Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 190: 432 Park Avenue (and other pencil towers)

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

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Okay, I got the video recording going. I got my local going. The Zencaster is now going. Aww! Oh, look at the dog. Also, hello. Oh. I do it as WAV to piss off Devin next time. Wait, does he not let... Do they not like WAV?

I don't know. I just... It's literally fine. I live to antagonize Dev, so... Okay. Love you, Dad. I always sounded as WAB. I said they told them in the past no MP3, so I was doing this... Oh, yeah.

It makes, honestly, I can say this, it makes no difference whatsoever. Nova, you look beautiful today. A little. Thank you. Yeah, this is, this is, I'm experimenting with actually bothering to do makeup. You look terrific. Thank you. Ross, you look terrible. You have to because the screen is recording. That's right, yeah. All right. All right. Well, as long as we're doing that, uh, hang on so the people can get a glimpse of my face. There I am. I just came from work. Hello.

Now, show me the slides. Justin. Okay, I'm going to the slides. Faster, peasant boy. Here we are. Hold on, we have to... This is anti-Polish discrimination. He's also Norwegian.

I'm Swedish, so he... No, Norway barely even had any peasants, because it's no arable land. Who would want to live in Norway? Roswood. Vikings wanted to not live in Norway. You go out and go in a boat, and you go somewhere nicer. nicer and yeah like higin Minnesota um it's half Norwegian half Somalia that's the blue that's a beauty of America we do the sync point and then we

launch the podcast we should do the sync point yes yeah yeah yeah going to do three two one mark and then you clap three two one mark okay good enough sorry boy it's like full full every every recording he hates the clap so you Oh, that's unfortunate, but it's over now. This is a very clap-heavy podcast. Dog traumatized. Dog traumatized by clap. Voke left traumatizes innocent dog.

Hello, and welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am November Calli. I'm the person who's talking right now.

my pronouncer, she and her. Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouncer, he, him. I'm the person talking right now. And Victoria, go, I guess. I don't know what to call you. Host, fourth mic?

I think fourth mic, temporarily unemployed fourth mic. Yeah, welcome to the, well, there's your problem, make work program. We can have a broke experience, go, Victoria. Carrying on the, the mantle of FDR. My name is Victoria Scott.

I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are she and her, and a guest. And we have a guest. One more guest. Hi, my name is Rob. My pronouns are he and him, and I will be your elevator attendant for this episode. Oh, you got like the handle as opposed to the buttons. Yeah, it's always funny when you're an elevator with an attendant and they just press the button for you. Oh, like it fills games, yeah.

I just want a peaked cap. Like, this is all I want from life. The freight elevator in the B&Y Mellon Center has a guy who just sits on a milk crate and he pushes the button for you. Give the man a chair at least, god damn. I know, right? I do have a bomb shelter in the basement, so when it really goes wrong, the elevator attendant will be in unlimited positions of power.

That's a good point, yeah. Anyway, this is going to be chaos because there are like five of us. Yeah. What you see on the screen in front of you, is a very narrow skyscraper under construction. Oh my God. I hate this thing. I've been wasted to talk about it for so long.

Yeah. And knowing us, it's gonna fall down the day after we sort of do the episode, or an unusually skillful 9-11 is gonna take it out for it. Yeah. This is challenge mode 9-11, that's right. New game plus, you sort of get in, you're like, okay, now let's do a slightly harder one. We've had there's a whole, like, row of these things, we'll get into it. So, like, you could, like, pinball it, like, just hit the first one right, and then just doing it.

Doing a kind of Takeshi's castle of 9-11's down billionaire's road. Yeah, this is, this is 432 Park Avenue. There's some strong arguments that it is not supposed to look like that. Oh, wow. There's- One of the worst buildings in America, if you ask me. It's not very good, yeah. It's poor. I'm on 432 Park Avenue.com.

Well, I would be except the to... Oh, fuck, I didn't pause my torrents. Hold on. Yeah, let me... Well, that's going to give a moment for, you know, all of the right-leaning Yimbys to turn off the podcast right now. Yeah, as we said, 432 Park is bad.

They can suck my ass. This is a tower of abundance, if you will. Yeah, this is a... This is the middle finger to God, really. I have a question. If we have a painting for California housing policy, what do we have for New York City housing policy? Well, that's later in the episode. Oh, perfect.

Oh, thanks, dude. I appreciate you keeping that gag going. Yeah. That was all Rob. Oh, well done, Rob. Yeah, Ross, you suck. You're terrible. Ross, when you go home for Thanksgiving?

Never mind. We'll talk on there. Wednesday. Okay, thanks. Yeah. But before we talk about 432 Park Avenue, and other pencil towers. We have to do the goddamn news.

Oh, fuck, that's me. Obviously, so much national news going on that it's incomprehensible, so we need to talk about extremely local news. The ongoing septa-poly crisis has worsened. Polycrisis is a terrific word. Have they tried monogamy? Yeah.

Oh, yeah, we're going down to one form of public transportation and knowing us, it would be buses. But buses, yeah. Well, Corinne will be thrilled. None of us, none of the rest of us will be, but at least Corinne will be thrilled. Make the 15th of the subway, God damn it. So the situation on the ground at this time, so SEPTA, the southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, my local public transportation provider, has now lost the traffic. tunnel, as well as a good deal of regional rail capacity, as well as who knows what else is going on.

Apparently, someone had the bright idea that to reduce wear on the overhead lines, to replace the contact shoes on the trolley poles of the trolleys. These were from, I want to say, a earlier order from a couple, from a decade ago when we thought we were going to go in on an order of trolleys with Toronto. Was this supposed to be what happened in like Germantown where they laid down track and then never used it or is something else? No, no, this is after that. How do two grown North American cities not have trolley bus money between them? We have trolley buses.

Yeah. No, the trolley buses are fine. It's the trolleys that are fucked. Oh, excuse me. Yeah. So, yeah, they replace the overhead contact shoes with these bigger ones that were from Toronto with the idea that they would reduce wear. Problem is they're a little bit deeper than the older shoes. So when they went through the tunnel where the wire is much more highly tension, those contact shoes both wore down to nothing and then knocked off all of the insulators.

the holders and, you know, basically everything down there just got wrecked. The whole inside of the tunnel getting a perfect Schoenigan handshake. For sale, trolley shoes never worn. They used the Canadian inch, is the problem. Yeah, exactly. By understanding, I forget if this was in the Inquirer article or not, was that some essentially load-bearing employee either left or was fired. It was basically the guy saying, no, don't use these contact shoes.

I know we have a billion of them. They won't work. And, uh, Loebbearing employee is going to stick with me for a long time. You know, once, uh, they're called bottom. But once they're all is gone. Someone's like, hey, let's use these and see what happens. Uh, bad things as it turns out.

Stroke of someone, someone who is not woke by training, but is woke by inclination trying to refer to the concept of a gay employee. So, yeah, we're extra fucked. I don't know what else can go wrong. I'm sure plenty of stuff will. Just you wait there, bud. This morning, Governor Shapiro delivered a really big speech at the Fraser Yard saying they had, you know,

come up with $220 million to, you know, restore regular capital funding. But I don't know where he got that from it. If he could just magically pull money out of his ass, he should have done that month ago. Just doing Eric Adams and like come back from Istanbul and be like, don't worry about it. It's fixed. Why do all the trolleys say Turkish Airlines on them now? Don't worry about it.

It's fixed. We do have a for like six months. We got a Turkish Airlines wrapped streetcar in Seattle. And we were continually joking that it was Adam's signal that he was going to run for mayor of Seattle next. Yeah, it's like we have, you know, restored funding to public transport, but we do have to refer to the Armenian genocide in quote marks now. It's fine. Don't worry about it. But yeah, so this crisis is continuing to worsen. And I think things are going to get much

worse before they get better. You know, I, you know, I'm getting used to living entirely within like a five-block radius at this point. It's fine. It's fine. 15-minute cities. Degrowth is happening to you. Yeah, I've been forced into a 15-minute city. Mandatory 15 minutes of year.

Klaus Schwab is like successfully curtailing your freedoms. God, I just wish that there were a store that had nice- directed PennDOT to transfer money set aside for emergencies from the Public Transit Trust Fund, 2, Septa. Oh, just so long as there aren't any emergency. I guess this is an emergency, it's just an emergency. Except that it's a constant emergency. Yeah.

Hmm. Yeah, so, yeah, things are bad here in southeast Pennsylvania. But... Could be worse. You ever try being a Mathcore violinist? Yeah, or... Or in other news... Have you ever tried flying an MD-11?

Yeah, yeah. McDonald-Douglas. McDonald-Douglas keeping true to its corporate culture, which is, of course, as we all know, McDonald-Douglas, civilian or military, will kill you. 100% lethality guaranteed. We have the shirt, buy the shirt. We do, we do. I was just going to allude to the shirt because I wasn't necessarily going to promote the shirt

over the dead bodies, but sure, fine. Oh, yeah, it's a poor taste, but whatever. It's fine. It's fine. Step over the sort of mangled ruins of people and buy a shirt. Yeah, just poke the dead body with a shirt. stick, get 10 million more followers, it's fine. You can see if you here, you could, help you process grief, new T-Shift.

Ferry them in our shirts. Think of us like a true crime podcast. God, down. Stay sexy and don't get socially murdered. Yeah. No, so UPS put an MD-11 on the ground, not in the good way. They perfectly 9-11ed a fuel storage facility in Louisville. killing three of their own crew, 11 people on the ground, and you go, that's crazy, how did this happen?

Why do we have surveillance cam footage of a plane going in sideways? And the answer is, because left engine fall off, left engine fall off the plane on takeoff, parts departing the aircraft. It's usually, usually not a good thing when parts fall off the airplane. No, especially when you're on takeoff and so it's throttled up and And so it just sort of spirals off and over the wing and then maybe kind of the sort of middle engine because it's a trijet just dies. And then it augurs into whatever this is. So yeah, there are close up photos of the engine falling off.

NTSB says that it had fatigue cracks on the engine connection, which yeah, makes sense why it fell off. It was actually a very similar DC-10 crash in 1979 due to, they had this weird, like, bad maintenance procedure where to remove one of the engines, you're supposed to use a crane to lift it off, but I forget who it was Republic, I think, worked out it was quicker and cheaper to just balance it on the end of a forklift. That's what? That's excellent.

And this, like, rocked the engine back and forth in such a way that it, like, overstressed the pylon and eventually the engine fall off. If that's happened again, then that's really bad because that means that the sort of like 40 year old sort of maintenance procedures are sort of coming back. I don't care. Another load bearing employee there who was like, don't do it that way. Yeah, this is, this is what you need DEI. I don't care how cool you think a trijet is and neither does the FAA because they have grounded all MD 11s, also all DC-10s if anyone was still flying those.

DC-10s are all right. Yeah. Cool. My question, my question is, if your package was on that flight, what do they put on the tracking updates? Frowny face. Yeah. Unexpected item, your bagging area somehow.

Unexpected item in the bagging area. Your package has left our storage facility. It's really left our storage facility. Your package is consciously uncoupled from, you know, it's transport me. Well, the thing is, one of the things that clipped your package. One of the things that clipped on the way in was UPS's own warehouse. So it was entirely possible that the tracker would show that it had left the storage facility and then, I guess, come back briefly.

So once again, that is the kind of precision aiming you will need for like the main topic. So once again, UPS exploring new frontiers in the most expensive and deadly way to not deliver a package on time. Usually that's what I'm hearing is the film that will eventually be made about this will of course be entitled Return to Sender. God damn it, Braz. I already made a joke about wearing a McDonald-Douglas shirt to a funeral, which I guess it's I mean this this trijet shit it's literally just like they're they're cheap and they're old and the only people still flying them at

cargo airlines are UPS and FedEx and part of the reason why is because UPS and FedEx don't care about their employees, and so... I am also personally bummed because they do fly them into, not even CETAC, but the Boeing field, which is even closer and lower to, like, the city of Seattle. So you can get, like, it's like the 80s. It's like, I feel like I'm in the opening of, like, The Sopranos. You get TriJet, like, FedEx TriJets landing, like, right over the freeway. It's so cool.

Obviously, you know, I wouldn't recommend that we keep killing people to ensure that my Sopranos vibe is maintained, but still. I mean, if they blast like the music on the freeway while you're driving to work or something, that'd be, that'd be good. It's got a tack a fourth engine on there, you know, for redundancy. The quadjet. Yeah, for redundancy? Yeah, for redundancy.

Yeah, so there's extra of them. Yeah, redundancy to do it again. In case there's a problem with one, the other one, yeah. Oh, it's redundant. Yeah. Well, you know, all we can say is, I guess we'll wait for the NTSB report to come out. You know, we don't know what happened specifically yet, I don't think. Yeah, I mean, this happened during the shutdown, which I don't think I'm gonna talk about.

And the, I just think about being on the NTSB, like, go team and having to do this unpaid, like, unpaid labor to be like, let me just move, let me just move the chunky Marinarara that used to be a person out of the way, like, you know, retreating up. retrieve the, um, the sort of, like, uh, recorder with their sort of last screams on it. Great, fantastic. Probably got to pay your own airfare to get out there. Oh, God damn. Yeah.

I mean, your, your package arrives four months late and like the cardboard's still bit soggy and it's just a bit horrible in the end. Oh, no, my buy snooose.com. Which won't ship to the United States anymore, by the way. It's fine, but why is all of my snooze red? And why does it taste like pennies? Normally does anyway. I don't care.

God, where are you getting that? Bisu. Well, not Bysus.com anymore, because I watched it to the United States. Well, that was the goddamn news. Someday these terrorists are going to end. Now for announcements. Announcements. Announcements.

Announcements. Announcements. Um, we have. If my previous threats were insufficient, the threats will intensify. Come to the live shows. I don't know, I'm gonna find a way. I'm gonna escalate from threatening to kill them to threatening to torture them, you know?

Are you attached to your kneecaps? Would you like to stay that way? This is a really, really elaborate, like, you know, just like torture camp system. Maybe it's a fetish thing. Who knows? It's all my problem. I don't, this is gonna, like the history books

are not gonna look kindly on this. That's fine. They don't. I think I'll be remembered in the context of my time. And the context of that time, was not selling enough tickets to live shows. Yes. So anyway, we have two upcoming live shows

at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia, which I understand is now called Union Transfer. I like that you're going to get there at Loaded and be like, what happened to the spaghetti? Don't name it every time. We're there with the Quarators, podcast about questions from Quora. The worst website on the internet, yes.

Yes. We're going to... Non-forchandivis. It's the 14th and 15th of December, right? Yes, sir. Okay, yeah. No, I had a nightmare about it this morning where it was tomorrow and I hadn't written the slides yet. That's okay.

That's fine. We could get up there and read the phone book, but we won't. We'll put in a lot of effort. And because of that effort, and because of the fact that I'm going to torture you if you don't, you should come to the live shows. Yes. That's a perverse incentive for some of them. If that makes you feel strange, I'm not going to torture you unless you come to the live shows.

Yeah. We will be doing the beat and greet. Every fan gets punched square in the nose, and then we sign something, if you like. Yes. We have various Patreon tears, because, like, you could go from, like, you know, one punch to severe mauling for the higher.

We do, we do. I am pleased to announce that we have upgraded the forgery of November signature. And we're now going to rubber stamp November signature so we don't have to write it anymore. You actually got it. Yes. It's fantastic.

Yeah, I have it. I was wondering why you wanted me to send you like a PDF with a really clear scan of my signature and my credit card details and my fingerprints. Dental records was kind of tricky. Yeah. Can I? Yeah. Cool.

But, yeah, come to the live shows. Roz won't be willing to beat you with the hammer because he abhor his violence, but I sure don't. So yeah. You do the opposite of, whatever the opposite of abhorring. is what you do about violence. Whoring? Yeah, you whore violence.

Yeah. Um... Video instantly requires content, requires, like, ID to watch. No, so let me get this straight. Yeah, bud. We're threatening to beat people up if they don't come to the show. Yep. But also if they do come to the show.

Yeah, it's a win-win. Yes, yeah. Makes sense to me. Yep. Okay. It's sort of like... The other one just like happens to you. It's sort of like a French army and, like, late-night

16 disciplinary policy, and I think that'll work out for us about as well. Yeah, well, there's your problem. Come to our live show and we'll kill you. You will be issued with a set of Horizon Blue sort of great coats and then beaten to . Yeah, well, there's your problem. The only podcast with Corvay Labor, it's great. Those were the announcements.

Wait, no, they weren't. No, they weren't. No, they weren't. No, they weren't. What was the other part of the announcement? The other part of the announcement was the press one. Oh, the press part. Yeah.

No, that was, oh. Yes, the press one. Please write nice articles about us. The only ones we have are a hyperal allergic article for like 2021. Cool. Part of getting November over the United States eventually, and I mean eventually being like, I don't know, 2028 after Trump's third term is, you know, the 01 visa process is really fucked up and complicated.

and it does require there to be a lot of press about us. So if you work for a newspaper of some kind, please write an article about us. It doesn't even have to be positive. Does not have to be positive. Yeah, it could be really mean. I don't know how to read. The other thing that I was going to say is...

Get us in the post-millennial. Don't have the American media. Can you just like get, you know, what is it, Times of India, that thing that just like reproduces everybody else's content. Oh, good question. I don't know.

Indian tour, here we go. Yeah. Ooh. I want to, we're going to do the whole tour on a commuter train with no doors. Yes. Led by Jay Satay. Yeah. But the announcement I was going to make was, uh, the wish lists are live.

I will link to them, uh, in the, in the description. Uh, these are for the seniors that I work with, uh, at Lutheran settlement house. They are for the kids, uh, who need toys and Christmas donations. if our compulsion to bring you to the live shows doesn't work if you don't donate to the children you will be you will be mulled in some sort of hyper-efficient way I'm good at mauling but also you know it's the dreams of children you shouldn't need mauling to persuade you I want to say that my favorite thing at work is is when so we get enough toys usually that we have

surplus which but however they are stored in the furthest corner of the creepy wet basement. So I always have to go, I said, like, load myself. I like make the side of the cross and load myself in to go in the furthest corner of the creepy basement. And I'm just like, and I pop out like Santa Claus. I'm just like, here's toys. And they're just like, why did that man screaming at me? Just for clarity sake, the toys are in the basement or the children, which are you keeping? The toys, the children upstairs. Oh, and I will be, I have, I have authorized my wife to spend the company money on a custom made Santa suit. So look, look, to that expense on our taxes.

All right, that was the end of the announcements, as far as I was concerned. Those were the announcements. All right. This is mostly a Rob episode. Hi, Rob. Let's go. Yeah. So as usual, I have, you know, my engineering qualifications through my master's degree in English literature.

So if I fuck up, then it's not my fault. I can provide help where needed. so basically why are we talking about this and essentially it is to make fun of some of the worst people in the world watch watch them make each other miserable watch them sue each other because they decide to build a fucking terrible billion building and then sell condos inside it for many many millions of dollars the condos all look hideous we'll get to it we'll get to it and this one of those ones where apart from maybe some construction guys here and there you don't have to feel sorry for anybody because they all you know everybody involved is a piece of shit. So it's really fun. Here's a small quote from the New York Times. I was convinced it would be the best building in the world, said Serena Abramovich, one of the earliest residents of 432 Park.

She, by the way, is married to an oil and gas tycoon, so fuck her too. They are still billing it as God's gift to the world, and it's not. She and her husband bought a 3,500 foot apartment for almost $17 million, dollars as a second whole fuck you you know die fuck you

that's about the size of a good size West Philly you know twin you know sort of one of the big mansion

type houses yeah but yeah you know we could have the podcast castle for we got

six of the podcast castles oh yeah so how many dank basements could that could that afford you one

just one yeah yeah And just, yeah, as a small credit where it's due, I started reading about this or researching this because of a long read in the New York Times from October of this year, written by Dion Searcy, Stephanos Chen, and Uvashi Uburoy, I hope I pronounced it was right. Credit where credits do, New York Times, mostly terrible, but sometimes they do really good work. Yeah, I also read this same article, and yeah, I read it and I was like, this is for us,

this is perfect. The story was fantastic, except for that segue where they started blaming trans swimmers for why it was built poorly. Well, yeah, they should have come in first place. Yeah, it could not work out whether or not the private pool had like a, you know, had like a weird policy, but, you know, maybe one day. I'm downloading the penthouse for a shore now. Oh, I'm going to gobble everybody in this building with my bare hands, man. You're not going to need to. I thought it'd be.

good idea to go over some basic skyscraper design here. Right. Yes. Fantastic. We have the best graphics in the game. I don't get. So high production values, I mean, like... The one article that Hyperalergic wrote about us that I was mentioning says, like, in

the second paragraph, this is nothing intricately produced like 99% or anything from NPR. It's like, I forget what they call us. it's like aggressively DIY and relaxed. As you all know, I was just recently in Europe for a while, and I got to see the Trash Future offices, right? How yeah. Got to record an episode with Gareth of Britonology. You know, we talked about U.S. versus UK railways and sort of the general vibe.

That's over on the Trash Future Patreon. You got to be on the special high tier to listen to it, though. Can you send that to me? No, no, give me $10. Give me $10, you cheat fucking bastard. So anyway, I was in the offices and I got jealous, so I went into the Patreon and took out a big bunch of money. Long story short, this is our new global headquarters building.

Where is it? Are you going to tell us where it is? This is going to go up in Center City sometime fairly soon. This is just a schematic. This is just a schematic. This is just a schematic. The actual building. will look nicer.

Anyway. Yeah, no, I'm sorry, you're never getting paid again. W-Y-T-P. No, you're supposed to read it

from left to right. Not you a lot. Des-open, don't inside. Well, you're their problem. Oh, I've got to be their problem.

Look, I, uh, I have, I have, in all seriousness, looked into getting us off a space for me and Ross to record,

uh, and just like in the shittiest place imaginable, like above bars and stuff. And I, I got so far as to setting an email, and I got just a flat, we are not interested, thank you. Yeah, it's crazy.

Like, owning a podcast studio, renting a podcast studio is a ridiculous expense. Do not draw any inferences about trash each from that. Well, no, but the thing is that once we approve these schematics, which we did, by a vote of two to didn't vote. Yeah. By a vote of two, two, one of you has a stamp with my signature on it. All right, three to zero and in. Let's do it, maybe.

So anyway, this is about 70 stories tall, right? We got about 2 million leasable square feet. I think we only need a floor or two of this, so I'm pretty sure that with, you know, Center City office space going at a premium as it is right now, we're gonna make that money back, no problem. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's like, us, us, Andresen Horowitz for five floors. Just Ross, you're the first, you're the first podcast to invent, you know, really,

estate scams, that's never been done before. Look, it's not a scam. I lease office space out to people who want office space. That's called business. Business. This is landlordism. If you ever considered writing one of those books,

that's like the 10 tips of successful business minds or something? I feel like you're on to something here. Sell things that people want to buy. What they don't teach in the Drexel University. Well, they don't teach you at Drexel University, and it's Ross Fist by the...

a guy from Anderson Horowitz in a parking lot. So, anyway, I feel like this is a good place to go over some skyscraper systems, some ideas behind their design, so on and so forth, why they are the way they are, right?

Obviously, we did a whole bonus episode about this a while back. I'm just going to do it again here, but shorter for convenience. Or just go back and listen to the old one. Just pause this and like, why don't you do your own homework? Fuck me.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, okay, you need some kind of frame that holds the building up. You know, that's usually just a grid of columns and floors and crap like that. That can be done in steel. It can be done in concrete here in the United States, at least. Usually office spaces in steel. Usually residential is in concrete. This has something to do with the fact that the floors are closer together in residential buildings.

So for whatever reason, it makes more sense to do it in concrete. I don't know the specifics there. You can also sometimes mix it up. So like the FMC tower near 30th Street Station, that has office space on the lower floors and residential on the upper floors. So the bottom is this light airy steel frame and then on top of it it's reinforced concrete.

Looked goofy as all hell when it was going up. I wish I had a picture. I think I might have one if you want me to send it there. when you were in to when we approved this and now that we're building a skyscraper W-TYP and friend skyscraper building company that never mind joke's gone sorry folks what no we still have the plane too don't worry oh no that was what I was yeah I wanted to make sure you hadn't sold the plane that that definitely isn't stolen and definitely wasn't involved what have I been signing

well so here's the thing right you we have a rubber stand- Am I enlisted into the Coast Guard yeah We have a little rubber stamp of your signature. Our power is limitless. First of all, how dare you enlist me? I was holding out for a commission. Why did you sign for all those UPS packages? Is it what I want to know?

November is shipping me from, uh, buy snooos.com by the truckload. I think I'm the Garantor for your mortgage? Why do these keep saying, you fucking bastard on them? Below the tower, there's... Below the tower, there's going to be some kind of foundation. This might be steel piles. You drive in with a pile driver. These might be concrete casons where you get a big auger and you drill a hole in the ground.

It's like six or seven feet in diameter, sometimes more. And you throw in some reinforced steel caging. You fill the whole thing with concrete, right? They might be a shallow floating foundation, depending on where you are. Sometimes that's sufficient. can you explain what you mean by shallow floating foundation so a floating foundation is just a big concrete pad and it sort of floats in the soil okay good enough thank you right so that's gonna be you know because there's stuff with like buoyancy in here which i didn't do good in

foundation design in school i'm gonna be honest that was never my forte yeah but you have the degree baby that's true so you know anyway you designed the foundation in such a way you don't have like excessive settling and it's strong enough to bear the way to the building, send it either into the soil or into the bedrock or, you know, whatever you need to do, right? There's lots of loads that act on the building, right? All the way through the earth to a parallel counterweight building on the other side. Oh, that's where the mole people live, yeah. Yeah, we have a 70-story tall mole people WTOIP headquarters sticking out of the

Antipity of Philadelphia. Yes. What is the Antipity of Philadelphia? It's better be funny It's a spot in the Indian Ocean Southwest of Australia says The AI overview Very annoying

That sounds about right That's where the missing plane is Which one? The MH77 Which one was the one that they never found Yeah, it's on top of the helipad Yeah Please don't

Please don't disrespect Our mole people Our more people count our counterparts Thank you So I'm on the website for Schukel Yards To look at FMC tower And the heading just says This is a building

Yeah It is it They're not wrong, checks. You know exactly what it is, you know? That'd be a good subject for the building show. Anyway, so several loads act on this building, right? On the frame, you have live loads, right? Those people walking around, that's furniture, that's, you know, papers, that's computers, that's all that crap.

Stuff you can move around. Yeah, fat man on a grotesquely heavy bicycle, etc., etc. There's the dead load, which is the weight of the structure itself, you know, the steel, beams, the floors, the, uh, even some of the, some of the more, uh, the fixtures you're not going to move around, you know, carpets, you know, uh, I don't know, HVAC systems, you know, pipes, you know, so on and so forth, right? Um, then you have stuff that's more variable. You have like wind loads that they act on the building sideways, right? You have snow loads that acts on the building vertically. Um, you have rain loads. That's a little, a bit of

less important. Usually that's less than the snow load. And of course, you have earthquake loads. Getting my sort of droplets of osmium rain. Yeah. You got earthquake loads. Those are pretty hard to deal with a lot of the times. They tend to be the governing code pretty much everywhere now, because at some point we acknowledge that the new Madrid earthquake occurred, and maybe we should plan for this stuff even if you're in like New York City. So, you know, I'm not going to go into like load combinations right now, it's not important, but either you build the thing very heavy to withstand all these loads. Maybe you find a clever way around them, right? So one example, for the sake of comfort, you want to avoid excessive sway in the building from wind loads,

right? It's normal for a skyscraper to sway somewhat in the wind, you know, even like a foot off center, but you don't want to go really far because that gets uncomfortable. So you might put a big-ass weight at the top of the building, right? And you put it on hydraulic rams, and then when there's wind, you sort of move it to the opposite side of the building, and then when the building starts to sway in that direction, you move it back,

and you keep moving it counter-cyclically in order to reduce the sway of the building. This is a tuned mass damper. It's getting more... Yeah, this is also a spoiler. Yeah. This is getting more and more common in new buildings. There's also passive designs.

So like the Comcast Center in Center City, Philadelphia, they had a passive mass stamper, which is just a giant tank of water. Yeah. Yeah, which is washed around. But it leaked so bad they had to drain it, and they found out they didn't really need it anyway. So that just sits there now. Yeah. Now, other than our fundamental structural systems, right, there's other things going on.

You have a facade, right? You know, if you're fancy, you call that a building envelope system, right? That's the thing that, you know, keeps people protected from weather. It protects them from falling out of the building, right? You know, all that good stuff. You have your big plumbing systems because you have to pump all the water to the top of the building because municipal water doesn't have that kind of pressure, right? You have big beefy sewage systems.

You have heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, also pretty beefy. Usually it's centralized, so, you know, the ducting work is a big nightmare. All these, like, huge HVAC systems have to do all kinds of weird things to maintain, like, multiple zones. And so it's more of an art than a science, big HVAC, which is kind of weird. You've got big electrical systems. A lot of times these buildings contain their own transformers. they take in like full mains power or at least like medium voltage and medium voltage here is like you know 13 kilovolts or whatever that is you know stuff that uh stuff that if

you touch it wrong it vaporizes you um you know you have trash shoots you have mail shoots you have stuff like that right you may have like a glycol system if there's like servers in there or something uh interior there's lots of different building systems right Right. Now, the size and shape of the building, they may be governed by local zoning laws or ordinances, right? So if you have like, this is sort of the classic Art Deco, you know, wedding cake step back, that was from like most pre-war skyscrapers in New York City were built that way because there was a law that said you needed to step back the building at certain height in order to allow for natural light and air at, the street level, right? Yeah, I like that you've, you know, reproduced that at W-TYP towers.

It's, I like that you're going for the retro look. We haven't gotten this through the value engineers yet. That's the problem. And we're not gonna. We, well, apparently, I've already signed off on this, though. Yeah, exactly. Well, we thank you for your contribution. And a lot of those older pre-war buildings had small floor plates.

What do I mean by a floor plate? That's sort of like the cross-sectional area of the building. you know so that was due to the need for natural ventilation they did not have air conditioning you know once air conditioning was invented then you can suddenly start building big fat buildings with you know huge amounts of office space on each floor where you could stand in the center and you couldn't see the windows uh anywhere um you know so yeah that that the this is uh one way that the size of the building is governed is by local laws

and whether you have air conditioning. But all the stuff I just mentioned pales in comparison to the real limiting factor on building size, which is vertical circulation, right? Which is to say, elevators. Elevators.

Elevators. It's all elevators. Ignore everything I just said. The only thing that matters is elevators. Thank you. So. Hi, Gwen. Hi, Glenn.

The taller your building is, the longer it takes for the elevator to get to the top of it, right? Sure. The taller your building is, presumably the more square feet it holds, meaning there's more people in it who all need more elevators to get around. Oh, it's like the rocket fuel. fuel payload thing. The tyranny of the elevator equation, yes. Yes.

Yeah, Konstantin Shokovsky launching a bunch of people to the top of a really tall tower. Yeah. We haven't yet built an elevator that can share an elevator shaft with another elevator. So each new elevator... Because the Oasis Corporation refuses to innovate in the previous 125 years. I think Tiss and Krupp had a prototype, but... Yeah, but they're also... Absolutely, every advancement in elevator systems has been about you not dying.

What if I want to die? What if I think? What if I'm the Gus Grissom of elevators? And I think that dying in an elevator accident is worth the risk of conquering the elevator shaft. Oh, this is... Why don't you just like do... They invented that.

It's called a patter-noster. Yeah. Why don't you just do two on like a counterbalance and like just run it through like a carabiner on the top and then like, you know, just... Straight up and down. Just fucking, like, Treibend at that. It's called a Patternoster. They like it in the Czech Republic, but they go very slow.

Just crank that shit faster. I don't... Well, they have to move continuously, and you have to figure out how to jump on and off. That's the problem. Skill issue. Yeah, just half of Central Park filled with, like, Trebushets and catapults. Getting into the office and out every day is going like the film Cube?

I'm the cube from the film, Cube. Was that the Cube from the film Cube? Wow. The practical result of this is for a given site, there's some practical upper limit to the height of a building, or at least its occupancy, because otherwise the building would be entirely elevators. Your sort of like, mile-high, Frank Lloyd Wright concept building does not work unless you have some kind of like V-Tol aircraft with a lot of landing pads. Oh, love a jump chat. Love a hair. Lloyd Wright, when he designed the Illinois, he did acknowledge that there were probably not enough elevators, but he said by the time this building were able to be constructed, this would be solved using atomic powered elevators.

All right, man. Yes. Hell yeah. Why not? Yes. So. Elevators shoot cheap to meter, I say, as I led to the stratosphere. We still don't have the atomic elevator that solves this problem,

but we have some ways to mitigate it. Frank Lloyd, right, visionarily predicting the fallout series of games. So you can have things like I have an express elevator, right? So I'm at the lobby. I want to go to the floor up here. There's an elevator that goes halfway up. It makes all the local stops. And then there's another elevator that goes all the way up here before it starts.

making stops right that's an express elevator that's one way to do it another way to do it is with sky lobbies right so i have uh uh hold on i'm at the lobby right i once again i want to go to a floor up here well the elevators here only go ah crap uh i moved the mouse too much god damn it yeah i can see why they said our production values were DIY some amount, but there's a second elevator. It goes all the way to the top, but it only makes two stops, right? And those are at Sky Lobbys, right? At the Sky Lobby, you can catch a local elevator that brings you to your floor, right?

That's another option. That sort of takes some of the load off the elevators at the bottom. It also means you can stack these elevator shafts on top of each other, right? you can also do things like have double-decker elevators that's usually combined with a sky lobby so if there's an elevator that's going to be very highly used you can make a double-deck elevator you can do fancy dispatching systems where rather than you being in the elevator hall and you push a button that says up instead you enter your floor and then the computer does beep-bo-bop and figures out the most efficient way

to dispatch all the elevators to get as many people to where they need to go as quickly as possible. Pan medicine does this. Yeah. I don't like it. But it's more efficient. But it's marginally more efficient as a thing.

This is not like a total revolution in elevator technology. Ultimately, when you have a big building with a lot of people need to move around, you just need a lot of elevators. And if you're in a building that's been under spec, Like, Liam, you may remember this.

The Times Square Holiday Inn. Ah. One elevator. One of them. One elevator. 36 floors. With eight hotel rooms on each floor. Fuck y'all.

Give me my money back. Congratulations on getting the furry convention experience, Liam. They did, they did have warnings on each floor saying, The elevator wait time can be up to 15 minutes. And they weren't lying, to their credit. So, yeah, the big thing about buildings that constrains their size and shape is elevators. It's all elevators. Everything else, who cares?

Just elevators. Anyway, that's what I had to say. Has anyone ever considered putting a big fireman's pole so that the elevators only have to go up and then you can just slide down? I just use some really nice gloves. Yeah, I heard about the school where they had elevators that only went up and elevators that only went down. Are you talking about sideways? I don't want elevators that go down. I just want the pole.

Are you talking about sideways stories from Wayside School? Yes. That book is an absolute banger. Yeah. The elevators worked perfectly once. We've taken an elevator that worked perfectly once. We were in New York, a city that hates us. Oh, yeah.

There's a, where I was growing up, there's like an amusement park with a swimming, pool inside and it has like all the fancy slides but it has one that's like it has two slides that are almost vertical like they're just off vertical and they'll only for like you know you have to be 12 or order to ride or something and i remember them because like the really steep one several times you just completely let go over the water and you just fall through empty space until you hit the water again do that that's so you can use that swimming pool that's empty in the uh the building in philly their mass damper that leaked just have people just cannonballed directly into it.

See, dual-purpose mask dampener. Like, you put the corpses of multimillionaires in there, weighs a bit more, gets a bit more stable. Don't see a problem. You've got to wait for them to decompose so they slosh around. Just take it, just take it forever. Just like, come on. Anyway, so, yeah, skyscraper does, it's mostly elevators.

It's just elevators. Anyway, before we start talking about the building itself, I thought we have to explain a little bit why we are and what we're doing here. So this is the view from Central Park looking south and this is what's known as billionaire's row now. Oh, I hate to it. Oh, yeah, it's terrible.

It's just a bunch of middle fingers to working people. It is just like, if you want like a highest concentration of where the worst people in the world live, it's this and Dubai. Like that's kind of, you know, I'm not saying you could do some surgical strikes, but I'm saying they would be high. Limited genocide on billionaires row.

I'm just saying to the IDF that maybe I've identified three Hamas command centers. I believe you have, November. Yes. So specifically the big five needle towel you see before you on the screen, those are the main five. There are others. There are, I think a few more being constructed. And this is either where the worst people on earth live or, you know, more commonly it is where they speculate even more on their apartment being worth

forever and forever more in the future, because, you know, that's what you do with very expensive real estate. It's centered around West 57th Street, like I say, near the southern edge of Central Park. Why is it the southern edge? It's because it has the best views and also because it catches the most sunlight. So if you face the park, you have southern exposure, you know, and you can either, I don't think it's really good for wine growing because there's no slope angle but you know like you you have the south facing side and in November of 2025 just to give you a little bit of context the top floor penthouse which is 11,500 square feet or 1,070 square meters if you live in a real country and who won the war

I think that the Soviet don't worry about that and one of the I think it's it went on to be sold for about like $100 million in the end? Jesus, what? That was a discount, though. First time it sold when the tower was just completed, it went for $165 million. So, you know, your asset may depreciate in value as well. I feel so bad for whoever's asset depreciated in value.

Well, you know, wait until you get a look at what, you know, that money buys you. Next slide, please. This is what you get for 100 somewhat, million dollars. I think this is... It's a big room. It's a room.

It's a room. Yeah, it's the hotel lobby in the sky. Yeah, you could sit down. Yeah, but you could... I do like that there's like openable windows, you could crack open, you know, and get a 47-mile-an-hour breeze. Plasty. That's already pleasant. Every German listening to this just sat forward in their chair, like, okay.

He's probably only open like a crack is the thing. Yeah, probably. It's like a rifle shot. Yeah. Just getting birdstrike by opening the window, just like fucking getting lanced by seagull. You could look out of the window, you could look at some of the little objects. It's got a lot of little objects. This is my large white carpet where I display my white furniture I never use, which the

The developer assured me was very expensive, but he actually got it from crate and barrel. Yeah, good luck getting anything up or down from there. Also, you're like exposed on three, if not four sides, so then you have the problem of like, okay, you can sort of be in there, but what happens when someone flies a drone up to your window, which they will all the time? Yeah, the windows don't open, you can't just shotgun blast the thing back to hell, yeah. Well, you could shotgun blast that you just spend a lot of money on, Just once, right.

Well, no, you can do it any number at times, but, you know, the window. Putting, like, foil over all the windows, like a crack house. Who's the, uh, who's the insane, uh, just got some plywood in there, just like, I got holland and holland on speed dial. Coincidentally, does anyone have a good window guy? I mean, I suppose the one thing you could do all the way up there in, you know, your multi hundreds of millions of dollar penthouse is, you know, much like a very other tall towers, you could feel closer to God. And God really likes it when you come closer to him,

as we'll see during the presentation. Of course. That's why everyone in this tower speaks the same language. I guess the other thing is, if you're in here, this is sky prison, right? Because not only are you sort of like up this high that you're fucking like, you know, swaying around, you can't open any of the windows. But also, if you're like, I feel like I want to go for a walk in Central Park, which is, after all, basically on my doorstep. It's very nice. You know, I want to do the Kurt Vonnegut thing and go and buy an envelope for whatever. Oh, sure, that'll be like half an hour into like and get to the ground. I didn't check elevator times, but it'll be something along the lines. This is, I think, the 80th floor, maybe it's something like that. It's

80 or 86th floor. There's some floor plans later on. My understanding is this building. No, this is not 432 Park. I believe 432 Park has two or three elevators. No, it has four. When there's... There has four, but when there's only a hundred apartments, okay, fine, you know,

but... What? Yeah, there's only 100 apartments. Well, we'll get into how many apartments there are. I hate to sell as a Nouveau-Riche, but that's still too many apartments. I'm taking the opposite angle on this.

This is too much, dead soon. You want to hear some real go-rusting? When I looked at this image, my first thought was, where do you put the big TV? Yeah. Where do you put the bayonet? Because I'm... You can show me this view, and I'm like, cool. How do I watch movies?

Yeah. Yeah. And also, like, with that much window space all the time, you'll just have sun, like, hitting your screen. Oh, the glass. Yeah, it's Samsung anti-Clear TV, yeah. I can't game under these conditions. Yeah.

I have the aluminum foil over the windows like a crack house, but that's just so the glare doesn't bother me like how to shrink. Selling one of these to the world's richest trans woman, and she has done this in order to like put one gaming chair. There's one floor that keeps color shift LED lighting at night. There's like the cheapest possible dog cage in one corner. She's got a steam deck. Some LGB, she's got an RGB light, say, shut the fuck up. Some Fortnite clan really regretting their investment that they're not going to longer get good. Listen, she's gaming like an angel, but to get to, like, you have to walk across that carpet, which is like crunched in Cheetos.

Do you imagine the ping is good up there? Because like, you're just running more cable, like, it's literally it's like a it's like hardwood at this point you know but yeah anyway next next slide please so the other questions of course is why is this particular part of the world so stupidly expensive well the first is it has Dutch colonialism my people are a vile tribe I readily admit you know like it's it's why I no longer live there, haven't done for 15 plus years. I now live in Switzerland, where it's all normal. Do not happen.

So it's literally as proximity to Wall Street and the offices of hedge funds, you know, various new money counts. This is not where old money lives, by the way. This is where new money lives. All money already has the nice apartment blocks that are directly on the park. This is where the new money lives. You still have the kind of verticality problem where it's like if your office is two blocks over the first this way there is to rig up some kind of a zip line. Well, I

couldn't find it because it's literally not available online, but when they start up marketing the apartments for this, not that you, I think, need to, but they still did. They did like a five-minute movie with the guy, I forgot his name, is it, Philippe Petit, the high-wire guy.

Yeah. And he did a high-wire walk to this building, and it was filmed and, like, essentially, the promo film, as I understand it, had no bearing to what you were actually buying. It was just like a series of artie shots. So I think technically you could high wire to your

penthouse office in Morgan Stanley or wherever. I want to see them try it. That should be conditional for living there. It would make you less dependent on elevators. I mean, you could set up a zipline or like a Turolean traverse, but like with the wind speeds up there, if you didn't like get it right, like you would just like whirl around on it instead of like landing. It was just...

Yeah. I want to see it. Let's fucking go. getting bird strike in the middle of, you know, my commute. Yes, anyway, but like Central Park has historically been an area of extraordinary wealth. It was like that under the founder builds, the Morgans, they built all the other fancy apartments on specifically the southern side. Some of the people who live here, or not either in Park 432 or other similar buildings, include Bill Ackman. Michael Dell, Ken Griffin, Lloyd Blank Fine, some Chinese billionaires, some Russian billionaires, just, you know, your favorite people all live there.

And they're also, crucially, these are all money storage facilities. They're all bought on the assumption that they will increase in value or stay in value. And also, the apartments are protected by US law. They are protected by a purchase price in the, you know, still reserve currency of the world. We'll see how long that. last, and you also have a bolthole in case, you know. When does this podcast get released again?

It might be you. Bill Ackman's sort of very, very long 4 a.m. tweets make more sense when I consider that he might be having to sleep, like, sort of half a mile into the sky. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I usually, in most circumstances, I tend to push back on the, all these new apartments are vacant narrative for most buildings. But for these sorts of buildings, yeah, no, this is an investment vehicle first.

They're also all, like, not to be sort of trad and based here, they're all ugly as sin. That middle one, I believe, is 1157th, which is the one that I was reading about before we recorded, because I got really fascinated by it because the developer's main goal with it was to be the tallest non-union-built skyscraper in the city of New York. Oh, fuck my life. Jesus Christ. And they ended up actually, like, getting criminally charged with screwing over all their employees on, like, overtime wages, and not contributing to, like, New York's, like, Fortman's comp fund. And they were all really guilty of it, but none of them went to prison and they finished the building. I believe that currently the most expensive one of these buildings, again, that's not in, in Park 432, but in another one, belongs to Ken Gris.

Riffin of Citadel Security and Arch Nemesis of the GameStop Freaks. He bought it for $238 million, I think, a couple of years ago. That's like the top end. But that's just bragging, right? So at that point, you're just doing status symbol bullshit. Like, this is not. Yeah, I mean, just based on the images of this and like also, you know, all of the livability complaints, that just, you can buy like an incredibly nice turn

of the century, like 9,000 square foot house in Seattle for like $2 million. I don't know what it is in New York. I don't browse Zillow there. But like why I don't, whatever. Yeah, I mean, you can rent like a small apartment around here for that money. It's great. You could, if you wanted to spend that kind of money on an actual decent apartment, you could get it in some of the nice big pre-war apartment buildings that, you know,

they have a huge rambling floor plans and so on and so forth. They go for several, you know, tens of millions of dollars in these older buildings. But a fun fact, you can also buy. that in Chicago for a hundred and ten thousand dollars I think for this money you could probably buy like the other half of Detroit and then start like a rival police force to match that other freak who keeps buying private police forces there you could you could do you could do the Warriors 2025 edition is what I'm saying I've created Windsor two

anyway next slide please so these buildings are all quite new. This is from September 2007, and as you can see, not to be an asshole, but I do not believe this image is from 2007. It was according to the caption on the website where I legally

acquired it from. I see something here. To somethings, in fact. I was just listening politely and I was like, yeah, sure, I'll believe that. Absolutely. I forgot. I said I would never do that. With a time machine.

I said I would never do that, but I forgot. No, no, no, but it's whatever. I might have been slightly off, but my general point stands, these towers are all quite new. They're all built in the 2010s, essentially. Why were they built like that? That's swiftly move on from the thing that didn't happen. So, billionaires row and like the other needle towers in Manhattan,

and we're all built in the 2010s, like I was saying, but many of them are not quite as valuable as, like, the record prices for construction, for the apartments, has then achieved. What turns out to be really, really difficult is... This is post-the-big downturn. This is 2010, so, like, the hard thing is resale. So, like, the first person to buy it buys it for various reasons,

as we discussed before. The second person to buy it, they might want to live in it, and they don't like it as much. But essentially, what you're looking at here is one of the results of the post-2008 recession. And what was happening in New York at the time is because most real estate that collapsed. And there was so much like stimulus and other money still like floating around looking for returns. And the bet was that a couple of these super expensive towers would attract like the only people left with real money in real estate, which is people. with ultra high net worth with disposable cash who still want super fancy apartments or want an investment for later.

So that's why Park 432 and the other towers were built in this time at that time because it was a bet that the real estate market in Manhattan was still functioning for people for billionaires and for people for whom the 2008 recession fundamentally didn't matter to their bank account, like not really, not substantially. And so between 2009 and 2020, about 22,000 or new units, new condos or whatever were built in Manhattan across 530 new buildings, so about 44 apartments per new build. So they're all quite closely cramped together, and a lot of those were very, very expensive because they were specifically targeted at the ultra wealthy. the problem is though very wealthy people don't need a 20 or 30 million dollar condo they already have five houses they probably already have an apartment in new york so it's just a toy and the people who buy these condos at the price premium of a new build versus a rebate resale can be very high like the new build the first sale is super super high the resale is much lower according to the new york times the developers would try to ask for about 180 18% more for a first sale, them for a resale, because like they have to get their money out. So like Park 432 costs like a billion give or take to construct. They got three billion back in the end. But like the first sale was super important for all the developers to get their money out.

Also in case things go wrong, as we'll talk about in a bit. And this also means that like a lot of demand or like a lot of these apartments stay vacant. According to the New York Times, this is 2020. It's a bit older, but like there were about 7,000 condos available for sale in New York. So that represents about six years worth of inventory for Manhattan, for like, for Manhattan. And a normal market clears through its full inventory in two to three years. So what you're looking at is like an empty or an unsolved housing stock that's sitting there twice as long than a normal market would bear. But because it's Manhattan and because it's so expensive, normal humans do not buy these.

so these things just sit there being empty. And I'm sure that... You know what you've got to do, man. Yeah. Come on. It's time to go, buddy. Oh, for reasons we'll get into... Rent control those suckers.

It'd be very, very difficult to retrofit these buildings so that normal people could live. Yeah, I was going to say, it's a cruel thing to do to normal people, yeah. Maybe we use them as like prisons or something. I don't know. Oh, it's like the four seasons when MDS did that, whatever not kill. That's inhumane. Yeah.

I don't think it's ethical to turn a sort of like, respectable, honorable, ordinary criminal into Bill Ackman, you know? You just filmed the next Judge Dread movie in there. They'd just have like another sky tower to go into them. That's how we punish the billionaires when we finally take power. We make them live in the condos they own. When I'm gonna make no mistake, we will make no apologies for the terror, but it's just you can't get DoorDash.

We will make no apologies for the making can you live in your own apartment? Oh my God, imagine that, though. Like you get like an Uber Eats or something and you just want it at your penthouse. It's going to take half an hour. Like your burger's going to be stoned cold. It says meat at lobby.

All right. Time to put on the adventure clothes. Lacing on the hiking boots. Yeah. So basically a lot of these towers, what they did fundamentally in the end, like where the situation is now is create like a severe oversupply of some of the most expensive condos in the world because it's such a tiny market that you're aiming for and these people can afford

to be incredibly choosy so like Park 432 saw that 90% when it like when it opened which was really high but there have been other buildings we'll get into towards the end where like the sale rate has been a fucking disaster and like none of like right now building one of these things is almost like a shore fireway to lose money, which is the good news. The bad news is, of course, next slide, please, is for everybody else who lives in New York City. So this is, there are many, many reasons that locals hate these buildings, but one of the big ones is they literally, they act like a giant sundial. They throw actual shade across the city because they're so high. This is one of them.

You can see the sun move, you know, move. and this is where shade starts. So, like, you can be sitting in Central Park and enjoying the sunshine, and then all of a sudden, you are literally in the shade of one of these gigantic billionaire towers for like an hour or something, because it's just a giant sundial. It takes away the sun. It's Mr. Burns' hours.

I'm going to say this. New York City is disgusting swamp-ass city. It's 90 degrees out for eight months of the year. If I'm sitting in the sheep meadow, here. I want that shade. Give me that shade. Our new plan, roof New York City. We can get like one of the roofers unions in on this as well. We can get some nice sort of like DSA style art of Manhattan with a big Eve over it. Oh, this could be our office. Buckminster Fuller already had that idea to build a geodesic dome over Manhattan. No, no, he said it would. He said it would pay

for himself, it would pay for itself in snow removal costs in only 10 years. Sure, man. You gotta do it like T-Mobile Park where you can like roll it off on like the three nice days a year. Yeah, just like we don't buy one of the

roof of New York. Yeah. Covering Albany because you've like pulled the roof off in New York for the day. Everyone behave down there. Yeah, I I just want to put myself down as pro shade

I mean you presumably you could put it like in a big rule like all those things you put on the outside of a camper van to create like a little shaded area in the sun so you just like just create like a giant tube on the side on Staten Island or something I mean they're not using that for anything good so like we'll do it

like that and obviously of course like the main thing is it's the grotesque inequality thing you have to look at oh yeah these quite ugly horrible places where the worst people in the world live you know

try to build a tower towards God and you know they can't spit on you because they can't open the window but they would if they could and of course none of these towers contain any affordable or social housing none of them they just they do not they do contain servants quarters

which is fun but we'll get into that in a moment but oh my God yeah and also like if you build this high even you know barring the elevator problem there's very actual few let me try that again there's very few actual housing units for the amount of space you know um on the ground or in the sky that they take up so they're not exactly like

removing the problem of overcrowding in manhattan or in new york city uh there's almost you know 80,000 unhoused people currently in in new york so you know they're but they're not getting for various reasons they're not getting in here but current zoning laws for this part of Manhattan do not require that any of these sites have any affordable housing whatsoever. So these are only for the richest people in the world and like their servant class, like designated servants. Yeah, I mean, these sorts of luxury buildings, I mean, there's some places where they,

there are like requirements for affordable housing. A lot of times you can get out of that by like paying into some housing trust fund that a lot of cities like to keep on hand. The problem is they never do anything with that money. So, you know, I... Inclusionary zoning, I mean, that could be a whole episode. I mean, you know, in nice in theory, a lot of times, it doesn't really work. I look forward to our zoning episode in which we all...

We would actually all have to kill ourselves. The madness rude, standing by. You get the fucking abundance guys on and you just... whine about California for, you know, a couple of hours in a row. Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa, when I signed up for this, you did not tell me that I wasn't have to talk to Ezra Klein.

I'm out. I quit. Yeah. I will be taking my stamp of Nova Signature with me. Thank you. That's right. That's right. I know for the reason.

The editor of his podcast listens to this podcast, so. So, like, the reason these towers can or could, there's been some changes now, be built so high, is due to some workarounds and, like, legal things to do with building in Manhattan. And that's because some of the interior of these towers is not actually apartments. They are what is technically or legally, statutorily known as a mechanical void, where instead of more apartments, you just have like a giant floor of nothing. next slide please so this is a representation of a mechanical void that's actually in use in new york city this is a tower block on west 66 street which is a modest development by luxury standards you can get in there for like seven eight million u.s dollar for the small apartment so you know not that bad and the blue area you see on the right hand side is the proposed or the built

i think this is built now but it could be wrong uh mechanical void so these on have been been banned since May 2019 by the New York City Council, but a lot of these billionaire needle towers were built in the time where this is still allowed. So this is how it worked before 2019. So city regulations cap the number of stories, a number of floors any building can have, which depends a lot on the location as well as the size of like the ground lot. But before 2019, it didn't set a limit on the height of any particular floor. And mechanical floors where they put the HVAC where they put stuff for the elevators, pumps, all that kind of jazz. These are exempt from counting as floor area under zoning laws.

So what you do if you want to build a super high tower, but not like, you know, go over other limits is you just put the HVAC in one floor that you just make five times the size of the normal floor. So you have just like this incredible, like empty space in the middle of the building where just like the HVAC pumps live because you can make that four floors high or something without transgressing technically any of the rules there was one proposed building i don't know if there was built or not i think that was a proposal that got scuppered but they were going to have a mechanical void of 161 meters tall that's 500 feet so 50 meters tall yeah so like you

could fit like the building of grand central station in there comfortably with room to spare and it would just be empty space, so the apartments above, with more view, you could sell for more money. I'm going to say really tall. Central Station is the subway station. The building is Grand Central Terminal. Thank you. So like one planner when the New York Times, you know, talked to people about this particular sort of loophole, they said that like the max you would need for an actual mechanical void, because it is a

thing that buildings do actually need, including Park 432, that like the maximum level you would need for like all the machinery, all the pipeworks, et cetera, would be like about 15 feet. Yeah, I mean, about five meters max. It's like, you know, you're talking like stuff like big pumps. You're talking like recirculating chilled water, all that sort of stuff. Yeah. These machines are big.

They're not that big, right? even like if you have, I don't know, some of the stupid advanced new mechanical systems, you know, all the super energy efficient stuff, you know, which does have to be bigger a lot of the times. Nah, 15 feet's going to be fine. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, 161 feet possibly a bit much. I mean, again, I'm not sure whether or not that one was actually built, but there are like

ones that are 40 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet high, just empty, just empty space, just to raise the floor on the expensive apartments that you actually want to sell above. It's just, just lunacy that they allowed this. There are two other things. These are, I think, a bit more well known. Next slide, please. Yeah, so this is transfer of development rights. These are also known as air rights.

If the building next to you hasn't maxed out on its number of floors, you can sell your extra floors, put them on top of the neighboring building, and then they can build higher because, collectively you are what you're like this feels like there's no

there's a reason for this I put on the next slide and the other thing this is the floor to area ratio this is if you have a bigger floor a bigger footprint then you can build less buildings

if you only use half the footprint you can build more floors on top so one of the reasons that like Park 432 has a ratio of 15 one in terms of height versus floor is because that allows it legally also to be much taller than anything else. That allows it to create go so high up in the sky. So this is, okay. Floor area ratio regulations are sort of what replaced the old regulations that made you

step back on every floor. This is less prescriptive than that, which means that, you know, rather than having a nice old Art Deco building, I can have a plaza and then build, you know, the Seagram's building, right? Yeah. Anyway, speaking of air rights, next light. So, air rights, how did this happen, right? This sort of goes back to the cause of all problems in the world, the Penn Central Railroad. Bating worms number one So everyone remembers the Pennsylvania Railroad

In the early 60s they decide You know we don't need this ratty old Penn Station anymore We'll demolish it and put up beautiful Madison Square Garden Fuck you And that was of course an architectural landmark Everyone immediately loved No that didn't happen right You know they tore the thing down

everyone got really mad that led to all this outcry eventually the create i'm simplifying this a lot but led to a lot of outcry in the creation of the new york city landmarks preservation commission so that no one could do something like that again right and and all we have to do is watch the rags play yeah so the pennsylvania railroad merged with the new york central railroad suddenly found themselves with another ratty old trade station that they wanted off their books Grand Central Terminal, right? The problem is Grand Central Terminal was now landmarked, whatever the hell that meant, right?

So the first plan they come up with is the big hyperbolyde tower. This is an I.M-P-I-M-P, is it I-M-P or I-M-P? Hey, I am-P, excuse me, my brain's not working. I should have had that immediately. Anyway, this was going to be 2,000 feet tall. It was going to be, you know, the tallest building in the world, so on and so forth. Of course, you completely level the headhouse, right?

This was actually proposed in, I think, 54. So that's prior to the landmark commission. It's never got off the ground. It's a real shame, you know, you had a real chance to install, you know, Sauron on top of there. And then, you know, Mamdani would never have been mayor in that circumstance. That's all I'm saying. I hate to say it is actually a pretty good-looking building.

But so this didn't happen. Grand Central Terminal was still around. So the railroad has to, you know, they're like, we're still going to try and figure out how we maximize the value of this downtown real estate, which is currently a useless train station, right? The second proposal was 175 Park Avenue. here, which is just, okay, we're going to jam a big boxy office tower on top of Grand Central Terminal, right? And we're going to, you know, we're going to have like the foundations go straight through, like, the front of it.

So I think this mostly preserved the main hall. A lot of the other spaces, gone, right? And the Landmarks Preservation Commission took one look at this plan and said, fuck you. and the railroad said well fuck you too and they sued the city right uh this case was uh pen central transportation company versus new york city it goes right up the supreme court it centers around this basic issue right is the designation of a building as historic thereby preventing modifications by private owners considered a taking under the fifth amendment right uh Or what that means is, okay, should the railroad be financially compensated for the loss of the use of their air rights?

And in a six to three split decision, they came back and said, well, we don't care, but it does have to have separate bathrooms, and they didn't explain themselves anymore. So this was back when the Supreme Court was more liberal, and they come through and they say, nah. now you don't have to do shit um you know so historic preservation was saved um but this idea of transferable air rights sort of sticks around people look at it and say that's not such a bad idea you know so eventually they throw the railroad of bone and say yeah yeah you can sell those air rights to someone else because you can't use them so they can then use them to build a bigger building somewhere else, right? Yeah, like, so carbon credits, as Victoria says.

Yeah, exactly. I'm usually, this is restricted to adjacent parcels of land, which did screw over the Penn Central because Grand Central Terminal is entirely surrounded by a road, and therefore there are no adjacent parcels, but... Car culture wins again. Yeah. Suck shit, Penn Central.

But outside of this particular spot, this has been very useful for these pencil towers, right? I want to say there is a good graphic of this, I think, in New York Times a while back. I couldn't find it. But one of the big ones, I think 157, they strung together a chain of historic buildings several dozen lots long to allow them to build it to the final height of 1,04 feet. they just did like weird swaps of properties so the property lines changed around and they touched like a dozen historic buildings just barely it's like yep that's an adjacent parcel we gerrymandered a skyscraper fuck you so yeah and it's interesting this this system doesn't really exist outside of new york city to my knowledge I do not believe we have it in Philadelphia. I can't speak for everywhere because these laws are all very local.

There's no national historic preservation law that has teeth. I mean, we have a national register of historic places, but that doesn't mean anything. If you have a national register building, you can just tear that down. It's fine. It doesn't matter as long as you don't use government money. In Seattle, our tallest skyscraper, because Seattle is so hilly, they just built it wide enough. that it's got three floors of ground level retail, which they then daisy chained the bonus for height for each floor of retail.

So they got to add like 30 extra stories on it versus what like Seattle was actually allowing at the time as maximum. And they were like, oh, cool, we're just going to build this all the way up. But then the FAA was like, guys, what the fuck? We have planes right here. And that's the, that's the functional limit because the landing path for C-TAC. No, you don't. Fuck you.

I would just make a big hole in the building. planes can fly through. Yeah. Just slide like a business card across the table that says McDonald's Douglas, and they're like, okay, boop, okay. Personally, I think every airport should be like Kai-Tac pre the demolition of the Kowloon-Walled city, where you get to like look at people's, like, kitchens as you land, but, you know, that's just because I'm progressive.

I'm all about that abundance mindset, I digress. I like fun regulatory nonsense like this. I think it's fun. Makes you get inventive with it, you know? I know, right? Make them work for it. Yeah. Do some weird shit.

So yeah, that's what I got on that. Yeah. So anyway, in short, like we have now this series of needle towers in New York City. They're all new build. They are a market of the worst people in the world. They ruin the skyline. They create shadows. they don't build affordable housing.

They're only possible for various... Unless you're like that for some reason. Architectural and regulatory loopholes. And, you know, they do not in any way, shape or form house, you know, people in some of the most congested and densely populated cities in the world

with sky high demand and, you know, as I say again, 80,000 unhoused people. And let's see how that goes. Yeah, so just say how you've got us, like, all sympathizing for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I just like that painting.

It's there for no good reason. Don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, sure. Also, we're like 19 minutes in, and we're just going to start talking about the building, so this is going well. Yeah, well, there's your problem, dickheads. It never ends.

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 you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only

add you here 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 W-T-Y-P-P pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. You got me thinking about, you got me thinking about

One thing, are these actually all new build? Because I think there might be an exception. But that's only if a certain building that I, what you call it? Where are we? It's in Lower Manhattan. I found it. Shit. I'm not sure if it's a residential conversion yet, though.

70 Pine in Lower Manhattan, one of the older office towers, which, yeah, is now a residential conversion. I bet that is now retroactively a pencil tower. Oh, this thing does look like it fucks, though. Yeah, no, it's a good building. But it is very narrow and very tall. That is, yeah, but that's quite cool. I like that. That's pretty sick.

Yeah, guess what? We make the rules, you don't fuck you. Anyway, so we got one retroactive pencil tower. Yeah. Anyway, next slide, please. so we are finally on the object of today's podcast this is four three two park avenue just some general statistics so you get the gist of it it was built on the site of the old drake hotel the site was sold to the developers for about six hundred sixty million dollars in current dollar

value it moves through this incredibly complicated financial history due to the you know financial crash 2008 um i got very sidetracked and i had to lead all those slides because we We would never not be here anymore otherwise. I've only mentioned in passing the financial interests of one Paul Manafort, who at one time owned part of the site, because he got some funding from a Russian oligarch called Dimitro Fiatash, who is an alleged Russian-organized crime boss, and he got the money through embezzling more money from Ukrainian natural gas extraction.

So, you know, New York real estate really is quite something when it comes to money. Um, when it opens, it's nice to know, as I'm sort of like imprisoned in my kind of sky hell, that it was sort of like funded maximally unethically. We'll also say, uh, selling points of these fucking animals. Yeah. Drake Hotel was a nice old-fashioned hotel building. Now, I mean, those are sort of a dime a dozen in New York City, at least the buildings. But it was an issue in that, you know, they did demolish a hotel for this,

uh, which is a problem because hotels are, illegal to build in New York City. What? Can you elaborate on that? Hotels are illegal to build in New York City. Oh, that's right. You can't build that into my beliefs. You can't build a hotel in New York City.

It's, it just, it doesn't, no one can do it. It doesn't pencil out. It is effectively illegal. I'm not sure of the specifics, but you can't build a hotel in New York City. I hate that fucking, I hate that fucking place, ma'am. You challenge for the listeners. build a hotel in New York City. Yeah, so when 432 Park opens,

it was at the time the third tallest building in the United States and the tallest residential building in the world. It's since been superseded by two of its neighbors, Central Park Tower and 1-1-1-West 57th Street, which are, as you will have seen, or if you remember, the skyline, they're basically neighbors. Of the 106 apartments available, About 40 are known as accessory suites, and they are meant to house your accessories,

your nannies, personal assistants, personal chefs, you know, people that you want to have around, but you don't want to like see, you know, these are the servants quarters. These are of course housed on the lowest floors because the upper floors are for the real people where the real people live. The median unit sells at somewhere between 11 to 9. $90 million. It achieves a 90% sale rate, which is pretty impressive, and about 900 million in profit for the developers when it went on sale.

In 2021, the penthouse went up for sale for almost $170 million and was last sold in 2025 for just 61. So, you know, your real estate doesn't always go up. value because people just simply don't want it. Damn, that's like a Hyundai Ionic 5 depreciation. Yes. I think I dropped there, but hopefully my stream is still. It really is the carbon, like, genuinely, this is like the carbon credits of buildings.

It has 84 numbered stories and is segmented, segmented into 12-story blocks, followed by a, double story open space, which allows wind gusts to pass through the building because otherwise you'd have big wind problems. We'll get into that in a moment. And it also has, as best you can manage with concrete, a pure white lattice exterior of port in place concrete where the exteriors are made of Portland cement. That will be quite important later for how it's going now. We have to briefly talk about the architect. Next slide, please. What the fuck are these things?

This is this... These look like cities, skyline's, like, achievement buildings. I'm so happy to see you! It looks like my Mazda 3. This is really going to put my kind of southwestern, like, growing city on the map, I feel. So on the left you see... And I know one of the... One of these is the walkie-talkie, the one that has a death ray, the melted cars.

The death rate. Yeah, yeah. So on the left, you see the architect, Rafael Vignoli. He's one of those, he's one of the big time architects like Zaha Hadid. Like if you want to make a big fuck-off statement building that shows how rich you are, how cool you are, you get him or you got him. He's since died, but, you know, he's one of those guys. Well, so Zah Hadid, but that doesn't stop her working. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You know, I think his, his practice. He's on the grave to hire lots of slaves in Saudi Arabia. Well, his son, I think, took over his architectural bureau or practice, so, you know, the name certainly lives on. Weirdly enough, he's originally trained as a classical pianist, and later in life, when he had a lot of money, he built what he called a piano house on his own compound to houses nine classical pianos, you know. I don't want to hear a single person ever pocket watching podcasters ever again. I don't have a fucking piano house, right? You should be getting mad at like two dozen architects. Why, guy, why would you, who do you hire to build a piano house? The piano.

He hired himself, he just obviously. Yeah, fuck. No, you, you get Renzo. You get Renzo piano to do that. Come on. It's his name. You know, sometimes, you know, it's, it's like a lawyer representing himself, you know. But I have to have someone to store all of my Sauronans.

so yeah like November was saying he also did the walkie tokey in London who will I hire to store all of my mediocre Australian lagers yeah this is the foster's building of my compound so yeah like November was saying he also did the walkie talkie in London and the Vidara resort in Las Vegas both of which have one thing in common is they both love to focus sunlight on very small batches.

The walkie-talkie be quite famous for it. The Las Vegas one, apparently for a while, was hot enough to cinch hair and melt plastic cups in the hotel pool, which is that may have just been normal Las Vegas heat. Yeah, how could they tell? The London

one I remember because it melted cars. It like, not into like a puddle, right, but it would like burn off the paint on the bonnet or whatever. And because if you're parking a car in central London, you are also a rich psycho who you should be getting mad at for making too much money instead of me.

And so, like, you would be able to go to the papers and get mad at the architect. Yeah. I was reading an article about this on NBC. I'll just read you one quote from it. I said to the staff, I don't know if you know what's going on out there, but I was being burned.

And they're like, yeah, we know. We call it the death ray. That's beautiful customer service. I see you've experienced our torture device. We have a cute name for it. I see you for the end of the world, there's your problem life show. Yeah, we know, we call it the death ray. Yeah, maybe we should make some alterations to the global headquarters, so we'll

have a focusable death ray. Yeah, hell yeah. Big magnifying glass on an extending arm. One Archimedes place. So let's talk a little bit about the initial design, because that is quite important. So this, the developer, a guy called Harry Maclo, wanted what he called a statement building. So he wanted a big, fuckles show building. And he commissioned Finoli to make it work.

So the demand was for a perfectly rectilinear building that was both super tall and super skinny. it has a ratio of 15 to 1. So it's 15 high for every one across, basically. The Empire State Building, just by comparison, only has a 3 to 1 ratio, and that's because it has, it's an older building, so it has a flared base and it steps up rather than going straight.

This thing not safely insertable. I was going to say, yeah, we did it. So all this results in a building that is 93.5 feet wide and long. And it's a fine building, but like, why did you put the tuned mass damper in such a way that there's a sort of noticeable bulge about like a third of the way up from the base? Don't worry. If you don't get that one, don't worry about it. It is almost but not quite 1,400 feet high. It tops out at 1,396. And it's a perfectly square design that is mirrored in the square windows and the cast concrete white exterior. It's all supposed to be. straight, clean lines, white, you know, this is also why it has a completely flat roof, which

will also become important later. He, Vignoli said that this was inspired by a trash can, which if I was paying a hundred million dollars for an apartment, I would not want to say that I lived in the apartment building inspired by a trash can, but go off, I guess. It's confusing what rich people like. Uh, sure, brother. I haven't worked on rich people's buildings before, I don't, I don't understand it. I mean, the trash will become a feature of some of the many problems to do with this building.

Oh, the trash is my favorite problem. Me, me forgetting the names of my podcast, uh, no, I, genuinely, we'll get to it. But the, the trash solution in this building is my favorite thing about it by far. yeah um this is uh next slide please join me mr chapo in the retail cube it's it's it's mostly your sort of standard ish skyscraper build it's got a 30 foot reinforced concrete core with uh 30 inch walls that house the elevator shafts mechanical services etc which is surrounded by open floor apartments and an exoskeleton

um which is connected to the inner tube by uh by five outriggers that you can can see on the right. Those are like open floors and they connect the skeleton firmly to the inner core which houses the elevators, etc. This is what the exoskeleton. So the skeleton looks like. Next slide, please. There. So this is the exterior, the facade of Park 432, which unlike like a normal sky sky where like you sort of, for the bit that you see, the bit That's like, you know, the decorative part that people gazed upon, that's sort of like bolted to the outside and it's not really structural. It's just put on the outside of the metal frame.

With this one, the frame, like the facade is the part of the structure. The building cannot stand without the exterior. It is an integral part. The facade is structure and the structure is the structure is the, facades. It's the same thing. So if... Sounds like Marshall McLuhan. Presumably, presumably they actually presented this drawing somewhere with

all this fucking Z-fighting. Oh my God. Yes, yeah, it says that I signed off on this. Yeah, you did. When did I come back and give me something I can look at? So like if this, like the outside bit, like I say, because the facade is structural,

were to start, I don't know, developing cracks or something, that, that, that, that, might be bad, but, you know, this is simply a device known as foreshadowing. The idea is that the exterior is, but like, it's not connected to your apartment directly, where you can see on the right hand side, is because if the exterior were to be connected, like, if your windows were to be, like, completely set into, and if the exterior walls were the facade, you would have, like, too much wind movement. You would experience too much of the building swaying in the wind and moving about so what they did is they essentially built like

these steel cages um on every floor on top of the concrete floor but it is unconnected to the floor above so like your apartment rests only on the concrete floor below then there's a gap and then the next floor happens that's what you can see on the right hand side the cage stops and that's like connecting tubes and whatnot um but like this is not like apartment rests only on the on the on the concrete floor below you. It doesn't, it's not physically connected to the one above you. That's also to help, you know, your apartment not sway around if all the floors were connected.

Yeah, this gives you some advantages like you got some space up here. You don't have the air condition as much, you know, obviously you need the studs where you can mount the drywall and all that stuff. You know, and it prevents like thermal bridging to the outside through these big, big concrete members, which otherwise, you know, they'd be bringing the hot and cold in, as well as, you know, the movements from the wind and so on and so forth. It'll also cost less to convert it to Billionaire Prison, because the cages are already, like, pre-installed.

Good point. So at this point, we have to spend a little bit of time talking about the effects of wind on super-tall needle towers. Next slide, please. Is it good? Is it less than expected? Is that what I want? Is that why we're talking about it?

Is we talking about it because it's not an issue? Because it's not a problem. It's never been a problem. You know, Aeolos is our friend. It's fine. Yeah. So what wind does to all very tall buildings, but specifically to these super tall needle towers, basically the more tall the more slender, the taller the building, the more likely it is to be lively.

In severe storm weather with gusts of wind up to 100 miles an hour, a tower of 1,000 feet. So like a third lower than Park 432 might sway up to two feet in either direction. That, as you will imagine, would be noticeable if you lived in a wiggily. Okay. Yes. No, that's the thing outside a car dealership. Yes, yes, dude. It's not that bad, but it's not good.

We made Bill Ackman live in the inflatable tube thing outside a car dealership. Stuff won't fall over, but you will get seasick. Yeah. yeah you put bill acman in the wiggler and you know yeah that's that's just that's just the life you live yeah so because 432 park is twice as tall as any of the other surrounding buildings you know apart from it's more taller neighbors now and new york city is quite close to what we affectionately known as the sea or the ocean uh it catches like a lot of high winds and high wind speeds what we affectionately know as the sea or the ocean is accidentally a

perfect Trump phrasing. I've never been proud of it. And so wind loading, so like these deformations start to affect windows specifically, so like windows and window frames, if the width, the height ratio is one in five, and part four, three, two is one in 15. So the effect is very, very strong. And if you don't control these impacts of wind, your building is a, essentially going to do the deformation dance, which isn't good for you or the building you live in.

And even at sub-castrophic levels can impact elevator movements because the shaft is no longer perfectly aligned and like wind tunnels shoot, like wind forces shoot up through the elevated tunnel. That also stops elevators removing. Ooh, scary. Okay, sure. I live in the Tacoma Narrows Bridge building. Yeah. It can warp the facade. It can deform or crash. Like shit just moves sliding around like you're on the deck of the Titanic, just like, oh no, my million dollar couch. Somebody call my Windows slash shotgun guy. And also like even at like non-catastrophic level of impact on winds, like these dynamic motions can create like real discomfort if you live in these ultra high-rise towers.

Lateral acceleration, vibration and even the perception of movement is enough to make people see sick or like, you know, frightened. Now with, like, ultra-processed food, gout is no longer a disease of the rich. So it's good that we still have diseases of the rich. Yeah. Yeah. So like, and especially on the higher floors, even with all the insulation and everything they put in between you and the facade, you could still hear the building like Creek and Grown. And if you're on the 86th floor of your needle tower and the wind is blowing outside, that may or may not be comforting to you. That's a person.

That's really going to interfere with that puppy girls league. game. What I'm seeing from this diagram, though, right, which is interesting. I mean, okay, you have actual deformed shape. I assume this is all exaggerated from sheer and flexual deformation here. It does look a lot like when you add sheer and flexual, you know, it's going to move around a lot at the top, but it's basically in one piece, right? What's really going to get you is somewhere like, I don't know, 10 or 15 stories up where, you know, the whole building is just bending, you know? That's like, all of the forces are right concentrated there. Yeah, but don't worry.

Those are the floors where, you know, the service people live. So don't worry about that too much. They're not really. Yeah, I guess so. That'll be fine. Like, you can get another nanny. Put some trash bags where the window. Our nannies people?

Put some trash bags where the window was. Yeah. are nannies people, the longest threat in the history of forums. Next slide, please. So you get all of the deformation. You also get this, which is called vortex shedding,

which is quite an awesome term. And it specifically affects these very tall buildings. Basically, the taller you build, the more wind impact you have, and the more vortex you have. You never want to get into what I think of as like helicopter aerodynamics, you know? No.

I mean, I don't know what you're talking about. Nova, like, helicopters are perfectly safe. Never been any an accident with those. So, like, crashing an experimental secret version of 432 Park Avenue onto Osama bin Laden's compound in what they're calling the most ironic revenge. So basically, when a vortex forms on the side of a building, it creates a suction force.

The force then generated by this vortex, It's like, it's not so large enough itself that like it can create like a catastrophic motion or anything like that. But the problem is these vortexes form because of prevailing wind directions and, you know, your building not really going anywhere. They form in like well-organized patterns and that rock the building as they move individually side to side. But they do that continuously quite a lot because winds do tend to come from one direction or the other. So like your building is constantly moving in the same directions and you need to. account for that in your design properly and certainly you know if if the facade is critical to the stability of the building that's really quite important that you you do that and what makes it

worse is if you were to say build a statement building uh with sharp 90 degree rectilinear angles because like you don't find a lot of like strictly rectangular forms in nature do you not as many as What you'd think? No, no. Although box turtle is a thing. Uh, formed. Do you just say a box turtle is a thing? Yeah, I get it. Do you think a box turtle is in the shape of a box?

Like in Minecraft? Like in Minecraft. It's a box. It's in the name, Doss. Yeah, it's weird. You don't know, also don't see as many death rays, like, naturally occurring, but, you know, one day, maybe. You know, there's a supernova, like, every week. Come on.

I mean... Did one of those... Steve Owen? That's because we were called this... What a supernova! Yeah, Steve Owen was killed by a gamma ray blast, like a gamma ray burst. They just perfectly micro-targeted his heart. Yeah.

The stingray, that was a cover-up. That was... that was coincidental. So, yeah, like a building with like these sharp 90-degree corners will create a greater vortex effect. That's like why a lot of... a lot of the really tall buildings are not that. they're either stepped or they're curved which allows wind to like more naturally flow past buildings not park four three two or they're just thicker you know that that's another option is just make the floor plate bigger you know and possibly more rigid the other thing you can do is vary the height of the building so like build steps in it um or you can like have different

shapes along different compass points so that monstrosity tower that's now, I think, the highest in the world, that thing in Dubai with all the sort of drum towers that are like glued together. Part of the reason that's done that way, it's stepped and it's curved because if you bought like sort of non-sequential

things together, the wind curves around it and sort of breaks apart because it can't create a vortex essentially. But again, Park 432 is designed specifically to be perfectly rectilinear so it doesn't have any of these natural protections.

What it does have is, next slide, please. Hold on. It has two main defences. The first being the open drums that you can see in red on the right-hand side. These are literally two open floors where the wind passes through the building. So instead of just like slamming into it, they do break up this vortex effect. And they allow the wind to pass through the building apart from the central drum. And that allows, that stops the sway, it also stops these vortexes from becoming overly intense.

The other thing that they have is, we were already talking about it before, is these two mass dampeners. Big block of concrete. Yeah. On hydroly. On some springs. Yeah. Well, no, iron hydraulics. Springs aren't enough.

You got to move it actively. So these, these, Park 432 has two of these. on opposite sides of the of the central column right on top of the building you can see it on the right hand side on the top it says tuned mast dampeners they are on the tallest like right beneath the penthouses essentially as discussed they are there to counter wind motion and to sort of stop like to counter to prevent counter force to the sway of the building and it should be enough to stop the building from getting blown over in like a megastorm or something like that So the two tuned mast dampeners in Park 4-3-2 are 600 tons each. They consist of mast steel plates. They were ferried up in individual sections and then bolted together on top of the building. And they are attached to the building by springs. I think pistons, I think, in this particular building.

I wonder how they did that. If the tower crane was still operational or if they did something I like to call elevator abuse, which is actually fairly common in building renovations. One thing you can do is you sort of, let's say I need to get a big steel member into an upper floor of a building. I don't have a crane. So what do I do? Well, there's a thing in the building that already goes up and down, right? There's an elevator. So you cut out the weight sense. You put the elevator on, you know, some kind of independent service and you sling the big steel section underneath the elevator, drive it to the top of the building. And then you just have to open up the doors of the floor below the building and just sort of pull it out somehow.

So like Guantanamo Bay, but for elevators. Elevators. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You can torture an elevator. to get heavy things to the top of a building. Just blasting Metallica down the shaft and make it go. Oh, exactly. I mean, technically is ready in the stress position, so like, you're off the way there. Are the open drums open to the public? Like, if you're in the penthouse, you want to go out for a smoke,

and you just go down to, like, the closest one to your floor. That'd be awesome. I'm not sure if you'd actually want to be there. I don't know what the wind speed is up there, but, like, you know. Yeah, I imagine it'd be pretty hard to get the lighter. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like there's got to be a lot of wind. When it says windproof, it had better mean.

We're going to push windproof to the limit. You're going to lose your hat. I mean, if I'm paying $170 million for the penthouse, I want at least like a complimentary Gortex jacket so I don't freeze to death of there. You know, like, that's the minimum. Locking, locking my, like, carabiner or my climbing harness into like a hard point

on the sort of drum floor and just spalling out a length of a length of cable, like an astronaut doing an EVA. so yeah like these open drum floors as like i say the main function is for them to like let the wind flow through they're also uh at these five points there like where the outriggers um like extra fix the facade exterior to the internal column and that provides structural rigidity and sort of makes the the whole thing thing go apparently though like you don't as regards the the tune-mast dampeners, you don't

strictly theoretically need them the building from the reading I've done, the building like shouldn't fall over if it didn't have them but they do provide a much more like comfortable way of living or any way of living maybe.

It's got to be strictly for comfort because you want the building to stand up if there's a horrible windstorm which then causes a power routage, which it might do. So you can't like rely on the tuned mass damper to keep the building up. It has to be just, you know, it's there to provide comfort.

It's not there to keep the building up. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, without it, it would be, I mean, and to be fair, there has been some proof because, as far if I understood it correctly, there have been two or three occasions where they've had to repair these tuned mass dampeners and the building didn't fall over while they were doing that. So, you know, all as well, that ends well, I guess. Yeah.

I do like how rich people have invented in an apartment building that if your power goes out, it gets significantly less comfortable to be in. Like, even more so than the power went out. Yeah. It's like a sort of more extravagant version of that. The ride in my condo has gone to ship. Yeah, it's like a more expensive version of that, that stupid app connected bed from Amazon. That all stopped working when there was a power outage when U.S. East One. went down from AWS, and nobody's beds worked anymore, which was an incredible.

I can't remember the name of the company now, but it was incredible. Anyway, next slide, please. You could phone into the tuned mass damper and make it actually exacerbate the sway because you want to be on a roller coaster. Doing cool tricks with it like a lowrider. Yeah. So this is the exterior cladding or the facade or, you know, part of the structure of the building. this is poured in place because obviously like you can't prefab and then winch it up 86 floors

and it's poured in place concrete of this specific uniform shade of off white almost white that gives the tower its specific you know landmark look during construction they poured more than 70,000 cubic yards of concrete and 12,500 tons of rebar were used for the superstructure to keep the whole thing going. So like I say, it's cast in place, and because you have to pump it up and it has to settle fast, this is a pumpable self-consolidating mix with very little water in it. That will be relevant later. And according to Structure Magazine, the places you go for this podcast, the idea is you could

have access to newly cast horizontal surfaces within five hours of placing. I really hope that Structure Magazine has, like, a good review of building show. Yeah, maybe write them, maybe they can write up, well, there's your problem, that, you know. Yeah. There you go. I mean, I'm profiled in Structure Magazine. You get a glossy, you know, feature in there, yeah. Yeah.

To my knowledge, I had to go, I am now, like, trying to think back to my materials class. I was never a concrete guy. I always knew the masonry a lot better. None of this is like wrong per se. No. In terms of how you could put together a building, especially like when you're building a reinforced concrete high rise,

a lot of the times, you know, because normally concrete doesn't reach its full strength until 28 days later as the movie goes. Yeah. But in the interim, what you do in order to build the building, building higher while the concrete is still curing is you put about one trillion shoring poles on each floor, right, as you build up.

And then, again, 28 days later, when all the zombies are dead, you go in and remove them, right? Yeah, I think I have this in a slide later, but I think when they got really efficient with it, they could like pour a whole floor. three days later put up the next one and three days later put up the next one. So it was a really fast process because of the way this concrete, this concrete mix was specifically designed for Park 432. Yeah, three days, the floor is about average these days. Yeah.

And like it also had, like I say, a really low water to cement materials ratio. And another thing that they, that they refuse to do is they refuse to mix in, fly ash, which creates a much more stronger, more stable concrete, but it also causes the concrete to darken and gray,

which they didn't want. They wanted white concrete specifically. And not, not painted, no kind of facade over it, just like the concrete itself has to be white. Yes. I want the visual of my house being built on sand.

I am been rusty on my material science, but fly ash here. Fly ash is like, you know, coal ash from the power plant or something like that. It goes in, it performs much of the same function that like volcanic ash performed in Roman concrete just to make it very, very durable for a very, very long time.

And mixing in fly ash in concrete is very common, like most concrete has it. That's why it's great. Yeah, but if you have anti-miscegenation... Is it like part of just the deal with getting concrete that it's gray? Yes. Or not. You know, like, you could have this.

Oh, we're going to build this building where this... It's got a concrete facade that also happens to be structural, and it's the tallest, thinnest building in the entire world. But also, if the concrete's gray, I'll fucking kill you. Yeah. It's like such an architect thing to do. I want my fucking Apple iPhone building. You can also dye the concrete a different thing. color if you want.

That's cheating, but that's cheating. You can do all kinds of shit with ad mixtures. Anyway, building opens. Next slide, please. What was the slump test on this thing? That's what I want to know. Well, so genuinely, in the New York Times article, there's a lot of them going back and forth with their concrete people. We will get into the concrete people in what they were saying.

Yeah, have had a lot of headaches over this. Yes. Anyway, buildings open, the worst people in the world move in. Some critics love it, some hate it. Like I say, 90% of the apartments get sold. Jennifer Lopez and her boyfriend or husband A-Rob move in. I found some apartments currently for sale and the block on Zillow, of all places. They go from 10 million to 55 million.

You can move in, maybe not tomorrow, but soon if you want. the amenities that you get, but you do have to be for... Subscribe to the Patreon. No, we're already getting our own building. Yeah, but I want a second home in New York City. Subscribe to the Patreon. Yeah. We're not zoned for residential use, Raz.

No, Center City, CMX-5. Residential use is fine. Oh, you're right. But what if you call it a watch collection compound, and technically it wasn't for permanent habitation? Yeah. No, it can just be for permanent habitation because it's legal. Yeah, but that's less fun.

Yeah. We don't have to do illegal things sometimes. Piratical about it, but fine. You're only doing illegal things because you want to at this point, not because you have. So what? What do you care? It's called illegalism, you know? Yeah, also pay my bail, Roz. So the amenities take up about three full floors.

They include a private restaurant. That's what you see on the slide, which is run by a Michelin-Star chef. There's a fitness center. Why does it look like a four seasons at the Furibunker? Yeah, I was like, you know, this is like a nice Marriott, you know. It looks just horrible and pressing. Like, yeah, I think I've had my grandmother's wake in there. I think it's very possible.

Yeah, there's a, there's a billiard room you can into an 80-seat movie room, a boardroom you can rent. There's a 75-foot indoor swimming pool. What are the house rules about? about if the sort of grotesque movement of the building fucks up your billiards game. I think you just get like a free do-over or something. I think the, the billiards are on the amenity floors, which are at the bottom of the building, so you don't, yeah, the moment is mostly being applied to the floors where the staff

live. Oh, okay. I was hoping when you were saying that it was going to be applied like almost exclusively to Jennifer Lopez and Arod's apartment. No, they're way up top. They're experiencing a different defamation scheme. Actually, they're not anymore.

They sold up and took like a $1 or $4 million loss in the apartment because they didn't want to be there anymore. Oh. I mean, listen, I think I have complaints about my apartment. There's, there's, you know, the usual amenities, these do all come with like a monthly

or a yearly cost, including for like if you want to have dinner in this horrible restaurant you do have to like pay for your meal but at least at the beginning breakfast was included so you could go and you know have you know go down in your slippers and the first appealing thing you've told me about this building yes I could move in somewhere and they gave me free breakfast

I'd be like well you know for 15 million that's not bad actually they give you free breakfast in a travel lodge some of the amenities they don't give you free breakfast. A higher-tier Marriott Hotel. Right. Anyway, so, like, this is part of the third. Next slide, please.

This is, it's all going just fantastic. That's just a nice picture I found. Don't worry about it. Next slide, please. This is where we ask the question. Oh, it's black. No, you've made a mistake here. What you've done is you've applied some photos of like,

like small arms fire damage on buildings and, like, Okay. But I mean, this is... It's been standing for what, 80, 90 years, right? Yeah, it's part of the history. You don't want to just sort of like patch that over. It's from... You know, that's actually anti-aircraft fire on one of those.

Yeah, it's like that bridge, is it, of the... in Moscow, in... Yeah. In Croatia. Yeah. It's... Over the river... No.

No. Mostar. Mostar bridges Croatia and I think Bosnia, because I know the Croatian, because I know the The Croatians did a bunch of war crimes on it. And then that's what the, like, poison drinking guy was doing. That's why he was in court in the first place. Oh, shit. Yeah.

Mosta, musta, musta. Yeah. Harich. Yeah, Kavadzich, I think. Yeah, but it's in Bosnia. Yeah. Anyway, these are all not pictures. I can be completely wrong about all of this.

These are weirdly enough. Check yourselves now. These are pictures of the concrete about nine years after the building was finished sorry,

just as a technical question. Are the bars black like in the final presentation because there are some words that are in there that are, it doesn't matter if they are like I can just talk about it

but like just to Oh yeah, I don't say as you can see in the picture there's words written. Right, yeah, no, they're black. All right, that's fine. I mean, it's just about

visible, but it's gray on black. I do know that one of them is, so these two on the left describe themselves as spalled, and I am used to spalling in the context of armored combat. I'm used to that being a thing that armor does when it's hit by something from the outside is it like spores on the inside and you get a bunch of like sort of sharp fragments of armor like killing the crew. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, yeah. Concrete can do that just sort of on its own over a long enough period of time, especially if it has reinforcing bar, especially if that bar is corroding or something. You know, but do not build your main battle tank out of concrete.

Not white concrete. If you build it out of concrete, just put in some fly ash. I know your tank will look ugly and gray, but it'll be a lot more functional on the meantime. I wanted my pure white tank to blind the enemy. Layer 1 of the survivability onion, be seen in such a way that people go, damn, he's got that shit on. The pure rectilinear tank is incredible. This is, this is the cavalry part of the household cavalry.

This is the, this is part of the new Vatican City Army, pure white tank with a cross on it. It's a little bit fucked up that the Vatican don't have cavalry anymore, they should maybe bring that back. Yeah, probably should have a few tanks, yeah, just in case. Yeah,

so spoiling, yeah, is like it's when flakes fall off of the larger body. It's chipping. And yeah, as we were saying, the most common cause is corrosion of the reinforcing steel bars. When steel corrodes,

it can expand up to 10 times its volume, which stresses the concrete, which basically sort of like pings chunks off the side. And it's not uncommon for like high-rise, to lose some material and chips as the building settles. Like that's an accepted part of like these buildings of settling in. But maybe not to this scale and maybe not nine years in.

Like that that's bad in general. Yeah. Rebar has all kinds of fun tradeoffs, right? I don't know the specific details of construction in here. But yeah, so you have your concrete section here. And then you have some kind of curve bar that goes around over like this. that repeats, then you have your, your bars that go like this and that and there. And this is a cross section, right?

Right. It looks kind of like a frog. Anyway. So, but yeah, each one of these bars, you know, if it gets affected by water in any way, which it does, they tend to corrode. As they corrode, they expand in this really ugly way. One of the ways you can avoid that, hold on. I'm going to switch the color of the pen here.

to green because that's the color. The plastic usually is, is you can coat each bar in green plastic. I don't know why it's green, but it's always green. And the interesting thing about that is it will completely protect the rebar from corrosion unless there is like a very slight nick in the plastic, in which case it will immediately corrode at like 50 times the rate from that place. onwards. Are the Achilles plastic?

Yes. So the other thing- The electrolysis, you know, that sort of stuff, I mean, the corrosion reaction is funny. It does funny things. So the other thing you see, which is on the top right-hand side, is called honeycombing. This is basically like small gaps in air pockets. This happens when the pore hasn't been done exactly right, and the mix doesn't quite fill the space between the rebar and the formwork, like the cast that keeps it in place while it settles. So this is just like, this is just like a cast that's gone slightly wrong.

Again, that's not massively a problem on this scale. You're always going to have a few casts that don't go 100% right. But again, when the facade is structural and all that stuff, it might be a bit more of a problem. The last thing... I'm going to have... I'll be honest, you know, if you're being this psycho about the facade, I just put some super P in there, super plasticizer, excuse me, which just makes the thing like settle out instantly and no air voids whatsoever.

Self-levels all that crap. Yeah, but then, like, it wouldn't be pure white anymore, and then we wouldn't have miscegenation towers anymore, and that would just be bad. Nah, this is like just a little bit of something you put in there, and it affects the chemistry, it'd be fine, probably. I don't know. It's been a long time since I took material science.

Someone in the comments might go, no, if you put Super P in there, collapse instantly. I don't know. I haven't played some slump test for the PS3. Anyway, the last thing, bottom right, you see, these are called surface voids. They're again, they're pockmarking in the surface, and they are caused by water that's trapped between the surface of mold

and the concrete pool or air bubbles that are trapped in the mix because there wasn't quite enough mortar to fill in the space. between the aggregates, so, like, these are just flaws in the poor, and that leads to- No thing that these look very bad. These don't look good. They are- If I was paying $1 billion for the sort of like very smooth, very perfect, very white, sort of- You know, it kind of looks like Travertine.

You know, if you were going for that look, it would look great. But I guess they weren't going for that look because they have no taste. sadly because instead it looks like next slide please um these are facade cracks these are all different like you know spoiling um pockmarking voids the all of this you can now see on the outside of the building these are pictures from october 2025 so last month normally normally i appreciate stretch marks but in this case i think it kind of detracts from the overall it's going Yeah, yeah. No, I think it looks better with this.

I'm going to be honest with you. It's got the kind of suburban tiger pelts. Yeah, this is a better look than a pure white building. Now, the fact that these are all structural problems with the structural concrete is a different issue. So I'm just going to read you a little bit. This is from a PDF of the suppliers of the white concrete mix, because they were very proud of of their efforts, as you understand. I'm just going to read you a little bit from it.

White cement reacts more quickly and is temperamental, which meant that the construction crews needed to pay careful attention to the quality control process, travel in trucks, the raw materials, adjusting for the weather, etc., etc. In order to have a very good consistency among the different concrete batches every single time, the rapid construction schedule was an additional challenge

with the goal of one floor per week for a total of 90 floors. Thus, the combination of white exterior, the aggressive timeline, and the general requirements of building a superstructure made this one of the most challenging concrete projects that has ever been executed. Well, he did a bang-up job with that. This is the promo material, mind you. I should just, you know, add. It's not the foreshadowing material. Yeah, just kind of, I got my concrete guys in, and after a lot of kind of yelling at each other and then me, they put something in the brochure that just says, greater even than the gods. You know, you got to think about the logistics here. You have a concrete plant somewhere offsite. You know, they mix the concrete there at the plant.

They put it in the concrete truck. The concrete truck has a certain time window where they can get to the building. It then needs to be pumped all the way up to the top. Then you put the concrete in and, you know, probably you're doing like, I don't know, a dozen trucks per floor or something you know so it's got to be consistent over every single truck right you're doing these batches constantly

forever um you're probably more than a dozen and like you can drive trucks into downtown Manhattan no problem like there's never any traffic or anything that you could like get jammed in or anything so I don't worry about that yeah no no I mean there's again there's a window where you you can deliver the concrete and then

there's a window afterwards where that's when you have to phone up your buddy and say hey do you have a you got a foundation you need pouring somewhere else, like a crappy one. Right. And then after that, of course, you have to go to the designated dump site. Um, concrete logistics is insane. Everything about it. Um, yeah. And then it's made easier if you just have to like pump it up 90 floors that that makes everything and it has to be this weird shade of light. Um, so if you're asking you were pumping it up at that point or if they were, you know, bringing it up in a bucket with

a tower crane. Because I think after a certain, after a certain amount of floors bringing it up with the bucket makes more sense. I don't know, I haven't done. I did maintenance, not construction. So if you're asking yourself at this point, well, why is any of this like a problem apart from, for the, you know, pricks that live inside it? And next slide, please. Very obvious ones, sure. Oh. Yeah.

The moon is one of the most strategically valuable places on Earth. You could drop rocks with the power of dozens of nuclear bombs. Brianna Wu never change about her Never ever change I Yeah God

Oh She's so smart That's my president Yeah Yeah So the reason Why it's bad Because if you have a building

That's like a couple feet short Of 1,400 feet tall That means that any concrete chips that like ping off the side of the building has a very long way to travel down before it hits the deck. And essentially there's no... I did some reading about this, right? The Department of Buildings in New York City, their power, their sort of legal power about

this is they can require you to build like wooden, like plywood sheds over the like sidewalks so that, you know, if somebody drops like a scaffolding pole or a bucket of nails or whatever, you don't die. But if what the thing that falls off the building, at like, terminal velocity is, is a sort of like chunk of extremely white concrete. There's no shed you can build. No, you're fucked. That's not penetrating through and killing you stone dead.

Lean through. Like a hot butter. Yeah, I mean, you can get taken out by a brick from like four floors up. Yeah. You know, this is, this is not a, not a situation that you're, I mean, if you're. If the concrete is falling, it's probably falling off on, like, pebble-sized chunks. You know, you're not necessarily going to get, you know, a big, big rock of concrete, for lack of a better word.

Yeah, but also, you could tank a big rock of concrete. I could tank a pebble-sized piece of concrete traveling at like 45 miles an hour. Yeah. Yeah, but when it's a big rock of concrete, all of a sudden, it's breaking the sound barrier by the damn it gets to you. I'd be standing on the sidewalk outside Park 3 and 432 looking up, screaming, come out, be coward. Just looking up and being like, are those shock diamonds? So I read you a little bit from the New York Times.

Is this from a report that the 432 condo owners commissioned by like an engineering consultancy firm when the things started going to shit? The report, quote, details the presence of new cracks, failing patch jobs. and missing chunks of concrete on the exterior of the 6th, 49th, and 54th floors, loose concrete had to be removed from several areas of the facade, including from very high floors. This is a bit more from the same article. Yeah, there was, they've done some,

there are some photos in the New York Times article that have some of the patch jobs on there, which are, again, really ugly and really clash with the sort of, like, jack off motion vision of the building. because they had to use real concrete. Also, you know, this is a very expensive fix just because you need the guys trained to work on the outside of buildings like this.

A lot of people don't want to do that. You know, I used to do it, and I decided I didn't like it. Granted, much shorter buildings, but, and I was in a mass climber, not a swing stage. But, you know, swing stage is like the window washer, you know, platforms, you know, that are hung from cables as opposed to the mask climber, which has two masks attached to the side of the building, which is usually more for heavy renovation.

Anyway, that was, you don't want to be in a fucking Bosen's chair on the side of this dodging chunks of concrete falling down on you. No, sometimes I was either the floor guy or the roof guy for the guy in a Bosen chair. Preferred being on the ground to being on the roof. I was never doing my boson chair though. Just just doing it with like rope work, just doing like, you know, fucking dangling off the side of the building while the vortex wins like. Yeah, fuck it.

I don't need shit for this. I can self-ballay. I just give me like a long enough length of rope. I'm fine. Yeah, so you would go over the side in the boson's chair with a plastic bucket and a shizzle and a trowel yeah and chip off any loose concrete you find yeah and drop it in the bucket but but try not to drop the bucket all the things inside the bucket all the way you know the bucket is attached to the rope you can't drop the buck okay few yeah problem's solved um

although theoretically you could accidentally tip it out i don't know that's why there's someone on the ground to say don't walk in front of the rope uh i'll read a little bit more from the new york times. Anthony Ingraphia, Ingrafeia, I don't know, I'm sorry, an expert in concrete fractures and a Cornell University engineering professor emeritus who reviewed photos from the inspections, described some of the defects as cosmetic for now, but said that others have the potential to peel off the building and become, quote, concrete hand grenades. Oh, I'm not just like lowering the lighting in your office, like cosmetic. Now, for now. I would not sign off as a license engineer in the state of New York

that this building will last forever, he said. I would sign a document that says the Empire State Building will last. This building, I doubt it. Which is good news for, you know, the ants living below. So what happened here? Next slide, please. So to make sure that this white concrete, which is a genuine engineering problem,

was done properly they made I've read various sources various points about this but they made like 12 20 foot test columns off site a couple years before the construction started I think this is a picture

of one of those test columns I think I have it correct but engineering news record has a paywall that I couldn't get around so I'm a little limited in my resources at the moment but normally when you test architectural concrete you just do it once

day my 12 just Usually you're not using the proprietary blend that hasn't been used before Usually you're using something that you know is like relatively well established You know because it's either you're fine with gray concrete or it's not the facade material But you know this building has to be special so I guess we got to we got to really make sure this thing works which which it didn't really because like according to emails

obtained as part of several lawsuits that are currently ongoing between the owners and the developers this which I read a bunch of said one representative from the architectural firms from the firm vignoli's firm

this is an embarrassment it seems to me that the concrete mix has been diluted by the two entities sorry let me try that And it seems to me that the concrete mix has been diluted by the two entities, i.e. the construction company and the developers, who have never done architectural concrete facade before, land lease and macklow properties.

I believe that one of the financier groups is following what their team is telling them. They are going down a dangerous and slippery path that I believe will eventually lead to failure and lawsuits to come. This process of ignoring consultant's recommendations. So apparently... That must be so satisfying. to get your, you're going to get sued, email subpoenaed. I told you. Apparently, these test columns already started showing surface voids more than an inch across

and water infiltration in the columns. And all 12 test columns showed cracks after a 12-month period, as it turns out. So they did 12. Why did they build the columns? If they were like, oh, this shit's awful. You build the test. No, this is perfectly emblematic of the whole thing. You build the test to give you the right answer

so that you can build the actual thing you want to build. And if it doesn't give you the right answer, then it's failed its purpose as a test bed. But you still build the thing. Yeah. Well, you know, I'll give you the answer, actually. This is a bit from the New York Times. One of the one consulting engineer recommended specifically

adding this fly ash to the mix to make the whole thing more durable. But, this is from the New York Times, they will not accept fly ash, parentheses, color is too dark, replied Hezimina, an engineer who was then a senior associate at one of the builders in a December 2012 email. There were two options, Sylve and Marcus, a structural engineer consulting on the building replied, you can have color or you can have cracks. And they chose wisely. Yes. so despite several emails from from this guy warning about the instability of the mix the developer decided to begin pouring two months later anyway you know whatever shut up quote again in new york times cracks merged even at the start of the pouring process

according to the lawsuit it said that the concrete supplier was still experimenting with design mixes three months after the start of the facade construction and without understanding the cause of the cracks or how to prevent them. So what if we build a super tall needle tower and just kind of went yolo with it? Yeah, I mean, if the test didn't work, obviously there's something wrong with the mix, so you

should start fucking around with it while you build the building, right? That makes a lot of sense to me. That is standard practice. If I had a stamp, I would absolutely sign... No, no, don't do that. That's fucking stupid. Nova has signed off on this.

Yeah. No one stamped, anyone who stamped these drawings should have gone to prison. Listen, I don't know why you would do that to me. Sorry, buddy. So, like I said, I can't use the restroom. I'll be right back. All right, it's fine. Keep going, keep going.

No, I need the next light button for... Oh, God damn it, Justin. I don't know who has the master switch. It's fine. the next slide. Yeah. There's the engineering disaster on it. We'll take the next slide in your mind, right.

We have like five more slides of content, and then we're at to shake hands with the Angels, so, oh, this is reaching Everest levels of episode. I'm so sorry. I thought, I thought it'd be, I, this is my fault. They're, like, mostly my slides. Ah, it's fine. Oh, man. My dog has given up.

He's giving me, he gave me, like, and half hours worth of dirty looks, and then, fucked off to bet I'm I'm looking at the cover of Wired magazine which has a tactical girlfriend on it and the hard left shooters leading a gun culture revolution oh these these these these these I really

you it's every day is Friday you're the has too much money transactual and I indict myself here is a scourge on our community but when you are the I can drop $2,000 on my special interest

at the drop of a hat kind of special interest transactual and your special interest is rifles and then you allow yourself to be photographed with them you're going to get us all fucking kill hey on the bright side like that one will kill me first

yeah you're probably fine because you don't have any guns there yeah no that's true they'll kill you for other separate worst reasons yeah I don't know I just I find it I find it embarrassing and unreflective and like a lot of sort of left gun culture you know

back Hi Roz Hey I was uncontroversial in your absence in this I either can or can't stay in Oh, damn. How do you feel about guns? Guns? Oh, pretty cool.

Yeah, they are, right? They are, yeah, you can shoot bottles and cans off a fence. I've been clear about the sort of bonuses, the benefits of that. You can. You can, yeah. You have to. I'm not getting prior to disease. And that's good easing, unless it's got CWD, in which case, it's bad easy.

Yeah, yeah, it's scary. Your brain implodes, yeah. Mm-hmm. If you had a gun, you could stop them from pouring the, bad concrete. That is true. All right, so the conclusion we've come to is, um, the New York City Department of Buildings.

Yeah, Zoran. Yeah, you... Zoran, I am like three handshakes away from having your phone number. Like, we can make this happen together. You need commissars in the Department of Buildings. Yes. Yeah. That's true.

Either that or, you know, the only thing that stops a bad developer with shit concrete is a good developer with shit concrete, but... they put it in a latex suit they put it in a latex suit they put it in a latex enclosure so while the building um was going up yeah let me try that again so while the building was going up because everybody could see and you know the builders and developers were noticing all these cracks um they brought in like this series of consultants to fix the problem and help them out because it was obviously not going quite important to plan. And most of them recommended this elastomeric coating,

which is the stuff you see above. Yeah, because it would see... Consultant sort of like hurriedly kicking a bottle of Vivashine out of shot of the webcam. What you need is to put this coating on it. Don't worry about it. I would just bring in a really big roll of duct tape.

I mean, this probably would have worked. Like, just be like, this is now the Cristo building. If you used... If you use the normal concrete and put an elastameric coating on it, that probably would have been fine. Yeah. It would have been white. Everyone would have been happy.

Well, you say this. Apart from all the people who had to look at the building or, well. Wow. Yeah. You say this because, quote again, the New York Times, but the coating would give the building a glossy sheen that clashed with the developer's vision. As you can see in the slide, it does look quite closely. What you have to do, this is because it's fresh.

It's a wet look building. It looks matte and garbage in like a few weeks. No, there's a solution for that, even if you somehow got the glossiest one, you go down to your local hobby shop, you buy up the entire stock of testers' dole coat and spray it over the building. Don, easy. I fixed it. Just a few weeks exposed to like New York City air, you know?

Yeah. No, that's not going to stay glossy. Instead, Mr. Maclow, again, the main developer, suggested that workers apply a clear-code finish similar to the product he used to patch a yacht he raced in European regattas. Are you suggesting that a Manhattan property developer is some kind of idiot Philistine? I would never do such a thing, but that, you know. So they did eventually settle on like sort of a clear sealant for the concrete. but rejected the elastomeric stuff

that would probably actually work. And then we turn to the pages of the New York Times. The severity of the problems with the concrete was beyond concerning. It is deplorable and should be embarrassing to anyone associated with the project with even the slightest level of care for quality. David Dodds, then a top executive

involved in the construction with Mr. Maclos firm wrote in the same email threat. I'd imagine working around this guy being like, can you use the clear coat I use on my yacht? I assume yacht racing and, you know, needle towers are, air and water are the same thing, right? Yeah. Someone was definitely at the end of their rope when they signed off on that one.

Like, they quit the next day. So that's the problem with the concrete as the mix. The other thing that they may not have actually solved properly enough was, wind. Next slide, please. This is the cow in the wind tunnel diagram. I remember those early COVID graphics as well. Yeah. So like the concrete mix is definitely part of

why the facade is cracking, but the question is did the open floors that they put in, you know, five times and these tune must dampeners on the upper floor actually solve the wind sway and the twist issue on this perfectly rectilinear building with the flat roof with no tapering or you know anything that would structurally work it the answer is probably not it's kind of hard to work it out as we as it stands um like i said before it didn't really help that the tuned mast dampeners already needed several repairs in the last few years so they're definitely they are or weren't quite working as

supposed to be and you know like i was saying before the perfect rectangle isn't you know known for its aerodynamic properties. Well, it's going to get more aerodynamic as bits of it fall off. Yeah, yeah. And the building still sways and turns in the wind, but like within tolerances, that's kind of normal for a building like this. But once the concrete starts cracking as it twists and sways more,

and as more concrete fails and chips, the more it sways and twists and so on and so forth, this is a vicious cycle that reinforces itself. because the more stressed the building gets, the more cracks it appears, the more stress it puts on the mechanical systems until one day, probably, you know,

will it fall down? Probably building fall down, probably not, but will you be able to take an elevator? Maybe not. And, you know, if you can't get to the 86th floor in comfort and style in your elevator,

then, you know, what's the point of having this building in the first place? Because the first point of, You come to the real fun question, how do you demolish a building like that? Oh, that's fine. Don't worry about it. Like I genuinely, a bunch of, like in this country, we don't require a demolition plan for a tall building, like you just don't need one.

If the shard ever needs to come down, no, it doesn't. Yeah, building stay up, shut up. Yeah, got to hire some guys from the Middle East for this one. Honestly, though, I mean, I feel like this does, like, you could just convert it to like an 86th floor walk-up, and then it might actually be affordable. God, think of your calf muscles, like, you would be so fucking ripped, like, after a year of living there. Like, inviting your friends over and being like, now I understand, like, if you come upstairs with me, you're really my best friend, I swear. That's got to be. got to be rough on like tinder or something though like you know you're like oh but you

come home with me just like here put all this complimentary pair of mountain boots really really finally get that uh splendid isolation experience like warren zeevan saying about um so like i mean what we were what we were saying before like um lift is problem quote again the new york times from 2021 One really long ladder. A management email explained that a high wind condition stopped an elevator and caused a resident to be entrapped on the evening of Halloween, 2019, for an hour and 25 minutes. This is not what we should be doing to all billionaires, but this is a good start. And it's embarrassing for any organized left movement that in terms of praxis, you are getting out.

outdone by helicopters and wind. The left has to get more aerodynamic with it. Well, we're going to struggle here. Yeah, like a fish swimming. Wind sway can cause the cables in the elevator shaft to slap around, which is what you want when you're in it, and leads to slowdowns or shutdowns according to an engineer who doesn't want to be named because the elevator shafts are so tall.

If the wind gets in, it just like whips like a vortex into the... Oh, what if it was Bill Ackman? From Bill Ackman until 011. And according to one of the lawsuits filed by some of the odors, the wind doesn't like just gust up the elevator shaft. It also gusts up garbage chutes, doorways and hallways, making, quote, the New York Post, spooky noises. And apparently, the garbage that people throw down the shoot, because it falls so far,

it just sounds like a bomb goes off every time like a fucking bin goes. Yeah, that's my favorite thing. Also, I don't believe Bill Ackman tweeted for a couple of days around Halloween 2019. So new theory unlocked. But yeah, the straight-down garbage shoot is easily my favorite thing about this building. Also, if I lived on the top floor, I would have the intrusive thought of hurling myself down the garbage shoot to see what would happen. All I can think is you could never have small children in this building.

No, this is a da palace. Absolutely not. No, you just have like the same thing. They also have the intrusive thought of hurling themselves down the garbage chute to see what would happen. No, they'd hurl their brother down the garbage to see what would happen. You have fewer brothers. Toddlers are durable. They're not that durable.

no what would happen is what happens in every movie is if you drop down the elevator shoot there's just like a big you know linen basket but because this is 86 floors it's just a really big linen basket you're fine don't worry about it the laundry shoot my my wife has just brought me some like hot spiced apple juice because I have been podcasting for a long time I love you so much this is a wife appreciation podcast yes Yeah. You've been wife-mogged horribly here, I'm afraid. I just, I love my wife.

Podcast, podcast, podcast, garbage shoots. I also love your wife. Yeah, no, she knows. I've never met her, but, you know, from what I've seen, she seems lovely. Yeah, absolutely. Wonderful camera woman. anyway there's one more thing we need to talk about a little bit shortly next slide please and that is water because water damage has been occurring inside the tower as well so because obviously like the problem with pumping water so high in the sky for people who take you know showers and do the dishes and whatnot is that you need like a shit ton of pressure in the system to get it all the way up my I fire up my sort of my power shower on the 89th floor and I'm killed instantly They can't even get like a stretcher up to me, they throw them out into the garbage chute, you know.

This would be worse for people on lower floors. Oh, you're right, because the pressure is still higher. Yes. Yes. I fire up the shower and a massive water hammer explodes the pipe, killing me instantly. I mean, you say lower floors, but if you are above, you know, the fake mechanical void floors, then, you know, what floor are really talking about? So, like, you do huge...

Maybe that's why it needs to be that high, the mechanical void. Yeah. So, like, what has happened already is a flange blue on the high pressure feed on the 60th floor. And a pipe burst on the 74th floor, the first of which caused such... It caused severe leaks that a $130,000 rug was damaged, which, again, I remember. Don't feel bad about any of the fucking people who live in this thing, but yeah, you're a hundred and thirty thousand for a one hundred and thirty if a rug cost me a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. If I stand on it, I better die.

So I would assume I would assume this is the supply pipe because that's going to be pressurized to something ridiculous. I mean it's possible. Yeah, I couldn't find the final details of what first, but as opposed to the return pipe or the the pipe that goes. down, you know, that's going to be, well, I don't know how the water system works, because I assume, like every New York City building, it has an old-timey wooden water tower on top. That's not even a joke. That's not even a joke. They still make them. But you can't do that because that would ruin the perfect, you know, square rectilinear look

of the building. What are you some kind of film? No, that's why you got really high parapet walls. I'm actually going to look at this on Google Maps. right now. And the most, your most expensive rugs, because like, like, a rug that's like a historical object, you know, example of the textile arts, whatever, is either kind of like literally priceless, like no one, like irreplaceable, or, you know, Sotheby's or whatever has auctioned

like, you know, millions of dollars or whatever, fine, sure, whatever, that's evil, rich people shit, but I get that in the sense that it's a historical object, right? A $130,000 rug is like that's just a normal style rug that you're paying too much for because you're rich. Yes, surely. Probably, yeah. I'm going to go insane.

Okay, there's no old-timey wooden water tower on top. There's two chillers and sort of an unidentified mechanical space. Cowards. But it's a lot of these, a lot of new buildings in New York City still get built with old-timey wooden water towers because you don't need a crane to put them together. You just haul them up in the elevator or up the stairs or something. And they form like this protective layer of moss on the inside

that actually improves the quality of the water. And they are all made in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Oh, yeah. Fun fact about old-timey wooden water towers. They're not that old-timey. Incredible. Yeah. So the other thing that...

That's a tangent, but... The other thing that happened was the burst pipe on the 74th floor, and that caused water damage to the point that two of the four residential elevators had to be closed for several weeks, thus, you know, increasing commute times by several standard hours. One can I assume at this point. There's one more thing... He says it caused $500,000 in total damage or three rugs. Yeah, yeah.

well this is a part of the thing that like i mean we'll get into the lawsuit in a moment but like these absurdly rich people have absurdly wealthy everything so if there's any water damage that comes through a wall that seeps through a thing if there's any shearing if something cracks then like it's not just like you have to go to ikea and get like a new rug it's you know these people have thinking about they're like i have to go to ikea by which i mean i have to get one the one non-broken lift down 80 floors, drive to IKEA, get the like Malmue rug, load it into a car, drive the car back, load the rug into the lift, get the lift 80 floors up, get stuck for an hour and a half on the way, then put it in the thing.

That's an obviously. Then unroll it, remember that you've forgotten the Blahaj and then you have to go all the way back. Fuck. They're not shopping at IKEA. I like the jungle scog better. Right. They're going to like, you know, you know, design within reach and how ever.

Everything is out of reach there. No, I don't know this, but this sounds apt. No, yeah, design within reach. Everything's really expensive there. You can't afford any of that shit. They have a special version of that, which is design outside of reach, you know, which is where you go buy, you know, $800,000 worth of furniture. I'm developing a conspiracy theory here.

What if there's a parallel rich people like here? It's like, Ingvar Kamprad, as the name suggests, Nazi, major Nazi, right? What if there's a kind of secret IKEA, like, bunker, right? There's an evil IKEA underneath every IKEA. You get like the kind of IKEA Christmas adventurers, you know, like, and you can, you can go in there and you can buy like the Billy bookcase that's actually good or whatever, but you can get the... I thought it was all right.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But you got the, you go to the cafe and they serve you one extremely nicely plated meatball. Well, speaking of extremely well-plated meatballs, next slide, please. The shirt that finally gets a suit. The shirt that finally gets a suit, and it's me doing rich people IKEA, and it's just that logo. It's run by the blue and yellow skull

It's called Eiki It's called Eiki right A E-E-K-I Yeah yeah fuck you So because I've got more briefly talk about the private restaurant Because it is also very funny So you know as I said at the start Like you had to pay for dinner

But at least you got breakfast for free And in order for you know The upkeep What a deal You have to pay like yearly costs like sort of maintenance costs to whatever association runs that stuff. At first, that was a co-op, wasn't it? Yes, a co-op.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to pay $1,200 at the start when it opened in 2015, you had to pay $1,200 a year in like sort of communal area charges, which included the restaurant. But since 2021, a spot of a new requirement by the building management, which I think at that point was still the developers and not yet the people living there. that residents are now mandated. This is not optional to spend at least $15,000 in the restaurant

or face penalty. Weeping as I'm dragged in for my mandatory foie gras. Yeah, because otherwise you have to pay penalties and, you know, worst of all worlds, the breakfast is no longer free. Oh, fuck you, so genuinely, if you're rich enough, you can live the life that we all want to of torturing rich people in strange sort of squid game ways. Like, you can make them spend $15,000 a year in one restaurant.

You can make them live in the kind of wind cell. You can, like, all rich people have the ability to inflict suffering on other slightly less rich people, like Elon Musk can make you be around Elon Musk. There's like all kinds of options, right? A lot of the buildings around Central Park, especially on Central Park West, are co-ops. And that's where celebrities go to yell at other celebrities about, you know, why won't you let me install a fire pole in my apartment or something? It's my apartment.

Do you think it's like genuinely legitimately sucks being in the like 0.1% because what that means is you have been enrolled as part of the like cast of like hostile torture porn for the 0.01%. Yeah, that's a good question. I could imagine living in one of like the older co-op buildings on like Central Park West because that would, I feel like it'd be a little bit more chill, but in these newer buildings. All-money, because these are all co-ops, as we say, right?

I think the question is then what kind of debauched, awful things do you have to do to get past the co-op board to be able to buy an apartment there? What do these old fuckers want from you? You are going to have to be jerking off in a coffin or some real, like, real, like, Yeong secret society. Yeah, yeah, no, at least, like, at a bare minimum, you're, like, worshipping the big owl. Like, there's no fucking way around that.

Yeah, yeah, you got to, you got to, like, you got to be worshipping the owl. So, yeah, like, the fee rise in the first six years was more than 1,200%, which they made everybody fear, and also specifically for the restaurant all the chefs who work in these places because like all of these towers have their own like private restaurant they're all miserable because like everyone who comes there has impossible standards because they all eat in three Michelin style restaurants all the fucking time these people don't know any better but at the same time they don't want to eat at home because if you have that much money why would you eat at home when you can go to the three Michelin star restaurant around the corner every night because simply you can um Just eating in this sort of Michelin-style restaurant and you're literally, your attitude is,

I'm just here so I don't get fined. Pretty much, yeah. So there's an article in the New York Times about this as well, which talked about a restaurant, not in this one, but in a very similar needle tower where there was only one couple. They finished their food at seven, and then the place stayed entirely empty because the two other parties simply didn't show,

which they can do because the in-house restaurant can't charge for no shows. because obviously you live there, you own the place. This would be, this feels, yeah, just like running like any place like this. Because you know there's stuff they probably had to prepare in advance or something. Oh, yeah, you're getting in early for this. Like, it's just rotting and it's going into a locked dumpster. I, this is the most efficient system for allocating the resources of the planet possible. And I think there's probably those great things to chefs as well, like mentally, to be

like I'm getting paid a lot I guess but probably not as much as I should be to not cook this is how you get a the menu situation the article that I read had like a it was again it was not in Park 432 it was a different one

but the guy there was clearly like I mean he was supremely well trained he'd worked in Michelin-style restaurants like he was really you know he had a staff and he was at first he was like super keen to be there and I think he just kind of like existed in limbo basically because he's well paid enough and like he can close the restaurant down at you know 10 p.m every night and go home and see his kid tuck his kids into bed which like

as a michelin star chef you never get to fucking do that so like he was sort of like trapped in this hell of you know making these dishes that nobody ended up eating nobody wants yeah this is this is this is this is Kafkaesque Anyway, all of this has, of course, resulted in, next slide, please. A series of lawsuits. Okay, so here's the thing, right? If we're thinking about this as a kind of pyramid, right? 1% getting obscenely tortured in some way.

0.01% doing the torturing. If you're a service employee of the 1%, and I include lawyers in this, you can just, you can just carve the meat right off the bone, you know? Like, I'm looking at this and I'm going, yeah, I'm representing the co-op board of like the most expensive apartments in the world against the developer and constructor of the most expensive apartments in the world. I'm not too worried about my billing for this one, or really anything ever again, I think. You got, construction law is very lucrative.

Yes, yes, it is. one of the most lucrative cases in construction law. It's really, like, you know how Dickens was always sort of like skewering the British sort of like, like, Chancery Court for like, you know, like settling wills and stuff, because no one involved has any incentive for it to go on anything less than 100 years, like, until everyone involved is dead. Very similar mindset here, I think. So this lawsuit is this is the first one.

There's another one since. But according to a engineering consulting report filed on behalf of the condo board, at least, there are at least 616 pending or future items to repair as part of what they say are original or construction defects and the estimated costs just for repair minus damages are just a hair over $239 million. Um, so, you know, just like a fifth of the original construction cost, essentially. So, that's, and the funniest thing is to some of them, that's pocket change. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

But of course, these people will never pay. They will, like, you know, pay, you know, a fucking piranha show of lawyers into infinity, rather, you know, and pay over the odds rather than actually, like, just spend the money, fix the thing, be done, you know, like. this is a common problem in rich people's co-op buildings is they think if they hire enough lawyers the building will get fixed on its own and also fantastically at least according to the New York Times most times boards that run these condos are not able to get insurance to cover the cost of construction defect so whoever's paying it's not an insurance company somebody's like on the hook for you know fixing

the rods from God facade essentially the other thing that this lawsuit does or these two lawsuits are doing of course and because this is like there's an insane amount of press about these lawsuits because obviously immediately the developers started leaking

that the condo board was full of maniacs and couldn't be trusted which is probably also Drew yes you know and also like but all this has done is like smear into the papers and in everybody's brain that this is a horrible, crack, dying shithouse of a place where everybody hates each other,

so why would you possibly move in? Therefore, all this has done so far is massively depressed the price of the condos, hence the bank house going from $169 million to $60 million because nobody wants to live there anymore. It's incredible. It's incredible. I love the most expensive apartments in the world.

rapidly becoming not that because they built it bad. Yeah. Anyway, there is an upside to all of this. Next slide, please. You can all go to hell. I hate everyone in before. You can lose money on your investment. Yeah, yeah.

Elevators go up as well, down as well as up. So the upside of this is like, The condos in this building are worth much less than first sales. I tried to work out how many of them were for sale. That's almost impossible, basically. Like, you can't, because so much is on secondary markets or private listing, you can't get an idea of how much of this tower is currently standing empty. But the good news is they're not alone.

New York Times. Construction on one seaport in the South Street seaport neighborhood of Manhattan has been stopped in the wake of lawsuits after the tower was found to be leaning. And in Brooklyn, only a handful of units have been sold in the Brooklyn Tower, the Burris First Stupidall, which has been plagued by financial drama and also the drama of, you know, ruining yet another neighborhood with more of these ghastly pieces of shit. So, yeah, like, it turns out that the market for super expensive needle towers meant exclusively for the worst people in the world is bad. Your clients are supremely litigious and also just horrible. and your terrible design decisions make you liable for flaws and fuck up

three years to come. But, you know, if you live in New York City, maybe not underneath Park 432 just like for... Don't just walk fast, walk fast. Yeah, until they built that unobtainium shed, you're fine. It does make you think that like the worst punishment that you could possibly do lots of rich people

aside from all the stuff we're going to do in the near future is making them live with other rich people. Yeah, that is pretty mad. Stuff that's going to happen is so much worse. Motherfucker. I mean, this is the thing, right? Genuinely. If we, if we, like, do the cool zone, right?

And we get to say, up against the wall, motherfucker, to every rich person. This can be the wall, the wall of 432 Park Avenue. And then that way you just... No, we're going to cause more spalling. Yeah, you just wait. Yeah. And in the meantime, hell is other acmonds, you know, like, it's fine.

It's fine. Anyway, uh, fine. Final slide from my side, please. Anyway, that's been the tale of Park 432. I genuinely and sincerely hope that everybody who lives there is involved in its construction, apart from just like the normal construction workers and, you know, whoever's the fucking janitor around there. I hope you have like a, you know, I hope everybody's fucking miserable.

I'll leave the last words to the same resident that we started with all the way at the start. Quote, this again from New York Times. the tension in the building has been simmering for years, Mrs. Abramovish said. Everybody hates each other here. Good. I really like rest energy, so, like, honestly, if she wants to have a nice apartment, that's fine. I got to say, you know, another thing I don't think we've mentioned, but I have this on good authority from someone who,

worked on the building. Apparently the fit and finish on everything in there sucked on day one. Just snapping off a door handle, you know, as I move it. Moving into my my $160 million penthouse apartment where nothing can possibly go wrong. Electrical outlet is wobbly, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it's like little stuff, you know. That is the fun thing though, like, I mean, because this shit, I mean, in a UK context, at least, like, Like, shitty new builds were always like just kind of for normal people. You know, Barrett Holmes would famously just like give you, you know, the paint socket and, you know, the fucking bricks that fell off. And the fun thing is now everybody gets that treatment.

Yeah, I hear that too, is that like the quality of housing in this country is always bad. It's just the expense that varies. Like, it gets really bad on the, you know, the lower you go, obviously. but like, even at the top, apparently, still bad. So anecdotally, you hear about projects they were designed as, you know, low income and somehow halfway through the financing stopped fensling out. So they were like, well, this is luxury now, so they swap the materials on the countertops and call it a day.

So much of what gets built in this country is luxury student housing, and I think so badly, I feel so badly for- That's an oxy moron. I know. But so imagine you were the sort of like child of like, I don't know, a provincial Chinese official. And it's like, okay, cool. Go get an education in somewhere. We've been reliably informed that Leeds is a fantastic place to go to universities, right? Whatever it is.

And you're going to get sort of like Western culture. Go to Leeds. You go to Leeds. And they put you in a sort of like new build high rise that has had all of the building material and a bunch of the builders stuff just kind of like left in the drywall. It's sort of like leaking through every surface and none of the electrical works at all. And you think the Chinese century can't come soon enough, quite frankly. And everything, every possible vengeance must be visited upon the United Kingdom.

And to be honest, I agree. So. Yeah. I mean. Britain, Britain too. I mean, America too, probably. Yeah, I mean, what do you learn from this ultimately? Build the building good?

No, no one's built a good building since we invented air conditioning. You know, that was the start of everything going downhill. You know, I mean, so many, like, new construction buildings are exactly as bad at this. They aren't at the, like, top end to the luxury market. They're still pretty bad, but it goes to show that you can go to the top end, to the luxury market and the building is still bad um yeah i should have kept building them all out of brick you know yeah we should have had you know apartments with cross ventilation you should have you know uh big rooms you should have you should have all kinds of stuff uh but no we that's lost

technology so i i don't know i guess the moral of the story is are you a wealthy person who wants an apartment in New York City. Give it to us. Just give us your money. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Number one, sign up for the Patreon. It's really at the Bloomberg tier. Yeah.

Number two. Yeah. Number two, get an apartment in a building that was built before like 1939. Yeah. Yeah. What we've learned is that strong buildings create good times and good times create a weak men. What we've learned is put the latex suit on your building.

Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, I mean, that probably would have nipped a lot of these problems in the bud, but I don't know. You know, I guess it really does matter what material it is specifically if you're looking at the building from the street and it's 1,400 feet high. You know what else the lesson is? The lesson is Unlimited War on Celebrity Architects.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah, there's not a lot of those guys who I think turned out very good. Yeah. Celebrity Design Prison Camp is, I'm okay with that. Just combine Vignodi and Zara Hadid Studios and say, make the world's most, you know, luxurious holiday camp. And then we just go from there.

I still got a soft spot for Rem Cool House because his name is Cool House. Yeah, he's the guy. Who do you think I had built my cool house? Yeah, exactly. So, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger. Hello, Devin, Justin, November, Liam, and all guests, past, present, and future. I forgot about Victoria, transphobic.

Yeah, that's true. Today I write in to share with you the story of how I, by pure chance, narrowly escaped gruesome into injury while working on a roadway marking crew for my state's Department of Transportation 10 years ago. I worked this job during a summer off of college thinking that one day it would be valuable experience as a then aspiring traffic engineer. Oh, you moron. No, I have since recovered from such delusions and now work.

in the concrete industry. Oh, yeah, I just finished this like super tall needles out. You wouldn't believe the things I've seen. I am not personally liable for what happened in the brief. Interesting and educational as some of the work was, it was also miserable. Hours in the hot sun working in the middle of the road, painting stop bars and turn arrows at busy intersections. This work involves the

use of a specialized piece of equipment, we simply called, and quote, semi-colon, the cart, and quote, semi-colon. The level is delpheme. That didn't, that didn't transfer right. Imagine, if you will, an awful ice cream cart. That, instead of tubs of frozen treats, featured a propane, heated cattle of 400-degree Fahrenheit, thermoplastic paint, and a hopper of. tiny glass beads instead of sprinkles.

All right, I'm already hungry. You don't have to sell it to me. Yeah. Hand-operated cart extrudes this paint onto the road surface while simultaneously depositing glass beads onto the wet paint to make it retro reflective.

Amid our crew of four, I had the honorable task of blowing the paint dry with a leaf blower. I see leaf blower boy indicated on the slide there. Leafblower pictured here. At the end of one day

we had just finished up at a busy T intersection, diagram attached, and we were packing up the equipment in the back of our enclosed trailer. That picture it here. The truck and trailer were parked

in a widened area of the shoulder just past the intersection, with the rear ramp door open. Over here. I had just stowed the leaf blower in its place in the trailer when the incident took place. Oh, no. I was stepping down the ramp door,

then several seconds passed where I must have blacked out. Because the next thing I remember was being knelt down, screaming obscenities, gawking at the Mitsubishi eclipse. that had neatly parked itself into the back of the trailer at over 40 miles an hour. Your Mitsubishi eclipse is cold outside. Let it into the back of your trailer. Yeah, it simply wants to, you know, the thermonuclear ice cream, as do we all.

The first co-worker to rush over after seeing that I was in One Piece proceeded to try and help the occupants of the wrecked car. I watched in the days as he helped a confused toddler from the back seat who was thankfully unscathed and then a very frightened, though also unscathed, cat. The illustration makes more sense now. I thought that was just a general expression of anxiety. The driver looked to have suffered a broken nose and likely a concussion as well. Somehow the only injuries I received was a painful.

strike to the elbow from the passenger side mirror and an abrasion on my neck from where the trailer, door, ampersand, pound sign 39 semicolon S, spring cable assist caught me as I reflexively threw myself to the ground. Car crash survivor. Getting hit by a car survivor. Yeah. I did, however, spend a good 10 minutes after the accident, pale as a ghost, crying in the truck, as I truly contemplated my own mortality for the first time.

Yeah, that's not supposed to happen to the leafblower boy. You're a hero. This is supposed to be a relatively safe job. Apparently, the driver had been bringing his cat to the vet, but he had it loose in the car. That's a wild way, sure. Why not? Go for it.

As he approached the intersection, the cat had crawled down by the pedals, and the driver bent down to, to fish him out, causing him to veer off into the shoulder and into the back of our trailer, getting deep enough to give the paint cart a good bump. How lucky it is then that I was not still in the trailer, or else I may have been laid out on the hood of this guy, ampersand, pound sign 39, semicoloness eclipse pinned against the still quite hot paint cart. I can't say I learned at least two things from this experience.

number one to always remember that safety cones and high-vis gear are never a guarantee of safety when working near traffic and also number two to always ensure that any feline cargo is properly secured for transportation can confirm

despite the first despite the first lesson I continued to work on the paint crew for the rest of the season because I needed the money well as I have been binging your podcast for the past few months I've become ever more grateful for leftist content

as entertaining as elucidating as yours and speaking as someone I don't need to read Mitsubishi eclipse because I have the marks of Mitsubishi eclipse all over my body speaking of someone who was largely ignorant of the gap in their civic and historical education for far too long

thank you for cursing me with the knowledge of just how fuck everything is... You were hit by a car. Yeah. Talking to Americans will legitimately be like, well, I never, until I heard about this DSA thing, I never knew things could be bad in America, and you go, oh, what was your life like beforehand?

And it's like, oh, they used to pay me to like scrape the nuclear waste out of reactors by hand. I didn't have healthcare. Yeah, I had the worst summer job in recorded history and almost, you know, died in a flash of white paint. But sure, you know, your engineering podcast is what has opened my up. I really don't like contributing that level of importance to us. Please, now.

It's like decades of material conditions of the most abject nature. And then fucking idiot podcast is the thing that, like, radicalizes you, is just, that's really, really funny. We're very good at propaganda here in America. That's right. That's right. That's right. Realizes that it exists. Yeah.

Are you saying, Justin, that we serve a useful role in part of a leftist political project? Oh, God. I didn't sign up for that. No, I'm out. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't like to, you know, think so highly of myself, but you know. But if people are like, yeah, every morning I would clock into work and my boss would shoot me in both kneecaps with a gun.

Listening to your podcast was the first time I ever thought that things might be unfair. I don't know what else to take from that. Oh, we used to dream of being shot by a gun. Yeah, nice pick when I started. My boss had a cannon. That used to be a Mitsubishi outlander, but the eclipse is actually making more humane. That's incremental reform, you know. Foreforming a union to get the boss to reduce the caliber of the gun.

Yeah. Long we're not saying, stop doing it. We're willing to work with you on this one, so facilitative union. Yeah. Could you drop it down to a 22? Whigism is when you get hip, by a cyber truck, yeah. Yeah.

The arc of the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards you getting hit by a smaller Mitsubish. Thank you for cursing me with the knowledge of just how fucked everything is while getting me to laugh about it. The show is great. All of you are great.

From Leafblower Boy. Thank you, Leafblower Boy. Thank you. You leaf flower boy. We're sorry. Trying to explain class relations to an American, it's like, well, imagine the Mitsubishi. Now, could this Mitsubishi be like a metaphor for anything else in our society? See, the ruling class for like a guy with a cat under his gaspubes.

Marks talked about the cat in the grunt race I thought he mentioned it in capital volume 3 that's where all other stuff is that not face attention to it's a very famous the fragment of the feline I think if I remember it correct that was we just there's a there's a far side cartoon right where there's a guy in hell whistling and so like moving the wheelbarrow amidst all the flames and one of the devils is talking to the other devil and he's like you know we're just not reaching

that guy that's how I feel as a communist all the time well that was safety for our next episode we'll be on Chernobyl does anyone have any commercials before we go praxis cast yeah listen listen to listen to my podcast listen to podcast listen to podcasting is praxis or at praxis cast on blue sky mainly because we just are placeholders on Twitter now. We do, you know, it's the usual stuff. It's more Britain focused if that's really your, you know, if you really want to get into the depths of that. And it's also essentially whatever happens to come into my brain and what I feel like talking about. It's great. I've been on. We've been on. It's cool. We should have done this up front instead of at the end of three

hours, but we'll put a thing in the description. Yes. And on a more personal note, I have been applying for jobs for a while now and I can't compete with AI written garbage because everybody sends in 5,000 letters a day and it's depressing me if you live in Switzerland and if you need a researcher or somebody to do shit in communications my DMs are open please I would like a job because the taxman would also like you know his cut so yeah I hire Rob I row higher Rob right now and also come to the live shows we could get two birds with one stone That bird may be ill.

Yeah. I'm driving my Mitsubishi into the live show group. Get the celebrity architecture beating. Don't get like any, you know, random. We're going to wedge a cat firmly under the brake belt. You know, you know the awful nerd shit where the proud boys do, where they do like some kind of like mockery of getting jumped in, but it's like naming breakfast serials. We're gonna make you name celebrity architect.

Yeah. gonna get the shit kicked out of you, you're gonna be like Santiago Calatrava, Mies van der Roe. Bluey Kahn. All right, end us. All right, that was a podcast. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.