Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 180: Times Beach

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

the most dangerous thing in the world: a man with a truck. new SHIRT: https://www.bonfire.com/pls-dont-sue-us-either/ links to help out gazan families from DEVON: https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity https://chuffed.org/project/124906-help-ahmed-and-family-evacuate-gaza https://chuffed.org/project/121901-help-mahers-family-with-medical-costs https://chuffed.org/project/128691-help-my-family-evacuate-gaza-war-zone https://chuffed.org/project/130802-help-rashas-family-in-gaza-evacuate-and-live 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/

And we have to do up the... Sink point. ALICE That's the word I'm looking for. Yes. I remember how to podcast. LIAM You take one month off merely because you've been doing an extremely strenuous tour, and also I had to finish my degree, and all of a sudden we don't remember how everything works.

Thank you, thank you, yeah. I mean, I say finish the degree. I think it is still technically possible for me to have fucked up this last dissertation bit badly enough that I don't, but, you know, in shal'a, right, I get a degree soon. JUSTIN Yeah, I was about to say, we need to see you with the degree in your hands. ALICE Oh, they don't do the graduations though, and it's still October, so it's gonna be a minute. I know.

It's crazy. So. Um. Oh, the sync point. 3, 2, 1, mark. Um. 3, 2, 1, mark. Okay. That sounded... crispy.

Yes. Um, alright. We're here, we're podcasting. Alright. Sick. Welcome to, Well Where's Your Problem? It's a podcast about engineering disasters. With slides.

Sometimes we accidentally take a month off from. Sorry. Sorry. Which we've done multiple times. Yeah, listen, we have a particular kind of work ethic, and also- The bad kind. It ain't the Protestant kind. And also neurodivergence.

The Catholic kind. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I missed you guys, and I missed the audience as well, I missed doing this. ALICE Don't tell them that. ALICE No, okay, fine, I resent all of them deeply, right, but if I had tried to do one of these while I was doing the end of my dissertation, my brain would have melted out of my ears live on air. Like, you think you've seen derangement beforehand, it's, no, it would have been, you know, incomparable. Absolutely.

Yeah, now we're all here, we're in a relaxed, zen-type state. A zen-caster-type state, one might say. Exactly. Free plug for the software that we all hate. Well, I was gonna get there, I was praising it, it's like when my dad says thank you to the ATM, because when the robots rise up they'll remember his kindness and spare him. ALICE Your dad believes in Rocco's Basilisk, but for ATMs? JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, the singularity is coming, it's kind of job one.

ALICE Let me finish the intro. I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. Yay Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McEnderson. My pronouns are he, him, and before we get too far into it, I have a plug, which is to say that my co-worker's grandson needs a accessible van. We're gonna drop the link in the description below, the hogs are gonna buy a van. Yeah. Not the kind you buy for $3600 somewhere in the Poconos and you go to Atlantic City and

try to steal the president's stuff. Yeah. It's a pro-van podcast, we've been very clear about that. That's right, baby. Yeah, and I just want to thank everyone who came to the tour. Yeah! Yeah! It was really good.

If you didn't, fuck you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Nothing bad happened at any of the shows, I think. No, it's crazy. And, I mean, we'll be releasing the edits of the shows, the recordings, as we, you know... As those come... One of those ideas for bonus episodes?

I have an idea, I'm just trying to schedule it, right? Oh, is that with the guests? Topic-redacted, yeah. We'll talk about it, we'll talk about it. The reason why I'm being so oblique about that is because it sets up the only joke that I've thought of for the subject, so I don't wanna spoil it. Hardly knew. Thanks to everyone who helped out with us on the tour. June, Corinne, Scooter, who else was there?

Megan, Jay. Megan, yes, Megan and Jay. Obviously Jay, because he's doing the edits. Yeah. He sent me an email that said, I'm trusting you to not abuse this power. I don't know what that could've possibly meant, but buddy, I am going to abuse it. Wait, what's your power? I think I now have root access to his file server.

Oh, wow. Okay. I don't know that I do, but Jay, the unfinished TF2 mods are coming. Yeah. Jay's cut, parentheses, Liam's version. I'm downloading a bunch of documents from the War Thunder forums and storing them in here. Just 3D printed auto-sare files? Yeah. Alright. So anyway, what you see on the screen in front of you is a quite pleasant looking state park. I see the Merrimack River, which I assume is gonna intersect with the Monitor River

downstream. I think it actually might. You're kidding. Merrimack is spelled differently when it's the boat, though, I think. Well, they were spelling all kinds of stuff wrong back in the 19th century? Well done, yes. Oh, yes. That's true.

Ah, nailed it. I'm gonna ace AP US history, as well as criminology. Well, that means you don't have to take a class in college. Anyway, so this pleasant looking Route 66 state park, it's not supposed to look like this. What? It's supposed to be a town. Oh.

Oh, okay. A town called Times Beach, Missouri. Yeah, I've read The Greed Anarchist, yeah. I've read Why Hope? The Case Against Civilization. Yeah, this is what the Nimbus Beach, Missouri, we have to do the goddamn news. Ah, Krasner one.

Oh yeah. Fuck you. Stimads. I really liked your, I like that. I really liked your, I am a hardened criminal in favor of Larry Krasner's pro-crime policies tweet. Yes, that, that is true. This guy, so the big hobby horse right now for a lot of people in the Philadelphia Democratic

machine is we're going to try and kick out our progressive prosecutor, Larry Krasner, who has been pissing off the establishment for a long time, on account of- Because he's good at his job. Yeah, because he does his job. It's the San Francisco playbook, it's the same thing they did to, is it Chase of Budan, is that how you pronounce his name? I hope so. I think so.

That sounds about right. But yeah, it's the same thing of like, oh, we've got a prosecutor who's too progressive, so the cops and every other kind of force of evil out there is gonna collaborate to try and ratfuck him. Well yeah, once the FOP endorses a candidate, I sort of turn the other way. I do want to point out, in Roz's response to the auto-text from Fuckface, what was his name, Dugan? What's his name?

Dugan? Was it Dug name doug was it dougan or something red shoes dougan it doesn't matter if the things he lost yeah he lost exactly the other guy capitalized both w's and wah-wah yeah that's how i know you're not fucking from here the wah-wah camel case that's deranged yeah yeah that's that's a fuck shit wah-wah is not capital a or capital w lowercase a capital capital W lowercase a, it's just W-A-W-A. Except for the one in Wildwood. Yes, that one's... Well, okay, so that's not filling.

He did Camelcase in Wildwood and Wawa there, just for... Yeah, Wildwood was a trip, I was in Wildwood last week. Place never changes, man. Oh, Kevin Kwa. My note here just says congratulations to Ozempic Patton Oswalt. Go on off that Zem. And if you think that's a cruel thing for me to be saying about Larry Krasner, I'm also on- I'm Ozempic November Kelly, so it's fine, I'm allowed, so I have like, epistemic privilege, I can say that.

There you go, there you go. So yeah, this is, I mean, good for the city, I mean, this seems to be the only place where progressives seem to be consistently winning anywhere, is DAs. I don't know why. Well, there is an addendum to that, which is, if you live in New York City, vote many times and illegally for Zoran Mamdani, for mayor of New York City. Because he has a decent shot, against- Yeah, it's looking more promising there.

If I give you from Cuomo one more fucking time, I'm going to. You'll have to bleep this, Devon. I'm ****, 9-11 ****. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, he's within touching distance of Cuomo, and that's the last distance you wanna be, of Cuomo. I was about to say, yeah, probably wanna avoid that. He's within touching distance of Cuomo, and that's the last distance you wanna be, of Cuomo. I was about to say, yeah, probably wanna avoid that. For more, see our Cuomo episode.

Yeah. But is Zoran gonna bring home the ZD? Yeah. By the way, can someone explain to me, right, I don't have a dog in this fight, right, I don't go to your country, but can someone explain to me why neither AOC nor Bernie have endorsed that guy yet? Because he really, it's fucked up that they haven't at this point. JUSTIN You know, there could be a lot of reasons, it could be a timing thing, sometimes people

like to wait a bit so it's fresh in the minds of everyone, sometimes it's like, okay, we need some kinda, you know, someone's gotta pull some strings in the background, you know, there's probably all kinds of internal politicking we're not even aware of. I mean, I'm sure there's a bunch of, like, horrible, you know, liberal bullshit going on back there. ALICE You think AOC is working tirelessly towards an endorsement? Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right, yeah. You know what, the older I get the more I'm just like, alright, November Kelly is Stalin,

let's do it. Right at the top of those. Voting for November Kelly for Stalin. I don't, I mean, listen- Just put my dad there, he's, whatever, he's a million, he's deranged, he's not a sexual predator, he's just insane. I support your dad. Liam's dad is running for Mao. Yeah.

I don't think I'd be a good Stalin, I think I'd be a good, like, one of the guys Stalin shot, who went to his death being like, sure, whatever, it's all for the revolution, I'm sure it'll turn out fine. You know? That's my niche, I think. SEAN My dad's Twitter bio... Cause he's not allowed to go on Twitter anymore cause it raises blood pressure too much, a real thing that happens.

It just starts with unrepentant leftist. ALICE Hell yeah. I mean, you'd hate to have a repentant leftist, right? SEAN Yeah, he doesn't give a shit. He's going out, both middle fingers up, I think. Hell yeah. So, yeah, my dad from Mal. Whatever, man.

Who cares? Planet's doing what it's doing. Climate Mal. Everybody start making solar panels in your backyard. We're bringing back Lysenkoism, folks. In other news... The Pope is from Chicago. ALICE Oh, that accent.

Yeah. Uh, the Lord said, go socks. JUSTIN Go socks. Yeah, wrong socks, though. ALICE Doesn't matter. Close enough. JUSTIN Yeah, I, yeah, he's not the guy I would've picked for it, but then they don't let me pick the pope, either.

It turns out. So, I do think that... I have an inkling, right, which is that as popes go, this is gonna be a relatively woke pope. JUSTIN I think he's gonna be a pretty... Yeah, I think this is gonna be a pretty good pope. Things are looking good, I mean, he's continuing a lot of Pope Francis' policies, he's going after Opus Dei right now, which is hilarious.

ALICE I mean, also, cause like, the thing that I want to see from a pope is, and I think why he got this job in the first place, is to yell at American, like, MAGA conservatives. JUSTIN That is also the impression I got, and also it's like a compromise, because, y'know, having an American pope, y'know, these sorts of trad-cath guys who wanna, y'know, create a new kind of Protestantism, are kinda like, well... They just wanna do prosperity gospel bullshit nonsense, and then dudes paying forty thousand dollars for boot camps because their dads failed them, bullshit.

ALICE Yeah. You ever see a guy get elected for what might be like a twenty year term, purely to write one encyclical that starts, listen up, fuckface? JUSTIN Yeah. Well, no, there's also gonna be the encyclical on a prohibition on Catholics putting ketchup on hot dogs. ALICE I like ketchup on hot dogs. ALICE I like ketchup on hot dogs. ALICE Gonna get a real dogmatic ruling on what shape

a pizza should be. JUSTIN Exactly, exactly. ALICE It should be a casserole of some kind for some reason. JUSTIN No, no, maybe it's tavern style. ALICE Ooh. JUSTIN I like a deep dish. You know, you can't really get them here, but in principle I like a deep dish, you know, like, you can't really get them here, but in principle I like a deep dish.

A deep dish is like a once in a while thing, you know, tavern style is like, you can have that a bunch. Deep dishes are too expensive, is the thing. Like you can't just get it ordered, you have to go to a restaurant. Everything's too expensive, man. It's weird that you get that as an encyclical in English verbatim. The other thing about this guy is that he's kind of Peruvian, right, which means that this is a generational endorsement for the idea that if a white boy is sensitive enough

he can kind of become Latina. What a sentence. Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is a big leap for Pan-Americanism. We are going to close the Darien Gap. The Darien Gap. We're finally gonna put a railroad through the Darien Gap. Yeah, we're gonna do it. Pope Leo, close the Darien Gap.

I'm tired of riding my armored motorbike. Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be like anything else, right, where you see any of the stuff that he used to a kind of basically pastoralist, kind of woke Catholicism, where you're gonna see all of the pro-migrant stuff, which is fully in line with that, or all the Catholic social teaching stuff, and people are gonna be like, and you're telling me this guy's a reactionary. And then you're gonna see all of the anti-abortion, all of the anti-queer and anti-trans stuff, and people are gonna be like, and you're telling me this guy's a reactionary, and then you're gonna see all of the anti-abortion, all of the anti-queer and anti-trans stuff, and people are gonna be like, so you're telling me this guy's supposed to be a liberal? And it doesn't mean anything.

ALICE No, he's the pope. ALICE He's the pope. That's his job now. The fucked up thing is that he has brothers, and who will make themselves available to the media, because the church doesn't sequester you for that anymore. And he's got one Woker shit-lit brother, and he's got one MAGA chud brother, so you get one brother each for MSNBC and Fox. They just go back and forth. Maybe they teleport, who's to say?

Yeah. I'm excited to hear from both of those guys for the rest of my life. This is also gonna be the guy who's probably, you know, starting to set up Vatican III, which I think is... Come on already! ...intentively... Well, it's probably still like, 15 to 20 years off. Yeah, let me in the fucking building!

Also when I said in my life, I really hope I live longer than that, but, y'know, if I don't outlive the Pope's MAGA brother, then, y'know. Yeah, do, do, uh, uh, ho-holy father, I assume you listened to the podcast, you speak English better than any of the previous ones, the last Pope who spoke English spoke Middle English, so like, uh, I assume you listened to the podcast, can you just fuckin' like, chill with the... ALICE We gotta start more aggressively, steering the tiller towards, it's okay to be gay.

But, you know, the church is an oil tanker, not a... skew. I like the visual of Pope Leo, hanging on for dear life in Wildwood Crest. You know what it's been, you know what it's been too long since we've had, in my opinion, is a gay pope. Right? Because like, when's the last time you had, obviously okay, they can't be like gay gay, but like, sometimes you just know, right? You know when you see a gay priest, right? When was the last time we had an ambiguously gay pope, and why isn't it now? You know? I think it would do wonders, bring back a whole medieval renaissance vibe.

ALICE What's that word that Pope Francis used? Yeah, we can't say that. But I can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The late pope of, like, dear memory used to say that there was too much thrushaginé in the Vatican, and then when he got called on that he apologized, and then the next week he said it again. Which I can't... Don't laugh, baby! How are you not supposed to... Like, I don't care what he called me, that and then, like, how are you not supposed to...

Like, I don't care what he called me, that's a funny thing, I feel affection for the guy. JUSTIN It's a beautiful word. Like everything in Italian. ALICE Mmhm. Absolutely. So yeah, American Pope is crazy, and Villanova, I assume, are gonna be normal about this. LIAM Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uhhhhh uh I would call him Chicago Pope, but people are trying to say he's a Philly Pope. He's not, Villanova is not a Philly school.

Villanova is not a Philly school. We have two legitimate Catholic universities, we have the good one, St. Joe's, alma mater of my beloved wife, and we have LaSalle, alma mater of my less beloved father-in-law. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. ALICE & LIAM But if you look at the scoreboard, zero Popes. JUSTIN Pope Francis did visit St. Joe's, and yet did not visit Villanova. ALICE Interesting. What does he know? JUSTIN Two major world leaders right now who have probably been to Wawa. ALICE I mean, the Pope and Bibi Netanyahu going to the same wah-wah?

Yeah, troubling. ZACH Oh, what a- what the world's worst meat cute. On my AO3 page it's gonna look like fuckin' Chernobyl. ALICE Enemies to Lava's Ark, slow burn coffee shop au. ZACH I'd read that, yeah. And Craig Pope is what I'm saying. I think that gets you excommunicated, and you just got in.

I just got here. Yeah, well, when I come back, when they make me Pope, you're coming with me, Nova. I'll hand-cuff you to me, like, what's-her-name-did to the Twitter door. Yeah, I'm Stalin, your dad's Mao, you're Pope, we just gotta find a job for Justin, what's her name, did, to the Twitter door. ALICE Yeah, I'm Stalin, your dad's Mao, your Pope, we just gotta find a job for Justin, it's fine. SEAN Vice Regent of the Swiss Guard. Whatever they use. Come on man, you get an MP5 and a funny hat.

ALICE What's not to like? JUSTIN I do want the funny hat. SEAN Yeah, you wouldn't be so good with an MP5. Your accuracy. ALICE The thing, the last thing I gotta say about the Pope, right, is, they really threaded the needle on this one, right, because he's a compromise candidate in the funniest possible way, which is that, on indications, he's like a woke Latin-masse guy, which is so fucking funny, as a combination of aesthetics and

politics. It's like, I have high hopes that this is the guy who brings back the incredibly heavy crown and it being carried around in a big chair being fanned with ostrich feathers and shit, but he's also, like, woke by Catholic standards. That's the dream. ALICE Well, he picked Leo because he's... SEAN Well, trans people are made in the image of God, but I can only say this in high church Latin.

Yeah. Well, he picked Leo as his name because he's like a big fan of Rerum Novarum. So you know- God says join the union. Yeah, exactly. Um, well- AMDG, baby. In a jarring shift in tone.

Fan cars. No, that's the next one. Oh, different one. Different one. No. Jump. No, that's the next one. Different one. No counting. Jump the gun, so to speak. These are all the bits of stochastic terrorism now happening against, on the one hand, Israeli

diplomats, and now, like, pro-Israel marches, and I think we file this firmly in the what the fuck do you expect is gonna happen column. Yeah, I mean, you have... Once you've lost my mother, uh... I don't know. Disorganized political violence was always going to result from, y'know, doing the genocide. 100% accurate, man. That's just, that was very, very, uh, you know, I'm surprised it took this long.

ALICE Somebody is gonna be desperate or deranged or despairing enough that they decide that what they wanna do is to kill some people, and I mean, this is after, mind you, over a year of showing people that nothing works. Like, protesting peacefully doesn't work, like writing youresting peacefully doesn't work, like, writing your congressman doesn't work. Well, exactly, right? And so it's not really a surprise that somebody who's at the most extreme end of emotion for that decides, okay, well maybe the thing that's gonna work is setting other people on fire. Which it isn't.

But you see how someone gets to that. LIAM Connects those dots, right. Yeah, exactly. ALICE Yeah, we don't have, uh, I mean, you know, you can't do organized political violence because we don't talk about that on YouTube. I mean, it kind of just- LIAM We're going to rumble! ALICE It kind of just doesn't happen anyway, like, at least the way things are set up, something would have to change for that to be possible.

And so instead you get this. Which is, it's like a car not going into gear, you know? It's like... it's purposeless, senseless violence. Like, the thing that has really gotten me about the way pros, like I've said a billion times, the man to design a studio ofetic states shouldn't exist in the first place, and my people don't need one, especially, y'know, colonization, so on and so forth. But one of the things that really strikes me is the tone of pro- the pro- is that, like, that Lindsey Graham tweet, Greta Thunberg, is going to, as far as I know, run the blockade

something? And it's just this mean-spirited bullshit nonsense, I mean, fucking, uh, I know you're not wearing a shirt that says dog milk. ALICE Well, listen. I mean, don't worry about it. SEAN Alright, roll tide. I, uh... ALICE Roll damn tide.

SEAN I just, I just, and like, Betterment 2 is just this mean-spirited bullshit where it's just like, I know the guy's brain doesn't work anymore, but it's just it's just so fucking It's that MAGA like who are you treated? It's like people are fucking dying people are starving in the streets You know and regardless I would say almost regardless of your positioning on Israel Palestine which should be that Israel that one state called country one one language called language, and one currency called Liam Bucks, as we stated, official podcast position. I think what gets me the most is just like, you can't fucking talk to these people. They're all fucking cuckoo bananas.

And I don't necessarily endorse gunning people down in the streets. But I think the answer is, what the fuck did you expect? If you're being exposed 24-7 to horrific images of children dying in the streets, you're gonna lose your shit a little bit. ALICE Yeah. And I mean, nobody's really equipped to deal with the notion that, like, there is nothing that can be done to stop this. Which is what it increasingly seems like, and it seems like that more every day for

the last, what, like, fucking, fourteen months, or whatever the fuck it is? And obviously that's gonna push some people over the edge. And like, it's impunity, again, right? And all of this stuff indirectly benefits that, because then you get to say, like, the entire world is so anti-Semitic that it produces this kind of anti-Israeli terrorism, and therefore Israel continues to have a moral duty to commit this genocide, right? Like, I don't fucking know. I mean, I see those takes, and I'm just like, listen man, I have been subject to anti-Semitic attacks when I was growing up, I would call them attacks, they weren't, they were just

because I was Jewish, and I don't know, the people I know, I mean, I'm sure, I've said this to Roz, I don't really think there's a meaningful anti-Semitic problem on the left. I mean there is, you know. You get conspiracy theorists for sure. Conspiracy theorists every once in a while. I said to Roz, and I do believe this, that the language of anti-Zionist can creep towards those tropes. Oh sure.

But once you set someone down and they're just like, hey man, we probably shouldn't be using the phrase Zionist-occupied government, because that's Turner diary shit. But I think I can't wrap my round around, the thing that actually really kind of gets me is like, no one's b****** Tel Aviv and they probably should be at this point, you'll have to bleep that, I guess. ALICE Nobody who has the power to do that will. And the only people who have the will to do that don't have the power to do that. You know? JUSTIN Reminded of that imam on memory TV.

Yes, I support LGBT, let's go bomb Tel Aviv. ALICE Happy Pride Month, D. The mind hunts for an explanation and it's just like, I don't know, sorry Dev, Bibi, send him to the hag. I'm so exhausted, and not to make it about me again, but I'm so exhausted of watching horrific crimes be committed in my name, and then watching people who aren't Jewish turn around like, Federman, and be like, aren't you grateful for this? Fucking no I'm not! I'm happy when we're not massacring innocent people.

ALICE It's the same as the Trump stuff, where you look at it and you go, okay, well all the stuff that's already happened, right, not even the stuff that's going to happen that they say they're gonna do, that we know that they're gonna do, but even the stuff that's already happened is so bad that there's no way back from it other than... and this is the minimum shitlib position, like, war crimes trials, right? You need to have some kind of massive Nuremberg scale, and that's not even a huge fucking cell on Nuremberg, because they let a lot of people off the hook, but you need to have some kind of formal process to say that the ideology that produced this can't exist anymore. Whether that's for the Maga ship, whether that's for Zionism, it just, like, if it leads

to this, the only way out of it is through something like that, and there's no sign that that's gonna happen for either of those, ever. SEAN These are my corrective shotguns, truth and reconciliation. JUSTIN Yeah. But I would like to emphasize, we do not endorse disorganized political violence. No, we can't. No, we do not. You can read Trotsky on individual terrorism, right? It's adventurism.

But you see why it happens, and it's not like, to set your personal feelings about it aside. It's also, how do you think this is gonna end? Whether that's, in either the US or Israel, do you think this is gonna end? Whether that's in either the US or Israel. Like, do you think it ends with a Democrat getting elected, or a guy who believes 80% of what Bibi believes getting elected, but who has a slightly less oppositional defiant disorder and slightly less corruption so he's not gonna perpetuate the genocide to stay out of jail, in part? Of course not.

This is setting things, or has set things, for a long time, on a path to which the ending is something even worse than this, something almost incomprehensible, yeah. JUSTIN You know, this is an ugly situation. You can understand the motivations here, but also, yeah, once again, I don't think disorganized violence like this is going to help. This is an ugly situation. Yeah. No, for real.

Yeah, if you're looking for an endorsement of disorganized political violence on an Engineering Disasters podcast that we have to host on a Google product, you can figure out how long it's gonna take. ALICE Yeah, for sure. Anyway, I recommend to the listener, do not go out and do something like this. ALICE There's a bunch of fundraisers, some of which are gonna be under-described. LIAM Yeah, follow Devin. ALICE Exactly.

ALICE And again, okay, yeah, sure, that raises the same question of like, this is a kind of drop in the ocean, but you still have to do it. SEAN You have to do it. You are morally compelled to do it. In all seriousness, yeah, follow Dev, they're doing a great job on fundraising to get people to safety and out of Gaza. You are morally compelled to help people. That is your duty as a human being.

That is the deal you cut. If you don't like it, fuck off to Mars, you can take Elon with you. Alright, you wanna go- That'd be a quick way to go, anyway. In other news... ALICE AND THE DARK Now ban cars. Yeah, ban cars.

This is just a quick one from me, it's a UK update. Yeah, so, the good news is, bafflingly, no one died in the course of this, but so, Liverpool, football team, won the question mark FA Cup, I think. ALICE Football association. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big parade through the middle of town. The team was there, all the supporters were there.

Great, good time for everyone, they close off all the streets, but then somebody has a heart attack or whatever, so they have to open one of the barriers to let an ambulance through, and some guy who is just driving, tailgates that ambulance through the thing, gets immediately stuck in a crowd full of people because the road's closed and he's not supposed to be on it, and, I mean, this is all, like, in court at the moment so I'm kind of limited on what I can say about it, but like, I don't know why, but it seems like then just runs a bunch of people over. And this is not like a huge Ford F-150 type situation, this is like a, what do you call like a people carrier in America?

Like a... A minivan? Yeah, it's a minivan. Like, it's not like a big war vehicle, right, it's just a completely normal large family car, just driven into the crowd by someone for, y'know, we don't really yet know why, and injures like, a hundred people. Like, just straight down the street. And it's absolutely miraculous that nobody died. There's a couple of things here.

The band cars thing is where I'm gonna finish this up, the other thing is, because of the Southport thing and the riots, all of the usual suspects, all of these far-right influencers, were all immediately assuming and hoping that this was some kind of Muslim domestic terrorist attack, and had already kind of pre-announced that, and so that pushed the cops into having to announce, hey, we've arrested a white British guy. Like within an hour. ALICE So, you're saying terrorist, I mean, but you repeat yourself.

ALICE Yeah. Well, exactly, right. But the thing is, they're not charging it as terrorism, I don't think they're even charging it as attempted murder, I think it's like GBH and dangerous driving. JUSTIN What?! Oh my god. ALICE But, like, uh, this is, I think, troubling, right? Because if you're setting the precedent that, okay, well, when it's a white guy, and it's

like, when it's not a Muslim, we announce that to tamp all this shit down, and we go, yeah, we arrested, like, you know, a sort of area, angry white driver to this. ALICE Yeah, rude your dickhead, right. Yeah. Then what happens the next time it isn't a guy like that, you know, and you don't, do you not announce that and get the same riots thing again? Like, it's a really uncomfortable precedent for the future. So that's the one thing. The other thing is, you just can't have a city center that's built for cars, that you

then close off for parades and you can't do that consistently and safely without this being a thing that can happen. JUSTIN I have to say, I mean, they have... The last Super Bowl parade in Philly, they handled it much less well than they did the first one. SEAN Yes, they did much less well than they did the first one. Yes, they did. And they didn't handle the first one all that well either. They didn't handle the first one that well either.

Well, I guess they didn't want to see people hauling kegs over the city hall gates. We're fuckin' Philly, dude! Yeah, and I know, right? I fuckin' hate Shrelle Parker so much. I hate the fucking fun police. I hate that she comes here to suck up fun with her big ol' straw. Go birds. ALICE Didn't someone die at the second parade and

not the first one? SEAN I don't know, man, probably. ALICE Yeah, but I don't even know how well or how badly they set up the barriers for this. But it's driving, right? It's the kind of thing that driving makes you do, is go, well fuck it, I can tailgate this ambulance into the thing, and then you kind of find yourself in a situation where you set off what looks for a long second like a terrorist attack.

ALICE And it functionally is, by the way. ALICE Yeah, because you're like, well I want to drive my car down the road. And it's not even just like that guy's a unique kind of asshole, though he may well be, it's also that he is literally on a road that's designed to do that that has been closed off temporarily. Like, it's not wholly him, it's not wholly deviant or aberrant, it's also that we have designed everything in this country around cars, and we've designed it so that, like, we've had this ecosystem for years at this point of being like, oh, you know, latently I can't wait until someone runs over those Just Stop

Oil protesters, or whatever. And that builds that sense of entitlement to the point that something like this happens. So it's like, if you want to have a vibrant civic life, right, and if you want to have parades and stuff like that, then you have to de-car all of these places in ways that are more permanent and more protective than this. And I had this really uncomfortable revelation about this, because I know this street, this is, I think this is Water Street. SEAN Why is there a Hooters here?

ALICE British Hooters? It is cursed. It is real. SEAN We have to go. ALICE Yeah, let's do a Liverpool live show, I'd be thrilled. SEAN Liverpool show would be really good, yeah, go to the Hooters. ALICE Okay, sure. But, like, I've been on this street before, because the Liverpool Pride march goes down

it, and that's an uncomfortable sensation to think, oh, well, it was presumably protected using the same traffic strategy, by the same people making the same decisions. This could've happened to fucking anything! And it could've happened by someone who had, like, a different intention, it could have been worse, we don't know. And so, you just, you can't do this, you can't be like, by the way, every street has to be this incredibly broad sign for traffic thing. You need to pedestrianize shit.

Like, urge it. JUSTIN I don't know if you saw the article that came out recently where all the tech bros are like, really excited because we're making the Waymos more aggressive. Oh, cool, okay. I'm getting a harpoon gun. So now we can get this exact thing, except there's nobody to pull out of the driver's seat. Just have a fucking glorified Roomba with like a five ton car just decide to Mr. Mercedes an entire fucking

city. Yeah. Well, not until I get my harpoon gun. Roz and I are going whaling. I'm looking for the white Waymo. Roll boys roll as I just puncture an entire car full of tech props. Yeah, so like, this guy's in court, I don't know what's gonna happen to him, but like, it almost doesn't matter at this point, because

whatever it is, it's not gonna address anything systemic here, and the only thing that would be addressing something systemic would be to try and wean city centres off of cars, because you don't, like, I've been in Liverpool city centre many times. You don't need a car to get around it, if anything it's a hindrance, right? It's like, you need... The stuff you need to move around is like, deliveries, municipal services, and the emergency services and public transport, right? There is a way to do that that is so much safer, and also, by the way, is gonna fucking save

the fucking planet, because of the climate, rather than having like, every dickhead in a Ford Galaxy be able to access every single street address in the middle of town for no reason other than their own rage. LIAM Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, y'know, let's start getting rid of these cars. This is a bad idea.

We don't need them anymore. All right, that's it. That's, that's all I had for that. That was the goddamn news. All right, 40 minutes in and we're talking about God's burden estate. I had a lot to get off my chest. No, no, you're not in trouble. It's been a month.

I have some self-disclosure here. Okay. So, my mother used to live in Missouri. That's it, that's a self-disclosure. She's gonna love this bit. Gonna have to recuse yourself. No, I'm not recusing myself, I'm doubling down. Level the Midwest.

All I know about Missouri is that it loves company. Level the Midwest. Do you know how many hills there are in the Midwest? Turn the Midwest to glass, is that better? Lake of the Ozarks can stay, friend of the show Katie in Northwest, I believe Northwest or Northeast Arkansas can stay. That's it. That's it.

I know Arkansas is not the Midwest, but for my purposes... Oh, and Francis gets to stay. Yeah, Francis. Yeah. Alright, that's it. That's all we're saving. Turn it to glass. So, first we must ask, what is Missouri?

A pointless wasteland full of the worst fucking people you've ever met, also Francis, and sometimes my mother. It's home of Flight Simulator 2024's only unmarked challenge level of flying under that motherfucker right there. SEAN Yeah, under the Gateway Arch. Which is a terrifying structure if you see it in real life. ALICE Don't we have to do an episode on that? SEAN No, we're doing an episode about the Arch, yeah.

I think Francis' brother is actually a park ranger there. ALICE Okay, well, way Doc's Francis' brother, man. Well, nah, I should, okay, cut that out then. Anyway, so there's two things in Missouri, St. Louis and Kansas City. It was admitted as a state in 1821. Oh, do you mean Kansas City, Missouri, home of the Super Bowl losing chiefs? Yeah, Kansas City, Missouri, homeura- Homer Swift's loser boyfriend? Yeah, exactly.

Travi lost a big game. She's not giving us reputation, Taylor's version. Go fuck yourself. You may ask, you may ask, why is Kansas City not in Kansas? Urban sprawl. And the answer is there's two of them. There's one in Kansas, isn't it? Yeah, but the main part of Kansas City has always been in Missouri.

This is what happens when you build a city on the state line. Yeah, and the real answer to that question is I don't know. I don't know anything about Kansas City. I like the baseball mascot. Yeah, go Royals, baby. What else do I have to say about Kansas City? Don't people like the streetcar there? Is there like a touristy streetcar people like?

It has the one good Obama era streetcar, yes. There we go. Because it only goes in a straight line. And it actually has like some advantage over a bus, unlike the rest of them. Obama era streetcars. That's a future episode. Put it on the spreadsheet. We have a spreadsheet?

JUSTIN Yeah, what can you do in... Yeah, we have a spreadsheet. I think it's all on there. ALICE Okay. Weird cheese, fried ravioli... JUSTIN Fried ravioli? JUSTIN Fried ravioli? I had some fried ravioli at the airport.

ALICE Yeah, fried ravioli fox. JUSTIN It was actually really good. It was really good. Yeah, it was really good. I mean, it looks like a fried ravioli, I don't know what I expected, but like, I don't want this. I don't. Yes you do. No, this is like white boy falafel, this is horrifying, no.

You know what food, Roz, I'm surprised you don't eat more of is falafel. I feel like you would fuck with some good falafel. No, I like falafel, I'm just not usually in a position to acquire falafel easily. ALICE You're in the Halal Cart capital of the Western Hemisphere and you don't have regular falafel. JUSTIN Guess what, the two Halal carts nearest me are like a half a mile. ALICE Oh, the one at the mosque? JUSTIN Yeah, the good one over at the American Institution for Islamic Charitable Projects, yeah.

ALICE This is how Aleya was able to dox you, is because you triangulated your position perfectly with two halal cards! ALICE And the peacekeeper is coming... now! JUSTIN I would need three halal cards. ALICE It's just a line, otherwise, right? So, yeah, um. No, it's fully not, if you say I'm half a mile from point A and point B, you draw a circle around point A, you draw a circle around point B, that has an intersection that, like... Alright, fine, I'll say it.

The whole address is... So, St. Louis, Missouri. Well, Missouri, you can see the arch, you could go see some significant architecture, like the Wainwright building here. The skyscraper that was the skyscraper, and still is. ALICE We've talked about it before, many times. You could go see the Blues play. JUSTIN There's Hooters across the street from it, but not in this picture.

ALICE Hooters is everywhere, man. SEAN It gave the world the new American Gothic, which is this couple. JUSTIN Yes, yes, you can go see some racism. ALICE That's a, what is that, is that a sig like P230? Like, what the fuck is she cooking with, though? LIAM Racism. ALICE It might be a P230. LIAM Probably a cross on a couples lawn, frankly, but-

That's too cool of a gun to be handled by that racist of a woman, I think. Yeah. See, this is why, this was people threatening a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, and I'm here to say we should've armed Black Lives Matter protesters with 50 cal sniper rifles. ALICE I mean, it's like, again, the kind of impossibility of organized... Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's just crazy that nothing happened. JUSTIN Give me a 50 cal, I'll be responsible with it.

JUSTIN You could go see Union Station, you could go see the last piece of Penn Station over here. ALICE Oh, that's some sick mowing. Oh yeah. Yeah, they mow that lawn really good. I haven't been there, though, so I can't... Maybe this was a publicity photo. What else?

You can go see the City Museum and get stuck in a coil. What? Excuse me? So, the St. Louis City Museum is a very strange place built by a very strange man. Ah. Um, and it's like a bunch of, like, you know, kinetic sculptures and outsider art and a bunch of weird stuff, they got a whole floor that's just terracotta from demolished buildings, they got a whole floor that's like, um, you know, they have a ten story slide, they have a five story slide, they have a 10-story slide, they have a 5-story slide, they have a place where kids can go

crawl under the floor and get stuck there. They have... Oh, so it's just the booby-trapped jungles of Vietnam. Oh my god, there's so many ways a kid could get hurt. Everywhere in there. Oh, that's terrific. Yeah, full-heartedly bring your kids to the city museum. No, it's great.

Yeah, there's an outdoor section where you crawl through coils in order to get into a fighter jet that's perched precariously on a thing. Yeah, the city museum is like, they got like an indoor... There's so many ways to injure yourself in there. You know what else they have? Bars. Incredible. This is maybe the greatest city on earth.

JUSTIN Oh my god, it was so good. It was so good going to the city museum. I'm a great fan. I should put some pictures in here. ALICE Yeah. I was distracted looking at airsoft guns. Uh, because I'm normal. JUSTIN There's a school bus on a roof that's half perched

on the outside. ALICE Cool. JUSTIN Yeah. Um, yeah, that's the main thing in Missouri, I think, is the city museum. Everything else sucks. ALICE Alright. Summarized. Perfectly.

JUSTIN Summarized, yeah. Oh, and also St. Louis Union Station is a bizarre, incredible architectural space, which I never experienced anything like it in my life, just... You think there's no American Art Nouveau? Uh, that... Knocked my... KM Think again, dickhead! JUSTIN Yeah.

That was a mind-blowing thing to go into. Anyway, so, Missouri. It's a mixed bag. But, now we must ask, what is Times Beach? ALICE I recognize this photograph from the map we saw in slide one. Yes. So, the idea of Times Beach, this is a fantastic vacation destination, right by the scenic Merrimack River.

Which they've misspelled in the thing. Or, unless the spelling changes every time you look at it. That could be the case, yeah. I mean, this looks... So this looks not bad, I mean, this looks like some of the campgrounds in Cape May case, yeah. I mean, this looks... so, this looks not bad. I mean, this looks like some of the campgrounds in Cape May, but... Very ominous photo that they've used on that ad, though. It's like, come and buy this, y'know, get a timeshare in this horrifying location.

Exactly. Yeah, I've been to Eglsey, New Jersey. This is sort of a largely auto-oriented resort town, right? On the beautiful Merrimack River. And this is based on a simple deal with the St. Louis Times, right? Why? Pay $10 down and $2.50 monthly, and for the low price of only $67.50 total, you get a 20 by 100 foot lot, and also a 6 month newspaper subscription.

Oh, they were desperate, huh? Yeah! So, I assume that just like, the guy who owns the newspaper, because it was just a guy then, oh I guess it is a guy now again, because it's just Jeff Bezos, just was like, also, I have a real estate development, please, please help me. ALICE Yeah. And so, is the idea then, when you say auto, like an autofocus thing, that you drive like an RV or a trailer?

LIAM A 1925 RV? My jalopy? JUSTIN Yeah. You drive your jalopy out to Times Beach, which is about, I think, 20, 25 miles away from downtown St. Louis. ALICE Okay. And then, so you drive there, it takes you four hours, all of you get hernias and sciatica from the suspension, and then you, with your own two hands, you being, y'know, the silent

generation, build a vacation house for yourself, and then as you put the last nail in, a newspaper thrown by the paperboy, which they used to have back then, hits the house and the whole thing collapses. JUSTIN Exactly. ALICE Gotcha. JUSTIN Most of the houses when the development was built were built on stilts because the Merrimack River likes to flood. ALICE Oh, this is getting better and better.

I'm sure this won't come up again. Anyway. So, you know, admittedly, you know, okay, this is a great deal because you get a plot of land where you build your house and a newspaper subscription which is worth about the same because the economy was weird. And this starts off pretty good, right? This was a deal a lot of people took up. This is 1925, right?

Bad stuff started happening pretty quickly. Yeah, it's 1925 in Missouri, dude. Yeah. The Great Depression means no one can buy a vacation house. And then after the Great Depression, of course, you got the war, which means no one can afford to gasoline to go out to their vacation. Well, they can't have it. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's, there's just, uh, there's just rationing. So over a long period of time, you know, especially as travel patterns change after the war,

this town goes into a steep decline. It's mostly like lower middle-class permanent residents. By the time our story starts in 1971. There's not many people and there's not much to do in Times Beach. ALICE Just one kid throwing newspapers at empty houses. JUSTIN Exactly, exactly. It's like, damn, why did we leave the contract going that long.

No, the Times had been bought by the Post-Dispatch. I just put together that it's called Times Beach because it's presumably named after St. Louis Times. Oh, that's smart. Okay, I would never have thought of that. Okay, good show. Yeah, that's why Roz is the showrunner and you and I are just heckling him. Mm-hmm. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. So in the meantime, on the other side of the state, in Verona, Missouri, there's a chemical plant owned by Hoffman Taft. Oh no, are we gonna have to do O chem again?

I'm not doing too much of it. Thank you. Hoffman Taft was producing strategically important chemicals for the military. Namely, Agent Orange. ALICE Oh, fuck. Oh, cool. Okay. I'm sure this won't have a kind of, like, moral injury that kind of leaks out into the

soil of not just Vietnam, but also in a metaphorical sense, the United States, right? And literal sense. Oh, hold that thought. Oh boy. But this is a relatively flexible facility, right? It had some extra capacity, so this company, Hoffman Taft, leased some of the space to Northeastern Pharmaceuticals and Chemicals Company. Oh yeah, the shit that the Joker fell into, yeah.

It's so cool that if you're like a chemistry graduate, right, this is one of the two kinds of companies you can go and work for. You can go and work for the, like, we are poisoning Vietnamese children company, or you can go and work for the nice civilian we are poisoning American children company. JUSTIN Yes. Well, French children, but yes. ALICE It's like, what do we do here at, like, Incorporated Petrochemicals? Well mostly we, like, we get a paintbrush, and we baste every toaster sold with a thick

layer of hexavalent chromium, so that if you touch it you get cancer and die. I'm not entirely sure why we do this, but we kind of, you know, it's good business. JUSTIN But it's pretty funny! ALICE Yeah, it looks nicer. JUSTIN Yeah, it looks nicer. Yeah, it does. The chrome is shiny. And then now, 50 years later you get boomers complaining, like, why don't the toasters look shiny anymore? Everyone I know died of cancer.

Yeah, so they, uh, we're gonna do the episode one day on the company that made everybody stupid that Ross and I have been to. Speaking of chemical processes. So, the Northeastern Pharmaceuticals and Chemicals Company, or NEPICO, right? They start occupying the space in 1969. They were going to use the facility to make this guy here on the top, right? Which is hexachlorophene. Uh oh. That sounds bad. I'm not thrilled about any of the syllables in that. JUSTIN Hexachlorophene is actually manufactured in a similar process to Agent Orange, but it's different.

It's an antibacterial chemical which was used in soaps and toothpastes and disinfectants, right? ALICE Okay. Alright. It's good that we put this in your body. JUSTIN Yeah, they found out later it was extremely highly toxic, and if some of these products were manufactured wrong it would cause severe brain damage. So in 1972 products containing this chemical were pulled from the market, I believe right

after 36 infants in France were killed by improperly produced talcum powder. Oh, Jesus, huh? Yeah. So anyway, the process for making hexachlorophene involves some big organic chemistry nerd shit where you react formaldehyde with 2, 4, 5-trichlorophenol, and then there's a bunch of complicated stuff with the reaction that happens, and you get your hexachlorophene, but you get a fun byproduct called 2, 3, 7, 8, tetrachlorodibenzopedioxin. ALICE Not thrilled with the last two syllables of

that, particularly. I love being a perfectly innocent and morally neutral civilian and going to work and reacting formaldehyde with 2,4,5-triclorophenol to create 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorobibenzopedioxin. So I bet this kills weeds really, really good. Oh yeah, no question. Makes a toaster shiny as fuck as well. This is like my dad's mom insisting on using bootleg DDT well into the 90s. You've gotta use this on the clear coat on like a car, cause it shines like nothing else.

There's no eagles around, it's fine to use DDT. So anyway, yeah, this big long word, we're just gonna call it TCDD for a while. Of the several chemicals known as dioxins, this is the most toxic one, right? It's pretty bad, but mostly it's bad if it's in like relatively large quantities. You know, what constitutes a large dose varies widely by species. I mean, you know, because there's instances where some animals just keel over and die instantly and others are like, you know, they shake it off. I mean, it's a weird, it's sort of a Calvin Ball kind of toxin. ALICE Oh good. I love to hear the phrase, Calvin Ball

toxin. ALICE If there's one adjective I want to associate with my chemical toxin, it's unpredictable. Yeah, very unpredictable. It's something unpredictable, but in the end, it's very fatal. This was also present as a contaminant in the production of Agent Orange. Wait, so, wait, so there's contaminants in my Agent Orange? Well, yes, because, um, arguably this is the worst chemical in Agent Orange.

ALICE Oh, Jesus, okay. JUSTIN You know, the other two are, you know, they're defoliants, they're not necessarily designed to hurt people. ALICE I always forget, based on the wanting to beat Robert McNamara to death with my bare hands thing, that they weren't... Agent Orange was primarily not intended to give a bunch of children birth defects and stuff. RIght, yes. That was not the intent of it, it just happened, and largely, probably because

of everyone in Vietnam ingested huge amounts of this particular contaminant in Agent Orange. But since, y'know, the hexachlorophene was not intended as a defoliant to be used in war, it was intended to be used on soaps and, y'know, talcum powder and toothpaste, of course they tried to get rid of as much of it as possible. So Nepico simply distilled the hexachlorophene. ALICE Oh! It's the world's worst whiskey! JUSTIN Exactly. This of course leaves a nasty oily residue on the bottom of the still that's full of

the TCDD, and in chemical processing we call this horrible oily residue bottoms. ALICE I mean, yeah, we've all known some horrible toxic oily bottoms. JUSTIN That bill's insulting for pride. ALICE So, NEPICO originally dealt with these bottoms by sending them to an incinerator in Louisiana. ALICE Yeah, give us another couple of pride months under Trump that we try on that shit again. JUSTIN This was expensive and time consuming, though,

they wanted a better, cheaper way to handle all the bottoms. So, uh-huh. They contract with the Independent Petroleum Corporation, which is a chemical supply company, but they don't actually deal with waste oils themselves. So they in turn subcontracted this job out to a man. Just a guy? Yeah. Russell Martin Bliss. ALICE Okay. Well, okay.

JUSTIN He was a man with a truck and a shed with some tanks in it. ALICE Listen, if a guy with a truck can't handle some bottoms, what is America coming to these days? JUSTIN This is a good point, yeah. Based on it's always sunny, I believe the guy in the truck may be the bottom. So Bliss picked up the still bottoms, and he brought them to his facility in Frontenac, Missouri, apparently unaware that what he had picked up was much nastier than his usual line of business, which was used motor and transmission oils. ALICE Yeah, just gotta kick this out the back of

the truck, huh? ALICE This being pre-woked, he gotta kick this out the back of the truck, huh? ALICE This being pre-woke, you just poured that on the ground, you know? JUSTIN There was at least one instance where a truck came into his property, overweight, and got pulled over by the police, and they just, they dumped the... they dumped the still bottoms directly onto Bliss' property, and covered it up with some dirt.

And I believe the farm across the street had seventy chickens die. And one dog. JUSTIN Oh, Jesus. ALICE So anyway, he dumped the horrible dioxins into the main tank, with all the other waste motor oil, and the transmission oil and the... There was some sense of environmental responsibility here, cause Russell Bliss did keep transformer oil in a separate tank, cause that was full of PCBs, but this, nah, this wouldn't win

the main tank. ALICE You get the sense that nobody told the guy shit, or he wasn't paying attention if they did. JUSTIN Yeah, I do get the sense that it was never adequately conveyed to this guy how bad the stuff was. Because it was also not really adequately known at the time how bad the stuff was. ALICE Oh boy. I hope there's nothing like that now.

JUSTIN Ehhh. Don't worry about that. So here's a question, what can you do with waste oil? Refry some ravioli. No. Don't do that. You can use it to power your 80s Mercedes. If it's multi-fueled maybe, yeah.

So in some cases you get this big mishmash of waste oil, right? You can sometimes send it to an oil refinery and they just redistill it and they make new oil with it. Um, certain kinds of new oil. Obviously you're not getting everything out of there unless it's a very advanced facility. This is how they do like multi-product pipelines, right? You know, where you have like a pipeline that goes, well there's a pipeline that comes from like the Gulf Coast, goes all the way up to like Maine or so, it's a product pipeline. And like, okay, on this day we're sending jet fuel, on this day we're sending heating

oil, on this day we're sending fuel oil, so on and so forth. There's obviously a big mishmash at the end, you know, that gets stored in a big tank, it's full of all kinds of grades of oil and they just send it back to the refinery and distill it a second time. I had no idea how that worked until like a couple months ago. And I was astonished that you could just do that. Anyway, so in other cases you just burn the waste oil, right? Either in an incinerator or as Bliss is doing,

just selling all this as heating oil. Okay. But there's a problem with that, which is that you only have the option to sell it as heating oil in the winter, right? No one needs it in the summer. But in Missouri, there's a lot of dust. So, especially on the many unpaved roads.

So, what do you do? You take the waste oil, you put it in a big truck, and you spray it on the road, and that keeps the dust down for a few months. Okay. Sure. Sounds like deal. That's actually like, 50s, sort of like, what would we do without petrochemicals in information films?

It's easy, greasy, and fun! Yeah! Think of it like one big slip and slide. Yeah, but convoy going down the street, first you have the water spraying I mean, you have a convoy. You have a convoy going down the street. First you have the the water spraying truck that, you know, is the street sweeper that, you know, shoves all the toxins directly into the nearest river. Then after that, you have the DDT truck that sprays every single service. And then after that, you have the waste oil truck. So this is similar to a McAdam pavement, but it's greasier, right?

And for Bliss, this was free, fun, and easy. ALICE It's a safe and legal thrill! Oil off those roads! JUSTIN Exactly. People paid him to take the oil, and then people paid him to spray the oil that he had been paid to receive on their roads. Amazing. paid him to take the oil, and then people paid him to spray the oil that he had been paid to receive on their roads. Amazing.

This is the second greatest grift we've talked about on this podcast. ALICE The circular economy. JUSTIN Yeah. So, Bliss owns his own farm, he has dirt roads, and he has a large supply of waste oil, so it's kinda like, okay, why not? Let's give it a shot one application on his farm was sufficient for several months of dust control and Apparently he started this practice sometime before receiving the TC DD from nepo co right, but his reputation starts growing

He finds himself in a nice new side business, namely spraying down the roads, paths, and interiors of local equestrian facilities. ALICE Giving the horses cancer for fun and profits. JUSTIN Oh. ALICE Oh man. JUSTIN Oh, they don't live long enough for that. ALICE Oh ho ho ho ho, oh no. JUSTIN So he starts with Shenandoah Stables of Moscow Mills, Missouri.

Oh, Moscow Mills. Famous home of knockoff outlet mall Stalin. You know what, actually I want to give one more thing to Missouri, which is that Branson slaps. You go to the Moscow Mills GUM outlet. Fans of Soviet department stores are gonna like that one. It's there next to, um, Saks on the Prospect. I don't know. Anyway. ALICE So this is the 26th of May 1971, this is when our story really starts. The owners of this equestrian facility, who are Judy Piat and Frank Hampel, they pay him the princely sum of $150 to spray 2,000 gallons of waste oil on the floor of their indoor

equestrian arena. Oh no. Just like, hey, I want you to kill all my horses. Yeah, I'm gonna sabotage the derby from inside. I just... I don't under... I'm not a horse girl, in that sense. I don't understand how...

What do you mean, that's... No, no, no, no, no, no, pause. What do you mean in that sense? Don't worry about that. Alright, I'm moving swiftly on. I don't understand how having a big oil slick on the floor of the thing makes the horse spectating thing a more enjoyable achievement. Because surely the horses are like, slipping, and it's horrible.

There's no dust, you're only doing a little bit of oil. Oh. Okay. So it's not a giant slip and slide full of... Nah, it's not a giant slip and slide, it... No, it's not a giant slip and slide. It's just to keep the dust down. Okay, okay. But this oil seemed unlike the oil that Bliss had used himself.

It was thicker, it was darker, it left a horrible smell. But the smell did dissipate after a while, but the effects did not. So the first sign that something was off was there were hundreds of dead birds discovered in the arena the following day, they had all keeled over and fallen from the rafters. ALICE Oh god. Well, we'll just sweep those out of the way and bring on the horses. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Fuck off.

No. What?! Don't horse people like, like their horses? Isn't that like a thing? Yeah. Like... So there was a horse show at this location... Not for long. ...soon after the spraying.

And this particular show was said by the participants and the audience to be remarkably free of flies. Oh, I mean it's working so well. Smells awful, though. Then the horses started to become ill. With anorexia, diarrhea, abdominal bloating, bad balance, rashes, so on and so forth, and then they all started to keel over and die. In fairness, these are all also conditions of a perfectly healthy horse that thought it saw a snake.

This is true, yes. A horse is not a resilient animal, um, one reason why I identify with him a bit, but like, even still, you'd think this might be a sign that something is wrong. Poor Snuffles thought of ants and died. There were also eleven cats and four dogs who fell to the ravages of the TCDD. And then Judy Piet's six year old daughter fell ill, who was, uh, frequently, y'know, sort of used the equestrian arena as a sandbox in the off days. ALICE Oh god.

At least if you're riding the horse you're above the... The worst of it, you're not getting, like, skin contact for a lot of it. Yeah, you're not getting skin contact, you're not like, you're six years old, you're like licking it and shit, you know. Yeah. That's lead-based paint, it's not even lead-based, you'd be lucky to have lead-based paint. Dioxin-based paint. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, but at least the toasters are shining. So in the end, 65 horses died or were destroyed. Or were destroyed doing a lot of work there, Ross. ALICE That's like a minor Civil War skirmish kind of number, you know? The Yankee artillery killed 65 horses, 11 cats, 4 dogs, and a 6 year old girl. JUSTIN Uh, a 6 year old girl lived.

ALICE Okay, well. ALICE So it's not immediately clear of the cause of this rapid illness, the Center for Disease Control got involved. They were completely stumped. Is this some kind of localized pan species epidemic, right? Oh boy, okay. They took some soil samples, but they couldn't find anything particularly wrong, right? There were some elevated levels of PCBs and trichlorophenols, but not enough to cause these sorts of problems, because

those were a little bit better understood at the time. In the meantime, Russell Bliss went on to spray two more horse facilities, with similar results. ALICE Oh, Jesus. This guy was just running around killing horses. JUSTIN Yes. Except for some reason, his own. ALICE He's, like, killing more horses than, like, a 1920s movie director.

JUSTIN What I've sort of, what I think sort of happened here is that, as he, y'know, cause he owns a waste oil business, obviously he's getting more waste oil in every day, not just from, y'know, the horrible Agent Orange and Soap Factory. not just from, y'know, the horrible Agent Orange and soap factory. So like, the concentration of dioxins in the waste oil he's spraying changes over time. Cause he only got those dioxins for like a year, I wanna say. Uh huh. But he went on to spray two more horse facilities with similar results, and the owners caught

on, they began the long process of, oh god, we gotta remove all the topsoil in the entire equestrian facility. ALICE What are you gonna do with this incredibly contaminated earth as well? JUSTIN Oh, I have a great idea for that. Some of it was actually disposed of properly, in like a hazardous waste landfill, or incinerated, but of course, some of it was also used for landscaping in a residential neighborhood.

ALICE Okay, sure, yeah, why not. What's this playground made out of? Don't worry about it. Agent Orange, kind of. JUSTIN Probably fine, probably fine. Bliss also took smaller jobs, he started spraying like driveways and parking lots, he was spraying mobile home parks, other miscellaneous sites, but his biggest contract was yet to come.

So his dust control methods had been remarkably effective, and very cheap. And this is the guy. You're like, I don't want dust? You call this guy, and his Chevrolet Kodiak of the Apocalypse. ALICE Yes. Yes, he shows up in sort of a Mad Max vehicle. JUSTIN Five to seven six six six six! Who wrote this shit, Cormac McCarthy?

Yeah, let me just call Judge Reinhold's waste oil service. What the fuck?! So, the town of Times Beach had fallen onto hard times, they had never paved their roads. Yeah, hard times beach. They had never paved their roads, there was a long dry summer coming up, and several afterwards. What did they do? In 1972, they hire Blitz for the princely sum of $2,400 to spray 160,000 gallons of waste oil over a period of four years. He's going to come back each summer to reapply the waste oil. That goes until 1976 and Times Beach's dust problems were a thing of the past.

and Times Beach's dust problems were a thing of the past. Uh huh. In the meantime, the owners of the horse ranches were getting angry. Judy Piat and Frank Hample were preparing a lawsuit against Bliss, but they don't have the evidence they need, right? So they start borrowing cars and wearing wigs to tail Bliss's trucks to determine exactly where all this waste oil is being sprayed and logging everything for fifteen whole months. ALICE That's pretty badass, honestly.

ALICE Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of cool. I'm the environmental crimes PI, you know? JUSTIN Among these sites they stake out is Times Beach. And in the meantime, it's a bad time for our friends at NEPICO, right? The FDA bans hexachlorophene in consumer products in 1972.

Ah, you kill 36 French kids, and all of a sudden... Suddenly you're a villain, right? Everybody's woke. Yeah, everyone's woke. Everybody's got opinions. They had to reformulate dial soap. And suddenly you're like, this doesn't get my kidders clean, and you're like, yeah, that's because of the fucking tyrants at the FDA deciding that it's not a worthwhile price

to pay to just kill a bunch of French children. Exactly, exactly. You know, this is woke gone mad. So there's no market for Nepico's product anymore, they're one single product, so they shut down and a company called Syntex moves into their part of the plant, Verona. ALICE Again, Cormac McCarthy but less subtle. Like... JUSTIN Now, the Center for Disease Control was still working to find the actual cause of the death of all the horses and the birds, and so on and so forth. ALICE Raising hand.

Is this the CDC, because it looks like somewhere that just got hit with Agent Orange? JUSTIN This is the CDC, yes. I think the building was relatively new at this point. ALICE Jesus Christ, newer than, like, grass? JUSTIN I dunno, it might be, uh, maybe they covered it in hay because they're trying to get it to grow fast, maybe they- I don't know exactly what's going on here. SEAN It's the Centers for Disease Control, not the

Centers for... ALICE Yeah, not the Centers for Beautiful Lawns. ALICE I guess, I'm doing uh... Yeah, not the centers for beautiful lawns. I guess so. I'm doing the like, Stephen King, the stand thing, but instead of being like, what are they doing in there? They're probably like, you know, doing like, secret experiments and shit. I'm like, my objection is the landscaping. Yeah, exactly, it's like...

Maybe this is where they dumped the like, topsoil. So they're still trying to find the actual cause, they'd taken soil samples from all the stables, they were seeing some strange results, right? Their initial theory was some kind of contamination from trichlorophenols, right, which are well understood, used in herbicides, insecticides, to confirm this, they applied samples of the soil to rabbits. JUSTIN Oh. ALICE Thank you for your service.

Thank you for your service, Bugs. They developed irritations on their skin as expected, right, and then two of them unexpectedly died of liver disease. Oh. That's certain right for drinking on the job, you know? We do that! Oh yeah, shit, sorry about that. My apologies to the alcoholism community, I was just trying to get bits off and I wasn't

thinking that hard. We prefer to be called the people of drinks. That's what the pod in podcaster stands for. Keep it moving, Ross. Anyway. Clearly something else was at work here, so the CDC started looking for dioxins, right? Not to bury the lead, I'm sorry, does this say 31,000 parts per billion? That's dot, you know, it's- That's a lot of parts, motherfucker! Not great, not terrible.

Well, yeah, think about it this way, it's only 31 parts per million. I am flabbergasted. That's a lot of horse. Clearly, however much it is, it's enough to kill a horse. Not a six year old, though. The CDC tried looking for the dioxins, and what they found was a horrifying amount of, yeah, 31,000 parts per billion of 2378 tetrachlorodibenzopedioxin. This was nasty stuff.

This was a lot. ALICE. Horses are weaker than a six year old. Just to confirm, I get that on the record. Yeah. JUSTIN. As I said, there's like a weird way this affects different species of animals. Including humans.

ALICE. Yeah, you can just say horses are pussies, Roz. JUSTIN. Yeah, well, well, you know, I... Honestly, though, including humans. ALICE Yeah, you could just say horses or pussies, Roz. ROZ Yeah, well, you know, I honestly though, kind of. ALICE I too have spooked at my own shadow. ROZ Yeah. So, in the meantime, there are also veterans returning from the Vietnam War, right? And they were complaining of various diseases.

Many of them attributed these diseases to their exposure to large quantities of Agent Orange." ALICE I mean, correctly, but also not just that. I feel like, I've said this before about Gulf War Syndrome as well, that if you were in the US military up until about, I don't know, 2010 and probably later in some applications, your immediate supervisor, your commanding officer, was almost certainly a large lump of uranium sculpted to look like a guy. ALICE Right, you look- burn paper's not good for you.

LIAM Yeah, the burn pits are everywhere, yeah. ALICE Yeah, like, everything is coated in five different, horrifying chemicals, because, weirdly, given that it supplies a whole parallel healthcare system for them, the US government does not consider troops human. So, you know. You get that. You get that benefit. Ten percent off of those.

JUSTIN He was exposed to so many horrible chemicals that it's really hard to isolate the effects of any single one, yeah. ALICE Oh yeah, that's why there's no one kind of etiology for Gulf War syndromes, because it's fucking like, they were spraying desert paint on vehicles in completely enclosed tents, shooting you up with experimental anti-nerve gas things. LIAM However, shiny. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very shiny.

So, who, yeah. Very shiny. So, who fuckin' knows. JUSTIN So, when the news came down to Judy Piat and Frank Hempel that their horses had been killed by dioxin, they immediately realized, wait, like an Agent Orange? And then after some sleuthing by the CDC, they found the offending chemical plant which had done business with Bliss, the now-defunct Nepico. So those guys went on the lawsuit, despite being non-existent. ALICE I like these, I like this couple. They're like, they're persistent, y'know?

JUSTIN Oh yeah, they are, they are doing a lot of due diligence, they assist the CDC and later the EPA and a lot of the stuff. ALICE The horse people, they might not have cared about their horses enough when they were alive, but once they were dead, you know. JUSTIN That's a lot of money down the drain, y'know? Can't even make it into soap anymore because there's... ALICE Jesus. Surprise!

JUSTIN You can't put the chemicals in the soap anymore. So with the locations of dioxin contamination confirmed, the CDC recommended that the state of Missouri get involved in the cleanup. However, with the half-life of TDCC in the environment estimated at one year, Missouri opted to just do nothing and let the problem sort of solve itself. That sounds like Missouri. How many horses can it possibly kill in two years?

My understanding is some of these horse ran- ranches attempted to continue operating, and um... Oh boy, okay. The horses did not last long. The horse ranches that kills your horse instantly? Yeah, exactly. Imagine that. Um, the weagles keep turning, but very very slowly. How can they keep turning, Roz?

Their horses, they have hooves. Have you seen the horses in Cities Skylines? In 1979, the EPA, which is still only nine years old, they finally get involved. Which is of course too old to be killed by the TDCC, so. Apparently, yeah. I think before we continue here, a useful thing to remember is just how bad the damn pollution was back in the 70s. How much it was absolutely fine to dump all your hazardous waste barrels into a big hole

just eleven miles south of downtown Louisville. ALICE It gives a shit, it's at the dumpster. JUSTIN It's America's Red Barrel Room. This is where you go if you wanna discuss your favorite passwords. ALICE This is the Valley of the Drsters. It's America's Red Barrel Room. This is where you go if you wanna discuss your favorite passwords. This is the Valley of the Drums. Sick name. It's a sick name, yeah, and it's very descriptive. You think it's, oh, it's like, music?

No, it's chemicals. Oh, I've just found a color picture of it and it looks so much worse. Very yellow. I was gonna say brown, like the Doom 3 color palette. No, no, no, it's like, you can climb on this video game semi-autics yellow. Well, most of the defoliated hills you see back here, those have drums buried underneath them, which is why they're defoliated. And then eventually they ran out of space to dig anymore, so they just started tossing

the barrels on top of there. This was a chemical waste dump for a very long time, I think sometime in the 70s the owner died, and then people just kept dumping their barrels there. ALICE Funny story, there's one of these in West London, and nobody knows what to do about it. And yeah, it catches fire occasionally. JUSTIN Do you not have Superfund? ALICE No.

No, oh my god. It's down to like a borough council to decide if they wanna do anything about that. I'll make an episode about it. Would probably say remediation is a good idea there. So yeah, no one knew what kind of horrible chemicals were where, no one knew what half of the horrible chemicals could do to you, right? It was assumed that if you dumped these chemicals in a hole, it was no longer your problem. But the pollution got bad enough that fucking Richard fucking Milhouse fucking Nixon finally had to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

Also created legal services. We had to create the Environmental Protection Agency before we all poisoned ourselves or dissolved ourselves with acid or whatever. So this'll provide some context for what's coming next. A former Nepico employee reported to the EPA that the company had covertly disposed of 90 barrels of still bottoms on some guy's farm. Through this investigation, they also found that Nepico had left a huge tank, also still full of still bottoms, on a property of the chemical plant, right? Which no one could figure out how to dispose of because these, these dioxins had gotten a bad reputation. You know,

this is getting a little bit publicized now. The only way you could get rid of them was through a sort of high temperature incinerator. There was not one in Missouri. There was one in Minnesota that was willing to take it, but no one was willing to allow any of it to cross state lines. Yeah. Yeah. No one could blame them.

So this becomes a huge headache for the EPA for a while, and they wind up just isolating this tank with a big concrete berm. Just say no one can go near this. It's a different kind of out of sight, out of mind. Yeah, exactly, exactly. We're handling this. Fired for GEPA for bizarro world waste, yes. Yeah. So the EPA decided that along with investigating this, they should probably go revisit all those stables and test the soil there.

Dead. All of them dead. Horses dead, six-year-old dead, Richard Dixon dead. The news was pretty bad. Rather than the one year half-life expected, when I say half-life here, I don't mean in the nuclear sense, I mean the half-life of the chemical sort of exposed to the environment, right? You expect it to sort of, you know, this is the amount of time that it will take for half of the chemical to sort of reduce into more benign compounds, right? They expected a half-life of one year, so after one year half of it had begun, the next year, you know, three quarters of it is gone, the next year, so on and so forth. Rather than the one year half-life expected, it appeared the rate of contamination had

not gone down at all. Oh. Okay. Good. Yeah. Okay. Ideal. Oh. Okay. Good. Okay. Ideal. Mm. Mm.

Mm. Sure. Yeah. So, ignoring the problem was not working. The area that kills horses forever. Yeah, it's frustrating me, because I use that strategy so much in life, that sometimes it does not work. Turns out that often the problems remain.

The problems keep going, yeah. Furthermore, they put together a list of all the potentially contaminated sites in the entire state of Missouri. It's just the state of Missouri, the Fed Diagram's a circle, yeah. By 1982, the EPA was ready to begin addressing this issue in an orderly fashion and in accordance with the latest science, which it also indicated that possibly the dioxin was not so bad as long as it was not present in huge quantities, like in the stables and arenas. Right, there's some threshold here where it's much more benign.

Yeah. Yeah, it's much more benign. Yeah. Yeah, it's not as huge of an issue. So anyway, the Environmental Defense Fund leaked all those internal documents. I guess you got it, right? But like, did they leak those with the intention of being like, it's fine? No. No, the opposite. Okay, gotcha.

Yeah, the first on the list of contaminated sites was of course Times Beach. And so the residents are really pissed off by this, right, they've been mired in this stuff for years, they didn't even know about it, they didn't know the government knew about it, what's more, the government doesn't know how toxic it is, actually, but it's also, you know, trying to defend against lawsuits over Agent Orange related to the same chemical. ALICE Yeah, like, the feds aren't gonna be like, oh, sorry, I guess now it's our responsibility that you decided, instead of paving your

roads, to just have Judge Reinhold spray a bunch of Agent Orange on them. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, there's just sort of general outrage that no corrective action was taken. You know, it's a confusing situation to be in, because there is, I'm again gonna say, there is some evidence by this point that, you know, as long as it's not in a huge concentration, this stuff is not good, but it's not going to kill you. Yeah, that's a trouble. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're a horse. Right you're fucked. You were fucked anyway. Well again 31,000 parts per billion is a lot more than the concentrations we're gonna talk about. So this finally prompts the EPA to get off their asses and do

something which was soil testing right. Now the soil testing in Times Beach indicated that concentrations were as high as 300 parts per billion along all the town's roads, right? This is well below the rate of contamination for the stables, but still above the EPA's new threshold which had to be developed right on the spot, without all the knowledge of 100 parts per billion. ALICE So actually not great, not terrible. which had to be developed right on the spot, without all the knowledge of a hundred parts per billion. ALICE So, actually not great, not terrible. JUSTIN Yeah, actually not great, not terrible, yeah.

The CDC recommended one part per billion. But this is again based on nothing. On December 3rd, 1982, these tests were completed, and then on December 4th, 1982, the Merrimack River overflowed its banks, reaching twenty feet above the flood stage, completely inundating the town, which of course meant the whole town was evacuated. ALICE So, sometimes, quite often, I've done it on this episode, I think ahead too far and I say the thing that's gonna happen, and I accidentally fuck the foreshadowing, and I'm really sorry to do that.

This one blindsided me. You mentioned the river flooding, and I didn't put that together in my head, and I'm so glad that I didn't, because that was an earnest reaction of, like, horror there, in that realization. JUSTIN Just right after all the testing, flood, everyone's evacuated. Biblical. So, no one really knew what to do at this point, right? The town was flooded, the people were all gone, no one knew how toxic anything really was, no one was acting rationally, the residents just wanted some action, god damn it, right?

Now, luckily there was a group inside the EPA called the Chlorinated Dioxins Work Group, right? With direct experience with dioxins. Not a work group you want to be a part of, but yeah, at least they're there. Far more than like anyone else at that point, right? The chairman of this group had an idea. Well, you know, if you just pave the roads and add sidewalks, all the contamination's gonna be sealed underneath there, it's gonna be fine. Just build the town on top of it. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, it's like, Centrelia. Great, okay, terrific. Well no, Centrelia has actual physical problems that result in the stuff being disturbed frequently. I think the paving idea was probably viable, but these guys were never consulted. There were now several agencies with jurisdiction over the emergency because of the flooding, right? The CDC, the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They're all complaining at each other.

They can't get along. Luckily, we have President Ronald Reagan. He convenes a Times Beach task force, with the limited knowledge they have they come to a reluctant conclusion. Yeah, we're gonna kick everyone out. Yep, that tracks. Yeah. Anne M. Gorsuch...

No relation? To the Supreme Court? Just, okay. She's her, she's his mother. Anne M. Gorsuch gives the order and the EPA agrees to pay $33 million for relocation with $3.7 million dollars coming from the state of Missouri. All 800 families in Times Beach were bought out and moved by the government into whatever housing was available nearby.

It happened so quickly there was not even really any organized resistance to this. This is a route. This is a panic. Yeah, exactly. Nor was the community consulted for anything, right? Notably a lot of people were moved into the nearby Quail Run Mobile Manor, right? That's a trailer park, which Russell Bliss had actually sprayed with waste oil much more thoroughly than Times Beach. Right. Oh, good.

And that was also later evacuated. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Everyone is panicking about what the long-term effects of dioxin are, what health problems they or their kids might experience. This was a complete disaster. Right? It's just like, alright, everyone leave. You never want the, kind of, like, federal government advice to be like, now panic and freak out.

Right? Like... Exactly. Go in, they put up the big scary signs, like this one. Caution, hazardous waste site, dioxin contamination. Stay in your car, minimize travel, keep windows closed, stay on pavement, drive slowly. ALICE Incredible haircuts on this woman as well. JUSTIN Oh yeah.

ALICE We used to let women have mullets. JUSTIN Back in the day, back in the day. That's what you could do in the Midwest. ALICE Real trade-off, on the one hand, the feminine mullets, on the other hand, dioxin. But the toasters, think of the toasters. So shiny. Creased jeans? Like...

Yeah. So then they start demolishing the town. Furthermore, they start going to all the other contaminated sites around the state, basically everywhere that Russell Bliss had been, they start demolishing them as well. They start going to all the other contaminated sites around the state, basically everywhere that Russell Bliss had been. They start demolishing them as well. How do you think he feels at this point? Like smoking a big fat cigar, he'd lit off the back of an oil fire.

Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, I think he probably came off best out of anyone involved. The waste was all stored at Times Beach being what they figured was the most contaminated site. Pending construction of a powerful enough incinerator somewhere in state, which happened in 1995. They built it on the site of the town. Jesus, okay.

Vast numbers of lawsuits go forward. There's something like 14,000 individual ones. Um, I know Piat and Hempel eventually settled for $10,000 from Bliss, a hundred thousand dollars from independent petroleum, but the guys with the big pockets don't exist, right? Right. Um, most of the pertinent environmental legislation that would have punished anyone involved was passed after the dioxin-laced waste oil was applied.

So there were a few legal avenues to proceed here. When this disaster started unfolding, the EPA was a year old. Eventually independent petroleum pays out a million dollars to each of Piat's daughters who had gotten permanent chronic health problems from dioxin exposure. Real bad. Yeah. But the weird thing is, you know, they clean up the site in 2000, 1997 they finished the cleanup, they finished, they demolished the incinerator in 2001. The site was delisted from the Superfund program. Since then, dioxins in particular have received a lot of heightened scrutiny from regulators,

but there are some questions to be addressed regarding, you know, even chronic low exposure. This problem may not have been so bad that they needed to evacuate. All the studies of Times Beach residents revealed negligible at best health effects from the long term dioxin exposure. Y'know, this is... So of all the real stuff to panic about, the thing that gets the big panic and the big scary is something that turns out maybe not to have done anything. JUSTIN Maybe it didn't really do anything.

I'm not disputing, like, over in Vietnam where you're getting Agent Orange dumped on you like every day for months. But y'know, in this case, maybe you could've taken some less extreme measures. This may not have been necessary. So they just pave it, they just pave over it, gang, were right? Pave the earth! Probably, yeah. Yeah, you probably could've just paved over it.

Incredible. It was not, it's probably not that bad. Well, I mean, it makes sense, cause if it's job is to stick to the dust and stay there, it's gonna do that, nobody's walking around licking dirt roads. SEAN Exactly, you know, you- ALICE Exactly, well, you won't be able to lick the dirt road because there'd be pavement over it. SEAN Well, exactly.

ALICE Wow. SEAN So, yeah. Times Beach is gone now, the only building left in town was the roadhouse that was built across the river, which is now the visitor's center, for what is now known as Route 66 State Park. ALICE For, like, to commemorate the Route 66? SEAN Which is no longer there. We de-... ALICE Yeah, Route 66 is gone, but...

ALICE And there's never really a thing in the fo- okay, sure, whatever. SEAN Well, it was signed, but it's no longer signed. It's like, decommissioned, yeah. ALICE Okay, cool. Well, it was signed, but it's no longer signed. It's decommissioned, yeah, it's weird. ALICE Okay, great, cool. Well, I mean, this is a perfect American story, right? Of, like, a town that exists due to a weird capitalist swindle that fails on its own merits is then horrifically polluted by one guy in a way that then gets everybody to panic. LIAM One guy with a truck ruined everyone's lives.

Yeah. That's a good metaphor. JUSTIN And then the feds evacuate everything, and then it turns out they never even needed to, and now it's kind of a boondoggle national park. Or state park. ALICE Yes. Yes, you can go there, and I think there's like a dog park, and there's like... I don't know what else there is in there.

The negligible health effect. Park, and there's like, I don't know what else there is in there. There doesn't seem to be much. ALICE The negligible health effect. JUSTIN Yeah, negligible health. Well, the Superfund cleaned it up good and proper, I mean, they took out all the top soil and everything. ALICE This is like, the ideal right of a centralized planned economy, is that everybody has a kind of do nothing job at a state institution that only really exists to cover up a series of other people's errors,

this is ideal. JUSTIN It's really bad when you look at this and you say, you know, you start to agree with Reagan about, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. ALICE Well, in this case the federal government didn't really make anything worse apart from, you know, destroying the town. They just kind of... yeah, they cleaned it all up for no reason, and now there's a state park there.

Yeah. Well, they've exploded the community, I mean, that made everyone... Yeah, it's perfectly capable of doing that on its own. That's a good point, yeah. What the hell do they got at the Route 66 state park here? Hiking, cycling, equestrian trails, so I guess it's fine for horses now. Uh, picnicking areas- If the horses can handle it, it must be fine. Easy peasy.

Yeah. Route 66 captured Americans' imagination and exposed millions of citizens to small towns across the country. Okay, sure. I have a feeling a lot of those citizens also lived in small towns at that time. ALICE I'm much more interested in the other parks you may like, Missouri Mine State Historic Site, which looks fucked up. That is, that's an old mine, it's in a state of extremely cool disrepair.

And I like the look of it. LIAM So, what did we learn? ALICE Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No, I learned definitely say I. Government who's to say good or bad or not? I don't know. I don't know. I was reminded.

I was reminded strongly of East Palestine by this. I'm in Palestine. Excuse me. Um, because, you know, you have people like we want the government to do something and then the government does something, and... JUSTIN Not like that. SEAN I shouldn't have done that, yeah.

JUSTIN Reed, I invite... SEAN There's an extent to which environmental remediation works, and sometimes you don't need to take the most extreme option. Yeah, this is my most pro-chemical industry episode. ALICE I invite the listener to read the novel White Noise. The movie's pretty good, too. Yeah, cool.

It's a real kind of simuvac type situation. JUSTIN Yeah. So this is, uh... Well, they'd only been doing it for ten years, you can't expect the EPA to not make an oopsie doopsie every once in a while. Well, we have a segment on this podcast, called Safety Third. ALICE Shake hands with danger. Uh, alright.

JUSTIN Hello Nova, Liam, Justin, and Schrödinger's guest. Eh. Great, well now I'm lost. It's the punchline to a joke I haven't even told. Whatever. Good enough. Schrödinger's driving along, and he's speeding, and he gets pulled over by the cop, and the cop says, do you know how fast you are going, and Schrödinger says, great, now I'm lost.

And it's not even Schrödinger, it's Heisenberg. It's Heisenberg, isn't it? It's Heisenberg. It's Heisenberg. So I fucked up the joke that I also fucked up telling. I'm really tired, it's 1.45 in the morning. Can we do the thing, please? JUSTIN Yes. In my current life as a site reliability engineer, which involves neither site reliability nor engineering quite frankly, you wouldn't think I've had any good workplace stories for safety

third. However, I wasn't always a desk jockey, and my proper trade in education is in the kitchen. ALICE Oh boy. Lot of injuries in there. Lot of Safety Thirds there. LIAM Yeah. JUSTIN As you might imagine, there are no shortage of ways to injure yourself or others in a commercial kitchen.

ALICE That's what I get for not reading at long. JUSTIN So the real trick is finding a way to do it that is novel. ALICE Oh. Okay. JUSTIN Many years ago, when I was fresh out of college, I unknowingly resolved to do just that. And so we have the oatmeal incident. ALICE Oh, gods.

I'm scared. JUSTIN I took a job right out of college, because it was available, but also because it was the only unionized kitchen I had been aware of before or since. That particular local turned out to be not so useful, but that's neither here nor there. My precise job as the new hire and a lowly block one cook was to single man the entire preparation of our breakfast buffet. For a hotel chain you've definitely heard of in a city. I know at least two of you have been to and no, it wasn't a Howard Johnson's.

What's wrong with ho-jazz? This relatively straightforward task would not have been difficult for an experienced cook with a good sense of how long it takes to do things and the corresponding ability to sort out the order of operations. Again, I was right out of college. One day when a QHL hockey team was staying at the hotel, I actually managed to run out of oatmeal. Jesus.

The commercial preparation of oatmeal for a buffet service is not complicated, but it is time consuming. As you need to bring a liter or two of your preferred cooking liquid. I believe I used milk at the time to a gentle boil before adding the oats and give the oats time to cook in that liquid and the whole product to thicken up. Now I was mortified by this, so I made sure not to repeat that mistake the next time the

team stayed with us. For this kitchen, oatmeal is cooked in a large, shallow, three foot wide aluminum pan called a rondo. Rhymes with bondo. Thank you. And looks like a Louisiana surname. Yeah. The advantage of this arrangement is that you can cook a large quantity of the oatmeal

while providing a broad surface area and a large enough body that you can employ two burners on the stove to supply the necessary heat. This was my undoing. Okay. Hmm. As was the fashion at the time, you handled pans this by grab gripping their handles through the aid of a side towel Which is nothing more or less exciting than the sort of thing you'd use to dry your dishes Knowing that the time for the buffet to open was drawing close. I shut down the burner

Seized the pan and turned hurriedly towards the preheated chafing dish I intended to put the oatmeal inside of. But since I only killed one burner, the slightly oily, very frizzy towel in my left hand immediately caught fire, and at the speed of reflex I did what any sane monkey would do and let go of the burning thing. Oh no. Oh no. No.

No. The pot immediately fell from my hands and if I'd followed the thought through and had Oh no. Oh no. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Danis Fluitzer want to do the bubbling hot oatmeal happily, jumped out of the pot and slapped me straight in the face." ALICE What you did to yourself is something that

sometimes prisoners in the UK do to other prisoners or prison officers on purpose. Since you cannot run a prison system in the UK without every prison cell having a kettle in it. This is a known thing, right? Like sugar and water, it sticks. Real bad. Um, yes. Mmm. Mmm. SEAN MAHERLYS Skipping all the really ghastly over-explaining

this unexpected hot oatmeal scrub had the predictable effect on my ability to make logical decisions, and after being talked to by our baker into going to the hospital, I took a taxi rather than calling an ambulance. Why'd you do that, it's Canada. Um. Yeah. At the ER, when the staff called my parents to tell them that their son was in the hospital,

my father immediately demanded to know what my little brother did that time. I escaped the worst of the scarring and thanks to Norm MacDonald I will never forget the phrase, always wear these safety glasses. If I hadn't been wearing my glasses that morning things would have been a lot worse. Jesus, no kidding. Yeah, Jesus Christ. What we learned here is that Brando Cook should probably be reminded to slow the hell down, side towels should be clean, dry, and free of lint, and that some jumped up hockey player from Montreal has to wait a few minutes for his oatmeal. You know? Just let him.

Yeah. Yeah. Greetings from Irvingland, from Patch. Burry's oatmeal. You know? Just let him. Yeah. Yeah. Greetings from Irvingland, from Patch. Thank you, Patch, I'm glad that you did not lose your vision to a thing of Quaker Oats. Yeah. Jesus Christ. These and other things can happen to you in a kitchen. Yeah, I want some more kitchen safety thirds, cause I know there's a million of them out

there. Yeah, yeah, I feel like I might cause some at some point in the near future. Me anytime I cook. Same. Well, that was Safety Third. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? Do all the stuff in the description of the video, whatever it says. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Buy a shirt. We have shirts. Probably should've plugged that at some point before, uh, an hour fifty-four. No, the hogs'll do it. Merchandise. Thank you, hogs. Whoops. Um, yeah, uh. Do organize political v-

RAAAZ! Believe that. Or don't, I don't care anymore. Who knows, no one's gonna watch it to this- well hopefully the content moderators don't watch it to this far. No, don't worry, it's just AI robbing us again. Oh my god. Alright, that's the podcast.

Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone. Bye.