and then if it does feel wrong then you go up to eight and then twelve, but then... But then you've had no effect because the light's gone on, and you have to have an odd number to have an effect.

No, no, no, that's not... Well, okay, sure, but... Then either the lights are always on, or always off. Yeah, correct. Yeah. This is the- We're about yourself, Roz. Don't worry about the lights in my house, I know how many furniture in there.

Just turning the light on and off on an empty room. But yeah, no, I mean, obviously the thing is, right, we can go through, because it's everybody's fault. It's like, it is your fault for if you voted for her not voting for her enough, it's your fault if you didn't vote for her, it's Joe Biden's fault for setting her up to fail, it's her fault for losing, it's Tim Walz's fault for... I dunno. ALICE I'm having a nice time. ALICE It's Donald Trump's fault for winning. JUSTIN Tim Walz, I feel like, got a bit too much

of the muzzle put on, and I... ALICE Yeah, they were scared of him being relatable. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. It's like Devon's fault for telling you not to vote, it's fuckin' Putin's fault, probably, or something, because of Russiagate. You can play this blame game all day, and it kind of doesn't matter, because all we really know is that, like, even if you have the perfect theory of change and of how to win elections, the Democratic Party have indicated to you that they are not gonna listen to it, right? They're gonna do the thing that they wanna do, they're gonna run things their way, and

their way loses every time! JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, about all you can say is, well, that went poorly, but I don't know if it could have gone a different way. Yeah, no. I don't know if there was a campaign that could have run in three months, where she was like, Vice President of someone as unpopular as Joe Biden, that could have won. Even if there had been, she would never have run it, because the people involved were just never gonna feel comfortable doing that.

So here's the thing, I'm a moron, right? That's very important. Because the people involved were just never going to feel comfortable doing that. And... So here's the thing. I'm a moron, right? That's very important. Oh, same. Absolutely. To put that on deck. But I have just written a book that did a lot of discussing...

I kind of repeat the point that people can get too locked into fluctuation events and not look at the macro. The macro here is that, and it's the same in the UK with the budget we just had, to be honest. We just had a budget that says it's record investment, and yet none of that will be seen by the lowest income people. And that's exactly what happened with the big investment strategy of the Democrats. They said we're investing all this money in it. It's a pathological thing. You refuse to acknowledge that people are suffering.

So I don't think any different, I don't think any campaign could have won this for the Democrats because they'd fucked it by their broad economic policy of, we're gonna do big investment but it's all gonna disappear into big corporations to make line go up, rather than to actually land in the pockets of people who are struggling. And the only person who was actually promising economic change was Trump. Yeah, I have maintained the theory that the Democrats could have run basically anyone besides maybe a couple of people. Uh, and Trump would have won. And I think a lot of his people like Trump and it's hard for us on the left to get that. But like, I, uh, I, I like, I don't

fuck it like the guy. I think he's a lunatic moron, but people love him. And I was reading the New York Times article that came out today, because I am a moron as well, about what undecided voters in 2024 and who they voted for, and number one, I have a bone to pick with, there's a woman in there named, like, McClain, that's her given name. Uh huh, like Joan McClain? Yes. And she was like, I was swayed by the Trump they them vote, like, I was gonna vote mine before that, and she wrote in Romney in 2020, and it was like, you're a lying scumbag.

But I do think that, yeah, people wanted to vote for Trump, and we have to deal with that on the left, and even with our liberal friends, friends sort of in quotes there. Yeah. We have to learn. I mean, the stuff that people like about Trump is that he's funny, and he feels like he's gonna be strong, and he's gonna fuck with and trigger all of the liberal institutions that everybody hates. I do two of those three things already, right, so like, if there's a lesson from this, it's to, like, fucking get more like a podcast, I guess, or kill yourselves.

I don't know. JUSTIN And people would have believed that. JUSTIN We meet the left Joe Rogan, apparently. Oh Jesus Christ. ALICE Jesus Christ. If things are fucked. LIAM If we tried that, it was called Comtown. JUSTIN Well, yeah, I mean, you know, this is the thing, that was a big piece of discourse a

couple days ago. There's this whole ecosystem of left-wing podcasts that showed up over the past eight years or so since the Bernie run, and I guess the Liberals just have no idea we exist? Yeah. We didn't move the needle at all, because we didn't want to because we felt like ambiguous and because we felt conflicted. Are we going to come out and endorse Kamala Harris? No, I'd rather end the podcast and beat you to death with a sword.

Which one of you survives? Yeah, one of the three of you gets to live. Who is it? I just, I think, yeah, maybe I'm over simple line, but I think when a lot of people in the US are feeling fucked, as in like their cost of living is getting worse, the amount they can actually get for a dollar is getting smaller. And there's two parties, and one of them says, we ain't changing shit. And the other one says, I'm going to do change, even if it's fascism. Then you're're gonna be inclined to vote for the person who does something, because at the moment you're fucked, and someone telling you we're not gonna change anything

is not appealing. And they're both just never gonna learn this. ALICE I said this on TF, right, because one of the things that Riley on there is trying to contextualize this in is that it's within this global shift rightwards, right? And it need not always be so, that's not just weather, you know, it's because of stuff happening. But speaking of weather, one of the things that is profoundly affecting this is climate change, right? And we saw in Spain, I don't know, we probably should have put this in as a separate notes

thing, but I want to talk about it now, we saw, like, absolutely catastrophic flooding, like, caused by climate change, like, hundreds of people dead. And- Also Santiago Calatrava put in that big arts center where the river's supposed to be. Yeah. And, like, Spain has a, like, center-left government that clung on by its fingernails in coalition in the last election, and their reward for that is something that is, like, makes it obvious how untenable this whole thing is, y'know?

And like, of course that's gonna drive you into the arms of whatever party is like, y'know, what's causing this shit is immigrants or whatever. So... Yeah, I was about to say, the Democratic party going hard in anti-immigrant was a bad idea. It also dropped opposition to the death penalty. Of course, no one wanted to do anything about Gaza, no one touched that issue. They made that way worse. They sent, what's his face?

They lost Michigan off that shit! Like, whatever anyone tells you that it doesn't matter, like, they lost big cities in Michigan, they lost the college towns in Michigan because they were like, kids were getting fucking pepper sprayed. Yeah, kids just didn't show up to vote, I mean, that was definitely- well, obviously kids are under 18, they should not show up to vote, that's voter fraud. But the young people did not show up for the vote, that's voter fraud. But the young people did not show up. I know, I could fucking blame them. So I turned 18 in 2009, so I voted socialist in 2012, I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2012, and I voted Democrat since, because they've all

been fucking against Trump, who, regardless of his politics, I just, I can't stand his voice, like his speaking voice, and when people do their Trump impressions It makes me mad. Oh, I'm glad you said that sentence ends cuz I was I was gearing up. I was no I am people do like friend of the show Tom Payne does it does like a pretty spot-on Trump impression. Yeah, and it makes me furious Folks very mad at my voice Is he triggered? I don't know. But I was just like, I can't stand this asshole.

And my entire- Should we bring out the fish? Should we bring out the fish? I don't like fish. And my entire, whatever you want to call it, voting career, it's been just like, oh, this is the most important, like we'll do it this time you guys, like we'll make life measurably better for,

and then they just don't. Yeah. That's what Gareth was just saying and I wanted to reinforce that. It's like when people can't buy like eggs and meat, they're going to vote for the other guy, even if the other guy is like, as long as they just say change,

because the median voter is a dipshit I think. Also to say that, you know, that no one was going to address, you know, the big sources of inflation that has been obvious in our, you know, fixed costs that everyone has, you know, rent, healthcare, higher education, so on and so forth. Yeah, can't touch those. Can't touch those. You know what would have made- The egg cost sixty cents more. Yeah. I wonder what would have...

What the Democrats, you know, saying Medicare for all and just flatly... Liam, in fact, you even gave them a head... A few episodes ago you even gave them the headline for the legislation. Just Medicare for all that would immediately save like every American on average like hundreds if not thousands of dollars. I yeah it was my dad's idea when he was arguing with Glenn Beck on Fox News when Obamacare went back. I made the ship forward and make it again. And my dad was like I could do it in one sense. United States of America hereby adopts universal health care and empowers or delegates the secretary of health and human Services to implement the same. Done.

One sentence. We have universal healthcare. That's one page, yeah. Yeah. Give my dad Secretary of Health and Human Services. Yeah. For real. Donnie, I know you're a big fan.

I take back whatever I've said about you or whatever. Give my dad HHS. This is gonna be interesting because they're,, you know, they wanna put RFK into something and he's gonna... ALICE Oh my god. Yeah. Oh, he's gonna kill us all, dude. I genuinely every time I- JUSTIN He's gonna kill us all cholera, but

what I'm excited about is he does wanna ban chemtrails. Which I think will be good. That's gonna be good for the railroad industry, because we just won't be able to fly planes anymore. ALICE Yeah! I look forward to that. Yeah, that'd be good. ALICE I just, every time I think about the election, I think about a new way in which all of us are fucked.

And I haven't run out yet, it's been a new one every time. So I just, I don't know what to tell you, I don't know what to say, I- SEAN By risky, buy streetwaffles, consume bus. ALICE By a gun! Like, fucking- SE, yes, God. Yeah. If you live in the United States, you can do it legally, if you feel like you can do it safely.

I think it's something I would do, if I lived in the US. Like, no question, I wouldn't hesitate about it. Because shit's gonna get, like, as bad as it is now, it's gonna get so much worse. Yeah, I was about to say, we need a liberal Waco. Oh god. Yeah. Talking of changing climates at Maslotto... Yes.

I was about to say, let's go to the other side of the world. So in Neom, in Saudi Arabia, they're putting up Panama Canal numbers. More than Panama Canal numbers. This makes the Panama Canal look like, you know, sort of, uh, kids play- Well maintained. Yeah. They're putting up like, white sea canal numbers, you know? Exactly.

21,000 dead are missing. 21,000 dead over 100,000 missing. Jesus. Putting together Niamh and the Line and so on and so forth. And missing in this case presumably just means buried alive in a trench or something. I am really confused at how you can put up those numbers with modern construction techniques. Yeah, me too. You just actively have to beat a couple of guys to death every shift, you know? Those are visible from space numbers. You just actively have to beat a couple of guys to death every shift. I was about to say.

I was invisible from space numbers. Like, I, yeah. So it's funny, because I recently was working at a company, and I joined the company and then realized that that company, oh it's Sister, it's Sister, everyone knows it's Sister, I was working with Sister. And Sister were working on Neom, and I come in and they're working on Neom, and I was like, why are we working on, what? And the people at the top genuinely convinced themselves, like, you know, obviously they're, you know, they're working, practicing stuff, but we

can change it from the inside. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Why do you, why do you think that? Have you ever met MBS? Do you know what it's like? We can push MBS left, you know? Like, they're like, okay, so yeah. So, so while I was, in the brief time that I was a sister, I was basically going, we should not bid for this, it's extremely high risk, we should not bid for this, it's extremely high risk, just listing off all the Neom stuff that we were trying to get in with. Partly because all engineering consultancies in the UK have been driven insane by the fact there isn't any work here, so they start doing nuts stuff like, what crazy shit monies can

we go for instead? ALICE Yeah, well I mean, Neom is like one of the places that is building stuff, and it's a short list, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, it's a giant, it's an extremely long ditch that is, I hope, not gonna be much more. But they've killed 121,000, sorry, killed or lost 121,000 Nepalese, Indian... ALICE Bangladeshi... JUSTIN Bangladeshi... Pakistani, people who come into the country, have their

passports confiscated, have absolutely... it's essentially indentured servitude. And have pretty grim working conditions. And send a bit of money back to their families. And then apparently, don't even get recorded as dying, you become lost, and then the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia pretends that you weren't, and then the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia pretends that you weren't, and gets upset that the Western commentators are talking about you. It's absolutely horrific. ALICE Yeah, we have a hundred thousand different

videos of these guys walking backwards out of the airport, so it's all good. JUSTIN Yeah, I don't understand how, it's like, what are they doing? Are they trying to blast the several tunnels for this project entirely with people with suicide vests? I don't understand. ALICE. Duffy knows how they're doing this.

ALICE. Duffy's caught to a factor of a million, yeah, are they just giving these guys cholera and then shooting them? ALICE. I mean, my feeling is, if you think that the design process for this is bad, imagine what the, like, sort of, like, works oversight for this is, you know, what do you think the foremen for this look like, what do you think their managers look like?

NARESH Yeah, are they like lining people up in front of the scraper? ALICE I mean, maybe! NARESH You know, I don't understand. ALICE Listen, I don't mean to brag, but I'm pretty certain if you put me in charge of a construction crew of a hundred people, I could find a way to kill all of them accidentally. Like, so- I don't know if- you know what, Nova, I don't know if you could.

I honestly do not know how you kill this many people without shooting half of them. I don't know how you managed that. Imagine I'm like a very junior Saudi prince's, like, fail daughter? And, like, I then have the same job, and I'm like, okay, now I need all of these guys to stand in front of the bulldozer, just in case, you know, to balance it. That was about to say, if you killed all those people by shooting them, that's adding a lot of ammo to the budget. That's true.

Ammo ain't cheap, yeah. And it's expensive, because we're in Biden's America. Not for long. Oh, Jesus Christ. And it's gonna be more expensive somehow. Yeah, it probably will. This is appalling. So my call to, and there are lots of engineers out there, lots of my fellow design engineers out there, but others as well, like people in the UK right now, if you're working on

this and you're kind of like, well, you know, I was told to work on this job and I don't have a choice, say no. You can move to another project or you can threaten them with leaving. Say no. Give your line manager the stories about this, the stories about the indigenous populations being murdered. You should not be working on this stuff. You have blood on your hands if you work on this project. Step away from it. Call it out. Shout out to New Civil Engineer, which is like an incredibly middling sort of engineering business to business publication. But they've been gunning for this. They've really pushed hard on making a point of this and shaming some of the UK companies working on it, of which there are a long list. So fair play to New Civil Engineer

magazine doing some proper genuine journalism. The big media companies just haven't been actually calling out engineering consultants and engineering companies in the UK who have been working on this. Universities involved in this stuff, stop it. Abandon KSA. Just because he has a lot of money does not mean that you should be sniffing his ass. Get out of there. Yeah. Yeah. This is a bad project folks. You know, I, I, I, my concentration at Drexel was in construction management and the one thing they drilled my concentration at Drexel was in construction management. And the one thing they drilled into us at Drexel, which is otherwise, you know, I don't

think they were very good at engineering ethics there. Every worker has the right to leave the job site uninjured. And here at here in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, apparently they've managed to install some kind of Rube Goldberg machine that they just toss all the workers in, instead of that, you know? It's just a stacker. It's a really big number. In return for what? Yeah, well exactly, it's for return for in return for what? Yeah.

Exactly. It's for bullshit. Yeah. It can't be a very efficient site. Um, just go back to the Seamus episode for people. God, it was a while back now. Absolutely. Tort of Forrest.

That Seamus episode. If you want to understand what these projects are, why they exist and how fucking stupid they are, that episode, if I'm sure everyone listening to this has, cause it's a brilliant episode, but if you haven't, go back to the episode to understand what the hell is going on with these projects. But like this is, it cannot be stressed enough that these are planet killing projects. They serve no useful function. There are like maybe two projects as part of Vision 2030 that are useful, which are railway projects, dedicated railway projects that have nothing to do with Neom. But like the majority of the 2030 stuff is

shit like this. It's like 500 meter high mirror stuff that is just planet killing projects that we shouldn't be progressing. Like no one on the planet should be letting MBS build this stuff. Sorry, I know I'm getting angry and elevated about this stuff, but this is like a typical situation where my fellow engineers, we're not taught ethics and this is the fucking result. This is the result is that British engineers, shit tons of them are working on this stuff or going out to Saudi and doing this, you know, are working on this stuff as site engineers, as consulting engineers. Why are you doing this? Stop it. The money is not worth it. You have hands, you have blood on your hands.

It's like the only, the only like situation in history that this feels comparable to, in terms of the churn rate, feels like French Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, where they did just run through slaves at an incredible rate, because they just considered people completely disposable. You know, this is ugly. This is ugly to comprehend. Yeah. It's a lot of that around, you know? Yeah.

Well. Let's blow something up. I was about to say, that was the goddamn news. Give me one second, I gotta get a backup beer. We continue, uh, we, yeah. Well listen, it was always gonna take a minute to talk about how the bad things happened. Fucked we are, yeah.

Yeah. I can't stress enough how much I'm not an authority on any of this, I just know that it sucks. I don't have a prescription for it, or anything. Just... Don't, like, don't get mad at me, cause I don't know either, I don't know anything other than that. I feel that in my gut.

I'm back. Liberal delusion, liberal complacency, those are the words that just come to mind, is like, we on the left are doomed to remember, right? If you do nothing and people get poorer, well, anyway, we've been there, we've been there, we've done that, let's talk about explosions and what, once Roz comes back with beer, when we get to go. Let's do this. I'm gonna get a beer, actually. Okay. Let's talk about explosions and what, once Ross comes back with beer, when we get to go. Let's do this. I'm gonna get a beer, actually.

Okay. That's a good idea. Yeah. Okay, do we wait a bit more then? Yeah. We'll wait a second. Okay. No, no, it's okay.

Oh, there we go. Cool. Okay. What is propane? What is propane, Ross? We're on organic chemistry again. Yeah! I was about to say, yeah, a lot of organic chemistry this season.

Propane. Three carbons, eight hydrogens. That's propane. It's really nice, good, clean burning fuel. Now, propane, as sold to consumers, is a type of liquefied petroleum gas. It's a mixture of propane, a small amount of propylene, and some other trace gases. Some other fun stuff.

Yes. So to make it smell so that you can... there's sulfur-y stuff so you actually smell it if it leaks. Little bits of stuff like that. Liquified petroleum gas can also include butane and other chemicals, but commercial propane is 90% propane. And then the stuff you use in like a propane grill, that's like 95% propane. Oh, wow. Okay.

Yeah. So propane is gaseous at room temperature, and so therefore they liquefy it by cooling it down and they store it in pressurized tanks, which you can then purchase and take home with you, for your propane grill. ALICE Yeah. Have a liquefied, pressurized gas that you can use to cook meat on. JUSTIN Exactly, exactly. It's reasonably safe, it's reasonably clean, it's reasonably convenient.

ALICE It's a very Hank's a very Hank Hale type of fuel. JUSTIN Yeah, you don't have to clean out the grill afterwards, although I'm a charcoal guy, I prefer charcoal. I like to taste the meat and the heat. ALICE I think I've got like three almost finished cans of propane upstairs from when I go camping. Those are now like, haven't been used for like twelve years, so they're probably ready

to just explode upstairs. That's fine though. ALICE That's good, that's good. GARETH They probably, either that or they've all leaked out by now. ALICE Well that's also true. Yeah, they're sat next to the plastic cup of old BR track detonators that are also explosive. GARETH Oh, that's a good idea.

That's a good idea. ALICE Yeah. Workplace safety is number one, baby. GARETH I like that it's different parts of the thing. Like, Roz, you have the nuclear bomb in the basement, and Gareth you have the explosives in the attic, so it's, y'know. Yeah. There's a symmetry to it.

One inherent issue... Shameless. Huh? Shameless. And I was gonna say get the fertilizer, but... One inherent issue that sets propane and other liquefied petroleum gases apart from, say, natural gas, or like, fuel oils, is that propane is a dense gas. If a cylinder springs a leak for some reason, the gas will flow out of the tank, and it

will pool on the ground instead of dispersing into the air. Oh, so you don't blow up your house if you have a leaky propane canister upstairs. JUSTIN Uh, maybe. ALICE Oh, fuck. JUSTIN I'll open some windows. So that's why you should store propane outdoors, in a cage. ALICE Then if you blow it up it's the ground's problem. JUSTIN Yeah!

JUSTIN Then if there's a leak it's dispersed by the wind. That's why you usually store it in a big cage, with individual cylinders, or if you have... I'm just writing this down, I'm just writing this down, I'm thinking about my Ikea Calax upstairs, it's full of propane canisters. Outside. Yeah. Page. Okay.

Yep. Or, if you need a bunch, you have a dedicated tank, which is also outdoors, designed to vent to atmosphere. ALICE Vent to atmosphere. Okay, cool. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE The grow-off valve, yes. JUSTIN So, propane is also odourized, so you'll be able to smell the leak, and know that when

you smell it, it's time to get out of the area. Propane has many commercial uses for fuel for vehicles or for industrial equipment. A lot of forklifts run off of propane I want to say. It can also be used as an aerosol propellant. There's a lot of newer heat exchangers or heat pumps that use it as a refrigerant because it's more environmentally friendly than chlorofluorocarbons and also works a lot better. And of course another aspect where propane is used is in commercial kitchens, especially those that are like off of a natural gas distribution system. You know it's a lot more convenient to transport propane than

compressed natural gas. Propane is like 320 PSI or so, compressed natural gas is like 2400 PSI, I wanna say. He's a much more robust container. And if you're running like massive gas burning, like, stovetops off of it, y'know? Yeah, exactly. Now, in this presentation, just because of the sources I used, we're going to refer to propane and liquefied petroleum gas interchangeably. I should mention the big source I used for this was Disaster in Isle 13, it's a report on sort of the emergency response to this incident, more than it is about the actual

incident, that's available on Internet Archive. ALICE You would hate to hear disaster on aisle 13 over the tannoy at a supermarket. ROD Exactly. Yeah, that's pretty bad. ALICE If they don't even use a code, you know? ROD Yeah, that'd be disaster. ALICE A quick shoutout to the Cincinnati episode,

where someone who, one of the sources that you used, Roz, came into the comments and was like, oh, that's me. I wrote that. So shout out to that guy. Hi. Yeah. What is a state fair, and why does it need a coliseum? I can answer this through the medium of stationery.

Are we familiar with the hipster stationery brand Field Notes? Yes. Are we aware that they did, uh, you like them, Justin, they're a little like a two staple cardboard notebook thing. It has a pretense of being unpretentious, it's meant to be like a farmer's almanac or whatever, or something you'd use for engineering, maybe. And so they do a lot of special editions, and I had a box set of one per state, in different colors, with a little gold foil thing, with some fun facts about the state.

So, this is the California notebook out of the box set, and here's all the stuff that California exports, or whatever. And I used these for years and years and years, and so, because of this, I not only know state capitals, but I also know what a state fair is. And a state fair is where you, like, go to a location in the state, and you look at a cow made of butter, or you look at the best pig from this state, or you see some... You can go see butter made of cows.

Yeah, you can see some like... Ross, have I ever taken you to the, uh, the, uh, farm show? I have not been to the farm show. I would like to go to the farm show. I'll take you to the farm show. Yeah, so my understanding of it is, you and whoever is running for president, if it's a swing state and an election year, go to this place, you see some cultural activities, you consume some very strange, very high fat and carbohydrate

foods- SEAN And the best milkshakes you've ever had. ALICE Uh huh. And then you maybe get drunk and you go home. JUSTIN That's something that compares with my milkshake. ALICE Aww, you're so handsome. Actually, these milkshakes might bud. Yeah, that's a good point.

Um, yeah, he's mad at me because I tripped over him in the kitchen yesterday. Oh, you're a cake-milkshake like the football? Jesus Christ. Yeah. Jail. Jail for Rodz. Jail for Rodz for one thousand years. Um, yeah, so, you know, this is a great place.

You can show off your biggest livestock, your giant vegetables, your enormous fruits, um, eventually there's side shows and attractions that show up, you can go on a ferris wheel, you can go on some kind of fold-up dark ride, little tiny roller coaster, merry-go-round, the infamous zipper... ALICE I wonder if it's possible to do a kind of night tour situation and go to every state fair in the same year? Oh my god.

I think they're all roughly in the same season as the issue. Yeah, you'd have to do a lot of traveling. And some of them, like Hawaii and Alaska, would fuck you up in terms of the travel, but I wonder. Yes. You also have shows, or events, you might have horse racing or a concert or auto racing. You can just say Kentucky. You can just say Indiana.

Yeah. Demo derbies. Demolition derby, demolition derby. Okay. You have mini bands. I love demo derbies. Demolition derby, but with pickup trucks, monster trucks, demolition derby, but with... They usually have a lot of demolition derbies.

You might have a tractor pull too. Oh, I love a tractor pull. Yeah, many, many redneck things. Hey. They're all very exciting and fun. And fun. Fun, yes. Yeah.

I'll do Republican voter outrage. It'll just be me at the demo derby. With like a ten foot idol of Joe Biden on my car. Oh you have the Kamala Harris car at the demolition derby. ALICE It's painted brat green. You get the most neck injuries someone's ever had at one of these. LIAM But I'm so Julia.

Uh uh uh uh uh. Many loves that fucking song, it's exhausting. ALICE The problem is, it's a banger, but now it's indelibly tainted by association. You wind up like that guy. She could've been legendary, she could've had a reign of power to totally restructure the US, but like, y'know, the hubris and tying herself to the thing made it really really tainted and ultimately she lost out on power and it emerges that I'm talking about Charli XCX. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH.

JUSTIN You'd wind up like that guy, uh, the pro wrestler guy who went as a heel, the progressive liberal, where people forgot it was a bit. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. JUSTIN Um, yeah. I would not... I don't know, seeing the Harris-Waltz car at the demolition derby would be very funny. Oh yeah, crushed into a cube instantly. Yeah.

Lots of horrible delicious fried foods. Mmm. Yeah, go to the State Fair, it's a good time. At the Indiana State Fair in particular, you can visit the Midway, You can see automobile racing. They got a racetrack because you know It's Indiana the Indianapolis 500 is not so far off I was going to say the Indy 500 but you know about that You can see the local 4-H show off their livestock. You can see high school marching bands in competitions Yeah, there's also a hot air balloon race. How do you rate what I assume the first person to get vague near the county where the finish

line is wins. That's bullshit. No, this should be, you should have to do this like a JDAM. For the first time in history, the Indiana State Fair balloon race has been won by the People's Republic of China? ALICE And piloted by Balloon Boy, remember that? ALICE Oh god, yeah. JUSTIN In the past there were such exciting events as Velocipedestrianism.

ALICE What? JUSTIN Very early bicycles. ALICE Ah, Velocipedes, yes. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Oh, yeah. JUSTIN They had horse diving. ALICE That's so bad for the horse, they don't like it. LIAM That feels cruel. JUSTIN And of course they had a eugenics event.

ALICE Ah, hooray! LIAM What? ALICE I mean, it's a logical progression in the sense that you have a bunch of, uh, like, sort of planters and ranches going, yeah, this is the best cow we bred in the state this year, and I am very racist, buy the transitive property. JUSTIN They had a, this is the best baby we bred in the state this year. ALICE Mm. JUSTIN Yeah.

We have moved past such things as velocipedestrianism and eugenics. ALICE Uh huh. JUSTIN So let's talk about the Indiana State Fair Coliseum. Why is Garfield in this? I'll get to why Garfield is in this in a second. I'm glad, cause that had a series of questions about Garfield. Why is the ticket booth so ornate? Cause this was a Works Progress Administration construction. Okay.

Uh huh. Yeah. This was actually renamed to Corteva Coliseum today. Literally? Yeah. What the fuck is a Corteva? It's some kind of big agribusiness. Of course it is.

Of course it is, yeah. Before that it was the- The Monsanto Farmers Coliseum. Yeah, okay, yeah. Before that it was the Indiana Farmers Coliseum, and before that it was theers Coliseum. Yeah, okay yeah. Before that it was the Indiana Farmers Coliseum, and before that it was the Pepsi Coliseum. Yeah, I see where this is going. You hate to see a kind of small local producer like Pepsi bought out by a Leviathan like Indiana Farmers.

Yeah. So it's funny, so there's a thing every year called the Royal Wealth Show. The UK has farmer shows that are kind of like lots of elements of this, but without some of the Americana. Fun vibe, a lot cheaper. Much cheaper, yeah. And I suppose this is the parallel of the fact that Royal Wealth Show happens every year, it's in the same place. It has permanent structures. So lots of it's like tents and temporary stuff. But for the thing that you know you need to have lots of people seated in every year, you might as well build a permanent thing that does that, right?

Which I guess is what this is. It could be a tent, but actually by the time you've built an enormous bloody tent with all the seats once a year, just build a permanent structure, right? Yeah, it comes in useful in the off season for miscellaneous. Plus, I mean, this isn't really a coliseum. It's like a medium museum, but like, but, uh, yeah. So Indiana farmers coliseum named after the Indiana farmers mutual insurance company who uses Garfield as its mascot. Illegal.

I bet they paid like $5 in like 1932 for it and they've, and they've, and they've just ridden off the back of it since. Now, why do they use Garfield as their mascot? Googling the age of Garfield. Why? Yeah, that's a good question, why did they? Because Garfield lives in Indiana. No, he- that can't be true, I refuse to accept that.

Google's Garfield. You're not telling me that Garfield is an Indianin. No, Garfield lives in Indiana. I'm not, no. Prove it, where is his- show us the long form birth, Garfield lives in Indiana. I'm not, no. Prove it. Where is his... Show us the long-form birth certificate. He lives in Muncie. I just...

There's also a kind of element of a John Grisham or James Elroy thing here, where it's like, the Indiana Farmers Mutual Insurance Company, they'll kill you, in the sense that that's like a, probably like a multi-billion dollar corporation somehow. That is just like, ostensibly, and grew out of two guys in dungarees being like, bury my money in this barn, but now is this kind of terrifying thing that has tendrils all over the world, that extends from Indianapolis, and is now like, having a guy beaten to death in a back alley in Kowloon somehow. You know?

JUSTIN LAUGHS. So, yeah, they actually have a big, uh, Garfield mascot who hangs out in the stadium. LIAM I don't like that at all. JUSTIN The mask of capital is a Garfield face. You know? ALICE The creator of Garfield, uh, is a resident of... He's an Indiana native. He's from...

And he's a lunatic! Is he? He's from Marion. I don't know where that is. I mean, I know the Dilbert guy is insane, but like... So sorry, so sorry. I was starting to worry there was something wrong with cartoonists. Even more, even more...

So sorry, Jim Davis, as far as I know, is normal. The only one we can trust is Heathcliff. I mean, he did draw John drawing Dogcum that one time, so, y'know, maybe not that normal. That's a good Garfield right there. We can find that, Dev, if you just Google, well don't Google Garfield Dogcum, but like, find it. No, I don't want to, god dammit. Find a head put up a thing. I don't even want to find it. So there's a lot of Garfields God dammit. Find it, and then put up a thing.

Yeah. So there's a lot of Garfields out there that are kinda mediocre, that one's a good one. The thing is, I find Garfield very very germane to the kind of absurdism of putting Garfield out of order, or Garfield without Garfield, so it's just John talking to himself, or, my favourite was the one that, there's a panel, there's one panel of Garfield where Garfield, so it's just John talking to himself, or my favorite was the one that there's a panel, there's one panel of Garfield where Garfield is being flung upside down T-Posed out of a window, and if you tag that on as the third panel of any Garfield comic, it's still funny.

So, uh, yeah, this is, this is the Corteva Coliseum, I guess again, as of today. It kinda looks like old Boston Garden, I like it a lot, this is a very handsome building. It does, yeah. It is nice, yeah. Reminds me of, um, this is some shit from Tropico, kind of, which I'm a big fan. So I really like the ticket windows here, I assume these have been boarded up because they put HVAC back there or something, but they got like, y'know, the grading is all cornstalks. ALICE Yes.

It's very nice. Yeah. Of course there's cornstalks, yeah, that is nice. I like a little detail like that. JUSTIN Oh yeah. Well, it's interesting, the Works Progress Administration sort of invented a new order of columns, where the capital... ALICE It was like, functionally they were an ancient Greek city-state for like a week. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly.

Where the capital is like a corn stock as opposed to, y'know, the ancient Greek, whatever. I forget what it's called. ALICE The Ionic, the Doric, the American? I mean, fuck, I feel a little bit like Patriotic by Proxy, that's cool. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah, so this is a multi-purpose arena. It could be set up for ice hockey, basketball, it could be set up for concerts. Again, this is built by the Works Progress Administration in 1939 to replace the 1907

livestock pavilion. It formerly was the host of the Indiana Pacers. Uh huh. And no less than seven ice hockey teams, none of which were in the NHL. ALICE They sure are trying. ALICE Doing ice hockey in Indiana angers God, I think this is clear at this point. To everyone except Indianans.

JUSTIN It's a lot better than doing it in Las Vegas. ALICE Oh, fuck the Knights, dude. Yeah. 6,800 seats when configured for basketball, 6,200 for ice hockey. You know, today it's just not big or modern enough for professional athletics. They all moved downtown to the Gainbridge Field House. They still use it for smaller events and concerts and like high school sports and stuff like that. They hosted the Beatles in 1964. ALICE Huh.

JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE And the recording for it was just solid screaming, as every Beatles live act recording was. JUSTIN Mmhm. Yeah, so this is a pretty nice venue, in my opinion. Now we have to talk about fire inspections. ALICE I desire this car, ecstatically. JUSTIN Oh yeah, fire marshal, yeah!

ALICE Let me drive this around. Listen, okay, everybody got mad at me, right? I desire this car aesthetically. Oh yeah, fire marshal, yeah! Let me drive this around. Listen, okay, everybody got mad at me, right, I got a new compromise thing that's gonna make only 70% of the people mad at me. Let me be a fire marshal. You get the car, I think they give you a gun, you definitely have a badge, that's like most of the ways you're like a cop. Fire Brigade good, right?

Yeah, I think so. Fire Police and PA, I don't think carry firearms? The guy, our friend here on the right of the fire seems to be enjoying it as well, he seems to be puckering at the Fire Marshal vehicle, he seems quite pleased. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was! That white arm!

No, it's gorgeous. Gorgeous. ALICE Yeah, exactly. He's going, ooo. ALICE I was! That white- ah, mm. No, it's gorgeous. Gorgeous. JUSTIN So, for any building that's like a large venue, fire inspections are important and ought to be conducted regularly. ALICE Yeah, by a guy with a cool as possible one of a car. JUSTIN Yes. These inspections are the purview of the fire marshal.

During these inspections, of course, you're looking for anything that might cause a fire, or which may impede evacuation if a fire were to occur. Like a whole bunch of crap stored in a stairwell. ALICE And padlocked emergency exits. JUSTIN Yeah, padlocked doors, improperly stored flammables, or whatever, right? Now, fire inspections are important, but they only work if you actually have the manpower, and the wherewithal to do them. ALICE One of the first things that any fire department

facing budget pressures cuts. JUSTIN Yeah. LIAM Yep. This stuff. Yeah, exactly. JUSTIN In Indianapolis in 1963, there was a problem with both of these. The Indianapolis Fire Department had shortened the work week from 70 hours to a leisurely

63 hours. ALICE Oh god. JUSTIN Oh, those lazy pricks. ALICE Uh-huh. They read, you know, they read the thing about ace hours for work, ace hours for leisure, another ace hours for leisure. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. That's basically how much the French work.

This resulted in a shortage of manpower. Fire police do not carry weapons. Sorry that took me so long. Still a cool jump title though. Yeah, they're basically just glorified traffic cops, but they- What's the car look like? I'm gonna google this real quick. Uh, it's, yeah, I think it's municipal based, but there are some that are like, pretty sick. ALICE Fire police car.

I'm just seeing a lot of police cars on fire. ZACH No, do fire police car, fire police Pennsylvania. ALICE Oh, that's pretty sick. A bunch of like old 90s SUVs, like an old disaster movie? Okay, that's sick. ZACH Oh, nice. Okay, yeah, that's a nice vibe. You just know that in the UK it's a hatchback Astra.

ALICE A 1990 Suburban that you have to drive for work? Incredible. Fuck the climate, this rules. Pennsylvania does it different, baby. I don't know, someone's gonna have to send this to Devon so they can put it up on the screen. I'm not gonna remember to do that. Nah, we're not gonna remember to do that.

She's so tired, Roz. Now furthermore, the Fire Chief in Indianapolis believed that because the Coliseum was state-owned property, it was outside of its jurisdiction, even though it was inside the city limits. ALICE You gotta have some kind of state fire marshal, y'know? JUSTIN Yes. Thus the inspections were rare, and only cursory. Unley usually they just inspected it right before the state fair, even though the Coliseum was leased to promoters and held events throughout the year.

Now, you might ask, okay, what's the risk of fire in a fireproof Coliseum? ALICE Man, you can't burn down a Coliseum. I haven't seen Gladiator 2 yet, so I assume. JUSTIN Yeah, it's all made of brick and, like, concrete and, y'know, metal, y'know? Yeah. Right? It's ice hockey, you got ice in there, what's the ice gonna catch fire? I don't like that, ooh, Ross.

I don't like that. If you like ice, you can talk about the ice, but not in the context of fire. In the Coliseum, of course, they serve concessions. Yeah. Well now I'm hungry. concessions. ALICE Yeah. Well now I'm hungry. JUSTIN Concessions need to be heated. ALICE Uh, oh boy, this is gonna suck ass. ALICE Just a shitload of burning corndogs.

JUSTIN Yeah. This is about, I wanna say, four miles north of the city centre, there's no municipal gas line out here, so the heat comes from propane, which needs to be stored. Where's there a lot of room for storage in a coliseum? Under the seats. Oh. Oh. Now, do you see a problem that may develop here?

I'm not, I'm deliberately not, I'm looking at the corndog, I'm thinking about how good a corndog's gonna taste, and I'm just not thinking about it. So for everyone, anyone who uses the ASDA in Adel in North Leeds, there's a space underneath that asda that's called, by the staff, called the Void. Because when they built the asda, they built, the asda was basically a giant warehouse, they built it flat, but it was built on a plot that was on a slight slope. And the Void, the bit that you could actually access without stooping had lights, it was kind of like basically fine, they used it for storing stuff, but they also store stuff

in the void, which was the bit where you open the door, go in, there were no lights, and it disappeared off into infinity under this, you know, Amy along building. ALICE You can't call it that. You can't be like, hey, can you store this bag of crisps or whatever in this pallet in the void? ALICE That is literally what they did, yes. And what I love is, there could be anything in there, since that thing was built in, presumably, the late 90s. So, yeah, so if you're using the Azda Adel, just be aware that you might be stood on above anything, and it could be flammable,

it could be, yeah, who knows. So as the adult, shout out. Yeah. I have been ADULT by this information. So you know, there's a problem that may develop here. We'll talk about here the commissary, which is located under aisle 13. I'm just gonna read the caption here. This is an artist's conception of the approximate dispositions of materials in the concession commissary at the Coliseum.

According to an eyewitness, a radiant heat device, number one, fired by propane gas, was used to heat pre-popped popcorn in a storage bin. ALICE Not the popcorn heater! You were supposed to serve man, not betray him! LIAM To serve mankind. A nearby take... ALICE Feeling like emotionally, like, the popcorn heater has betrayed its purpose.

LIAM I don't know why I just immediately, my mind just put you into a beret, and you were just dressing de- like, Sarge sergeants are just dressing down this slightly sheepish looking popcorn machine. I don't know why I just went there. That's not your popcorn, that's the king's popcorn! Oh dear, I must be delirious. Yep. Right there.

Probably still hungover. A nearby tank of propane apparently became overheated and a safety valve was popped, causing the gas to flow from the valve and the tank to fall over. Oh, no, I don't like that. It's about a hundred pound tank of propane. Another popcorn- Five second rule. You pick it back up, it's all good.

Yep. Another popcorn storage bin, number three here, was being warmed by an electric cone type heating element. Right, okay. So as you're describing this, I know this is a little bit left for you to describe in this, I'm visualizing like, six or seven different, like, weird heating constructions of varying types and sizes. ALICE Yeah, just like individually heating popcorn

kernels, and like, the music powerhouses playing. JUSTIN This is the propane popcorn, this is the electric popcorn, this is the charcoal popcorn, over here we have yandercite coal popcorn, and also bituminous coal popcorn. ALICE I believe that, like, there was a point in the Pennsylvania State Fair's history where you could've got, like, anthracite popcorn. I believe that there was a point in the Pennsylvania state affairs history where you could've got anthracite popcorn. I believe this. Pennsylvania dominance!

Yeah. Hey, you could still get, uh, I mean, coal-fired pizza is still a thing that's single-handedly holding up the Pennsylvania anthracite industry. Good grief. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also still some home heating. So all these things are wiggling and jiggling

and falling over in this void underneath the seats at aisle 13. LIAM What's really funny about this is this disaster happened on Halloween, and we didn't do it for the Halloween episode. ALICE Fuck's sake. ALICE Yeah, why is your Halloween costume ocean, Spex? JUSTIN This is on October 31st. Just maybe not in order here, but...

ALICE That's rough if you get blown up and you're wearing a costume, you know, you gotta go to the hospital and they're trying to reattach your arm, you're wearing a Dracula cape. JUSTIN Sometime, shortly before the events we were about to describe, a manager opened the door to the commissary, saw a thick fog inside, closed the door, and warned employees to get out. Smart.

Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart.

Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. One man went in to try to stop the leak, failed miserably, I don't know what happened to him, I'm gonna be honest. I have a guess. I have a guess. Like, that's rough. I mean, fucking, trying to do the Chernobyl reactor diver shit, but you're one Indianan man.

Yeah, you've got fireworks, but it's popcorn exploding around you. Like, DJing. Just give that man the Indiana Medal of Honor. He went into the gap of danger. Indiana Curl. In the popcorn reactor. He was in the popcorn reactor vessel! What is this if not a pressure vessel to contain popcorn reactor?

You have to dip the control rods in, but they're corndogs. No, granted, the pressure differential is one to one, but it's a pressure vessel to contain popcorn reactions. Oh. Yep. So, now you may ask, okay, why are these things running at all, what's the event? It's not the state fair, it's a separate event, which the Coliseum was rented out for. It was of course the performance of holiday on ice.

Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, it's got to suck a little more Nova. This is a very long running ice show. This is what you get for doing Christmas before Thanksgiving. It's not even Christmas themed is the interesting part. It said holiday. Yeah. No, they do like a different theme every year. It's like non-denomination.

Every holiday. Yeah, this one was Kwanzaa, weirdly enough. Yeah, I believe, I think they have done a Kwanzaa themed show, yeah. I'm not super familiar with the ice show scene, but I believe this was actually the first one, and it is still running to this day. ALICE I went to say, um, fucking Shenyang, China before communism, on ice. JUSTIN But yeah, this is on October 31st, 1963, it's

the first show of an eleven day run of Holiday on Ice. Now, this show starts a little late, but not so late as to cause an uproar. It starts at 8.45 instead of 8.30, so the show was supposed to wrap up around 11.15 instead of 11 as scheduled. ALICE Charlie Cheeplin at the front there. SEAN Yeah. ALICE Very good. SEAN There's uh, 4000- ALICE And me boymoding standing next to him.

Yeah, yeah yeah. Devan, you can put that picture up if you want. There's 4,327 spectators for opening night. With propane slowly filling the commissary. Oh god. It's a- and- mmm. Now, at 1106- And slowly filling the commissary. ALICE And... Mm. Mm. JUSTIN Now, at 1106... ALICE Oh, god.

Uh. JUSTIN As the show is wrapping up... ALICE At 1106, we pop the fuck out of some corn. We pop more corn, more, like, to a greater extent than has ever previously been popped. JUSTIN The corn popped. ALICE Oh my god. ALICE The corn pop heard round the world. JUSTIN Yes.

Um, yeah, just as the finale began, at aisle 13 there was enormous boom just underneath the box seats. A seven hundred square foot section of the seating and floor flew up into the air and came back down, smashing a load bearing wall below which collapsed and took out another 500 square feet of floor with it. ALICE Jesus, it's like a mortar, like a trench mortar. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE And in amongst all of it is just gallons of half cooked popcorn.

JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Raining body parts and corndogs. Jeez. It took a moment for anyone to figure out what had happened. Many of the people who were not directly viewing the exploded stands thought that since there had been small pyrotechnics as part of the performance, maybe this was actually part of the show. Until they looked and saw the destroyed stands. ALICE People sat there with their hair comedically

goth-stretched to one side with the comedy daffy duck beat spun around the back of their head. Goin' goin' Jesus, was that part of the show? Or, yeah, bloody hell. WILL It was so unclear. There was a horrible accident. People were strewn across the ice, they were crushed under big concrete blocks, they were mangled in a big pit of debris. It was very ugly to behold. ALICE This is also, this is a family show, right? Mmm.

JUSTIN Yes. Very much. Very much so. Now, despite this, there was general... ALICE Couldn't they, could it not have been, I ask this rhetorically to God, could it not have been a show that was, like, for unlikable losers? People that you wouldn't miss, like, anonymous, showing up, you know? Why is it always, when the roof comes in, why is it always the completely blameless, like, here's a benefit

we did for the local kids, why does this never happen to the Letting Agents National Convention? November. November. Only the good die young. I mean, you joke about that, but the number of train crashes, the number of formative train crashes in the UK that involve a holiday train full of children is actually, you joke about that, but the number of train crashes, the number of formative train crashes in the UK that involve like a holiday train full of children is actually notable. It's about to say, it's about to say, you know, you see that big train full of... We're gonna give this one to our drunkest driver. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's like, yeah, yeah, this train is full of nuns and orphans, let's give it to drunk Uncle Bob. That's my Uncle Bob, aw. We miss him every day. JUSTIN So anyway, despite this huge explosion, by and large there's an aura of calm in the auditorium, right, or in the Coliseum. The Holiday on Ice band, in fact, keeps playing to keep everyone calm. ALICE Nearer my god to thee.

JUSTIN Yeah. People start to evacuate in an orderly fashion. ALICE Spinnin' on a... what? JUSTIN The second explosion happens. ALICE Oh no. ALICE Mr. President! A second popcorn reactor has struck the Iowa State Coliseum? JUSTIN This time there was a 40 foot fireball contained entirely within the coliseum.

They, wait, this was October 1963? Yes. They would've had to tell Kennedy about this? And Kennedy was like, damn, that's crazy. By the way, everything's still good for me to go to Dallas next month, right? JUSTIN Surprising how often that comes up in this podcast. ALICE Yeah, right? Like, I dunno, it's like 9-11, right?

I can relate stuff, cause I know the date of the Kennedy assassination, cause the Stephen King book, I can relate stuff chronologically to it. JUSTIN It's also my dad's 17th birthday. ALICE Huh. Happy birthday, by the way, the president's been shot. JUSTIN That apparently is how it went, yes. ALICE Jesus. The debris, with many trapped underneath, was now also on fire.

Just like, trapped under concrete block, like, well, this can't get any worse, the concrete block is now on fire. Now on fire, yes. Lots of people were buried underneath concrete slabs weighing five to ten tons. You're not walking that off. ALICE Again, why can this never happen to, like, a Trump rally, you know? RILEY Cause there's never enough of them there.

ALICE Yeah, I have a good point, yeah. Yeah, it'd be embarrassing if an empty section of stands blew up. ALICE Why this, and why not Trump on ice? Or, I guess, 1963 equivalent, so George Wallace on ice. LIAM Yeah, George Wallace on ice, oh god. ALICE He's doing a long spin and he's just out there saying the word. Singing the word, actually.

What a beautiful contralto. I don't wanna add it to him, but it's really technically impressive. ALICE This, um, now this fire dies down pretty quickly because it is being fueled by the propane, which, y'know, sort of disperses. But it does burn a lot of people. ALICE At least it burns off clean, y'know, odourless. Y'know, like, you know, kind of that charcoal scent. I'm like, from your own body. I'm just gonna be a little stinky corpse.

Stinky corpse. Hope you're not wearing, um, polyester. Ooh, it's the 60s, everyone's wearing polyester. Yeah, that's true. Oh yeah, you are going up like a Christmas tree. Ugh. So, it's very apparent pretty early on that a lot of people are dead or injured, right, an off-duty firefighter called the Indianapolis Fire Department within minutes of the explosion,

saying there are probably 50-100 people injured in his estimation. Police are on the scene by 11.15, shortly followed by the media, and only then by the fire department. ALICE The budget cuts again, you know. And that 63 hour work week really cutting into response times. RILEY The American Red Cross and the Salvation Army, also dispatch personnel, Civil Defense arrived on the scene... ALICE I'm dying in this fuckin' Salvation Army, you're

trying to save me, let me die. Put me back in! Put me back in! You put that concrete block back on top of me! LIAM Bore. Wait. You put that concrete block back on top of me! More. Weight. Yeah. You had civil defense, countless other rescue and relief organizations, they hear about

this and they send everything they can, right? Oh dear. Uh oh. What resulted was an enormous traffic jam of emergency equipment. Incident Command Management. Is a skill... ALICE Gold, silver, bronze. It's actually very important to manage this stuff extremely carefully.

JUSTIN In fact, you can sort of see this in this picture, this is inside the auditorium, you can see a lot of ambulances, you can see a tow truck here, you can see probably a police car over here that's sort of blocking the way out. ALICE A lot of people milling around, like, no clear function. JUSTIN Yeah, just like, mmm, damn, look at that. ALICE Yeah, that's an aftermath type job. That's what the NTSB, or like, you know, the sort of accident investigation board, do,

you know? JUSTIN So, what's the situation? I, okay, yeah, okay, it's easy for me to post more on this, I would not be bringing vehicles in here, I would be human training people in and out so that you have clear working space. Because also you're doing all the excavation of material and... Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so everyone races in the Coliseum, I mean, the first and biggest problem was the police, right? All Races. Yeah. They had more officers on duty than normal, because it was Halloween, right, all the kids are getting into mischief. Uh huh. Yeah, people are putting fentanyl in the 60s candies. Exactly.

Those kids deserved it. Guys, it was like, what was the 1960s drug of choice? Quaaludes, bud! Putting quaaludes in my 1960s candy, and poisoning a bunch of racist children. Yeah, oh no! Either that, or what's the one? What's the one that gave all the nasty birth defects? The little mind bud.

So of course, they rush to the Colosseum, and they park all their squad cars at the sort of jaunty angle typical of bullies. I love pop parking. It's one of the most offensive things, just to be like, I'm parked at like a 70 degree angle across like, three handicapped spaces and a bike lane. I'm gonna leave it parked there for four and a half hours. This blocked access for everyone else. lane, I'm gonna leave it parked there for four and a half hours. Yeah. This blocked access for everyone else.

Yeah, you'll get nothing in like it. Of those vehicles and personnel that made it to the scene, there was very little that could be done for anyone but the most accessible victims. One of the more satisfying videos I've seen on YouTube is an FDNY engine physically moving an NYPD car that was blocking it out of the way, and just sort of idly crushing it and pushing it aside. RILEY You piece of shit. Get out of my way.

The debris was of course too heavy to lift by hand, so police radioed for tow trucks and mobile cranes, and the tow trucks showed up, a whole shitload of them, and they were of no use. They needed to lift the debris, not drag it around and potentially injure more people. ALICE Yeah, dragging the like, six ton concrete block off my legs, just smearing the whole lower half of my body across the ice. That's about to say, you get turned into an uncooked smash burger. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uh way a neighboring municipality. It's entirely surrounded by Indianapolis. They managed to locate and borrow a mobile crane, which was then given the world's slowest police escort

to the site of the disaster, arriving at 1250 AM. And then it got stuck in the traffic jam. Of course. So we're nearly two hours, correct me if I'm wrong on the timeline, it's nearly two hours now after the event, right? Two hours after the event, the mobile crane makes it there. Here it is over here. It's on tracks because it's 1963 It's not one of the new ones that you know can go fast Of course. Yeah The coroner of Marion County arrived at 11 45 p.m

Right. He managed to fight his way through the ambulances and fire trucks and heavy equipment Right. He managed to fight his way through the ambulances and fire trucks and heavy equipment, civil defense vehicles, Salvation Army canteen trucks, so on and so forth. Ice cream vans. He's like punching his way through chaplains like the opening of Airplane. He's like, I provide important pastoral care to the POW! I was thinking of a separate scene from Airplane where they dispatch all the emergency vehicles and they have like the air stairs and the Budweiser truck.

That's what's coming into the area here. ALICE Well you knew the Indy 500 was a real ride. ALICE Fucking Shriners, heavy rescue squad, it's a little tiny truck. ALICE It was Shriners night, actually. ALICE Oh my god. Fezz is on the ground. Oh no. They're tiny hats.

You know, when the coroner shows up, he is the first physician on scene. Jesus Christ. To do like, is there an actor in the house and it's two hours later? Oh, I'm here. Sorry, I have a drink in. Oh no, it's only 11.45. Okay. He's there, the crane hasn't arrived yet.

Understood. 45 minutes is still pretty bad though. Like, people would die by that point, who would have not otherwise. What are you doing with triage, you know? Just be like, dead, dead, dead, almost dead, almost dead, dead. He's too overworked to triage. The only thing he can do is give like the trapped victims who are not yet dead some comfort in the form of lots of morphine.

Yeah, makes that track. I'll do it. You know, until like the crane showed up and and additional physicians, it wasn't until like 1250 when they could set up a makeshift morgue. Now conveniently, they were on an ice rink. So, y'know. ALICE Well that's convenient, y'know. Like, good place to have it, y'know?

JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE At least one aspect of this was well planned, by accident. JUSTIN By accident, yeah. So there's the makeshift morgue in the foreground of this photo. ALICE Jesus. JUSTIN About 1150, the police chief of Indianapolis finally showed up to the scene, having also fought his way through other emergency vehicles,

set up a command post, to finally get all these various relief organizations organized. ALICE Yeah, turns out that's important, you can't just throw things at the thing and hope it works itself out. JUSTIN Yeah, so, we finally have some traffic control. Alright, so here is the Coliseum here, here is the adjacent building, which at the time was known as the Cattle Barn. Because there was a barn that had cattle in it.

ALICE Am I seeing a Salvation Army canteen directly in front of the site of the explosion? JUSTIN Yes, they got in really early and started making coffee. ALICE Oh, that's nice of them. I have some suggestions for what they should do with it. I hate the fucking Salvation Army, and I wasn't expecting to come out of this episode with a second reason.

I'm so proud of you. They'll get you. Union Busters, the hate gay people, they will take your unused surplus clothing, though. I don't know if they do. I don't know if they cover up abuse scandals in the process All right, so there's this solid mass of a virtue to see vehicles blocking all routes in and out of the Coliseum There's no coordination cool, dude There's no coordination between any relief organizations

The Chiva police takes control sets up an actual command post in the fairs The Chiva police takes control, sets up an actual command post in the fair's administrative building. That's down here, or over here. I don't know which of these images you're looking at. He ordered the fairgrounds sealed off until they could figure out what the hell was going on, while local relief organizations were still bombarding the site with ambulances, buses, fire trucks, wreckers. These things are piling up like it's uh, like Blues Brothers.

Like a devilish interment, yeah. They're sending, they're sending- This is like Kleinstatterei, this is like every fucking county just has a volunteer fire service, that it just has no coordination, and is just sending in more shit. Yeah. The funeral homes are even sending in hearses, there's dozens of cars full of various volunteers from like, Civil Defense, from like, you know, they got Red Cross and Salvation Army...

ALICE In fairness to the funeral homes, a lot of them were like ambulance services also at this point. In fact, the sort of form of the ambulance evolved out of the hearse, they ran a few as so-called combination cars for a long time. That's convenient if you die en route. Yeah, exactly, just change the sign over. Just a little roller like in a bus, you just roll it from funeral, into funeral. I believe the army was saturating the area with army ambulances. Oh my god.

Oh my god. I just feel like a van turns up and a bunch of mimes get out and start doing it. Army brackets salvation, army brackets regular, army brackets mime. Yep. This is, I think, a big win for Colossal Order, the publishers of Cities Skylines. You thought Emergency Vehicle traffic jams were fake. No, they're very real. No, they are.

This reminds me of a top-down video game I used to play. Do you remember the Emergency series? I think they released it, it was like 9-1-1, first responders. I used to love that game. I think I remember what you're talking about, yo. Love that fucking game. It didn't really have a proper sequel, I think there's a free to play one now, but yeah, large part of it is like, there's a gap in the market for that kind of incident command

management RTS game, you know? RILEY The local churches were sending priests and ministers in cars. ALICE I was joking about having to fight your way through a bunch of clergy, but like, every denomination is represented. Yeah, I was about to say, we found the one Shinto guy in Indianapolis. He's in there, he's ringing the little bell, y'know.

So the chief of police is like, okay, we need- Just on the radio, like, have you got the concrete blocks off the guys yet? And some poor Indianapolis firefighter is like, no, but I did learn that the temple bells reflect the impermanence of all human life. So- Chief, I got no attachments over here. JUSTIN The Chief of Police at the command post finally says, alright, here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna have a triage in the cattle barn. Cattle barn is just an open space, it's not full of dirt on the floor and crap.

But they do put cattle in there for the state fair. But it wasn't the state fair, so there's no cows in there. You know, we're gonna do that, we're going to move the police vehicles out of the arena and away from the area, we are going to have a one-way loop for ambulances through the cattle barn to pick people up. ALICE Oh, they're doing traffic design in situ. It's a good system, and it's actually a convenient site for it, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, exactly, it's indoors, it's enclosed, cause you can drive vehicles in and out of

the building. I believe there were specific gates for the entrance and exit. Can draw a nice clean diagram of it too. Exactly. ALICE So I guess, very quickly, in the Google Earth image you've got on screen, Roz, there's loads of car parking space. I'm guessing that wasn't necessarily quite as extensive then, it might've just been open fields maybe. ROBBIE I do not think so.

But I don't know. ALICE I just think, because like, yeah, if he's saying do it in the barn, I presume that was, it was covered, it was the right space to do that, like they didn't have all that big open concrete of tarmac. Because the thing I've been saying is, okay, all your vehicles, fuck off over there. You can go around in circles, I don't care, just leave. All of you go away, and I will come for you if you're needed. If there's this bizarre like, Blues Brothers kind of pile up going on with all the lights on, like people turning up in the sirens going, woo, woo, woo. It's completely definite.

Yeah, so they moved the police cars out, they let the mobile crane into the arena finally, after making the space for it, so they could finally pick up these big concrete blocks, and they moved the Salvation Army canteen truck into the Coliseum for, y'know, the coffee. I think they set up a grill as well. Uh huh. I would not feel very hungry, but, yeah. I just hope it's not a propane grill. I would like a hot dog.

Yeah. But there's still further disorganization occurring, right? So while they're being bombarded with ambulances, no one's coordinating which hospital do we send the speech into. Oh my god. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uh to receive quite a lot of victims from this. Although no one was really prepared, because no one thought to contact the hospitals beforehand, hey, there's been an incident. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, this is quality disaster response. Pick up the phone! Send a guy one of the fifty cars that you have parked blocking the entrance! So most ambulance drivers just brought people to the nearest hospital, which was Presbyterian Hospital. Which was pretty full up and not really prepared to handle a lot of people. They got 120 victims, while the Samaritan Hospital, which was better prepared, only received 27. Oh, okay.

There were like eight more hospitals that got victims, and a lot of them were just not prepared for it at all. You know, they only found out there was an emergency when, you know, there were 50 ambulances showed up with, you know, people with traumatic head injuries. Like, 50 Draculas have showed up in the ER. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Covered in fake blood and real blood. JUSTIN Yeah, they did.

Draculai. Yeah. Then began the grim job of identifying the dead. The morgue was set up and they installed temporary rubber flooring, so as to prevent the friends and relatives of the deceased from slipping on the ice in the frozen pools of blood." ALICE raising hand, how many times do you think that happened before they put in the temporary rubber flooring? JUSTIN Good question.

ALICE Yeah, like, that's a whole lot of- ALICE Yeah, they definitely hospitalized multiple family members. JUSTIN I gotta say, I imagine all the emergency workers are constantly slipping and falling in this incident. Oh yeah, exactly. I played Mario Kart, that's exactly how this went. Yeah.

You gotta have the reverse Sam Boney come out and rough up the ice. Yeah. What's Sam Boney backwards, hold on. The Inno-mas. Yeah. Yeah. Fuckin' yeah. Send one of those out. Yeah, exactly.

Now, the first people came in to identify the deceased around three o'clock in the morning, by seven thirty in the morning there was actually a line out the door from the amount of people who managed to force their personal vehicles through the emergency vehicles, and the tow trucks. ALICE At least there's like 500 different chaplains and ministers and shit to try and comfort them. JUSTIN Yeah, everyone's, there's like, there's like 4500 people there to give last rites. ALICE Yeah, it's like, many dead, but like, none

of them went to hell. Yeah. Nah, they went to extra heaven. They got so many last rites. Bonus heaven. That's how it works, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. So many sacraments.

I got like this... The Catholicism bonus episode is coming. The secret extra sacrament. Now, five propane tanks were discovered in the wreckage belonging to the Midwest Gas Corporation. These were removed from the scene as evidence, but with caveats we'll get to that in the next slide. By 4 p.m. the next day all victims had been identified, saved for two of them. All survivors had been removed from the building. Emergency workers had all left, save for a few state police guarding the site.

By the way, there had been a jurisdictional conflict this whole time between the Indianapolis police and the state police as to who should be running this. Of course. Yeah. It was gradually handed over to the state police as the night wore on. In the end, 81 people were dead, and over 400 were injured. Jesus. Oh boy.

And in the confusion, something strange had happened. Oh no. Did someone forget to do the S in S-N-R? Like, did someone forget to do the search and search and rescue and there's just still like, guys under the thing? No, someone was searching, but not for the victims. The pinata dog? Several lawyers had managed to infiltrate the blast site mere minutes after it happened. I don't know how that phone call went.

What? A fucking orbital dropped in? Like how the fuck? LIAM Yeah. ALICE We need you to drive at like 120 miles an hour in the shoulder past like a giant lane full of bumper to bumper fire trucks and ambulances, and get in there and start suing people. LIAM Yeah, the first people on the scene, the lawyers. ALICE I'm like a legal first responder, I'm like

a legal observer at a protest, I've got like a fluorescent green hat, and I'm just there like serving people. JUSTIN They're paralegals, yeah. These lawyers come in, they clamber over the records, they ignore the dead, the injured, and the dying, and went straight for the propane tanks and removed crucial parts, the valves and the hoses and so on and so forth." ALICE Oh my god. I need Indiana cops to learn how to set up a cordon, ever, maybe. Like, it's French for line. You could... Yeah.

They were stopped by the state police, and they were ejected from the arena, without the evidence that they tried to steal, but the damage had been done, you know, the evidence had been... He's got like one loafer on a guy's head, the other one braced against a propane tank, trying to pull the hose off of it. RILEY The evidence had been thoroughly and completely tampered with. ALICE Good creek. Jesus.

RILEY So, these lawyers, do we know- I'm not being about to shoot your fox arse, but do we know whose lawyers were these? Were these the site's lawyers? RILEY Um, I am not sure. I had difficulty- ALICE It's a mysterious gang of lawyers. RILEY Well, they- ALICE It's a mysterious gang of lawyers. Well, they said they represented an Indianapolis law firm, which is fairly obvious. I don't know who they were in the employ of, I didn't... I unfortunately never quite gleaned that information.

A coach like random John Grisham ass. Like, oof. Rogue state lawyers just popping out of nowhere. A SWAT team. The police recovered the evidence. The tanks were sent to Purdue University for analysis. What do you know? The tanks had been stored next to a heat source.

The gas inside expanded. The safety valve did its job and vented the excess gas. A vast quantity of propane built up in a commissary, and exploded the box seats when it found an ignition source. The National Liquid Petroleum Gas Association attempted to dispute this by saying, well, what if it was a steam leak, or a carbon dioxide leak? Oh my god. I mean, you don't really, that's a kind of commitment to, like, evil, that you don't

see in as many industry concerns outside of the, like, you know, oil and gas industry these days. Like, tobacco, and like, arms dealers. In general, though, your average corporate lobbyist for the thing that kills people accidentally won't go as hard as this until it's in court, but like, in public? To be like, yeah, y'know, maybe it's just fuckin' uh, the swamp gas. Yeah, exactly. Who's to say?

From like, the letter they sent, it seemed like even they didn't really believe it themselves, but y'know, we have to send a letter. Bunch of like, propane valves falling out of my pockets. It's like, yeah, this could've been anything, you know? A grand jury was convened to assign blame, they indicted no less than seven individuals, the Indianapolis Fire Chief, the State Fire Marshal, three individuals from the gas distributor, Discount Gas Corporation. Would not buy my gas from them.

LIAM Yeah, I know why I'm a mezzo doing business. JUSTIN The general and concessions manager for the Coliseum were both indicted, and everyone sort of, through legal proceeding, managed to shift the blame around adequately enough that they're all acquitted. Just like, forget it, Jake, it's Indiana Town. Like, I did, hmmm. In particular, the manager of the Coliseum managed to argue that he had no idea he needed a permit for indoor storage of propane, and that hey, the propane had been stored there in full view of inspectors for over ten years at this point, come on.

Absolutely ace defense. ALICE So ultimately, new procedures were put into place to ensure propane was not stored indoors at the arena, the coliseum would be regularly inspected by the fire department going forward, there were about $4.6 million in settlements from the gas company, about $70 million in insurance claims overall, and the Coliseum, well, they managed to reopen it in only six weeks. ALICE Jesus! I mean, I guess you just pour some more concrete, you know, hose it down, but like...

JUSTIN They just had this area roped off. ALICE Oh. ALICE Put a tarp over it, Jesus. It looks like the fucking Führunker in there, like... Jesus Christ. JUSTIN They fully repaired it in only a few months. Holiday on Ice returned the following year, despite... ALICE Oh, thank God, returned to normalcy, baby.

JUSTIN Yeah, despite fears that people would be afraid to go to the performance, no, they sold out the arena. ALICE Yep. Yep, that tracks. ALICE Indiana strong. JUSTIN Yeah, not too much later than that, the Beatles play the Coliseum, but- ALICE Indiana weird. JUSTIN Yeah.

As a result of the explosion, the Indianapolis Capitals hockey team move to Cincinnati. ALICE This is a really grave consequence of this, you know? JUSTIN Yes, exactly. But this is the worst thing to happen at... well this is the worst disaster in Indiana history, but there would never be another major incident at the Indianapolis State Fair until an inadequately secured stage collapse in 2011 in a thunderstorm, and killed a lot of people in the audience, and also a stagehand.

Well I remember, was this a Beyonce gig? No, this was country music. Sugarland, yeah. Sugarland, yeah. Oh, okay. I do remember there being a stage collapse. Yeah, good grief. But not good.

So we learned a lot then. Yeah. Yeah, lots of structural They're not good. So we learned a lot then. Yeah. Yeah, lots of structural issues at the Indiana State Fair, it seems. Yeah, you can tell, those columns are meant to be vertical, and instead they're all the way over and not attached anymore. They've invented a new style of column. You know, it's Ionic, Doric, Corinthian, American, and whatever this is.

Oh, this is like, VLA LeDuc was always, you know, wanted to experiment with angled columns. So, you know. Oh my god. But yeah, that is the story of the Indiana State Fair explosion of 1963, or State Fair Coliseum, it wasn't at the State Fair. Yeah, horrifying. Horrifying, thank you. I, yeah, ooh, I didn't, ooh, grimy.

What did we learn? Uh, put down some, some like, mats before you have your more of an ice. Horton off shit. That's true, yeah, yeah. I would say- Maybe, maybe store stuff in the void. Fuck the Salvation Army. Yeah, for a different reason than we thought going in. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. My main lesson is, do not store propane indoors. for a different reason than we thought going in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My main lesson is, do not store propane indoors. Do not store propane indoors. I'm just writing it down. It's maybe an actionable item there, bud. Yeah.

Always store propane in a well-ventilated space. Away from popcorn maker. Oh yeah, don't store it next to the popcorn maker. Or the debts. Understood. Okay, yep, good. Good. Well that was absolutely horrifying.

Yeah, crikey. I suppose we have a segment on this podcast. Called Safety Third. Shake hands with Dean. Aw. Safety Third. Oh. Dear, well there's your problem hosts, and also guests, who are present. Wrong. No, no, no they're not. While not as life or death as some of the submissions to Safety Third, I hope these

two brief anecdotes illuminate the disaster of so-called small business that Americans claim to love so much. Uh huh. For instance, you appear to have some kind of rat king of dogs here. I was about to say, it took me a while when I saw this picture, is this two dogs or just one really fucked up dog? Where's the dog? Yeah, where's the ass?

What's going on? I mean, I'm already happy because I can see dogs, but also where's the ass? I'm confused. Sort of a biblically accurate dog. A dog king? Yeah. RILEY I previously worked as an environmental consultant, creating reports assessing the environmental risk of a property during a sale.

In October of 2020 I travelled alone to a fairly remote small factory in Michigan, which did plastic injection moulding. ALICE Sounds like the opening to an extremely well-reviewed narrative indie game. ALICE Yeah, it matched the picture on the right perfectly, yeah. SEAN They were housing eldritch horrors there. Very fluffy ones. While not as intensive a process as other manufacturing, this process does involve the use of huge complex machines, applying 8,000 PSI to make plastic parts from pellets.

Now, my first red flag was a Trump flag. Actually, it was strung across the front of the factory, at least 6 feet by 10 feet in size. I was expecting a typical light manufacturing facility, but you can imagine my surprise front of the factory, at least six feet by ten feet in size. I was expecting a typical light manufacturing facility, but you can imagine my surprise when the husband and wife owners led me through rooms full of ugly furniture to their bedroom, where a Trump rally was playing on television. ALICE To the bedroom?

To fuck them? Like, what? I get that. JUSTIN There's a lot of problems here. That is one of them, but also, yes, they lived in the factory. Which was a converted shop school. There's a lot going on here already. The median American voter, somehow.

Yeah. Venturing outside, I discovered they had four dogs. Not mean guard dogs, but some big fluffy ones and tiny yappers. ALICE That's definitely, dogging is something, there's things going on here. Are the dogs a metaphor? Or uh... ALICE Yeah, it's like Silent Hill, the dog is a metaphor

for your kind of like loss of connection, you know? LIAM Yeah. JUSTIN They then proceeded to let all four dogs run around the active production floor, where the giant and very old machines were operating, including 25 or more open drip pans of hydraulic oil. Oh boy. What? Leave the dogs alone. I'm not a- no.

No. What? Probably should not allow dogs in that space. No. People are fucking stupid, man. Yeah, keep going. There are around 30 55 gallon drums with random chemicals labeled on the side, and I asked for the purpose of all these chemicals, and he stated he bought them all at auction,

unless they were all mislabeled. I went down to the chemicals auction and I bought some drums, kind of at random. I just bought some random drums, and I thought they were cool. This just feels like a money laundering operation for me. Every time I try to understand Trump's people, I learn something like this, and it just slips further from my grasp again. I would probably go down to the chemicals auction and buy some chemicals, though, that sounds fun.

Alright, man. Justin, who did you vote for? The basement ace, the basement nuke, yeah. I voted for a woman who lost. Same thing I do every election. Oh, she was dying. We don't talk about that. In fact, there were huge amounts of random equipment he had bought at Oxygen with no

discernible purpose. Oh, Liam, you are absolutely on the money with the money laundering. 100% that's what's going on. JUSTIN Money laundering slash hoarding. RILEY I wonder how those dogs are doing now. ALICE Bad. Keep it moving, I don't want to think about the dogs too hard. RILEY Second small business disaster I inspected

involved a car dealership with a large auto repair shop. ALICE He went by the name of John Taliban. RILEY Auto repairs typically pump their drains or oil water... Auto repair places typically pump their drains or oil water separators, I'm gonna say that's what that's supposed to read, regularly, as a lot of used oils flow to the floor drains in the repair bay. Most I have been to have done this cleaning annually, if not more frequently. The manager I was interrogating seemed bewildered when I asked about the frequency of cleaning.

It had not been done since he started in 1997, which was the year I was born." ALICE Oh. Oh. ALICE It's your twin. The oil is your twin. It's the same age as you. RILEY Furthermore, the new and used oil tanks were in one room I refused to step in, as the leaking

oil was several inches deep, uselessly covered with rags and cardboard." What? Are they trying to create a conflagration? Like, oh, we just tossed the flammable stuff in that room. Yeah, I just throw some leaking propane in there too. It's the fire room. Yeah. And I just put this over here with the rest of the fire.

Yeah. The oil leak was so bad that it was seeping through the cinder block walls into the adjoining rooms. Oh god. What the fuck? While I was appalled with what I saw, as someone who cares even a little about the environment, there's no guarantee they have to do anything to fix or clean this. Especially not now.

The facility had also never bothered to clean up the leaks from the historic underground storage tanks, which is probably still polluting the groundwater to this day. Uh huh. Ugh. Now I work with the ongoing engineering disaster that is NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act I believe is what that is, but I am glad to have seen many wild and interesting things in America's back rooms at this job. See photo two. Yeah, no kidding.

That's a back room. Yeah. I've been here since the first episode, and I appreciate you all very much from Charlotte. Thank you, Charlotte. Thank you, Charlotte. Thanks, Charlotte. I, oh, nope. Part of me finds the idea of the flammable stuff room humorous, but also, I suspect that building is no longer as intact as it was when that house was created.

We sort these rooms by flammability. Like, from this to Lois. Jesus. Well that was Safety Third. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? I think we hit em. Yeah. My book launched last night and I got...

Congratulations. Yeah, so it's on sale, go buy the book. Buy the book. How the Rails Will Fix the Future. Buy the book. Buy the tickets to our live shows. Yes, Philly, particularly Philly. Buy the Philly tickets.

Fill more seats. Fill more seats, yes. Yeah. Wow. Almost two hours on the dot. Alright, that was a podcast. Not too bad. Bye everybody.

Good night everyone. Bye. Really good, guys.